The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

Content Warning: This section contains accounts of terrorism and war-related violence, including torture and the killing of civilians.

At its outset, the US campaign in Afghanistan was supposed to be relatively quick and efficient. The target was not Afghanistan, or even its government, but rather the foreign terrorists who had used its territory to plot the 9/11 attacks. George W. Bush campaigned against the Clinton administration’s so-called “nation-building” efforts in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and elsewhere as a distraction from the military’s main task, which was “to fight and win war” (31). Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shared those attitudes and insisted repeatedly that the US had no concern other than killing or apprehending those responsible for 9/11, especially given Afghanistan’s well-documented hostility to foreign invaders. No one anticipated that the war would go on for 20 more years, long enough for some of the small children of soldiers to grow up and fight in that same war. And yet, step by step, the US engaged in “mission creep,” a military term for a task that gradually expands its scope without anyone necessarily intending or even understanding that such a process was occurring. Before long, US and NATO forces would be training a new army entirely from scratch, building up law enforcement and a judiciary, attempting to regulate the opium trade, and overseeing infrastructure projects, all of which constitute nation building.

Mission creep was in part the result of unexpected success in the early stages of the war. Few expected that a war that began in early October would have not only smashed Al Qaeda’s infrastructure in Afghanistan by December but also driven out the Taliban government, all at a relatively small cost. Having created a power vacuum, the US worried that an abrupt departure would leave the country destabilized and therefore vulnerable to a new round of extremists. Furthermore, the apparently quick and decisive victory “boosted US officials’ confidence and they tacked on new goals” in the expectation that a grateful Afghan people would welcome their liberators to tutor them in the arts of modernity and democracy (13). From that point forward, a vicious cycle took hold where the US and NATO expanded the scope of its mission more and more, which in many respects made conditions worse. Rather than admit failure or even come to grips with their own limitations, the coalition insisted that a further expansion of scope would turn the corner on the country’s many problems. In a chaotic environment where many institutions, American and international, were all vying to claim a piece of the Afghanistan security and reconstruction project, none of them wanted to take the fall for the failure of that project, and so all competed to expand their remit in order to show that regardless of the overall picture, they were doing the necessary work to turn things around. When every institution was similarly motivated, there was no room for a strategic reevaluation.