The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

Very well researched, organized and written summary of all that has gone wrong with the US led war in Afghanistan, starting with the bone-headed decisions of the Bush-Cheney administration at the very beginning of the action. A very poor use of our military and our intelligence capabilities. How many times must the US repeat these mistakes, affecting millions of people and countless billions of dollars, with no positive outcome ever within sight. I thought we learned these lessons in Vietnam, but apparently not. Anyone who has ever read about what Edward Lansdale accomplished in the Philippines after WW II would know that it is possible to counter and neutralize an enemy threat without the waste and destruction. Enough said.

There is nothing in this book to cheer about. I didn't know whether to read it with interest or throw it across the room.
Larry Matthews, The Washington Independent Review of Books

I agree with Matthews. While Washington Post investigative reporter Craig Whitlock provides the reader with an eye-opening and alarming analysis of America's twenty-year war in Afghanistan, it's a frustrating and, at times, exasperating read.

Whitlock uses a wide array of sources to document this expose. These include the Lessons Learned Project, a database of hundreds of interviews compiled by the federal office of Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction, and private memos of Donald Rumsfeld.

According to Whitlock, the war began as a response to 9/11. show more Its goal was to find and punish al-Qaeda. However, Bush administration bureaucrats conflated the Taliban with al-Qaeda, and the mission shifted to dismantling the Taliban and nation-building.

Whitlock believes that American hubris and lack of understanding of Afghani history and culture were crucial to America's failure. Afghanistan is a decentralized society governed by clans.
The bureaucrats of the Bush Administration tried to rebuild the Afghan nation by superimposing the centralized structures of the U.S. government.

The recruitment and training of the Afghani military stood out as a case in point. Military bureaucrats failed to realize the impact of long-term poverty and war on Afghani education. As a result, many of the recruits lacked basic literacy and numeracy skills, yet the military attempted to train them using power-point presentations. They also failed to build on many of the recruits' skills developed through years of fighting.

The Afghanistan Papers chronicles the bungles, missteps, and misunderstandings of the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations in Afghanistan. The book is well written, impressively researched, and thoroughly depressing. I recommend it if you want to get a deeper understanding of all that went wrong. show less

Culled from “lessons learned” interviews with military and diplomatic folks, this is a catalog of repeated bad decisions, with billions of dollars and thousands of lives lost for essentially no purpose but to strengthen corruption in Afghanistan. It’s hard to be hopeful that things could have been much better even if we hadn’t jumped into a distracting war with Iraq, but maybe the waste would have been a little bit less.

Overall, I find this to be an excellent book. For one, Craig Whitlock divided the 20 years into several sections, each of which dealt with a separate phase of the war. This made it easy to follow the narrative.

Also, I give Craig Whitlock full marks for organizing the material efficiently, and for writing in such an engaging style.

Clearly, the Americans went in without a game plan. I don't think they have a game plan even now, as they pulled out.

Why the 4-stars? For all its good points, Craig's book is aimed at one thing - proving the Americans did not have a strategy. While this may be entirely true, a balanced book would have pointed out the good parts of the American strategy and operations.

I finished this book on the heels of another book which was an autobiography of U.S. Congressman Ruben Gallego and his experiences in the Iraq war. The similarities are sobering and chilling in that in both wars, U.S. leaders misrepresented and lied about the ongoing progress (or lack thereof) in the war, and their reluctance to pull troops out rather than losing thousands of American lives in unwinnable conflicts -- a failure to define the objective for withdrawal.
This book was due to the concerted effort of the Washington Post to obtain, in some cases by court order, documents and interviews with participants of the Afghanistan war. It is remarkable in showing the denial and incompetence of our military and political leaders when show more communicating to the American public. The book is highly recommended as a definitive look at this war and the mistakes we hope will never be made again. show less

The scope of this book is limited, in the sense that it specifically covers just the United States involvement in Afghanistan, but it is so comprehensive while still concise that it deserves top marks for its efforts. Admittedly, the author had a couple massive but key resources to help him focus broadly but still very deeply into his subject. I have read several books touching on Afghanistan and specifically of America's involvement in it, and this would be one of my top choices for the less informed. My first choice would be, Tamin Ansary's book, Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan, which covers the long and unique history of Afghanistan as the target of empire after empire. It helps explain the morass show more that seems so obvious into which the United States would get itself in Afghanistan. A second choice would be Anand Gopal's book, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, because it so intimately captures the daily life of the Afghanistans and their involvement with the occupying military coalition. This book serves as a great end to the set. Having said that, regardless of your political position, I predict it will make you nauseated reading about the decades of wasted U.S. taxpayer money. It should certainly help you better understand what Biden faced when he decided to withdraw the U.S. from Afghanistan. Highly recommended. show less

Timely, well-written, engaging, if quite depressing. Great bit of investigative journalism and shows how fraught with issues the whole war was. Ends a bit abruptly and would have liked more of a closing with discussion of the Biden withdrawal -- but book was written before the withdrawal issues -- perhaps Whitlock will write an amended second addition with some discussion of the withdrawal.