The Afghanistan Papers Quotes

“US military officials and advisers described explicit and sustained efforts to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common in the field, as military headquarters in Kabul, at the Pentagon and at the White House to skew statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“U.S. officials wanted to pull out but feared the Afghan state would collapse if they did. Bin Laden had hoped for this exact scenario when he planned 9/11: to lure the U.S. superpower into an unwinnable guerrilla conflict that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“The Afghan army and police forces looked robust on paper. But a large percentage materialized as ghost billets, or no show jobs. Afghan commanders inflated the numbers so they could pocket millions of dollars in salaries -- paid by US taxpayers -- for imaginary personnel, according to US government audits.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Homosexuality was banned by the Taliban and considered taboo among adults, but it was not uncommon for Afghan men of means to commit a form of sexual abuse known as dacha bazi, or boy play. Afghan military officers, warlords, and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Unlike his predecessors, Biden gave a sobering assessment of two decades of warfare. He did not try to frame the outcome as a victory. Instead, he said the United States had achieved it's objective long ago by destroying Al-Qaeda's stronghold in Afghanistan. He suggested that U.S. troops should have left after they killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. "That was ten years ago. Think about that," he said.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“On one hand, U.S. officials expected Karzai to be a self-reliant and resolute leader. On the other, they wanted a subservient partner to do their bidding.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Almost all Afghan recruits had been deprived of a basic education during their country's decades of turmoil. An estimated 80 to 90 percent could not read or write. Some could not count or did not know their colors. Yet the Americans expected them to embrace PowerPoint presentations and operate complex weapons systems.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Maj. Charles Abeyawardena, a strategic planning officer with the Army’s Center for Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, arrived in Afghanistan in 2005 to interview U.S. combat advisers and senior Afghan officials about their experiences. As an aside, he decided to ask low-ranking Afghan soldiers why they had enlisted. He said their responses echoed those usually given by American troops: it’s a solid paycheck, I want to serve my country, it’s an opportunity to do something new with my life. But when he followed up by asking whether they would stay in the Afghan army after the United States left, the answers startled him. “The majority, almost everyone I talked to, said, ‘No,’ ” Abeyawardena said in an Army oral-history interview. “They were going to go back and grow opium or marijuana or something like that, because that’s where the money is.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Military strategists are taught never to start a war without having a plan to end it.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Ryan Crocker, who served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul under both Bush and Obama, said the gusher of contracts to support U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan virtually guaranteed that extortion, bribery and kickbacks would take root. He said corruption became so widespread that it presented a bigger threat to the U.S. mission than the Taliban.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“To reinforce the message, Obama administration officials touted statistics that distorted what was really happening on the ground. The Bush administration had done the same, but Obama staffers in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Of all the failures in Afghanistan, the war on opium ranked among the most feckless. During two decades, the United States spent more than $9 billion on a dizzying array of programs to deter Afghanistan from supplying the world with heroin. None of the measures worked. In many cases, they made things worse.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“While the fighting had become much less visible to Americans at home, the violence inflicted new levels of mayhem on the ground, killing and wounding record numbers of Afghan civilians”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Afraid that public opinion would turn decisively against the war, the U.S. military dusted off an old tactic: It buried the extent of the problem.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Of all the flaws with the Afghanistan nation-building campaign—the waste, the inefficiency, the half-baked ideas—nothing confounded U.S. officials more than the fact that they could never tell whether any of it was actually helping them win the war.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“The eradication campaign primarily hurt poor farmers who lacked political connections or money to pay bribes. Alienated and destitute, they became perfect recruits for the Taliban.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“In September, Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador, sent a classified cable to Washington warning that Afghanistan faced a “corruption crisis” that posed “a major threat to the country’s future.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“And by lying about how close the insurgents had come to harming Cheney, the U.S. military sank deeper into a pattern of deceiving the public about many facets of the war, from discrete events to the big picture. What began as selective, self-serving disclosures hardened into willful distortions and, eventually, flat-out fabrications.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“if you look at an American all kitted-up for war, we look astonishingly like the stormtroopers from Star Wars, and those might not be the best people to go try and win hearts and minds,”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Years after the war started, the U.S. military still had almost no uniformed personnel who could speak Dari or Pashto fluently. Few troops possessed even a remote grasp of Afghanistan’s history, its religious customs or tribal dynamics.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Instead of bringing stability and peace, the United States inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government that depended on U.S. military power for its survival.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“It turned out that the owner of the construction firm had a brother who was in the local wing of the Taliban. Together, they had built a thriving business: the Taliban brother blew up U.S. projects, and then the unwitting Americans paid his sibling to rebuild them.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“the war in Afghanistan was waged against people who had nothing to do with 9/11.”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“just”
― Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War