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And article related:
https://www.non-intervention2.com/2019/12/17/the-afghan-war-was-lost-between-9-11-and-7-october-2001/
The Afghan War was lost between 9/11 and 7 October 2001
I highly recommend to readers of this site the following article: Barbara Bolland’s excellent, “5 Infuriating Takeaways from the ‘Afghanistan Papers’,” American Conservative, 10 December 2019. (1) Ms. Bolland’s incisive article recounts the deliberate waste of U.S. human and financial assets in Afghanistan, as well as the wholesale lies that were, for 18-plus years, used to mislead Americans by presidents, media pundits, senators and congressmen, and, most especially, consistently, and vigorously by multiple Chairmen of the Joints Chiefs of Staff and many other U.S. general officers. (NB: I suspect that Iraq has been as bad, but that shoe has yet to drop.)
While I have often discussed America’s Afghan War on this blog, I cannot add much to Ms. Boland’s article, which clearly presents evidence from just-released documents and focuses on the years after the war began on 7 October 2001. I can, however, add a bit about what happened in the short span of weeks between 9/11 and the war’s October start. (NB: I worked on Afghanistan at CIA — from several different directions — from December, 1985, to November, 2004.)
The following points underscore, I think, how lightly the most senior levels of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) took the Agency’s responsibility to provide the best possible support to the U.S. government’s Afghan war effort. I tend to believe that this fact was, in major part, the result of senior CIA officials knowing that the Bush Administration’s main goal in the Afghan War was to use it to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as to use it as the driver for a vast expansion of the police/surveillance state in the United States, which is still growing. (NB: On Iraq, for example, I recall that Agency leaders began shifting Arabic-speakers from the Bin Laden unit and other CTC components by late-2001/early-2002, and sending them to aid preparatory efforts underway for the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.) Following is the story of these five weeks as I remember it. I was recalled to the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center in the early evening of 11 September 2001.
–1.) On 9/11, the CIA was flush with officers who had prolonged experience working on Afghanistan and the varities of war as they are conducted therein. A substantial number of these individuals – from lower GS grades to the most experienced Senior Intelligence Officers — had worked on Afghanistan for the entire length of the Afghan-Soviet War, 1979-1989, stayed on from 1989-to-1992 to assist in the final destruction of the still Soviet-armed and supported Afghan Communist regime, and then continued working on the country’s involvement in terrorism, insurgency, and heroin-trafficking to the day of the 9/11 attacks.
Now, 14-years of experience working on one facet of a private-sector institution’s business might not seem unusual – men and women spend thirty-or-more years making steel or automobiles, others preside over logistics or financial operations for the same period – but at CIA, and in the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) generally, such expertise is thought unnecessary and as a sure sign of an officer’s lack of career ambition. Some intelligence officers are permitted to specialize on particular issues for prolonged periods, but only at the personal cost of few and widely separated promotions. An officer’s decision to specialize is always made with knowledge that it will limit his-or-her chances for promotion.
–2.) Before the fires of 9/11 were damped and bureaucratic priorities took control of CIA decision-making, a team of several of the smartest, bravest, and most experienced CIA Afghan hands were deployed to Afghanistan. There they prepared the ground for U.S. relations with the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance, secured airfields and other areas for the use of U.S. Special Forces, gathered intelligence about al-Qaeda and Taleban activities, and made sure the coffee was hot when Afghanistan-ignorant U.S. general officers swaggered into the country.
These CIA officers did a magnificent and courageous job, one whose success shone even brighter after it was learned that Pentagon had no off-the-shelf plan for war in Afghanistan – not much of a surprise, as it already had refused to assist in killing/capturing bin Laden – and had no interest in exploiting the detailed plans formulated by the CIA and other IC components for destroying Afghanistan’s poppy fields and the organizations that facilitated the export of heroin to Europe, Turkey, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere.
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