Nirendra Dev
The 'interviews' mention about 'runaway corruption' in Afghanistan and how all attempts to stop the same were 'botched' up.
New Delhi: In the ultimate analysis, it's official now. Americans have blundered in Afghanistan in drawing out war strategies and dealing with a society and people they understood little. Worse, they could not control the runaway corruption.
Jeffrey Eggers. a retired Naval officer, has been interestingly quoted in a report by The Washington Post': "After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan." A former US diplomat, James Dobbins, has been quoted – "We don't invade poor countries to make them rich. We don't invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan."
It could be surprising, at one point, the report even says – it was "common" at the military headquarters in Kabul and the White House to 'distort' statistics to make it appear that the United States was 'winning the war' when that was not the case.
This only makes it crystal clear that the US governments under different Presidents – George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, had only 'misled' the public.
One part of the report says – "We found the stabilization strategy, and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and success in stabilizing Afghanistan districts rarely lasted than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians."
The report is part of a forthcoming book. 'The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War.'
"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we did not know what we were doing," top-ranking three-star US Army general, Douglas Lute, has been quoted in the 'Washington Post' report. The General has further said: "We did not have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
The report says, among other things, that since October 2001, over 7,75,000 US troops have been deployed in Afghanistan, and of those, 2,300 died. The report says three US Presidents – George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – and their military commanders have been "unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan." It claimed the officials (in about 2000 pages of interviews) say that the "war-fighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.
The US government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering. The 'interviews' mention about 'runaway corruption' in Afghanistan and how all attempts to stop the same were 'botched' up.
One estimate is perhaps around $978 was spent by the United States, but the figure does not include the amount spent by other agencies, such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs. This suggests, the US governments under different Presidents, only 'misled' the public.
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