Trump Has Allies Abroad-- Mostly From Enemies Of Democracy

 

Trump isn't generally admired around the world. In fact, he appears to be the most unliked American president in any of our lifetimes-- both by ordinary citizens and by most democratic governments. Just 6% of Danes, for example, want him to win reelection. With a still active fascist movement, Italians are the only people in Western Europe who back Trump with any strength at all-- and it's just 20%. Fascist governments in Hungary, Russia, Israel and Brazil, on the other hand, all think Trump is swell. In fact, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel covered an Eric Trump COVID-spreading event in a Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin bowling alley basement this week. Eric announced that the first person who "came out to wish" the president well was "Little Rocket Man," a reference to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Little Rocket Man, who inherited his job from his father who had inherited it from his father, is, in effect, the king of one of Asia's poorest countries. But that doesn't mean he is. Kim was born into great wealth and it is estimated that he's much richer than Trump, with a personal fortune of at least $5 billion. The best paid workers in North Korea earn around $62 a month.

On the other hand, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh is not a billionaire. He worked as a professor and then dean of Birzeit Universit, a non-profit school near Ramallah in the West Bank. It should come as a surprise to no one that the rabidly anti-Palestinian Trump doesn't many fans on the West Bank or Gaza. The Associated Press quoted him as saying "If we are going to live another four years with President Trump, God help us, God help you and God help the whole world."

The Palestinians have traditionally refrained from taking an explicit public position in American presidential elections. Shtayyeh’s comments reflected the sense of desperation on the Palestinian side after a series of U.S. moves that have left them weakened and isolated.

The Palestinians severed ties with Trump after he recognized contested Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in late 2017 and subsequently moved the American Embassy to the holy city. Trump has also cut off hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid to the Palestinians, shut the Palestinian diplomatic offices in Washington and issued a Mideast plan this year that largely favored Israel. The Palestinians have rejected the plan out of hand.

The Trump administration also has persuaded two Arab countries, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel and promised that other Arab nations will follow suit. These deals have undercut the traditional Arab consensus that recognition of Israel only come in return for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal-- a rare source of leverage for the Palestinians.

Shtayyeh expressed hope that a victory by the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would raise prospects for a peace deal.

“If things are going to change in the United States I think this will reflect itself directly on the Palestinian-Israeli relationship,” he said. “And it will reflect itself also on the bilateral Palestinian-American relationship.”

The Taliban, on the other hand, is enthusiastically backing Trump's reelection. CBS News reported that in a phone interview Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid basically parroted dishonest and misleading Trump campaign talking points: "We believe that Trump is going to win the upcoming election because he has proved himself a politician who accomplished all the major promises he had made to American people, although he might have missed some small things, but did accomplish the bigger promises, so it is possible that the U.S. people who experienced deceptions in the past will once again trust Trump for his decisive actions. We think the majority of the American population is tired of instability, economic failures and politicians' lies and will trust again on Trump because Trump is decisive, could control the situation inside the country. Other politicians, including Biden, chant unrealistic slogans. Some other groups, which are smaller in size but are involved in the military business including weapons manufacturing companies' owners and others who somehow get the benefit of war extension, they might be against Trump and support Biden, but their numbers among voters is low."

Foreign Correspondent: Russia Bounty Story Falls Flat-- Opportunist Democrats And Foreign Policy Insiders Drive ‘Hysteria’

Two refugee children in Kabul. Photo: Reese Erlich

-by Reese Erlich

On June 26, in a major front page story, the New York Times wrote that Russia paid a bounty to the Taliban to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan last year. The story quickly unraveled.

While the military is investigating the allegations, Mark Miley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says there’s no proof that Russian payments led to any US deaths. The National Security Agency says it found no communications intelligence supporting the bounty claim.

Marine Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., head of the US Central Command, says he’s not convinced that American troops died as a result of Russian bounties.

“I just didn’t find that there was a causative link there,” he tells the Washington Post.

Sina Toossi, senior research analyst at the National Iranian American Council, tells me the controversy reveals an internecine battle within the foreign policy establishment. “Many in the national security establishment in Washington are searching for reasons to keep US troops in Afghanistan,” Toossi says. “This story plays into those broader debates.”

Troop withdrawal?

Faced with no end to its unpopular war in Afghanistan, the Trump Administration negotiated an agreement with the Taliban in February. Washington agreed to gradually pull out troops, and the Taliban promised not to attack US personnel.

The Taliban and Afghan government are supposed to hold peace talks and release prisoners of war. The US troop withdrawal won’t be completed until May 2021, giving the administration in power the ability to renege on the deal.

Nevertheless, powerful members of the Afghan intelligence elite and some in the US national security establishment strongly object to the agreement and want to keep US troops in the country permanently.

Matthew Hoh, who worked for the State Department in Afghanistan and is now a senior fellow with the Center For International Policy, tells me that the reports of Russian bounties likely originated with the Afghanistan intelligence agency.

“The mention of Russia was a key word,” says Hoh. CIA officials fast-tracked the Afghan reports. They argued that Russia’s interference, and Trump’s failure to respond, only emboldens the Russians.

Originally, The Times claimed $500,000 in Russian bounty money was seized at the home of a Taliban operative named Rahmatullah Azizi. He turned out to be an Afghan drug smuggler who had previously worked as a contractor for Washington.

The Times later admitted that investigators “could not say for sure that it was bounty money.”

Hoh says the alleged bounties make no sense politically or militarily. Last year, he says, “The Taliban didn’t need any incentives to kill Americans.” And this year, it has stopped all attacks on US forces as part of the February agreement.

But leading Democrats ignore the unraveling of the story in a rush to attack the White House from the right. Joe Biden reached deep into his Cold War tool box to blast Trump.

“Not only has he failed to sanction or impose any kind of consequences on Russia for this egregious violation of international law, Donald Trump has continued his embarrassing campaign of deference and debasing himself before Vladimir Putin,” Biden told a town hall meeting.

Demonizing Russia

While cozying up to Putin on a personal level, Trump has actually taken a harder line against Russia than his predecessors, to the detriment of people in both countries. The President canceled two arms treaties, imposed sanctions on Moscow, and sent Javelin missiles to Ukraine.

Both high-ranking Republicans and Democrats benefit politically by creating an evil Russian enemy, according to Vladimir Pozner, Putin critic and host of a popular Russian TV interview program.

The bounty accusation “keeps the myth alive of Putin and Russia being a vicious, cold-blooded enemy of the US,” Pozner tells me.

Some call it the foreign policy establishment; others say the national security state or simply the Deep State. A group of officials in the Pentagon, State Department, intelligence agencies and war industries have played an outsized role in foreign policy for decades. And it’s not out of the goodness of their hearts.

Defense industries make billions from government contracts. Former military officers and State Department officials rake in six-figure incomes sitting on corporate boards. Aspiring secretaries of state and defense strut their stuff at think tank conferences and, until the pandemic, at alcohol-fueled, black tie events in Washington.

“There’s an entire infrastructure influencing policy,” says Hoh, who had an inside seat during his years with the government.

The Deep State is not monolithic, he cautions. “You won’t find a backroom with guys smoking cigars. But there is a notion of US primacy and a bent towards military intervention.”

And that’s what the current Russia-Taliban scandal is all about: An unreliable Afghan report is blown into a national controversy in hopes of forcing the White House to cancel the Afghan troop withdrawal. Demonizing Russia (along with China and Iran) also justifies revamping the US nuclear arsenal and building advanced fighter jets that can't fly.

“It’s Russia hysteria,” says Hoh.

Afghans suffer

While the Washington elite wage internal trench warfare, the people of Afghanistan suffer. More than 100,000 Afghans have died because of the war, with 10,000 casualties each year, according to the United Nations. The Pentagon reports 2,219 US soldiers died and 20,093 were wounded in the Afghan war.

A lesser imperialist power, Russia has its own interests in Afghanistan. It has taken advantage of the US decline in the region to expand influence in Syria and Libya.

According to Pozner, Russia doesn’t favor a Taliban government in Afghanistan. The Kremlin considers the Taliban a dangerous terrorist organization. But if the Taliban comes to power, Pozner says, “Russia would like to have stable relations with them. You have to take things as they are and build as good a relationship as possible.”

Neither Russia nor any other outside power has the means or desire to control Afghanistan. At best, they hope for a stable neighbor, not one trying to spread extremism in the region. That’s been the stated US goal for years. Ironically, it can’t be achieved until US troops withdraw.

Did You Know That In The U.S. There Is No Party That Favors Peace

War-mongers Jason Crow (D-CO) and Liz Cheney (R-WY)

Last week, the House Armed Services Committee-- an aggressively devoted tool of the Military Industrial Complex regardless of which party controls Congress-- voted on an amendment by Jason Crow (New Dem-CO) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) to prevent Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. As expected, it passed, 45-11. Think about that: a committee controlled by Democrats voted to prevent Trump from getting U.S. troops-- who, remember, are being assassinated by criminal elements to earn Russian bounties-- out of the 100% pointless and unwinable war in Afghanistan. How the hell did that happen? Maybe you think the Democratic Party is something different than is? Possible? Our troops have been fighting and dying there for 2 decades and we've wasted over a trillion dollars--much, if not most, of it finding its way into the hands of corrupt Americans and corrupt Afs-- and 2,300 American lives and God knows how many Afghan lives.

Do you recall how last cycle one of the DCCC gimmicks was to run military vets and call them heroes? A lot of them got elected and, guess what-- they all suck-- every single one of them; no exceptions. SUCK! Of the candidates who ran by flaunting their credentials as military heroes, each of them has earned a ProgressivePunch "F" score, even the one who pretended to run as a progressive, Maine reactionary Jared Golden (who Blue America was tricked into endorsing and supporting and even persuading Nancy Ohanian into doing a piece of art for!).

BIG Mistake!

There are 31 Democrats and 26 Republicans on the overstuffed committee, where it is extraordinarily easy to earn bribes from the Military Industrial Complex. Here's how the Democrats voted:

• Adam Smith, chairman (New Dem-WA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Susan Davis (New Dem-CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• James Langevin (RI)- stay in Afghanistan
• Rick Larsen (New Dem-WA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)- stay in Afghanistan
• Joe Courtney (CT)- stay in Afghanistan
• John Garamendi (CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Jackie Speier (CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Tulsi Gabbard (HI)- withdraw troops
• Donald Norcross (New Dem-NJ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Ruben Gallego (AZ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Seth Moulton (New Dem-MA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Salud Carbajal (New Dem-CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Anthony Brown (New Dem-MD)- withdraw troops
• Ro Khanna (CA)- withdraw troops
• William Keating (New Dem-MA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Filemon Vela (Blue Dog-TX)- stay in Afghanistan
• Andy Kim (NJ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)- didn't vote
• Gil Cisneros (New Dem-CA)- didn't vote
• Crissy Houlahan (New Dem-PA)- didn't vote
• Jason Crow (New Dem-CO)- stay in Afghanistan
• Xochitl Torres Small (BlueDog-NM)- stay in Afghanistan
• Elissa Slotkin (New Dem-MI)- stay in Afghanistan
• Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Veronica Escobar (New Dem-TX)- stay in Afghanistan
• Deb Haaland (NM)- stay in Afghanistan
• Jared Golden (ME)- stay in Afghanistan
• Lori Trahan (New Dem-MA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Elaine Luria (New Dem-VA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)- stay in Afghanistan

I spoke with Ro Khanna after the vote and he told me that "It is appalling that the time Congress would choose to wake up from its slumber on matters of war and peace is to mandate perpetual war and restrict bringing our troops home. Let's be very clear what just happened. The Cheney Crow Amendment is to the right of Trump’s foreign policy and it’s scary how many people voted for it."

Republicans who voted against the bill: Mo Brooks (AL), Bradley Byrne (AL), Scott DesJarlais (TN), Jim Banks (IN) and Austin Scott (GA), although I think one or two others who missed the vote added their names in opposition to the Crow/Cheney amendment.

It confuses some progressives when Trump actually wants to do the right thing-- even if it isn't for "pure" reasons. But in this case, Democrats on the committee should have voted against Crow (one of those DCCC military heroes who was elected in 2018 and has done nothing but suck shit since) and Cheney. I mean anyone can get their head around the idea than a Cheney can bewares then even Trump, right? Anyway, New York Magazine's Eric Levitz set out to help Democrats bridge the gap between righteous Trump hatred and getting out of the fuckingwar already: Please Don’t Prolong a Pointless War Just to Show Russia Who’s Boss. He reminded his readers that "Throughout America’s longest war, top Pentagon and civilian officials deliberately misled the public about the endeavor’s likelihood of success in a bid to insulate their adventure from the threat of democratic rebuke. As the Washington Post reported last fall, summarizing the upshot of various confidential government documents it had obtained, 'it was common at military headquarters in Kabul-- and at the White House-- to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.' John Sopko, the head of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, put the point more plainly: 'The American people have constantly been lied to.' Amid the lies, war crimes, tens of thousands of civilian deaths, egregious corruption, and revival of the Afghan opium trade, some positive developments have accompanied the U.S. invasion. Afghan women have made some real gains in their personal liberty, however limited and fragile. But the U.S. has neither the will nor the capacity to deny the Taliban a role in governing the country. The peace deal that the Trump administration struck with that group in February was an acknowledgment of the inevitable; as such, it was a productive step forward. Under the agreement’s terms, the U.S. will fully withdraw its troops in 14 months, so long as the Taliban upholds its commitments to, among other things, bar Al Qaeda from operating in areas under its control, and participate in 'Intra-Afghan talks' with the government in Kabul, opposition politicians, and various representatives of civil society about the future governance of the country."

To uphold its end of the bargain, the Trump administration plans to reduce America’s troop presence from its current level of 8,600 to 4,500 by this autumn.

But this week, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers erected new barriers to that withdrawal... [T]he House’s conditions are senselessly prohibitive. It’s difficult to see how one could ever withdraw military forces tasked with preventing the formation of terrorist safe havens without increasing the risk of “the expansion of existing or formation of new terrorist safe havens.” But that is not a rational basis for prolonging a 19-year war. The U.S. cannot maintain military occupations in every country where Islamist militants could conceivably gather and plot violence. Nor should it. As COVID-19 and climate change are making clear (or should be), terrorism is a relatively trivial threat, one that has diverted precious resources from pandemic prevention, green-energy transition, and other efforts necessary for mitigating the genuinely catastrophic challenges to Americans’ safety and security.

Congress’s (uncharacteristic) decision to interfere with the executive branch’s conduct in a foreign war was not explicitly tied to recent revelations concerning Russia’s apparent efforts to place bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But given the prominence of that story, it seems reasonable to worry that the issue influenced the House’s action. Especially since one of the amendment’s sponsors suggested that the U.S. must respond to Russia’s treachery by dispelling any question of America’s “will” to defend its interests.

Congress is right to investigate allegations of Russian targeting of U.S. troops and the Trump administration’s handling of relevant intelligence. But Russia’s actions have no bearing on the wisdom of prolonging an unwinnable war. If anything, the vulnerability of U.S. troops to such attacks constitutes an argument for quicker withdrawal. Extending military quagmires to demonstrate our resolve to Moscow was crazy when it was still the world’s second greatest power; doing so now that Russia is a declining petrostate with modest regional influence would be utter madness.

I'm not so sure about this report by Saagar Enjeti, but it's not out-of-hand dismissible and it's definitely worth carefully considering. Listen with an open mind:

Trump Has Covered Up Russians Paying Bounties For Dead American Soldiers

Trump has failed to protect Americans from the pandemic and yesterday it came out that he also failed to protect American soldiers stationed overseas from his Russian "allies." One would be crazy not to wonder if Trump was getting a percentage of the bounty Russia was paying the Taliban for each dead American soldier. Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwitz's story in the NY Times today, Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says would be a blockbuster were it not for all the other Trump insanity clogging the news cycles.

I want you to keep in mind that at the very end of May, when he had already been briefed and when others in his Regime were proposing sanctions against Putin's government for paying for the assassinations of American soldiers, Trump was whining about wanting to invite the Russians to rejoin the G-7 (May 30).

The Times trio reported that months ago, U.S. intelligence has concluded that Russia has been offering bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan-- including targeting American troops-- amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there. The Russian GRU unit carrying out the policy-- which had to be approved by Putin personally-- " has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats."

Money has changed hands for at least of some of 20 dead Americans killed "in combat" in 2019.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options-- starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

An operation to incentivize the killing of American and other NATO troops would be a significant and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it would be the first time the Russian spy unit was known to have orchestrated attacks on Western troops.

...While some of his closest advisers, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have counseled more hawkish policies toward Russia, Mr. Trump has adopted an accommodating stance toward Moscow.

At a summit in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump strongly suggested that he believed Mr. Putin’s denial that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election, despite broad agreement within the American intelligence establishment that it did. Mr. Trump criticized a bill imposing sanctions on Russia when he signed it into law after Congress passed it by veto-proof majorities. And he has repeatedly made statements that undermined the NATO alliance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Europe.

...[T]he intelligence had been treated as a closely held secret, but the administration expanded briefings about it this week-- including sharing information about it with the British government, whose forces are among those said to have been targeted.

The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere.

The revelations came into focus inside the Trump administration at a delicate and distracted time. Although officials collected the intelligence earlier in the year, the interagency meeting at the White House took place as the coronavirus pandemic was becoming a crisis and parts of the country were shutting down.

...Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on an American outpost. Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.

The officials briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the G.R.U. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former G.R.U. officer who had worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.

Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.

American intelligence officials say the G.R.U. was at the center of Moscow’s covert efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before that election, American officials say, two G.R.U. cyberunits, known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into Democratic Party servers and then used WikiLeaks to publish embarrassing internal communications.

In part because those efforts were aimed at helping tilt the election in Mr. Trump’s favor, his handling of issues related to Russia and Mr. Putin has come under particular scrutiny. The special counsel investigation found that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s intervention and expected to benefit from it, but found insufficient evidence to establish that his associates had engaged in any criminal conspiracy with Moscow.

Operations involving Unit 29155 tend to be much more violent than those involving the cyberunits. Its officers are often decorated military veterans with years of service, in some cases dating to the Soviet Union’s failed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Never before has the unit been accused of orchestrating attacks on Western soldiers, but officials briefed on its operations say it has been active in Afghanistan for many years.

Though Russia declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, relations between them have been warming in recent years. Taliban officials have traveled to Moscow for peace talks with other prominent Afghans, including the former president, Hamid Karzai. The talks have excluded representatives from the current Afghan government as well as anyone from the United States, and at times they have seemed to work at crosscurrents with American efforts to bring an end to the conflict.

The disclosure comes at a time when Mr. Trump has said he would invite Mr. Putin to an expanded meeting of the Group of 7 nations, but tensions between American and Russian militaries are running high.

Trump Predicted An Incompetent U.S. President Would Start A War With Iran To Help Him Win Reelection-- Who Could Have Guessed He'd be Right About Something?

After the assassinations in Baghdad this week, CNN reported that the U.S. is deploying thousands of additional troops to the Middle East as tensions with Iran mount. And CNN also reported that Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani says the United States and Iran should “solve their disputes through dialogue… We call on our great neighbor Iran-- with which we share similarities in language, religion, history and culture-- and the United States of America, which is a strategic and fundamental partner of Afghanistan, to prevent tensions and we hope that both sides can solve their disputes through dialogue.” Ghani assured his countrymen and neighboring countries that Afghanistan-- an American client state-- will not be the starting point of any attacks "against a third country or other regional countries," a point he emphasized in a call with Mike Pompeo. No other American allies-- other than Israel-- are backing the U.S. on this.

Yesterday in his New York Magazine column, Jonathan Chait predicted that Trump’s calculation-- the attacking Iran-- will help his reelection bid, is wrong. Watch the video up top for context.

Just like Trump’s notions that Obama would direct his attorney general whom to investigate or not, or pressure the Federal Reserve to loosen the money supply in order to help his party win the next election, Trump’s attacks on Obama were the purest form of projection. They reflect his cynical belief that every president will naturally abuse their powers, and thus provide a roadmap to his own intentions.

And indeed, Trump immediately followed the killing of Qasem Soleimani by metaphorically wrapping himself in the stars and stripes. No doubt he anticipates at least a faint echo of the rally-around-the-flag dynamic that has buoyed many of his predecessors. But Trump’s critics need not assume he will enjoy any such benefit, and should grasp that their own response will help determine it.

One salient fact is that it’s not 2001, or even 2003. A poll earlier this summer found that just 18 percent of Americans prefer to “take military action against Iran” as against 78 percent wanting to “rely mainly on economic and diplomatic efforts.”

What Blows Up Must Come Down by Nancy Ohanian

It is in part due to public war weariness that Republicans have sworn repeatedly, for years, that they would not go to war with Iran. The possibility of such a military escalation was precisely the central dispute between the parties when the Obama administration struck its nuclear deal. “Without a deal, we risk even more war in the Middle East,” argued President Obama. Republicans furiously insisted this was “absurd.” War has “never been the alternative,” said Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell in 2015, “It’s not this deal versus war... It’s either this deal or a better deal, or more sanctions.” The conservative Heritage Foundation argued that blocking Obama’s deal “makes the likelihood of war or a conventional and regional nuclear arms race less likely.”

And as Trump mulled following through on his threat to abrogate the deal, conservatives furiously denied that doing so would lead to military conflict. Here is former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren writing in the New York Times two years ago:

“The only alternative to the Iran nuclear deal is war.” That is what the Obama administration and proponents of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran claimed in 2015. Nobody in the Middle East believed that the United States would ever strike Iran, but enough Americans did that the deal went through... The alternative was never war, but a better deal.

Oren further insisted that fears the international community would refuse to follow America’s lead by canceling the deal, and that Iran would limit nuclear inspections, would both fail to materialize. “Now they predict that the international community will not follow America’s lead in withdrawing from the deal and reimposing sanctions. Worse, they warn, Iran might use the opportunity to evict United Nations inspectors and ramp up its nuclear program,” he wrote, “All of these assumptions are false.”

In fact, these assumptions have proven true. American allies have stayed in the agreement and refused to reimpose sanctions, and Iran has started restricting inspectors and begun restarting its nuclear program.

Trump’s allies have framed the issue as being about Qasem Soleimani’s moral culpability, or Iran’s responsibility for escalating the conflict. And it is certainly true that Iran is a nasty, aggressive, murderous regime. But none of this refutes the fact that Trump’s Iran policy is failing on its own terms. Having violated a diplomatic agreement on the premise that doing so would not lead to war, they are now blaming Iran for the war they insisted would never happen.

Americans historically support their presidents in foreign conflicts, both the wise ones and unwise ones alike, at least initially. Trump no doubt believes the halo effect will last at least through November-- that he might undertake an action that would harm his reelection out of some larger sense of duty to the nation or the world is unfathomable.

But presidents traditionally benefit from a presumption of competence, or at least moral legitimacy, from their opposition. Trump has forfeited his. He will not have Democratic leaders standing shoulder to shoulder with him, and his practice of disregarding and smearing government intelligence should likewise dispel any benefit of the doubt attached to claims he makes about the necessity of his actions. Trump has made it plain that he views American war-fighting as nothing but the extension of domestic politics. We should believe him.

Friday, Bernie and Ro issued the following statement announcing the introduction of legislation to prohibit any funding for offensive military force in or against Iran without prior congressional authorization. The measure to restrict funds for such military activities passed by a bipartisan, 251-margin vote in the House of Representatives, but was later stripped from the National Defense Authorization Act adopted by Congress in December: 

Today, we are seeing a dangerous escalation that brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East. A war with Iran could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars and lead to even more deaths, more conflict, more displacement in that already highly volatile region of the world.

War must be the last recourse in our international relations. That is why our Founding Fathers gave the responsibility over war to Congress. Congressional inaction in the face of the threat of a catastrophic and unconstitutional Middle East conflict is not acceptable.

After authorizing a disastrous, $738 billion military budget that placed no restrictions on this president from starting an unauthorized war with Iran, Congress now has an opportunity to change course. Our legislation blocks Pentagon funding for any unilateral actions this president takes to wage war against Iran without Congressional authorization.

We know that it will ultimately be the children of working-class families who will have to fight and die in a new Middle East conflict—not the children of the billionaire class. At a time when we face the urgent need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, to build the housing we desperately need, and to address the existential crisis of climate change, we as a nation must get our priorities right. The House and Senate should pass our legislation immediately and uphold our constitutional responsibilities. We must invest in the needs of the American people, not spend trillions more on endless wars.

You may have already seen those three asshole-on-parade tweets (above) last night, when the crazy Orange Pig Man, drunk on his power to destroy, issued them. I may be wrong about this, but I thought targeting sites of cultural significance was a war crime. If Trump does that, will Congress share the guilt? They deserve to-- except for the small handful who don't. You know what would be… interesting? Suppose Iran puts out a press release saying they know their enemy is the Orange Asshole, not the American people... just as they launch a coordinated series of attacks against Trump properties all over the world. If they knocked out some Trump golf courses and towers, they’d hurt their tormentor where it counts-- in his purse. And how would Trump explain using the U.S. military because of an Iranian attack on a couple of golf course in Dubai? Or Trump Towers in Pune, Mumbai and Kolkata in India and there's one in Manila… and maybe a Daewoo Trump World apartment building. And Turnberry. Put the mutha out of business. Better if they do it without any lose of innocent life, another way of showing Trump up for the narcissistic sociopath that he is.

Welcome to Dubai

Michael Franken is the progressive running for the Democratic Senate nomination in Iowa for the seat Joni Ernst is wasting. Until recently, though, he was an Admiral. I asked him about this mess last night. "Iran’s General Soleimani was the second or third most important official in Iran; killing him in a directed strike, of questionable legality, will generate a response from Iran and its proxies that will cause more loss of life. My biggest fear with this Administration is coming of age-- an expanded conflict in the Middle East. In any event in the Middle East, one must view the history leading up to the present. If our history begins in the 1950s, 1979, or the beginning of the Trump Administration, the one event that precipitated the current conflict with Iran is the withdrawal from the JCPOA nuclear agreement. That was a Trump feel-good moment without an underpinning of a strategic plan, a common refrain of this Administration. There are no winners in a conflict with 85 million Persians, excluding the Russians, maybe the Chinese, and certainly some Gulf neighbors. This will not go well. Iran is not Iraq, or Syria, or Libya, as detailed simulations and war games have proven. We cannot let waifish populist politics at home drive international relations. It is past time to demand a steadier hand on the tiller."

I Was Lucky To Have Gone To Afghanistan; The U.S. Wasn't

Yours truly, in Morocco, 1969, just before setting out for Afghanistan (so sanpaku)

In 1969, the Hippie Trail from Europe to India went right through Afghanistan. I spent 2 years driving a VW van from London to India and back. I left Mashad in Iran, drove along a bumpy, unpaved truck road to the border crossing at Islam Q'ala and suddenly was in another century: Afghanistan. Herat was the first stop before Kandahar, Ghazni and then Kabul. I fell in love with the country and spent a lot of time there, both on the way to India and on the way back. I went off the beaten path and went by horseback to parts of the country that were otherwise inaccessible. I spent a winter in a tiny "village" (two family compounds) in the Hindu Kush where people barely had a concept of Afghanistan as a country and where no one had ever heard of the U.S. or, for that matter, an airplane. No one had ever experienced electricity and there wasn't a pen or pencil in the village. It was amazing for a twenty year old from Brooklyn.

When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan 32 years later, I told everyone I knew-- including members of Congress-- that this was going to be a catastrophe. "Afghanistan isn't Iowa," I used to say. "Afghanis aren't Iowans. Americans soldiers will never understand them or their culture and this is going to end really badly for everyone. As we saw on Tuesday all my worries have proven themselves over and over for the better part of the past two decades. And there is still no end in sight. Afghanistan is a shambles and the trillions of dollars flushed down that rat hole would have paid for basically everything Bernie is advocating for American working families that conservatives keep saying we can't afford.

American soldiers' boots should never have stepped foot on that country's soil. But yesterday Jim Mattis was still defending the catastrophic endeavor. Dan Lamothe, reporting for the Washington Post, wrote that the former Trumpist Defense Secretary said "we had to try to do something in nation-building, as much as some people condemn it, and we probably weren’t that good at it." Yeah... that's an understatement, especially considering that no one from Alexander the Great on has ever been good at changing the Afs, a diverse group of ethnic groups and tribes who barely-- if at all-- recognize a central authority in Kabul as their government.

Mattis described the progress that has been made in Afghanistan since the U.S. military invaded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Speaking to journalists at the Washington Post, he cited an increase in the number of Afghan women who are educated, the development of Afghan diplomats and the inoculation of civilians against disease.

Mattis, who oversaw the war as the four-star commander of U.S. Central Command from 2010 to 2013, said that violence in Afghanistan is “so heartbreaking that it can blind you to the progress,” and he acknowledged that the United States made a strategic mistake by not paying enough attention to the country as the administration of George W. Bush launched the war in Iraq in 2003.

“That we didn’t do things right, I mean, I’m an example of it,” Mattis said, recalling that as a one-star general, he was pulled out of Afghanistan in the spring of 2002, promoted and told to prepare for war in Iraq.

“I was dumbfounded,” he said. “But we took our eye off of there.”

The comments came in response to questions about investigative reporting by The Post that outlines mistakes made in the war. The series, called “The Afghanistan Papers,” includes previously unpublished interviews and memos in which senior officials privately expressed misgivings about the campaign, even as they publicly touted its progress.

As a general, Mattis was among those who frequently spoke about the progress he saw in Afghanistan.

In 2010, Mattis testified before Congress that the military component of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was sound, and that by “steadfastly executing our strategy we will win in Afghanistan.”

In March 2013, he testified that it was “obviously a combination of progress and violence” on the ground, but that the Afghan forces were “proving themselves capable.”

“I think we may have to look at how we’re measuring them since they’re measuring themselves against the enemy and they’re proving themselves there,” Mattis said.

By 2015, the United States was dispatching its own Special Operations troops to stave off security disasters in the south and had stopped a planned withdrawal as scores of Afghan soldiers were killed each month.

Mattis said the reports in The Post have prompted the families of fallen service members and some veterans to reach out to him.

“You can imagine what it’s like for the families, and I have heard from them,” he said. “The emails are coming in.”

Mattis said he assured them that U.S. officials, including former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, “were not papering over any of this.”

“That it was hard, harder than hell, and that it was understood by all of us,” he said. “It is hard to explain that you can build on nothing. You had to literally build the ground, and that takes years to kind of build people who can be diplomats in a country that had known nothing.”

“I salute” the investigative reporting, he said, but that it is “not really news” because mistakes made in the Afghanistan war have been reported on by journalists for years.

“I don’t know why it’s such a revelation,” he said.

The new reports by The Post draw on interviews with scores of senior U.S. officials. They were carried out by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and withheld from the public until The Post won a three-year court battle through the Freedom of Information Act.

Mattis said there are “lots of lessons to be learned, and that’s why those documents were pulled together.” But he espoused misgivings that they were publicized in the media, saying the comments will “be used now as a club.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Mattis said. “I know why you did it, and I salute why you did it. But one of the unfortunate aspects is it could be a governor on those who want to go forward and collect self-critical information. Because that’s what it was, by an IG.”

At a Washington Post live event later in the day, Mattis said the difficulties in Afghanistan were well-known before the series was published.

“I have walked the ground in Afghanistan with your reporters beside me, who were embedded in the units, who were watching this close-up,” he said. “The reporting, I thought, was pretty accurate. The idea that there was any kind of an effort to hide this perplexes me.”

How We Were Led Down The Garden Path From Herat To Kandahar To Kabul To Mazar-i-Sharif

Craig Whitlock broke the story-- At War With The Truth-- The Afghanistan Papers-- in the Washington Post... and it's a doozy. I imagine Barbara Lee, the only member of the House to vote against attacking Afghanistan, is walking around with a big smile on her face today. Admiral Mike Franken (Ret) is a progressive Democrat running for Joni Ernst's Senate seat in Iowa. I asked him about the Afghanistan Papers since he was active duty for much of the war. "For many decades an unfortunate characteristic of American foreign policy has been to substitute a comprehensive approach with the Department of Defense, solely. Poor strategic direction, poor definition of end-state, poor coordination with allies, and even poorer understanding of regional cultures gives us Operation Enduring Freedom, et.al. We should insist on better leadership both in the White House and in Congress."

"In the interviews," wrote Whitlock of the more than 2,000 pages of interviews and memos about the secret history of a war still chugging along, "more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare. With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting."

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan-- we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction... 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three 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.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “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.”

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul-- and at the White House-- to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko’s agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.

In 2014, at Sopko’s direction, SIGAR departed from its usual mission of performing audits and launched a side venture. Titled “Lessons Learned,” the $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.

The Lessons Learned staff interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience in the war. Most were Americans, but SIGAR analysts also traveled to London, Brussels and Berlin to interview NATO allies. In addition, they interviewed about 20 Afghan officials, discussing reconstruction and development programs.

Drawing partly on the interviews, as well as other government records and statistics, SIGAR has published seven Lessons Learned reports since 2016 that highlight problems in Afghanistan and recommend changes to stabilize the country.

But the reports, written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.

“We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians,” read the introduction to one report released in May 2018.

The reports also omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project. While a few officials agreed to speak on the record to SIGAR, the agency said it promised anonymity to everyone else it interviewed to avoid controversy over politically sensitive matters.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, The Post began seeking Lessons Learned interview records in August 2016. SIGAR refused, arguing that the documents were privileged and that the public had no right to see them.

The Post had to sue SIGAR in federal court-- twice-- to compel it to release the documents.

The agency eventually disclosed more than 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from 428 of the interviews, as well as several audio recordings.

The documents identify 62 of the people who were interviewed, but SIGAR blacked out the names of 366 others. In legal briefs, the agency contended that those individuals should be seen as whistleblowers and informants who might face humiliation, harassment, retaliation or physical harm if their names became public.

By cross-referencing dates and other details from the documents, The Post independently identified 33 other people who were interviewed, including several former ambassadors, generals and White House officials.

The Post has asked a federal judge to force SIGAR to disclose the names of everyone else interviewed, arguing that the public has a right to know which officials criticized the war and asserted that the government had misled the American people. The Post also argued the officials were not whistleblowers or informants, because they were not interviewed as part of an investigation.

A decision by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington has been pending since late September.

The Post is publishing the documents now, instead of waiting for a final ruling, to inform the public while the Trump administration is negotiating with the Taliban and considering whether to withdraw the 13,000 U.S. troops who remain in Afghanistan.

The Post attempted to contact for comment everyone whom it was able to identify as having given an interview to SIGAR. Their responses are compiled in a separate article.

Sopko, the inspector general, told The Post that he did not suppress the blistering criticisms and doubts about the war that officials raised in the Lessons Learned interviews. He said it took his office three years to release the records because he has a small staff and because other federal agencies had to review the documents to prevent government secrets from being disclosed.

“We didn’t sit on it,” he said. “We’re firm believers in openness and transparency, but we’ve got to follow the law... I think of any inspector general, I’ve probably been the most forthcoming on information.”

The interview records are raw and unedited, and SIGAR’s Lessons Learned staff did not stitch them into a unified narrative. But they are packed with tough judgments from people who shaped or carried out U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich,” James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. “We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”

To augment the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war that were dictated by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.

Dubbed “snowflakes” by Rumsfeld and his staff, the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon boss dictated to his underlings, often several times a day.

Rumsfeld made a select number of his snowflakes public in 2011, posting them online in conjunction with his memoir, “Known and Unknown.” But most of his snowflake collection-- an estimated 59,000 pages-- remained secret.

In 2017, in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University, the Defense Department began reviewing and releasing the remainder of Rumsfeld’s snowflakes on a rolling basis. The Archive shared them with The Post.

Together, the SIGAR interviews and the Rumsfeld memos pertaining to Afghanistan constitute a secret history of the war and an unsparing appraisal of 18 years of conflict.

Worded in Rumsfeld’s brusque style, many of the snowflakes foreshadow problems that continue to haunt the U.S. military more than a decade later.

“I may be impatient. In fact I know I’m a bit impatient,” Rumsfeld wrote in one memo to several generals and senior aides. “We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.”

“Help!” he wrote.

The memo was dated April 17, 2002-- six months after the war started.

With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government’s determination to conceal them from the public, the cache of Lessons Learned interviews broadly resembles the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War.

When they were leaked in 1971, the Pentagon Papers caused a sensation by revealing the government had long misled the public about how the United States came to be embroiled in Vietnam.

Bound into 47 volumes, the 7,000-page study was based entirely on internal government documents-- diplomatic cables, decision-making memos, intelligence reports. To preserve secrecy, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara issued an order prohibiting the authors from interviewing anyone.

SIGAR’s Lessons Learned project faced no such restrictions. Staffers carried out the interviews between 2014 and 2018, mostly with officials who served during the Bush and Obama years.

About 30 of the interview records are transcribed, word-for-word accounts. The rest are typed summaries of conversations: pages of notes and quotes from people with different vantage points in the conflict, from provincial outposts to the highest circles of power.

Some of the interviews are inexplicably short. The interview record with John Allen, the Marine general who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013, consists of five paragraphs.

In contrast, other influential figures, including former U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker, sat for two interviews that yielded 95 transcribed pages.

Unlike the Pentagon Papers, none of the Lessons Learned documents were originally classified as a government secret. Once The Post pushed to make them public, however, other federal agencies intervened and classified some material after the fact.

The State Department, for instance, asserted that releasing portions of certain interviews could jeopardize negotiations with the Taliban to end the war. The Defense Department and Drug Enforcement Administration also classified some interview excerpts.

The Lessons Learned interviews contain few revelations about military operations. But running throughout are torrents of criticism that refute the official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the Trump administration.

At the outset, for instance, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had a clear, stated objective-- to retaliate against al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Yet the interviews show that as the war dragged on, the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in the U.S. strategy took root inside the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department.

Fundamental disagreements went unresolved. Some U.S. officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women’s rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia.

“With the AfPak strategy there was a present under the Christmas tree for everyone,” an unidentified U.S. official told government interviewers in 2015. “By the time you were finished you had so many priorities and aspirations it was like no strategy at all."

The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.

Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.

As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe.

“They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live,” an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. “It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are the bad guys, where are they?’”





The view wasn’t any clearer from the Pentagon.

“I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” Rumsfeld complained in a Sept. 8, 2003, snowflake. “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”

As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap of “nation-building” in Afghanistan.

On that score, the presidents failed miserably. The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan-- more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.

The Lessons Learned interviews show the grandiose nation-building project was marred from the start.

U.S. officials tried to create-- from scratch-- a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law.

“Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government,” an unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in 2015. “The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn’t have.”

Meanwhile, the United States flooded the fragile country with far more aid than it could possibly absorb.

During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive.

One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: “We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason.”

Many aid workers blamed Congress for what they saw as a mindless rush to spend.

One unidentified contractor told government interviewers he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a U.S. county. He once asked a visiting congressman whether the lawmaker could responsibly spend that kind of money back home: “He said hell no. ‘Well, sir, that’s what you just obligated us to spend and I’m doing it for communities that live in mud huts with no windows.’”

The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.

In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers-- allies of Washington-- plundered with impunity.

Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan several times and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said that the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had “self-organized into a kleptocracy” by 2006-- and that U.S. officials failed to recognize the lethal threat it posed to their strategy.

“I like to use a cancer analogy,” Kolenda told government interviewers. “Petty corruption is like skin cancer; there are ways to deal with it and you’ll probably be just fine. Corruption within the ministries, higher level, is like colon cancer; it’s worse, but if you catch it in time, you’re probably ok. Kleptocracy, however, is like brain cancer; it’s fatal.”

By allowing corruption to fester, U.S. officials told interviewers, they helped destroy the popular legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.

“Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption,” Crocker, who served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012, told government interviewers. He added, “Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it’s somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.”

Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afghan army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries-- paid by U.S. taxpayers-- for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”

None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.

One unidentified U.S. soldier said Special Forces teams “hated” the Afghan police whom they trained and worked with, calling them "awful-- the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel.”

A U.S. military officer estimated that one-third of police recruits were “drug addicts or Taliban.” Yet another called them “stealing fools” who looted so much fuel from U.S. bases that they perpetually smelled of gasoline.

“Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,” an unnamed senior USAID official told government interviewers.

Meanwhile, as U.S. hopes for the Afghan security forces failed to materialize, Afghanistan became the world’s leading source of a growing scourge: opium.

The United States has spent about $9 billion to fight the problem over the past 18 years, but Afghan farmers are cultivating more opium poppies than ever. Last year, Afghanistan was responsible for 82 percent of global opium production, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, former officials said almost everything they did to constrain opium farming backfired.

“We stated that our goal is to establish a ‘flourishing market economy,’” said Douglas Lute, the White House’s Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013. “I thought we should have specified a flourishing drug trade-- this is the only part of the market that’s working.”

From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money from the drug trade was powering the insurgency.

No single agency or country was in charge of the Afghan drug strategy for the entirety of the war, so the State Department, the DEA, the U.S. military, NATO allies and the Afghan government butted heads constantly.

“It was a dog’s breakfast with no chance of working,” an unnamed former senior British official told government interviewers.

The agencies and allies made things worse by embracing a dysfunctional muddle of programs, according to the interviews.

At first, Afghan poppy farmers were paid by the British to destroy their crops-- which only encouraged them to grow more the next season. Later, the U.S. government eradicated poppy fields without compensation-- which only infuriated farmers and encouraged them to side with the Taliban.

“It was sad to see so many people behave so stupidly,” one U.S. official told government interviewers.

The specter of Vietnam has hovered over Afghanistan from the start.

On Oct. 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing the Taliban, a reporter asked Bush: “Can you avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan?”

“We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam,” Bush replied confidently. “People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’ This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring al-Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail.”

In those early days, other U.S. leaders mocked the notion that the nightmare of Vietnam might repeat itself in Afghanistan.

“All together now-- quagmire!” Rumsfeld joked at a news conference on Nov. 27, 2001.

But throughout the Afghan war, documents show that U.S. military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam-- manipulating public opinion.

In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going-- and especially when it is going badly-- they emphasize how they are making progress.

For example, some snowflakes that Rumsfeld released with his memoir show he had received a string of unusually dire warnings from the war zone in 2006.

After returning from a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army general, reported the Taliban had made an impressive comeback and predicted that “we will encounter some very unpleasant surprises in the coming 24 months.”

“The Afghan national leadership are collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming few years-- leaving NATO holding the bag-- and the whole thing will collapse again into mayhem,” McCaffrey wrote in June 2006.

Two months later, Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, gave the Pentagon chief a classified, 40-page report loaded with more bad news. It said “enormous popular discontent is building” against the Afghan government because of its corruption and incompetence. It also said that the Taliban was growing stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a U.S. ally.

Yet with Rumsfeld’s personal blessing, the Pentagon buried the bleak warnings and told the public a very different story.

In October 2006, Rumsfeld’s speechwriters delivered a paper titled “Afghanistan: Five Years Later.” Brimming with optimism, it highlighted more than 50 promising facts and figures, from the number of Afghan women trained in “improved poultry management” (more than 19,000) to the “average speed on most roads” (up 300 percent).

“Five years on, there is a multitude of good news,” it read. “While it has become fashionable in some circles to call Afghanistan a forgotten war, or to say the United States has lost its focus, the facts belie the myths.”

Rumsfeld thought it was brilliant.

“This paper,” he wrote in a memo, “is an excellent piece. How do we use it? Should it be an article? An Op-ed piece? A handout? A press briefing? All of the above? I think it ought to get it to a lot of people.”

His staffers made sure it did. They circulated a version to reporters and posted it on Pentagon websites.

Since then, U.S. generals have almost always preached that the war is progressing well, no matter the reality on the battlefield.

“We’re making some steady progress,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters in September 2008, even as he and other U.S. commanders in Kabul were urgently requesting reinforcements to cope with a rising tide of Taliban fighters.

Two years later, as the casualty rate among U.S. and NATO troops climbed to another high, Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez held a news conference in Kabul.

“First, we are steadily making deliberate progress,” he said.

In March 2011, during congressional hearings, skeptical lawmakers pelted Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, with doubts that the U.S. strategy was working.

“The past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress,” Petraeus responded.

One year later, during a visit to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stuck to the same script-- even though he had just personally dodged a suicide attack.

“The campaign, as I’ve pointed out before, I think has made significant progress,” Panetta told reporters.

In July 2016, after a surge in Taliban attacks on major cities, Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan at the time, repeated the refrain.

“We are seeing some progress,” he told reporters.

During Vietnam, U.S. military commanders relied on dubious measurements to persuade Americans that they were winning.

Most notoriously, the Pentagon highlighted “body counts,” or the number of enemy fighters killed, and inflated the figures as a measurement of success.

In Afghanistan, with occasional exceptions, the U.S. military has generally avoided publicizing body counts. But the Lessons Learned interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false.

A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.

“It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture,” the senior NSC official told government interviewers in 2016. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”

Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity. Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban’s desperation, that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.

“It was their explanations,” the senior NSC official said. “For example, attacks are getting worse? ‘That’s because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.’ Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? ‘It’s because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it’s actually an indicator that we’re winning.’”

“And this went on and on for two reasons,” the senior NSC official said, “to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate.”

In other field reports sent up the chain of command, military officers and diplomats took the same line. Regardless of conditions on the ground, they claimed they were making progress.

“From the ambassadors down to the low level, [they all say] we are doing a great job,” Michael Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, told government interviewers in 2015. “Really? So if we are doing such a great job, why does it feel like we are losing?”

Upon arrival in Afghanistan, U.S. Army brigade and battalion commanders were given the same basic mission: to protect the population and defeat the enemy, according to Flynn, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer.

“So they all went in for whatever their rotation was, nine months or six months, and were given that mission, accepted that mission and executed that mission,” said Flynn, who later briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser, lost his job in a scandal and was convicted of lying to the FBI. “Then they all said, when they left, they accomplished that mission. Every single commander. Not one commander is going to leave Afghanistan... and say, ‘You know what, we didn’t accomplish our mission.’”

He added: “So the next guy that shows up finds it [their area] screwed up... and then they come back and go, ‘Man this is really bad.’”

Bob Crowley, the retired Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers that “truth was rarely welcome” at military headquarters in Kabul.

“Bad news was often stifled,” he said. “There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small-- we’re running over kids with our MRAPs [armored vehicles]-- because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome.”

John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand province in 2011, said military officials in the field devoted an inordinate amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results.

“They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop,” he told government interviewers. “There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures, or this is not a scientific process behind this.”

But Garofano said nobody dared to question whether the charts and numbers were credible or meaningful.

“There was not a willingness to answer questions such as, what is the meaning of this number of schools that you have built? How has that progressed you towards your goal?” he said. “How do you show this as evidence of success and not just evidence of effort or evidence of just doing a good thing?”

Other senior officials said they placed great importance on one statistic in particular, albeit one the U.S. government rarely likes to discuss in public.

“I do think the key benchmark is the one I’ve suggested, which is how many Afghans are getting killed,” James Dobbins, the former U.S. diplomat, told a Senate panel in 2009. “If the number’s going up, you’re losing. If the number’s going down, you’re winning. It’s as simple as that.”

Last year, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed in the war, according to the United Nations.

That is the most in one year since the United Nations began tracking casualties a decade ago.

That was part 1. Part 2 is Stranded Without A Strategy: Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail. Part 3 is Built To Fail: Despite vows the U.S. wouldn’t get mired in “nation-building,” it’s wasted billions doing just that. Part 4 is Consumed By Corruption: The U.S. flooded the country with money-- then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled. Part 5 is Unguarded Nation: Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption. Part 6 is Overwhelmed By Opium: The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn.

Before he was elected to Congress, Alan Grayson was the first attorney to take a case to trial against war profiteers in Iraq and win, after the Bush Administration declined to prosecute the case. Once in Congress, it was one of the most anti-war members and attempted to get the U.S. to withdraw from Afghanistan every time he had the opportunity. "It’s always that way," he told me after reading the report in The Post. "Remember the Maine. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Weapons of Mass Destruction. It’s been 75 years since we had an honest war."