Americans have hungered for a simple storyline, with heroes and villains, to make sense of the longest war in U.S. history. They have wanted stories like “12 Strong” to make them feel good. But at the very edge of the American empire, the war was nasty and brutish, and brought out in Americans the same imperial arrogance that doomed the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
This month, as the Taliban swiftly took control of Kabul and the American-backed government collapsed, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the government’s watchdog over the Afghan experience, issued his final report. The assessment includes remarkably candid interviews with former American officials involved in shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan that, collectively, offer perhaps the most biting critique of the 20-year American enterprise ever published in an official U.S. government report.
“The extraordinary costs were meant to serve a purpose,” the report notes, “though the definition of that purpose evolved over time.”
Released in the days after Kabul fell, the report reads like an epitaph for America’s involvement in Afghanistan.
ONE OF THE first things the U.S. did after gaining effective control over Afghanistan following the Taliban’s ouster in 2001 was to set up secret torture chambers. Beginning in 2002, the CIA tortured both Afghans and foreign prisoners flown to these torture rooms from all over Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The worst torture chamber was nicknamed “The Darkness” by the prisoners sent there, who suffered such complete sensory deprivation that they did not even know they were in Afghanistan. They were chained in solitary confinement with no light and music blaring constantly. They were hung by their arms for as long as two days, slammed against walls, forced to lie naked on tarps while gallons of ice water were poured over their bodies. At least one prisoner died in CIA custody after being left shackled in frigid temperatures.
No one was ever held to account for the American torture regime in Afghanistan.
American drone strikes also started early in Afghanistan. The CIA killed Al Qaeda operative Mohammed Atef and others with a drone there in November 2001, just two months after 9/11. Afghanistan soon became the beta test site for high-tech drone warfare, leading to countless civilian casualties and deep resentment among the Afghan people, who felt helpless against the unseen threat circling overhead.