It is beginning to seem as if there will never be any meaningful accountability for the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. George W. Bush, now a personal friend of the Obamas, is being rehabilitated among the political elite, his crimes forgotten (except by his victims’ families). These disastrous wars have destabilized the Middle East and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths; the cases for both wars were built on mountains of lies; and they both involved unspeakable criminal violence (from the use of horrific white phosphorous in Fallujah to the bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan that burned patients alive in their beds).Yet these wars are receding in Americans’ memories. The sheer amount of death and deprivation unleashed is difficult to even begin to come to grips with. The bipartisan consensus position in the U.S. appears to be that we are just not going to talk about it anymore, that while scores of Iraqis and Afghans will grow up orphaned, maimed, or both, there will be no investigations and no trials for some of the worst crimes committed in the 21st century.
There are still those who think the invasion of Afghanistan was a morally justifiable “good war,” since it was conducted with the explicit purpose of rooting out Al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks. It is hard to maintain this conclusion after reading the U.S. government’s own internal accounts of the war, as revealed in Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock’s 2021 book The Afghanistan Papers. We have evidence that the Taliban might have been willing to strike a deal to end the war quickly; the Guardian reported in October 2001 that “President George Bush rejected as ‘non-negotiable’ an offer by the Taliban to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States ended the bombing in Afghanistan.” In fact, as Whitlock shows, the Bush administration conflated the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, thus turning what should have been a narrow operation to round up a small criminal gang into an all-out war that toppled the country’s government and replaced it with an unstable, corrupt, and unpopular alternative. For 20 years, successive administrations were unwilling to admit that the war was squandering vast amounts of lives and money and achieving almost nothing. As in Vietnam, Whitlock says, U.S. officials were consistently “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” Whitlock documents almost unbelievable examples of ignorant policymaking, from trying to win “hearts and minds” by giving children soccer balls with Koran verses on them (utterly offensive) to destroying poppy fields in the name of the War on Drugs, thus encouraging enraged, impoverished farmers to join the Taliban. The Costs of War project at Brown University has summarized the harm done to the country: