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A reader wrote in about the revelations about U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and how shes changing her mind about what America can actually accomplish when it takes military action overseas.

I hate the idea of standing by while they fill soccer stadiums to stone women, and all of that. I truly hate it. But I think we have proven we cannot really do this. Ive always been more interventionist than isolationist, but I have to admit, the lives weve given, some of them personal friends, the money spent and yet things are just not getting done there.

How do you tell yourself, I did good, I did my best, I wasnt wasting my time in that service, with reports like this? How do you tell yourself your entire career isnt wasted, or even wrong? No wonder military personnel are fighting so many psychological issues now.

I thought we should even have gathered allies for stepping into Darfur, and Afghanistan was just a no-brainer for me, even as I lived with deployments right from the start. Listening to Colin Powell at the time, I thought [the 2003 invasion of] Iraq made sense, even knowing my [loved ones] would go too. I have thought we needed to stand up against tyranny and the use of chemical weapons for Syria against YEARS ago. I believed in the surges. Now I dont know. And I bet Im one of many.

What our post-9/11 history has demonstrated is that the United States has a first-rate military that can tear apart an opposing force thoroughly, quickly, and effectively. But our government, along with the governments of our allies, have not yet figured out how to establish peaceful, unified, stable governments to replace the regimes we topple not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Libya and arguably Syria as well. The problem was not that we were too stingy or didnt try hard enough; its that were trying to plant seeds in soil that isnt fertile enough to grow much of anything. (In Afghanistan, this is not merely metaphorical; the U.S. spent $34 million trying to grow soybeans in Afghanistan, despite previous researching the land was ill-suited to that purpose.)

The American public does not have the patience for the decades-long military presence, like in Germany and Japan and South Korea. We can argue that they ought to, and some would argue that the 13 to 16 U.S. personnel killed in Afghanistan each year since 2016 is a relatively small price to pay to ensure Afghanistan doesnt once again become an incubator for terrorists who want to kill as many of us as possible. But the public remains unconvinced . . . that is, when the public stops to think about foreign policy at all. Americans are tired of being in Afghanistan, but the protests against the wars largely stopped once Obama took office.

The grim SIGAR assessment of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan disappeared from the news cycle quickly. As Alex Shephard observes over in The New Republic, one major reason that the Afghanistan Papers have received so comparatively little coverage is that everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive. There are no hearings, few press gaggles.

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We Never Figured Out Afghanistan, and No Longer Want to Try - National Review

Ali Zifan [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

December 9, 2019; Washington Post

A confidential trove of government documentsreveals that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable, writes Craig Whitlock in the Washington Post.

Whitlocks statement is based on documents released to the Post by the federal government after a three-year legal battle. The documents come from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction or SIGAR, which interviewed over 600 people starting in 2014 for its Lessons Learned project. Since 2016, SIGAR has published seven papers based on research for that project, but the reports, contends Whitlock, often omitted the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.

What the Post has received, explains Whitlock, is more than 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from 428 of the interviews, as well as several audio recordings. Of these 428 interviews, the names were blacked out for 366 of them, although Whitlock indicates that the Post was able to independent able to identify 33 additional names independently. Whitlock adds that the Post is still seeking a court order to remove the remaining name restrictions.

Although the Afghanistan war has received scant US media coverage in recent years, the US commitment in dollars and lives lost has been significant. Today, the US military contingent today in Afghanistan has fallen to 13,000 soldiers, but bombing is occurring at three times the pace that it occurred under President Barack Obama. Civilian deaths in 2018 totaled 3,804, the highest single-year total since the United Nations started counting a decade ago.

Since 2001, Whitlock adds, 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. More broadly, an estimated 157,000 have died in Afghanistan since the war began, including an estimated 64,124 members of the Afghanistan security forces, 42,100 Taliban-affiliated fighters, and 43,074 Afghan civilians. Additional fatalities include 3,814 US contractors, 1,145 coalition troops, 424 humanitarian workers, and 67 journalists.

Direct federal costs (defense, state and US Agency for International Development) are estimated to be between $934 billion and $978 billion. Per capita, that works out to about $3,000 per US resident. These figures, adds Whitlock, do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

Among the findings:

The Post organizes interview transcripts by topicspin, strategy, nation-building, corruption, security forces, and opium. It has also highlighted 25 of the interviews that Post reporters consider to be particularly essential reading.

What happens next? Two members of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have called for hearings to be held, which may reveal some additional details.

Meanwhile, the Afghanistan Papers remind us of the high cost in livesand in treasureof the 18-year-war. For example, if just half of the direct spending on Afghanistan had been redirected to fund universal pre-K education, the federal government could have covered the estimated $26 billion a year cost these past 18 years without raising taxes a penny.Steve Dubb

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Afghanistan Papers Reveal Widespread Lying and Corruption - Non Profit News - Nonprofit Quarterly

A U.S Army soldier walks behind an Afghan policeman during a joint patrol with Afghan police and Canadian soldiers west of Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2007. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)Its not nearly as high as it should be, because the American people have for the most part declined to hold the liars accountable.

Late last year, Donald Trump announced that he wanted to completely withdraw troops from Syria. Then, the usual policy experts the few left serving his administration talked him down or ignored him and suddenly the White House announced it had reversed that decision. Then, this year, Trump moved between 40 and 100 troops out of one spot in Syria, and political and foreign-policy experts lost their minds. Kurdish allies were betrayed by the move, they said. ISIS prisoners were released. American influence was squandered and surrendered. What would potential allies think of us for having turned tail?

At Foreign Policy, Peter Feaver and Will Inboden wrote to criticize the handful of realist and restrainer voices praising Trumps Syria pullout:

Trump and the realists both tend to present the debate as a false choice between endless wars and total withdrawal. And both offer the false comfort that immediate withdrawal will not impose high costs to U.S. interests.

Even those with qualified praise for Trumps decision complained about the haphazardness of his policy-making and its implementation, and of his departure from the norms of American foreign policy.

What, you might ask, were those norms producing for us? Forever war or isolation is a false choice, they say. But cast your eyes over to Afghanistan, where it really does seem like the alternative to leaving is staying endlessly. At least thats how policymakers in three administrations have thought about the Afghan conflict, to judge from the Washington Posts latest scoop, a huge tranche of documents recording the candid, occasionally emotional assessments of the U.S. War in Afghanistan made by White House officials, generals, and policymakers.

My personal favorite is the early and perspicacious note from then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld: 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. He was right. The United States had almost immediate success in routing the Taliban from Kabul and denying safe havens to al-Qaeda, but met with almost immediate failure in its efforts to create a stable state that would prevent the return of the Taliban and the safe havens for terrorists that it provided absent a continual American presence. Weve remained in this state of half-success, half-failure ever since.

The more troubling revelation in the Posts story was that multiple presidents and generals had lied elaborately to the public about the war, pretending it was going well even though theyd privately concluded that our objectives were contradictory and our strategy was a mess. Worse yet was the lying they did to themselves, creating endless color-coded metrics and then manipulating the data that was measured by them.

Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible, said one Army colonel and senior advisor during the Obama years, Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.

Americans are still dying in Afghanistan. So are the Afghans who risked their lives to ally with U.S. troops against the Taliban. Over 60,000 Afghans have died in the 18-year war, against an enemy American presidents long ago concluded we could not or would not defeat. Has anyone asked what future allies might think of us for sticking around and bleeding our Afghan allies dry in a war we were simply unwilling to end or win?

Classical statements of just-war theory put the prospects of success at the heart of the moral calculation. Wars are occasions for so much evil that there must be reasons to believe their aims are achievable if they are to be pursued in a just way.

But the U.S. has pursued practically utopian aims in Afghanistan, including the establishment of a strong central government. Under the Obama administration, we tried to use our military to prop up the institutions of a stable country for the Afghans, believing that if they built enough schools and canals, a civil society would just appear around it all. And in a sickening replay of late Vietnam-era follies, officials continued to lie to the public about the level of corruption in the allied Afghan government, and about the effectiveness of its own armed forces against the Taliban.

Of course, what the Post reveals as the attempts of multiple presidents, generals, and other officials to mislead the public has also been half success and half failure. Did you, dear reader, ever believe that a modernizing civil society was starting to flourish in Afghanistan under American tutelage? No. Of course not. The lies were not credible. But I suspect that, like me, you havent decided to hold one president or another particularly responsible for pursuing an unattainable and thus by definition unjust objective in Afghanistan. And in that sense, the strategy of lying to the public has succeeded.

The U.S. governments propaganda failed to convince American citizens that Afghanistan was really getting better, but American citizens have failed to punish their government for lying to us and wasting American blood and treasure.

In normal countries that is, smaller and more vulnerable ones failures in war are punished severely and even spectacularly. Generals, policy advisors, and heads of state are sometimes hung or shot in the streets at the conclusion of a failed war. But we are a large and powerful enough country that the public doesnt bear such immense costs for its nations foreign-policy blunders and lies, so we dont give out such ugly punishments. In fact, we tend to give the architects of such failures new positions at universities or think tanks, or even advising the next president.

Perhaps there is justice in all this anyway, though: Having spent two decades lying about Afghanistan, the normal experts are now left to rattle to cable-news cameras, and for the most part they arent believed even when they tell truths about Washington. It may not be a just punishment, but it could be a fitting one. And in any event, its the only one forthcoming.

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The Price Our Government Has Paid for Lying about Afghanistan - National Review

A Canadian construction engineer conducts a survey for a new bridge near the Dahla Dam in Kandahar province of Afghanistan on April 16, 2008. PST

Recently, the Washington Post published a lessons-learned report on Afghanistan authored by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, SIGAR. The report, based on 600 interviews with American civilian and military leaders directly involved in the operations in Afghanistan, reveals bleak pictures of an unwinnable war, with the U.S. administration deliberately hiding the truth. The report caused a sensation in the international community involved in Afghanistan.

Canada spent $20 billion for the Afghanistan mission: military operations and development assistance (of $2.2 billion). Certainly, Canadas largest development assistance program in history must address public accountability principles. While David Mulroney, a former deputy minister who oversaw the Canadian operations in Afghanistan, welcomes a comprehensive review of Canadas involvement, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan dismisses the findings of the SIGAR report. He defends Canadas military and development record, based on what he witnessed during his time in Afghanistan. He claims that to comprehend the degree of the impact of Canadian presence in Afghanistan, one must be on the ground and see the ups and downs over the years.

I certainly meet this criterion, and my personal experience contradicts the ministers over-optimistic assessment of progress.

In 2003, I saw optimism pervading the country. I saw it on the faces of men, women and children. While my very first impression was that Kabul was the poorest of all Asian capitals I had seen, it was nonetheless vibrant: the Kabuliwallahs in their majestic turbans going about their business; lovely children, with smiling faces, running to the roadside greeting passengers in cars; women bargaining in the street with vendors.

What I see today in my drives in Kabul are certainly not signs of development or improved well-being. Children still line the roadside but childhood has been robbed from their faces. I see fearful eyes of women; and old men in tattered clothes; burkha-clad women carrying babies; young and able-bodied unemployed men and school-aged children, begging in the streets. I traverse a war zone marked with checkpoints, sniffing dogs, concrete barriers, steel walls, sandbags, armed guards and armoured vehicles all signs of declining security in the capital of a country we spent $18 billon to secure.

Contradicting Sajjans claims of progress in development, meanwhile, the most burning examples of our failed development projects are: the Dahla Dam, where we spent $10 million for security out of the total cost of $50 million, with little water flowing to Afghan farm lands; the polio vaccination drive, which has not been successful in erasing the title of Kandahar as the worlds polio capital; and the building of 52 schools with $90 million, a large number of them not operational.

We supported pomegranate production as an alternative livelihood to prevent farmers from cultivating poppy. We should have known that no other crop could compete with poppy prices. Afghanistan today is the largest narcotics-producing country in the world. Similarly, programming for womens development, largely detached from the ground realities from the start, produced all but dismal results. Aid workers question figures on enrolment of children in schools, as meaningful data collection is not possible under the deteriorating security situation; and the absentee rate and dropout numbers, especially of girls, are abysmal. In the health sector, the reduction in infant mortality rate is also questioned. Malnutrition in children under five is reaching dangerous levels.

Undoing the past is not possible but learning from it will help us avoid the mistakes made and save us from losses in similar ventures. Let us move our government to launch an independent comprehensive review of our Afghanistan mission with this purpose.

Dr. Nipa Banerjee, currently with the University of Ottawa, served 34 years in CIDA, Canadas Official Development Assistance agency. She was the resident head in Kabul, of Canadas aid program (2003-2006). Since 2007, she has visited Afghanistan twice a year, on average.

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Banerjee: Why we still need a review of Canada's role in Afghanistan - Ottawa Citizen

NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. (AFNS) --

Two pararescue Airmen received the Silver Star medal in a ceremony Dec. 13, for gallantry in action against enemies of the United States while deployed to Afghanistan.

Tech. Sgt. Gavin Fisher and Staff Sgt. Daniel Swensen were awarded the U.S. Armed Forces third highest military combat decoration for saving nearly 40 lives and eliminating more than 100 enemy fighters in two separate combat engagements.

For some of you, you may ask yourself how these two individuals in the face of such adversity performed so admirably, said Lt. Col. Douglas Holliday, 58th Rescue Squadron commander. Airmen like Dan and Gavin are part of a profession that dedicates their lives to a motto That Others May Live. A foundation of that motto is a pledge they made going through selection and years of arduous training. In the face of adversity, when Americans and our allies lives are on the line, under no circumstance will you quit on them. Never quit.

Gen. CQ Brown Jr., Pacific Air Forces commander, echoed Hollidays sentiments while comparing the actions of Fisher and Swensen to those of yesteryears comic book heroes and the rarity of heroes today.

We can become so absorbed by the tales and the characters and their abilities that we can lose sight of our real-life heroes heroes like Tech. Sgt. Gavin Fisher and Staff Sgt. Daniel Swensen, Brown said. Only 1% of our service men and women, representing 1% of the population have received this Silver Star. So, these gentlemen are in a very exclusive club.

Tech. Sgt. Gavin Fisher 350th Special Warfare Training Squadron, Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas

Fisher was awarded the Silver Star medal for his gallantry as a pararescue technical rescue specialist while engaged in ground combat against U.S. enemies Aug. 11 and 12, 2018, in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan.

Ultimately, Fishers actions saved the lives of 10 critically injured U.S. Soldiers, medically evacuated 20 casualties and eliminated 118 Taliban fighters.

Prior to the attack, a Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force was conducting a 10-day crisis response mission to fend off Ghazni City from more than 500 Taliban fighters. Fisher was serving as a rear gunner for the lead vehicle of the convoy, when Taliban fighters struck the armored vehicles with rocket propelled grenades and heavy machine gun fire.

In the midst of the ambush, Fisher was struck by grenade shrapnel; however, he remained focused, firing back at the Taliban and directing his vehicle out of danger. While still fending off two enemy fighters, he provided advanced medical treatment, stopping bleeding and administering blood transfusions to two critically injured Soldiers. Fisher then kept his brothers-in-arms stable until a medical evacuation team arrived.

Wounded and refusing to leave with the patients, Fisher was involved in a second ambush. Placing others lives before his, he treated five additional critically injured partner force casualties and requested a second medical evacuation.

The Taliban continued to strike the task force, eventually striking the mission support site and wounding 12 partner-force soldiers. Fisher, without hesitation or regard for his safety, maneuvered through 75 meters of heavy machine gun and small-arms fire to treat five of the wounded comrades.

Jumping back into the rear gunner seat of his armored vehicle, a wounded Fisher manned the heavy machine gun as his team continued clearance operations of the city. Suddenly, a rocket-propelled grenade struck the vehicle, severely wounding Fisher; however, he refused to falter while on guard.

Fisher returned fire and directed his team to safety, before he finally relented to medical care.

Getting this medal is important because it lets people know the war is still going on, and valiant efforts by men and women are still going forth, Fisher said. People are still out there dying and fighting for each other, and it needs to be recognized.

Staff Sgt. Daniel Swensen 58th Rescue Squadron, Nellis AFB, Nevada

Swensen was awarded the Silver Star medal for his gallantry as a pararescueman while engaged in ground combat against U.S. enemies Sept. 13 and 14, 2019, in Farah Province, Afghanistan.

Ultimately, Swensens actions directly saved the lives of nine American and partner force special operators.

On the night of the attack, U.S. Army Special Forces Operational Detachment-Alpha 1215 was conducting a helicopter assault to reclaim the Anar Darah District Center and police headquarters, which were under Taliban control. Simultaneously, Swensen, who was embedded with the detachment, was leading a ground-assault team through a compound, when Taliban fighters initiated an ambush less than 100 meters away.

Within moments, the Taliban were relentlessly sending heavy machine gun fire and rocket propelled grenades into the compound. Eventually, a grenade struck the wall behind Swensen, wounding him and five of his teammates.

Injured, trapped and separated from the support fire team, Swensen remained vigilant as he fired back at the Taliban and directed his partner forces to safety. In the midst of the chaos, he ran through intense enemy fire to rescue a fallen Soldier incapacitated by his injuries. As the gunfire sprayed overhead, Swensen treated the life-threatening wounds before moving him out of danger.

Swensen, continuing to ignore his injuries, grouped the casualties and prepared for extraction. He loaded an injured Soldier onto his shoulders and then directed the team to the helicopter landing zone 800 meters away.

Not long after the group had arrived, the Taliban executed a second ambush with heavy machine gun fire.

With disregard for his safety, Swensen remained exposed to enemy fire to direct the casualties behind cover and then continued treatment of the critically injured. Eventually, the medical evacuation helicopter arrived, and the injured were flown to safety; however, for Swensen, there was still work to be done. He then led the remaining team members back through the city to retrieve four additional casualties before allowing medical attention for his wounds.

Its weird to receive so much attention for something that I feel anyone else wouldve done on the battlefield that night, Swensen said. Im honored my peers think I deserve this medal.

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Two pararescue Airmen receive Silver Star for gallant actions in Afgha - Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base