The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

On May 1, 2011, US special forces conducted a raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing Osama bin Laden and opening up the best opportunity so far for the US to declare victory and end a war that was close to a decade old. The number of troops would drastically reduce in the coming year, and so Obama and other officials began to argue that the entire Afghan strategy was working, though it was not. They still feared that an abrupt departure would leave Afghanistan right where it was on 9/11. CIA Director Leon Panetta assured congress that the US was “very close to accomplishing” its objectives (203), after a visit during which he was targeted by a suicide attacker and a US soldier slaughtered over a dozen civilians. Officials relied on reams of data to prove that the war was progressing, even if that data was often misinterpreted, skewed, or falsified. As long as each soldier could say that, at the end of their rotation, they had worked toward “protect[ing] the population and defeat[ing] the enemy” (205), the mission could appear like a success, even if the overall strategic environment was teetering.

In other cases, officials drew ludicrous conclusions from data, such as portraying “suicide bombings in Kabul as a sign that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat” (206).