{"id":303575,"date":"2021-09-08T16:38:50","date_gmt":"2021-09-08T16:38:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=368928"},"modified":"2021-09-08T16:38:50","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T16:38:50","slug":"general-failure-how-the-u-s-military-lied-about-the-9-11-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/09\/08\/general-failure-how-the-u-s-military-lied-about-the-9-11-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"General Failure: How the U.S. Military Lied About the 9\/11 Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\"Army\n

Army Gen. David Petraeus is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 2007.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Lawrence Jackson\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

Pretty much\u00a0every<\/u> day since 9\/11, the U.S.\u00a0military has disciplined soldiers who failed to do their jobs properly. They have been punished for minor offenses, like\u00a0being late for duty, and for serious crimes, such as murder or assault. Since 2001, there have been more than 1.3 million cases of discipline in the armed forces, according to the\u00a0Pentagon’s\u00a0annual reports<\/a> on\u00a0military justice.<\/p>\n

But the generals who misled Congress and the American public about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not needed to worry about\u00a0negative consequences\u00a0for their careers. After 20\u00a0years of conducting a\u00a0disinformation campaign<\/a> about what was really happening on the ground, not a single U.S. general has faced any punishment. The reverse happened\u00a0\u2014 they were praised for their deceptively upbeat assessments and given more stars, and when they retired with generous military pensions, they landed high-paying jobs<\/a> on corporate boards, further profiting from their disingenuousness.<\/span><\/p>\n

This disconnect is\u00a0getting new scrutiny\u00a0after\u00a0the collapse of the American\u00a0campaign in Afghanistan. Last month, a Marine officer posted a video<\/a> in which he scorched\u00a0the country’s generals for the chaos of the evacuations\u00a0from Kabul. His video went viral, especially on right-wing platforms\u00a0that\u00a0prefer to focus only\u00a0on the war’s final act under President\u00a0Joe Biden. But Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller\u2019s video\u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/span>which elicited a rapid reaction from the military\u2019s machinery of discipline, with Scheller being relieved of his command in hours \u2014 has stirred up a deeper critique\u00a0of America\u2019s generals.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\u201cFour-star general officers are treated with great respect in the U.S. military \u2014 akin to modern day viceroys,\u201d wrote Andrew Milburn, a retired colonel, in an article<\/a> in Marine Corps Times last week. \u201cTheir exalted position shouldn\u2019t \u00adpermit them to execute without \u00adquestion an interminable and costly war to no end. Or, worse, to offer \u00adcontinuous assurance that the war was going well when it wasn\u2019t. \u2026 Despite two wars that have seen their shares of disasters \u2014 not a single general officer has been relieved of his duties for incompetence.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Afghanistan and Iraq, several hundred thousand civilians and combatants have perished (including more than 7,000 American soldiers), millions of people\u00a0have become refugees, and trillions of dollars have been wasted. Politicians were responsible for this,\u00a0pundits\u00a0were responsible, and so-called experts from think tanks were responsible too. But the generals were closest to these wars and most aware, or should have been, of what was happening. Few were closer or profited more than two in particular: Gen. Lloyd Austin, who is now secretary of defense, and Gen. David Petraeus, one of the most lauded military\u00a0figures of the past 20 years.<\/p>\n

\n\"WASHINGTON,\n

Gen. Lloyd Austin prepares to hold a media briefing on Operation Inherent Resolve, the international military effort against\u00a0the Islamic State,\u00a0on Oct. 17, 2014, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Allison Shelley\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

A Meeting in Baghdad<\/h3>\n

Back in 2003, Austin strode into a meeting at Baghdad\u2019s oil refinery and demonstrated how the U.S. military was well on its way to catastrophe in the forever wars.<\/p>\n

At the time, Austin was the assistant commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, the backbone of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A month earlier, U.S. forces had seized the Iraqi capital, which quickly descended into chaos. Austin was meeting on May 12 with the director of the Daura refinery, which was the target of nightly waves of looters trying to steal whatever they could \u2014 gasoline, cars, cash, office furniture.<\/p>\n

Dathar Khashab, the refinery director, had one item on his agenda.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is security,\u201d he told Austin. \u201cThe most irrational things are happening in Baghdad. Yesterday I lost one of my pickups.\u201d<\/p>\n

Austin did not want to hear that the occupation was wobbling. He blamed looting on criminals released from prison by ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, even though the looting was being done by pretty much anyone with a wheelbarrow or AK-47. He said things were improving every day, which they were not.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe never promised to get rid of all crime in a city of\u00a06 million, but we\u2019re getting our hands around it,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re setting up new police, and we\u2019re doing it quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khashab, dressed in work overalls, was having none of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThings are getting worse, not better,\u201d he replied. \u201cContinuous theft is still here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since 9\/11, U.S. generals have consistently failed to see what was happening before their eyes, or they knew what was happening and lied about it. The conversation at the Daura refinery was an early look at\u00a0this syndrome. There was little doubt to anyone with a clear mind that Baghdad, at that moment, was getting more dangerous. Austin insisted on his own reality.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\u201cYou compare the crime statistics today, after a war, to any major city in the world \u2014 the crime you have here is less,” Austin said. “There is a perception that crime is rampant. It is not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khashab, whom I had been shadowing for a magazine article<\/a>, was about to explode.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the Iraqi people in Baghdad are comparing the crime now to what they had two months ago!\u201d<\/p>\n

Austin was now visibly irritated.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you had two months ago was a brutal dictator who killed thousands of people,\u201d he shot back.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d Khashab replied, \u201cbut we did not have people stealing cars and robbing houses.\u201d<\/p>\n

The meeting came to\u00a0a cold end. After Austin\u00a0left, Khashab started talking about setting up booby traps to ward off the looters.<\/p>\n

A few years after the invasion, Austin returned to Iraq as the commander of U.S. forces there, and later he took charge of Central Command, the headquarters for military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan. His charmed path became even more charmed after he retired from the military. In addition to drawing a monthly pension of about $15,000, Austin joined several corporate boards<\/a>, including the board of directors of United Technologies Corporation, the military contractor that merged with Raytheon in 2020, from which he has received more than $1.5 million, and advisory boards at Booz Allen Hamilton and a private equity firm called Pine Island Capital Partners. Biden\u2019s secretary of defense\u00a0owns a $2.6 million mansion<\/a>\u00a0in the Washington, D.C., area with seven bedrooms, a five-car garage, two kitchens, and a pool house.<\/p>\n

Fatal Errors<\/h3>\n

In congressional testimony, in media interviews, and in speeches to their troops, Austin and the other generals who oversaw the 9\/11 wars did the opposite of telling the truth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Afghan forces are better than we thought they were,\u201d Marine Gen.\u00a0John Allen told Congress<\/a> in 2012, when he was commanding U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. \u201cThis has been dramatic progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Allen\u2019s successor, Gen.\u00a0Joseph Dunford Jr., was just as bullish.<\/p>\n

\u201cI talk a lot about winning these days, and I firmly believe that we\u2019re on a path to win,\u201d he said in Kabul in 2013.<\/p>\n

In the same ceremony, Dunford\u2019s deputy\u00a0voiced similar optimism.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou will win this war, and we will be there with you every step of the way,\u201d said Gen.\u00a0Mark Milley, who is now the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<\/p>\n

Austin, when he took his turn atop Central Command, parroted the happy talk of his predecessors. In Senate testimony<\/a> in 2016, he said the Afghan military was fending off the Taliban and getting \u201cstronger and more capable.\u201d He added, \u201cAfghanistan remains a worthwhile and strategically necessary investment.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s crucial to understand what the generals were not<\/em> saying. Austin, for instance, congratulated the Afghan military for having \u201cretaken and reestablished security in key areas, such as Kunduz.\u201d He did not mention that the battle for Kunduz involved a U.S. aircraft attacking a hospital<\/a> and killing 42 civilians \u2014 doctors, nurses, patients. It was the kind of civilian slaughter that typified U.S. and Afghan military operations, and that doomed the war. Austin and an entire generation of generals did their best to avoid mentioning these inconvenient details, denying them unless they were confronted with irrefutable evidence, and then doing little in the aftermath to prevent these atrocities from reoccurring.<\/p>\n

It would be dismal enough if the generals believed their own optimism, but they didn\u2019t, as journalist Craig Whitlock\u2019s new book, \u201cThe Afghanistan Papers<\/a>,\u201d explains. Based on secret interviews the\u00a0government conducted with officers and civilians who served in Afghanistan, Whitlock\u2019s book offers overwhelming evidence that military leaders knew the war was failing and lied about it. The book cites an Army colonel, Bob Crowley, as saying that \u201cevery data point was altered to present the best picture possible.\u201d Whitlock described the military\u2019s upbeat assessments as \u201cunwarranted and baseless,\u201d adding that they \u201camounted to a disinformation campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\"A\n

A wounded staff member of Doctors Without Borders, a survivor of U.S. airstrikes on the organization’s hospital in Kunduz, receives treatment in Kabul on Oct. 6, 2015.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Wakil Kohsar\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Failures and Lies<\/h3>\n

Unlike their counterparts in the worlds of politics or journalism, members of the armed forces belong to an institution that claims to aggressively regulate itself with an internal justice system that punishes troops who violate its code of conduct. Thousands of officers and enlisted troops are court-martialed every year; some are incarcerated in military prisons, and tens of thousands<\/a> face lesser punishments, such as reductions in rank and other-than-honorable discharges.\u00a0A review by The Intercept of the Pentagon\u2019s annual reports on military justice, going back to 2001, shows more than 1.3 million cases of nonjudicial punishment and courts martial. While a handful of top military officers<\/a> have been punished for bribe-taking and other offenses in recent years, there has not been a whisper of the possibility of holding combat generals to account for the carnage they perpetuated.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cAn officer who misrepresented, misled, and lied to Congress, under the standards of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, has committed a crime,\u201d noted Paul Yingling, a retired Army officer and author of a widely read article on generals evading responsibility. \u201cCaptains and sergeants face consequences all the time if they lie or otherwise engage in dishonorable conduct. All I would ask is that we apply the same standards to the conduct of war that we apply to falsifying travel documents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yingling\u2019s 2007 article was titled \u201cA Failure of Generalship<\/a>\u201d and included a now-famous line: \u201cAs matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.\u201d A few years later, a similar critique came from Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, whose article in Armed Forces Journal, headlined \u201cPurge the Generals<\/a>,\u201d suggested that \u201ca substantial chunk\u201d of military leaders should be fired. In 2012, the journalist Thomas Ricks, who had spent much of his life covering and studying the U.S. military, wrote a slashing article<\/a> that described the history of American generals after 9\/11 as \u201ca tale of ineptitude exacerbated by a wholesale lack of accountability.\u201d Ricks went on: \u201cIronically, our generals have grown worse as they have been lionized more and more by a society now reflexively deferential to the military.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitlock\u2019s book pointed to one reason the generals failed: cowardice. In one of the secret military interviews, a British general, Peter Gilchrist, who served as deputy commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the early years of the Afghanistan War, described his American counterparts cowering during meetings with then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. \u201cThis was a real cultural shock for me,\u201d Gilchrist said. \u201cYou should see these guys \u2014 and they\u2019re great men, grown up, intelligent, sensible, but like the jellies when it came to going in front of the SecDef.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Narrative of Success<\/h3>\n

It was 2005, still early in the disaster in Iraq, and the most famous general of the 9\/11 era, David Petraeus, was telling me how wonderfully things were going.<\/p>\n

At the time, Petraeus was charged with creating new Iraqi security forces after the original Iraqi army was disbanded at the start of the U.S. occupation. The bureaucracy he presided over went by the acronym MNSTC-I \u2014 Multi-National Security\u00a0Transition Command-Iraq\u00a0\u2014 and was headquartered in Baghdad\u2019s Green Zone, which was ringed by miles of blast walls, razor wire, and stop-or-die checkpoints. Petraeus had four computers on his desk, giving it the look of a currency trader\u2019s workstation, and there was a fruit bowl atop a mahogany table. He wielded a laser pointer to highlight statistics on a PowerPoint that was titled \u201cCommanders Brief\u201d and projected onto a flat-screen TV for his audience of two \u2014 me and another\u00a0U.S. reporter.<\/p>\n

The U.S. had distributed 98,000 sets of body armor to the new Iraqi forces, Petraeus said with enthusiasm, or what he wanted to be understood as enthusiasm. These Iraqi fighters had also been provided with 230 million rounds of ammunition, 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles, and 5,400 heavy machine guns. Four bases the size of Fort Drum had been established across the country, he added, with a total of 92 operational battalions of more than 40,000 troops. \u201cPeople keep asking when will the Iraqis take over,\u201d Petraeus said. \u201cThey have taken over in certain areas.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was largely a fiction. The security forces in question were embryonic,\u00a0generally ineffectual, and entirely dependent on not just American supplies but on American soldiers leading the fight. Petraeus was doing what pretty much every general who served in Iraq and Afghanistan would do, stringing together any data he could find that would masquerade as a narrative of success. The statistics on his PowerPoint were vintage Vietnam \u2014 find big numbers and call them victory.<\/p>\n

I was in Petraeus\u2019s office to get his support for an embed with one of the handful of Iraqi forces that seemed willing to fight. They were called the Special Police Commandos, and Petraeus had dispatched one of his top advisers, Jim Steele, to work with them. I got a green light for the embed and caught rides on Blackhawks to Tikrit and then Samarra, north of Baghdad, where the Iraqi commandos were engaged in an offensive alongside U.S. forces.<\/p>\n

The tactics employed by these U.S.-trained commandos were violently illegal. I saw detainees beaten up, I heard a prisoner scream from torture, and I witnessed a mock execution. After it became clear that I was seeing a lot of war crimes, I was abruptly told that my embed was over \u2014 grab my backpack and get on the next chopper to anywhere. I quickly made satphone calls to as many officials as I could reach in the few minutes available before being driven off the small U.S. base where I was staying; at the last moment, I was told I could continue for a few more days.<\/p>\n

The cynicism of America\u2019s most famous general emerged after the publication of my story, which had the cover headline \u201cThe Salvadorization of Iraq?<\/a>\u201d\u00a0\u2014 referring to the dirty war in El Salvador in the 1980s. I expected that Petraeus would be upset, because the tactics of his Iraqi pupils were clear violations of the Geneva Conventions. Instead, a few hours after my story was posted online<\/a>, Petraeus emailed me to request a correction that would state he was responsible for standing up the Special Police Commandos. He was upset that I hadn\u2019t given him sufficient credit for creating these thugs in combat fatigues.<\/p>\n

In 2007, Petraeus was named the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and became famous for implementing a strategy of counterinsurgency that he portrayed as focusing on protecting civilians and winning their hearts and minds. It was the opposite of what he was hoping to get credit for with his brutish commandos two years earlier; the contrast showed the lack of sincerity in either strategy. Yet those strategies had one thing in common: They provided a justification for keeping the war going, offering an illusion of victory on the horizon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe casualty figures showed that Afghanistan was growing more unstable and insecure \u2014 the exact opposite of what the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy was supposed to accomplish.”<\/blockquote>\n

Petraeus, hailed as a savior in Iraq, went on to command U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011. While there, he painted a deceptively rosy picture of what was happening. As Whitlock notes in \u201cThe Afghanistan Papers,\u201d Petraeus told Congress in 2011 that U.S. and Afghan soldiers were engaged in \u201cprecise, intelligence-driven operations\u201d that killed or captured \u201csome 360 targeted insurgent leaders\u201d in a typical 90-day period and that the number of surveillance blimps and towers had increased from 114 to 184. \u201cThe past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress,\u201d he told<\/a> the House Armed Services Committee. \u201cKey insurgent safe havens have been taken away from the Taliban. Numerous insurgent leaders have been killed or captured.\u201d<\/p>\n

But as Whitlock\u2019s book notes, \u201cmilitary officers in the field knew the blizzard of numbers meant nothing.\u201d The more important truth was that civilian casualties were rising. \u201cThe casualty figures showed that Afghanistan was growing more unstable and insecure \u2014 the exact opposite of what the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy was supposed to accomplish. U.S. intelligence assessments also cast doubt on the war\u2019s progress. Intelligence analysts in the CIA and the military prepared reports that were far more pessimistic than the pronouncements from commanding generals in the field. But intelligence officials rarely spoke in public and their reports remained classified.\u201d<\/p>\n

Public assessments from the generals were\u00a0akin to\u00a0a grift. In a scathing article<\/a>\u00a0last week, one of Petraeus’s advisers in Afghanistan, Sarah Chayes, recalled how\u00a0she made a flurry of\u00a0proposals for stemming corruption in the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. “None of those plans was ever implemented,” Chayes wrote. “I responded to request after request from Petraeus until I realized that he had no intention of acting on my recommendations; it was just make-work.”<\/p>\n

Petraeus continued to float upward. In late 2011 he was tapped by President Barack Obama to head the CIA, but in 2012 he was caught sharing highly classified information with his girlfriend and biographer. He resigned from the CIA but avoided the felony charges and lengthy prison sentences that ruined the lives of other people who leaked classified information. Instead, Petraeus landed a lucrative partnership at the private equity giant KKR. He often gives speeches to friendly audiences, and he frequently appears on cable television, where in recent days<\/a> he has sharply criticized the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

For military critics like Yingling, Petraeus should be answering hard questions from Congress, not getting softballs from TV hosts.<\/p>\n

\u201cCongress has the power to subpoena witnesses and compel testimony,\u201d Yingling told The Intercept. \u201cThey can subpoena Gen.\u00a0Petraeus, compel him to testify. They can put documents before him to ask him what he knew, when he knew it. And if they don\u2019t, that failure itself is complicity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yingling knows that his desire for an honest congressional investigation is likely a fantasy, because America\u2019s political leaders have been co-conspirators with the generals in sustaining the bloodshed overseas.\u00a0As the dust settles on 20 years of American warfare in Afghanistan, Congress is\u00a0on track <\/a>to approve\u00a0a military budget that will be the largest ever.<\/p>\n

The post General Failure: How the U.S. Military Lied About the 9\/11 Wars<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For generals like David Petraeus and Lloyd Austin, there has been no punishment for 20 years of disinformation on Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n

The post General Failure: How the U.S. Military Lied About the 9\/11 Wars<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[383,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303575"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303575"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":304617,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303575\/revisions\/304617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}