Probably the biggest unintentional irony here is the Pentagon’s title for the project: “Lessons Learned.”
Perhaps the most outrageous takeaway is the untold sums wasted in the war: One contractor told government interviewers he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a U.S. county.
The United States allocated more than $133 billion to build Afghanistan—more than was spent, in inflation adjusted dollars, on the Marshall Plan, which encompassed all of Western Europe after World War II.
Officials repeatedly acknowledge in “Lessons Learned” that with so many competing agendas in Washington that it was like having no real war strategy at all.
“They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live,” an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017.
“I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” Rumsfeld complained in a Sept. 8, 2003 memo.
In response to a 2017 FOIA lawsuit the Pentagon began reviewing and releasing hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war dictated by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006—often called his “snowflakes.”
“I may be impatient. In fact I know I’m a bit impatient. 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. Help!”
That wasn’t the face he showed publicly however. In fact, the documents show Rumsfeld’s blessing on numerous tactics U.S. military officials used, borrowed from Vietnam, to manipulate public opinion.
It’s that after 18 years encompassing three presidential administrations from both parties, no one has been held accountable for the vast U.S. taxpayer dollars....