Throughout America's war in Afghanistan, reporters told story after story of the politicians, contractors, commanders & warlords who filled their pockets with billions meant for the Afghan people.

We've heard the numbers, but what were the true costs to Afghans?

🧵...
Many who pilfered the country have now escaped to luxury homes in places like Dubai & London, where they're desperately trying to re-write their histories.

When confronted with evidence of their corruption or wrongdoing, they're telling lies that are easy to fact check.
Some claim they have no ties to a company they founded.

Or pretend they didn't close one & start another under a new name.

That they didn't move business ops to the UAE to hide profits & a paper trail.

But perhaps the most brazen lie is the one they tell themselves...
It is pretending to be oblivious to the impact their corruption and greed had on the ground.

We've heard the tales of millions taken out of the country, but what does that actually look like for ordinary people in Afghanistan?

I want to share just one example from my reporting.
While reporting Ghost Schools, I went to a primary school in Deh-e-Bagh, Kandahar.

Per U.S. records, it was completed years earlier, at cost and up to standard, and would provide a “tangible source of community pride and legitimacy” for local elders and the Afghan government.
What I found was anything but.

Only partially completed, its doors had never opened. There were no latrines, no running water. Without a security wall, the building deteriorated. Windows smashed. Rooms littered with construction materials.

It had never seen a single student.
I tracked down the man who donated the land for the school.

To get the $100,000 contract to build it, the district governor told him to team up with a local firm, Fatay Khan Construction Company (FKCC)

...which just happened to be owned by the district governor’s brother...
Only half the contract had been paid out; FKCC siphoned off the rest, he said.

At his Kandahar City offices decorated w/ornate chandeliers, Fatay Khan flat out denied to me ever having the contract—saying it went to Wali Beradaran Construction, which he had no association with.
What Fatay Khan didn't realize is that even though he'd taken down his website, an archived version of it still existed, and showed Wali Beradaran was a partner company.

It was used to funnel projects so as not to look like they were going to the brother of district governor.
It was an open secret.

I found a U.S. military intelligence assessment that showed the U.S. knew the district governor funneled development projects through his brother to make a profit.

But because he was their "ally" on the ground, everyone looked the other way.
And no one involved in this mess — from the landowner, to the contractor, to the district governor, to the military unit that funded it—seemed to care about who was paying the price:

the village children.
Instead of having classes in the new school, I found about 50 children from Deh-e-Bagh studying outside a cramped mosque across the street, rocking back & forth on the grass, reading Quran.
The girls only got a religious education from the local mullah.

The little time a visiting UNICEF-funded teacher had for subjects such as math and reading was reserved for the boys.
A mosque assistant walked around the kids with a skinny stick in his hand.

“I just want to scare them,” he told me, waving it in the direction of the children.

“If there is no beating,” one small student responded solemnly, “there is no learning.”
This was the human impact of a single $100,000 contract for a school, but I saw it over & over: buzzfeednews.com/article/azmatk…

Now multiply it by the millions and billions stolen from the country and consider how many Afghans viewed this war and their own government.

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More from @AzmatZahra

10 Sep
Context for #The911Wars panel:

"But in the areas where most U.S. funding was concentrated — territories that were key to winning the war — American efforts have fallen woefully short of the grand claims the government made, claims that it knew were false."
In some cases, American efforts to provide education have actually backfired, embittering local people rather than winning their hearts and minds. ...
a fmr USAID manager on education in Afghanistan for years, watched the military’s counterinsurgency goals steadily creep into the agency’s work. USAID officials & contractors were summoned to presentations by generals, who asked how their work fit into the military’s strategy...
Read 7 tweets
6 Sep
Most of the war in Afghanistan has been fought in rural battlefields, places like Sangin and the Kandahar countryside, where Americans rarely hear the voices of women who have experienced decades of conflict.

Read this deeply reported story about women in Helmand's Sangin Valley
On a more true civilian toll:

"But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths—anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war’s civilian toll."

newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…
"There was Muhammad, a fifteen-year-old cousin: he was killed by a buzzbuzzak, a drone, while riding his motorcycle through the village with a friend. 'That sound was everywhere,' Shakira recalled. 'When we heard it, the children would start to cry, and I could not console them.'
Read 15 tweets
5 Sep
A must-read:

"I Helped Destroy People," @janetreitman's @NYTmag cover story about @TerryAlbury, an FBI agent who provided journalists key documents about the war on terror—and went to prison for it.

Amid the Trump news cycle, many ignored the revelations from his leaks, but... The cover of the New York Times Magazine Sunday edition on S
Don't ignore this now.

@TerryAlbury's firsthand account is an unvarnished view from the inside of what the FBI has been doing to Muslim and immigrant communities across the United States for two decades:

nytimes.com/2021/09/01/mag…
"His first partner, who worked primarily on cases involving Palestinians, used to argue to keep open cases that even his bosses wanted to close... “You invest years in it and begin to believe it’s your duty to find evidence, no matter how small, confirming your suspicions.”
Read 6 tweets
3 Sep
If there's only piece of reporting you read about Afghanistan this week, I think it should be this:

WHEN THE RAIDS CAME - by @andrewquilty: harpers.org/archive/2021/0…

He spent 2.5 years reporting it, only to have it come out the day after Kabul fell & get lost in the cycle. But...
It a story that illuminates essential context about the war that Americans have missed over the last month:

from the urban-rural divide and unemployment that drove a mass exodus of young Afghans...

to the 2019 deluge of night raids/airstrikes and how the Taliban recruited...
These CIA-trained & funded 01 units you've been hearing so much about these days...

read this deep reporting about the operations they conducted on the ground in Wardak province...
Read 5 tweets
29 Aug
I went on @ReliableSources with @brianstelter today to talk about U.S. media coverage of the war in Afghanistan, which has been its lowest in recent years, despite record pace.

There are many negative consequences, but one I want to emphasize the most is this...

(a thread)
Because most Americans are only now waking up to the war, they're informing themselves about the debate over withdrawal based ​mostly on sudden coverage from Kabul over the last few weeks—not the the years of context that's essential to having an informed debate about this war.
Most of the war in Afghanistan over the last 20 years has been fought in rural areas — not Kabul.

These areas are harder to access, admittedly, and some reporters have really gone to great lengths to report from them.
Read 11 tweets
27 Aug
If you weren't familiar with ISIS-K until yesterday, here's some important context:

In April 2017, the United States dropped a 21,600-pound, $170,000 bomb in a small village in Nangarhar province Afghanistan—intended to target ISIS-K.

Better known as the “Mother Of All Bombs...
Here is a video CENTCOM made public of this bombing:

Is is "the most powerful conventional bomb in the American arsenal" — so large that it had to be dropped from the rear of a cargo plane...

nytimes.com/2017/04/13/wor…
Read 5 tweets

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