12/16/2023 0 Comments The afghanistan papersIn his foreword, Whitlock clarifies that his book is not a work of military history that dwells on combat operations but “an attempt to explain what went wrong and how three consecutive presidents and their administrations failed to tell the truth.” The publisher is to be commended for the timing of ‘the Afghanistan Papers’ which hit the stands even as the US was withdrawing from Kabul in August. It is to the credit of Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter with the Washington Post, that the unalloyed story of the US war in Afghanistan is recounted with journalistic rigour (based on interviews with more than 1,000 people directly involved in the war) and the diligence of the committed researcher (270 end notes spread over 38 pages). The truth and war linkage goes back to the 18th century, and English essayist Samuel Johnson (1709-84) is deemed to have the copyright on this tenet when he observed in 1758: “Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.” The intersection of sectarian interest and collective credulity was nurtured in a fertile American ecosystem for almost 20 years, where the truth was buried in layer after layer of falsehoods even as the calamities of the Afghanistan war mounted. ![]() The tragedy that warrants the macabre tag is that in many cases, US taxpayer money was expended through a web of deceit and lies to indirectly arm the adversary to kill American troops. The war in Afghanistan that was triggered by the enormity of 9/11 may well go down in history as a macabre Barmecidal ‘feast’, wherein US taxpayer money was ostensibly spent to wage war in a distant land, even while most of it was ploughed back through contractors to an opaque military industrial complex. The image of an American Marine general-the last US soldier to exit Afghanistan- wearily walking up the ramp of a transport aircraft symbolised the shambolic withdrawal of the lone superpower from one of the world’s poorest nations, having expended vast amounts of treasure in waging a war that was ill-conceived and swaddled in layers of falsehood and make-believe. ![]() ![]() Truth, it is often averred, is the first casualty in war, and this phrase has a special resonance in relation to the US-led global war on terror (GWOT) that formally concluded in August 2021.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |