After Afghanistan fiasco, Congressional inquest into US’ murkiest war is imperative to fix accountability

As rifle-waving Taliban insurgents take hold of an Afghanistan left shattered by a degrading US retreat —rather than a ‘withdrawal’ — they seem poised to mutilate the legacy of America’s longest, and murkiest, war.

Central to the two-decade-long fortified presence of the most powerful army in the world in this embattled Asian country is the question whether it had achieved its objectives in this war that had proven exorbitant in terms of both costs and lives.

With fear seizing the forsaken Afghans of a return to the repressive 1996-2001 rule of the Taliban, the answer is clear that there have been no achievements, with events having turned a full circle.

Addressing a news conference on July 8, US President Joe Biden had rejected the notion that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was inevitable following US military withdrawal, expressing confidence that President Ashraf Ghani's government and the 300,000 Afghan troops trained, armed and compensated by the US (at a cost of $83 billion) would be able to overcome the worse-equipped, smaller Taliban forces.

He also denied the Afghan government would collapse, a claim belied by the fact that Ghani allegedly decamped with hordes of cash on August 15 even as the Taliban surged into Kabul, overrunning the country in less than 10 days, encountering little or no resistance from his army.

Biden was possibly unaware of assessments by his own officials that a US troop withdrawal could lead to Taliban gains on the battlefield, as the Taliban were positioned more strongly than at any point since 2001, controlling half the country.

Though the number of US and 38-nation coalition forces had peaked to 140,000 in 2011, supplemented by the 300,000 Afghan troops, the Americans were eventually exposed in their inability to ward off ragtag anarchists, whose strength was estimated at between 50,000 and 80,000.

Questions are bound to arise on the accountability of succeeding US administrations that waged the war, as also on the abject political and military capitulation. Washington expended a staggering $982 billion, $145 billion of that towards rebuilding the war-weary country that has a GDP (of $21 billion) on par with that of Papua New Guinea.

The military campaign in Afghanistan was launched on October 7, 2001 by President George W. Bush to avenge the unprecedented terror strike on American soil on September 11 that year, the incident termed as ‘9/11’. It sought to oust the Taliban, who were then in power in Afghanistan since 1996, and crush the al-Qaeda terror network they supported and which was suspected to have perpetrated the attack.

To avenge the loss of 3,156 innocent lives in the carnage – 2,753 at the Twin Towers in New York, plus 403 firefighters, paramedics and policemen – the US reprisal led to the deaths of 2,448 American service members and of at least 51,000 Taliban fighters.

However, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, an additional 47,245 Afghan civilians, and 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan military and police, who had no involvement with '9/11', perished in the US operations.

These are heavy costs of war, and a heavier moral burden for Washington.

The CIA has also armed and funded Afghan militia groups that have been implicated in grave human rights abuses and killings of civilians. The turmoil has imperiled the land with unexploded ordnance, which slays and maims innumerable Afghans annually, especially children.

In his remarks from the White House on August 16, Biden lauded the US campaign in Afghanistan for severely degrading al-Qaeda in that country.

However, his own government had at the time assessed that al-Qaeda enjoyed a daunting presence in Afghanistan and had sustained its decades-long ties with the Taliban, which had moreover left unfulfilled their counterterrorism commitments concerning al-Qaeda. The Defense Intelligence Agency had also assessed last year that some al-Qaeda members are “integrated into the Taliban’s forces and command structure”.

Biden also defended American withdrawal from Afghanistan at that juncture by saying, “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralised democracy.”

However, his Department of State’s January factsheet on ‘US’s relations with Afghanistan’ notes, “In order to strengthen Afghanistan’s capabilities as a partner, and to improve the lives of the Afghan people, we continue to invest US resources to help Afghanistan improve its security, governance, institutions, and economy.”

Astonishingly, while the US had in 2001 precipitated a regime change in Afghanistan by overthrowing the Taliban for harbouring al-Qaeda, it sought to broker an interim “transitional” government that would include the Taliban leadership in the first direct peace negotiations between the then Ghani regime and Taliban representatives in Qatar in September last year. President Ghani had rejected the idea. Indeed, the US had itself held talks with the Taliban earlier, where the Afghan government was not represented.

Though the four US presidents who have presided over the Afghan war have been from both the Republican and Democratic parties – Bush (R), Barack Obama (D), Donald Trump (R), and Biden (D) – it is imperative that a Congressional investigation is held into the conduct of the extended military operations.

The US Constitution does not expressly authorise investigation or oversight by either house of Congress, but the authority to conduct investigations is implied since Congress possesses “all legislative powers”.

Congressional investigations are said to be central to the system of checks and balances, with investigatory hearings uncovering presidential abuses of power and corruption, such as the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s or Watergate in the 1970s.

Government misdeeds have been exposed in the past, as in 2004 when crony capitalism was found to have reaped the spoils of war, with oil services firm Halliburton Corp., once headed by then Vice President Dick Cheney, having been by far the largest recipient of the over 150 American companies that received US government contracts cumulatively worth more than $51 billion for post-invasion work in Afghanistan and Iraq. Halliburton alone cornered contracts totalling $11.4 billion.

Halliburton’s business with the military grew substantially since Bush and Cheney took office, the company rising to seventh-largest military contractor in 2003 from 22^nd-largest in 2000. Cheney had been chairman and CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, and alongside his close friend, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld had played a central role in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Another firm to have received windfall contracts for reconstruction of a fractured Iraq had been engineering and construction giant Bechtel Corp., whose executives included former Secretary of State George Shultz and ex-Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger.

Not only have the objectives of the Afghan operations remained unrealised, the forsaken people of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” are dreading the imminent restoration of Taliban’s repressive and brutal rule.

Taliban’s entrenched links with an undefeated al-Quaeda and other terror organisations, and its haul of the abandoned state treasury, as also of the armaments left behind by the American, coalition and Afghan armies have made the world suddenly insecure.

(The writer is Executive Editor of Business India in Mumbai; Regional Editor, Indo-Pacific Region, of Naval Forces, published out of Germany, and Asia Correspondent of Sydney-based cyber security journal, Asia Pacific Security Magazine (APSM).

(Views are personal)