michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: Newly disclosed documents reveal that for the past two decades, there was the story of the war in Afghanistan that U.S. officials told the public, and the reality of the war that they actively concealed. Times reporters Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt on what we’re learning from the Afghanistan Papers. It’s Monday, December 16. So T.M., set the scene for me on this day.

thomas gibbons-neff

So it’s the first week of December in 2009. I’m a 22-year-old Marine corporal, long before I was a New York Times reporter. I had just walked into a Subway shop off-base in Jacksonville, North Carolina. It was kind of a downtime between my last deployment to Afghanistan that came to a close in September of 2008, and we had been training for more than a year now for whatever came next. We were kind of in this weird limbo. And we knew that President Obama was making a speech. So we had walked in, and the lady behind the counter put it on the television. And there was Obama, and she turned up the volume.

archived recording (barack obama) As commander in chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.

thomas gibbons-neff

This would come to be known as Obama’s “surge.” The Taliban had been quickly resurging, and this would be the first attempt to kind of go in, stabilize certain parts of the country where the Taliban had returned, and allow both the Afghan government and the Afghan military to come in behind the American forces in an attempt to prevent a complete Taliban resurgence.

archived recording (barack obama) The 30,000 additional troops that I’m announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010, the fastest possible pace.

thomas gibbons-neff

And I remember thinking, well, I mean, I don’t know who that unit is, but that’s a quick turnaround. I mean, it’s the beginning of December and, you know, they’re probably getting ready to go. And by the time that I had gotten back to the barracks, we had received orders. We were that unit. We were going to Afghanistan, and we were going very soon to kind of be the vanguard of this new strategy that the president said is going to turn the tide. And we had kind of heard the name Marjah. It was often billed as the last Taliban stronghold. Whether that was true or not is very arguable. But that would be the first part of the surge, right, that we would go in with other battalions, and clear Marjah of the Taliban, and install a local government from Kabul that could do what the Taliban were doing, but better.

michael barbaro

And how are you feeling about this deployment at this point?

thomas gibbons-neff

I mean, I was 22 years old. I was in charge of seven other Marines, as a team leader for a sniper team. I had never passed sniper school, so I was in kind of a weird position where I was in a job that maybe I shouldn’t have had. But we had a pretty junior platoon and where every member of the team, this would be their first appointment in a sniper platoon. So I was — I mean, nervous would be an understatement. I would not only be doing this job for the first time, but I would be responsible for getting these seven guys back in one piece. So, yeah, I guess it boils down to really one word. I was scared.

michael barbaro

Hm. So what actually happens there?

thomas gibbons-neff

Right. So we get into Afghanistan, and we kind of get everybody on the ground. Our battalion’s a little over 1,000 strong. And in the weeks and months leading up to the big operation to take Marjah in February, our battalion, at the behest of our battalion commander and I’m sure commanders above him, thinks that it’s a good idea to do smaller operations around Marjah. And the battalion commander called it “bloodying our nose,” or something to that effect. And then, at the end of January, January 24, 2010, a platoon from Charlie Company got into a pretty vicious ambush. And two Marines, Sergeant Daniel Angus and Lance Corporal Zach Smith, both triggered a set of roadside bombs. And they died. They died instantly.

michael barbaro

Were these people you knew?

thomas gibbons-neff

I knew Sergeant Angus. But that was the battalion’s first deaths. I think the battalion’s leadership thought that these things had to happen. These Marines are new in Afghanistan, and they’re going to go on this big operation that’s a big deal politically, militarily. The term that military planners like to use is called shaping operations, right? Like it was shaping the battlefield for a big offensive. I don’t know if it successfully shaped anything. I just know that Zach Smith is dead, and so is Dan Angus. This is not going to be — this is not going to be an easy deployment. This is not going to be a walk in the park.

michael barbaro

And what happens when the fighting ultimately gets underway to try to retake this city?

thomas gibbons-neff

So February 12 — and I can kind of look at my journal here, and I can kind of recount late February 12 and early February 13. Slept, ate, still waiting. Unknown if going tonight.

10

00 p.m., staged.

11

00 p.m., on the flight line where the helicopters are. So now it’s February 13, 2010. 0900, troops in contact begins. Heavy fire, all directions. Casualty in third platoon. I think that was Doc Morris. He was a corpsman. He survived. Engineer hit, killed in action. Clear up to building 19, which was our company’s objective that day. And the engineer who was killed was Jacob Turbett. He was just shot in a spot where his body armor didn’t cover, kind of underneath his armpit. So we’re moving up to building 19. And we’re kind of getting shot at from a bunch of different directions. Sometimes it’s heavy fire. Sometimes it just kind of peters off. So set up rooftop position on building 19, begin taking accurate small arms fire. My team is kind of providing overwatch or looking out for anything that might attack the company. And one of the junior guys in my team kind of asks quietly, he’s like, is the whole deployment going to be like this? And I remember that very, very, very well. And within 15 minutes, we were getting shot at from pretty much every direction. So Matt Tooker, Matt Bostrom, hit. Matt Tooker, times two in the right arm. Bostrom, in his chest. Medevacs — and this part of my memory is just kind of snapshots of moments. You know, I can see Matt yelling. I can see a lot of blood, fumbling for a tourniquet, getting him off the roof. I mean, it’s just these little hiccups, I guess, of images. They both survived. And Bostrom came back about a month later. And Tooker never returned with the rest of the deployment.

michael barbaro

So two members of your team have just been shot.

thomas gibbons-neff

Yeah. That was the first day. I went from eight people to six people, myself included.

michael barbaro

This is the thing you most feared.

thomas gibbons-neff

It was.

michael barbaro

Does this operation ultimately achieve its goal?

thomas gibbons-neff

Yeah. I mean, it does in the sense that I think in the next few weeks, maybe by the end of February, somebody came out on some Pentagon briefing and said —

archived recording So last week, I spent Monday and Tuesday down in Helmand Province in Marjah, actually talking with and being around the Afghan National Police forces and the Afghan Army soldiers, so that I could see the end product and how it’s being — how it’s operating down there in that area. I would say most of us saw it performing better than I think the expectations were.

thomas gibbons-neff

The U.S. holds Marjah. You know, it’s secure. It never felt like we held it. I mean, in 2008 and the deployment before this one, there was kind of this on/off switch. It was we went in to a district near Marjah, there were some heavy fighting, and then all of a sudden the Taliban left. This was 2008. And so that was my understanding of kind of how maybe this went, right? We would go in, there would be some fighting, and then the Taliban would leave. And we’d pay back some locals for the house that we dropped a bomb on or a cow we killed or, God forbid, that anyone innocent was killed. We’d have to pay for that, too. But that just wasn’t the case. A lot of the villagers we talked to or the locals we talked to were pro-Taliban, had enjoyed the Taliban’s governance and how fast they solved some of their problems. And there was this creeping realization that maybe this isn’t going to work. Whatever this is was maybe a little off.

michael barbaro

And off why?

thomas gibbons-neff

Because I don’t think they wanted us there. That was kind of the feeling. And that quickly became apparent in those next days and weeks when maybe someone would be nice to us or we’d walk through a cluster of houses and everyone would be welcoming and talk to whatever unit was walking through. And then the next day, there’d be an ambush in that exact same spot or there would be a roadside bomb or it was — it was just complicated.

[music]

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. Eric, you have covered the war in Afghanistan pretty much since it started 18 years ago. As our colleague T.M. was fighting in Marjah as part of that 2009 surge, what was going through the minds of the generals who are overseeing the war?

eric schmitt

Let me tell you what one important three-star Army general was thinking. This is Douglas Lute, who was appointed by President Bush to be the White House czar in Afghanistan, and later stayed on under Obama. And Lute says, quote, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

michael barbaro

Wow.

eric schmitt

No one is ever this candid. And this is coming from the guy who was basically the top adviser to two presidents on Afghanistan policy. And he’s basically saying even he didn’t know what was going on.

michael barbaro

Right.

eric schmitt

And he’s looking back on this, and he’s remorseful. At one point in this he says, quote, “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction, 2,400 lives lost, who will say this was in vain?” Another thing you’d never hear a general talking about.

michael barbaro

So what is the context in which General Lute is being so startlingly frank and honest about an ongoing war?

eric schmitt

The context is essentially a secret history of the entire war in Afghanistan, involving hundreds of interviews with senior White House, State Department, Pentagon officials, military commanders, and even Afghanistan officials there, to get people to reveal why this Afghan war has proved to be so unwinnable. And all these people thought that what they said would remain secret. But that’s not the way it’s ended up.

michael barbaro

And if everyone who agreed to do these interviews thought they would be secret, why are they somehow sitting in front of you in that studio in Washington? Why are they now quite public?

eric schmitt

Well, the reason is The Washington Post went to court to basically make these interviews, audiotapes of the interviews, public. And after a three-year court battle, they largely succeeded.

michael barbaro

Even if these famous military leaders thought that these interviews would remain secret, why would they be so bluntly critical about the war, a war that they helped oversee?

eric schmitt

Well, in military culture, there’s a deeply rooted tradition of self-critique, of self-assessment, whether it’s after an actual battle or whether it’s after a campaign or a war in general. The military is very much about trying to learn lessons from whatever fight they were in, so as not to repeat the mistakes in whatever battle they fight in the future.

michael barbaro

So this would be a familiar experience to military officials participating in this secret history.

eric schmitt

Yes, it would. And the most famous example of this kind of self-critique is one that took place in the early 1970s, when the Defense Department commissioned a secret study of the war going on in Vietnam.

archived recording In newspaper terms, the Pentagon Papers are, of course, one of the major scoops of the century. And The New York Times treated it with suitable respect.

eric schmitt

And that report was leaked to The New York Times. And it caused such an uproar that the Nixon administration went to court to stop The Times from publishing. And they actually succeeded for a while.

archived recording First to follow The Times was The Washington Post.

eric schmitt

But then The Washington Post got their hands on the same set of documents, and continued publishing.

archived recording Then The Boston Globe and Congressman Paul McCloskey announced they, too, had copies of the secret study. At this, the Pentagon gave in.

eric schmitt

There were 7,000 pages revealed to the public.

archived recording Opinions differ as to precisely what the Pentagon Papers reveal. But many observers have seen them as a crushing indictment of America’s conduct of the war in Vietnam. From the published accounts, it certainly appears that mistakes were made and good advice went unheeded.

eric schmitt

It laid bare all the lies that were being told, that even as the commanders and the officials back in Washington were putting the most positive spin on this war in Southeast Asia, that they knew — these generals and these officials knew they were losing the war. The war was not going well at all. But they couldn’t admit that publicly, and so they misled the public. They misled the American people.

michael barbaro

So what do the Afghan Papers lay bare that we didn’t know or know as well about this almost 20-year-old war?

eric schmitt

So I think the Afghanistan Papers laid bare several things. First is that it shows just how chaotic the strategy was, almost from the beginning.

archived recording (george w. bush) Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against the Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

eric schmitt

This started out as a very narrow mission. Kill Al Qaeda, and topple the Taliban government that was hosting it. But that wasn’t good enough for these administrations. They decided it had to morph. It had to grow. And they decided they were going to rebuild Afghanistan in the image of America.

archived recording (george w. bush) We’re determined to lift up the people of Afghanistan. The women and children of Afghanistan have suffered enough. This great nation will work hard to bring them hope and help.

eric schmitt

They were going to create new opportunities for women that didn’t exist during the Taliban. They were going to counter narcotics. They were going to build huge public works projects. And one after another these missions piled on top of each other, until at one point in the documents, a senior State Department official says, if there was ever a notion of mission creep, it is in Afghanistan. They’ve taken a very narrow mission, very focused mission, and turned it into something much larger. And that gets to the second point, that Afghanistan, in the vision that the administrations had, was essentially ungovernable. Here was a country that just geographically had never had a strong central government. And yet, the United States wanted to come in and create a very strong central government with one guy, President Hamid Karzai. And that just also proved untenable. And then perhaps a third key lesson learned was what a missed opportunity there was after Al Qaeda had been defeated, after the Taliban regime had been ousted in 2002. The United States had an option. They had a choice. They could negotiate a peace with the vanquished Taliban, or they could continue to fight on. And it’s that moment that’s captured in one of the documents, where Zalmay Khalilzad, United States ambassador to Afghanistan, puts it this way, quote, “Maybe we were not agile enough or wise enough to reach out to the Taliban early on, that we thought they were defeated and that they needed to be brought to justice rather than that they should be accommodated or some reconciliation be done.” At that crucial moment, when the United States could have been negotiating with the Taliban, it instead started a new war with Iraq that lasted for years. And it was during that time that the Taliban regrouped, rearmed and became stronger than ever, perhaps stronger than they even were in 2001.

michael barbaro

Before the war began.

eric schmitt

Before the war even began.

[music]

michael barbaro

Eric, I wonder what, if anything, the documents tell us about the particular mission that our colleague T.M. was on in Afghanistan, the Obama-ordered surge that began in 2009.

eric schmitt

From the very beginning, commanders felt that the surge would fail, for several reasons. Even as the president was announcing 30,000 additional troops, he was also putting a deadline on those troops, that within 18 months they would start withdrawing these forces. And all that said to the Taliban was, just wait it out. Wait out the Americans until these forces start drawing down. Yet this put tremendous pressure on the commanders in the field to produce good news back to Washington, good news back to the White House.

michael barbaro

Right.

eric schmitt

Again, another echo of Vietnam. Here’s what The Washington Post said, that Colonel Bob Crowley, an army counterinsurgency officer, described. Quote, “Truth was rarely welcome. Bad news was often stifled. Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable, but reinforced that everything we were doing was right. And we became a self-licking ice cream cone.” In one document, an official says, quote, “It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory, and none of it painted an accurate picture.” This was the mission T.M. was on.

[music]

michael barbaro

T.M., I’m curious what you’re feeling when you start reading these documents inside this secret history of the war in Afghanistan, in which commanding officers, in many cases, I have to imagine, your superiors, are candidly expressing their own doubts and misgivings about the mission that you and your colleagues were on.

thomas gibbons-neff

Yeah, it’s tough. I mean, all these years later, you kind of have these two directions, right? You either say it was all worth it, that we were fighting for something that was important and worth my friends’, our friends’ lives, or you start peeling it apart and looking at everything in some attempt to figure out why we did what we did. And then something like this comes out, right, these documents that kind of just stare at you, with people that you kind of trusted that said, hey, this battle will go down in history. This is the turning point in the war. As a 22-year-old or as an 18-year-old, as a 19-year-old, you want to believe that, that that’s — you think what you’re doing is some net positive. You think the bombs that you dropped and the people that you killed were — that they should have died. But, you know, here we are. It’s 2019. We’re negotiating. The United States is negotiating with the Taliban. Who’s to say that Marjah had to happen at all? I guess what makes it tough, especially today, in covering the Pentagon as a reporter for The New York Times, is that I’m still getting fed talking points, the same talking points, the same things that they were saying in February 2010 — hey, this is an Afghan-led operation. Everything is going well. The Afghan troops are dependable allies, when on the ground, they were not. Right? I’m getting different variations of that today, as part of my job. And I know on the receiving end, somewhere in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, there might be a younger version of myself who kind of blindly takes everything at face value. And, I mean, you, again, you just read these documents. And it just always ends with me asking where my friends are, and why Josh, and Brandon, and Jacob Turbett, Zach Smith and Dan Angus, why — where are they? Why they’re gone. And I know that’s melodramatic, but —

michael barbaro

It doesn’t seem melodramatic.

thomas gibbons-neff

Yeah. Where are they?

[music]

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording (mitch mcconnell) And everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this to the extent that we can.

michael barbaro

As the House of Representatives prepares to impeach President Trump, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said he is actively coordinating with the White House about how best to defend the president during a trial in the Senate.

archived recording (mitch mcconnell) We all know how it’s going to end. There is no chance the president’s going to be removed from office. My hope is that there won’t be a single Republican who votes for either of these articles of impeachment.

michael barbaro

Speaking to Fox News, McConnell predicted that a Senate trial would exonerate Trump, and asked his Republican colleagues to vote down any articles of impeachment adopted by the House.

archived recording (jerry nadler) Well, you know, the Constitution prescribes a special oath for the Senators when they sit as the trial in impeachment. They have to pledge to do impartial justice.

michael barbaro

House and Senate Democrats reacted to McConnell’s remarks with outrage, saying he had abdicated his role as an impartial juror in the trial. By Sunday, several Democrats had called on McConnell to recuse himself from the proceedings.

archived recording (jerry nadler) And here you have the majority leader of the Senate, in effect the foreman of the jury, saying he’s going to work hand-in-glove with the defense attorney. And that’s a violation of the oath that they’re about to take. And it’s a complete subversion of the constitutional scheme.

michael barbaro