The Cold Dark Truth in the ‘Afghanistan Papers’: America Doesn’t Care About Losing
Never-ending defeat is preferable to U.S. leadership and invisible to everyone at home
It doesn’t matter how long it goes on, the United States will never win the war in Afghanistan. This is the reality that senior military leaders and top-level officials have discussed in private for nearly the entire duration of the two-decade-long conflict, as a trove of new documents published earlier this week in the Washington Post revealed.
With a meaningful victory out of the question, the military and political leaders in charge instead pursued a strategy of constantly redefining the war’s goals, lying and dissembling about its progress, and finally, in a bipartisan policy upheld by every president since 2001 and abetted by an absentee Congress, simply refusing to end the war on any terms, a measure that ensured no presidential administration would be held responsible for its failure since a war that never ends cannot be judged definitively lost.
“Your job was not to win; it was to not lose,” a former member of the National Security Council staff told an interviewer in 2014.
Force the band to keep playing on the deck and the Titanic won’t sink — or so the thinking went among…
