Things are not going as well in Afghanistan as the US government would have you believe. Not from a US point of view, anyway. This week The Washington Post claimed that classified government reports reveal a persistent campaign to put the war in the best light, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable”. This may come as a surprise to many, but not to those few media outlets that have taken a more distanced view of the war and its supposed progress.
Right from the earliest days there were indications of major problems, but such was the euphoria that the US military had been able to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaida within three months of 9/11 that these counted for nothing in the public mind. George W. Bush drove on regardless: barely a month after that victory he used his 2002 State of the Union address to extend the war against al-Qaida into a far wider conflict with an ‘axis of evil’. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were the first enemies to be dealt with, but with Libya, Syria and Cuba also in line for action.
Not all the western military were convinced that this was a good way forward. One of the most remarkable indicators was included in a report in openDemocracy in January 2001, months before 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ that Bush declared against the evil axis. It reported a speech that the head of the UK’s armed forces at the time, Admiral Michael Boyce, gave to an influential audience at the Royal United Services Institute in London:
