Don’t Let Congress Investigate Afghanistan
Why the American public should reject the planned Afghanistan War Commission
From the moment it began, Congress enabled the disastrous occupation of Afghanistan.
For 20 years, members from both parties voted to fund it, obstructed any attempts to end it, and ignored everything that was wrong with it.
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reports about our lack of progress compiled every three months. Classified intelligence briefings. Trips to the region to meet with Afghan leadership and tour the country’s cities. A relentless daily stream of publicly available reporting about the horrors we were causing.
Our elected officials knew what was happening every step of the way but because the US had a geostrategic purpose for maintaining a presence in Afghanistan, did everything in their power to make sure that the war continued. Now, following two decades of bombing and occupation, they’re angling to ask questions they already know the answers to in order to ensure that nobody realizes that they’re the ones to blame.
Spearheaded by war hawk and Russiagate conspiracy theorist Senator Tammy Duckworth, an amendment buried deep inside the FY22 NDAA promises to provide a mechanism for “investigating” the two decades the US had spent fighting in Afghanistan.
Created by Section 1094, the Afghanistan War Commission is intended to:
(1) “examine the key strategic, diplomatic, and operational decisions that pertain to the war in Afghanistan during the relevant period, including decisions, assessments, and events that preceded the war in Afghanistan;” and
(2) “to develop a series of lessons learned and recommendations for the way forward that will inform future decisions by Congress and policymakers throughout the United States Government.”
In reality, the exercise being planned is little more than a shameless and repulsive attempt by lawmakers to avoid taking responsibility for the criminality of America’s longest war.
As Duckworth’s office described in a December 2021 press release, the purpose of this commission is “to examine every aspect of the war in Afghanistan in order to produce actionable recommendations to develop real reforms that ensure our nation not only learns the right lessons from our 20 years in Afghanistan, but also ensure the same mistakes are never made again.”
Absolute gibberish coming from a senator who spent years in office watching the US military bomb Afghan civilians without any objection. Someone who did nothing while the Trump administration obstructed the International Criminal Court’s attempts to investigate the US for war crimes in Afghanistan.
Thousands of innocent Afghans were slaughtered and more than 2,400 caskets returned back to the US, but our lawmakers still worked to try to stop the war from ending. Now, they’re pretending to search for the truth.
Every member of Congress who could’ve worked to end this war and didn’t has blood on their hands. The theatrics of a sham “investigation” in which the government analyzes itself isn’t going to do anything to change that.
The finger-pointing began hours after Kabul fell. In the span of just a few short days following the end of the war, chairmen of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the House Armed Services Committee all issued statements with demands for hearings. If you have trouble keeping these bodies straight, just remember that the House Armed Service Committee is the worthless one comprised of members who just ask the same pointless questions over and over, and the other committees are exactly the same.
They’ve held these types of performative hearings for years – the same mindless inquiries, the same dull follow-ups. Now, Congress wants to hold some more.
The amendment was co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, most of whom have spent years cashing the defense industry’s checks while the war in Afghanistan raged on.
According to the press release issued by Duckworth’s office, among the commission’s stated aims will be to analyze the “effectiveness of Congressional oversight efforts,” which certainly foreshadows a real CIA-finds-it’s-done-nothing-wrong flavor.
According to the announcement, the commission will also provide an assessment of the “lessons learned,” a rather strange promise to make considering that the Washington Post’s already done that.
In the summer of 2016, the Post received a tip that retired Army general Michael Flynn had made some comments in which he was highly critical of the war in Afghanistan. The remarks were given in an interview that Flynn had given to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) office as part of the organization’s Lessons Learned project first initiated in 2014. When the Post learned that more than 90% of the 600+ interviews were excluded from the reports published by SIGAR, the paper spent three years in court to pry more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished material from the government’s grasp. The result were the Afghanistan Papers, an explosive six-part report detailing how multiple administrations were intentionally misleading the American public about how the war was progressing.
The subtext of the investigation being planned is that Congress needs to be educated on what happened in Afghanistan, but nothing could be further from the truth. The results of this commission – comprised exclusively of defense industry insiders swimming in corporate cash – will be a foregone conclusion before the work even starts.
Earlier this month, the commission announced that it will hold its first official meeting on August 23. A look at the commission’s roster of members reveals just how pointless this spectacle is guaranteed to be.
On the same day the commission announced the date of its inaugural gathering, the body’s co-chairs also made known that Jaime Cheshire had been appointed as the commission’s executive director.
Is Chesire a co-founder of a non-profit helping to deliver aid to refugees in the Middle East? Not even close. Is she an independent journalist who’s chronicled the destructive policies of the American war machine? Wrong again.
No, Chesire’s most recent position was a senior leadership role within the intelligence community, as the- Central Intelligence Agency’s Executive Secretary. That the individual tasked with investigating an American-led war was plucked from the CIA should tell you everything you need to know about this upcoming probe, but the problem with the commission’s composition runs much deeper.
Commission co-chair Shamila N. Chaudhary also comes directly from the belly of the beast, having served as Director for Pakistan and Afghanistan on the National Security Council (NSC) from 2010 to 2011. Her tenure in this role came just as the Pentagon was implementing Obama’s Afghan surge, in which the president escalated the war by deploying an additional 30,000 US troops to the conflict. Chaudhary also spent time as South Asia Advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Some of her other roles have included serving as a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center as well as at New America, two think tanks funded directly by the US State Department.
Commission Co-Chair Dr. Colin F. Jackson is a professor at the US Naval War College who’d previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, and was a senior DoD representative to the US-Taliban peace talks.
The rest of the commission is composed of individuals with nearly identical backgrounds. A breakdown of the most noteworthy aspects of these members’ resumes follows below:
[Many of the bullet points in this article were taken verbatim from the bio pages of the commission’s members.]
Michael Allen
Managing Director of Beacon Global Strategies, a DC consulting firm with a roster of clients that reportedly includes swamp monsters such as Citi and Raytheon.
Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counter-proliferation Strategy from June 2007 to January 2009 under National Security Advisor Steve Hadley, the former President George W. Bush advisor who played a part in building the fraudulent case for the Iraq war.
Majority Staff Director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Under Chairman Mike Rogers’ (R-MI) direction, the HPSCI oversaw, authorized, and funded all intelligence programs across the eighteen elements of the intelligence community and led the House of Representatives’ consideration of cyber security legislation.
Nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council.
A member of the Council of Foreign Relations, a pro-war think tank.
Additional roles at the legislative affairs office of the White House’s Homeland Security Council and the Bureau of Legislative Affairs at the Department of State.
Lieutenant General Robert P. Ashley, Jr.
Former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Army Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2, where he was the senior advisor to the Secretary of the Army and Army Chief of Staff for all aspects of intelligence, counterintelligence, and security.
Commanded at the company, battalion, squadron, and brigade levels with six combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a squadron commander, brigade commander, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (J-2).
Jeremy Bash
Founder and Managing Director of Beacon Global Strategies.
Chief of Staff to the Director of the CIA (2009-2011).
Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense (2011-2013).
Jeffrey Dressler
National Security Advisor to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (2017 – 2019) and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (2015 – 2017).
An expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a pro-war, defense contractor-funded think tank founded by Kimberly Kagan. Kagan’s brother-in-law, Robert Kagan, co-founded the Project for the New American Century, the think tank whose members would go on to serve in the Bush administration and were largely responsible for the post-9/11 foreign policies the US government would adopt. In his capacity at ISW, Dressler also served as a terrorism and counterinsurgency advisor to senior commanders in Afghanistan.
Daniel Fata
Vice President for Government Affairs at Lockheed Martin.
From 2017-2021, he was Lockheed Martin’s Vice President for Policy and Strategy Engagement responsible for managing high profile cross-functional, cross-collaborative projects to proactively shape policy outcomes and to develop strategic initiatives and campaigns across a variety of issues including innovation, defense industrial base, acquisition policy, DoD budget, and workforce. He served as the Corporate lead for overall Executive Branch engagement with the White House and key DoD offices/agencies. He also managed the Corporation’s strategic relationships with major industry associations, domestic think tanks, and influencers. From 2015-2017, Dan served as Vice President for International Program Support, where he was responsible for developing and executing US government engagement strategies that supported LM’s business priorities around the globe.
US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy (DASD NATO Policy). In that role, he was a key advisor to two Secretaries of Defense and was responsible for developing and executing American defense policy among the nations of Canada, Europe, Russia, and Eurasia, as well as with international organizations including NATO, the European Union, and the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe.
Previous affiliations with some of America’s leading think tanks and NGOs including the Alexander Hamilton Society, the American Enterprise Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the German Marshall Fund of the US.
Luke Hartig
A fellow with the International Security Program at New America.
Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council (NSC).
Worked on drone strike policy for the Obama administration.
Additional roles at the Department of Defense, State Department, Office of Management and Budget, Government Accountability Office, and US Forces Afghanistan.
A term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow with the Truman National Security Project, and was named a Next Generation National Security Leader by the Center for a New American Security in 2013.
Executive Editor at Just Security, an insider publication written by and curated for the Capitol Hill crowd as well as Washington’s national security elite.
Seth Jones
Senior Vice President, Harold Brown Chair, director of the International Security Program, and director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, a think tank funded by the US government which exists to provide foreign policy “research” about the Pentagon’s stated enemies.
Representative for the commander, US Special Operations Command, to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations.
Plans officer and adviser to the commanding general, US Special Operations Forces, in Afghanistan (Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command–Afghanistan).
Michael Lumpkin
Special Envoy and Coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which describes its mission as countering “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.”
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC).
Senior executive at both the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs.
Lieutenant Colonel Chris Molino
Deputy Legislative Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Managed congressional engagements and correspondence for the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics.
Director for Africa Counterterrorism in OSDPolicy’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC).
Bob Taft
Governor of Ohio (1999 – 2007)
Great-grandson of President William Howard Taft.
Dr. Andrew Wilder
Vice President of the United States Institute of Peace’s (USIP) Asia Center since 2015, after previously serving as the director of Afghanistan and Pakistan programs (2010-2013) and vice president of South and Central Asia programs (2013-2015). USIP is a research organization funded by the US government.
Ryan Crocker
Nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, funded by numerous foreign governments, corporations, and the US State Department.
A six-time US ambassador: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon.
A member of the Middle East Institute’s International Advisory Council; Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, and the embassies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar are included among the think tank’s financial backers.
Former Distinguished Fellow at the Wilson Center, an entity funded by the US State Department, as well as many other foreign governments and corporations.
Former board member for US Agency for Global Media, a CIA cutout funded by the federal government that operates State Department mouthpieces such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia.
Laurel Miller
President and Chief Executive Officer of the Asia Foundation, an organization funded by entities such as Google, Boeing, Bank of America, HSBC, and Citigroup, among others.
Senior foreign policy expert at the RAND Corporation.
Deputy and then acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the Department of State.
Senior advisor to the assistant secretary of state for European Affairs, senior advisor to the United States special envoy for the Balkans, and deputy to the ambassador-at-large for War Crimes Issues. She was directly involved in peace negotiations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia.
Senior expert at the US Institute of Peace.
International affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The closest the commission gets to an anti-war voice is Anand Gopal, who’s produced some good work in his coverage of the US war machine.
Unfortunately, for all of his reporting on the devastation caused by America’s drone program, among other positive contributions, Gopal also has a history of repeating mainstream talking points about US foreign policy that simply aren’t true.
For instance, during a 2017 interview with Democracy Now!, Gopal asserted, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that the US government’s meddling in Syria was not fueled by a desire for regime change. Furthermore, Gopal was also challenged during the interview by journalist Nermeen Shaikh on the origins of ISIS.
When Shaikh asked him to clarify his contention that “the cause of ISIS or what gave birth to ISIS in Syria is in fact the Assad regime because that’s not what’s commonly understood,” he responded by noting that this position stems from months of interviews with ISIS members.
According to Gopal, each and every one of these fighters joined the terror group after witnessing an atrocity committed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“I’ve never heard anybody give another reason other than that,” Gopal, a fellow with the International Security Program at New America, said.
Not a word about how the US invasion of Iraq led to the rise of the terror group. He didn’t mention Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA program that spent billions arming and training what it claimed were “moderate” rebels but propped up some of the most violent groups in the region instead.
During this interview, Gopal also repeated the widely discredited notion that the Assad regime was responsible for the April 2017 chemical attack in Idlib, and notes that to think otherwise is a “conspiracy theory” that is “on the level of Bigfoot or UFOs.”
**
One commission member with a connection to the State Department or the intelligence community would’ve been an anomaly. Two would’ve been a coincidence. The fact that all 16 individuals selected for the job have such strong ties to the Beltway is nothing less than an intentional, coordinated effort to ensure that an authentic investigation will never be completed.
During a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee several years back, Dr. Jackson flatly dismissed the notion that the Afghanistan Papers had exposed a deliberate attempt to deceive the American people about the progression of the war. In a 2003 op-ed, at a time when approximately 130,000 US troops were stationed in Iraq, Seth Jones advocated increasing that total to as many as 500,000 to help stabilize the country.
All of the other misguided viewpoints and government-favored policy positions held by Jackson and Jones, as well as the other 14 members, are beyond the scope of a single article. What’s important is that the individuals chosen for this task were picked for a very specific reason: to engineer an outcome Congress would feel comfortable publicizing. Even in the event that one of these individuals actually bothers to ask some real questions, their voice will be drowned out by all of the others.
Congress supported and enabled the war in Afghanistan for years.
When it came time to finally end the conflict, its members panicked, triggering a bipartisan effort to prevent US soldiers from leaving. Using the completely discredited Russian bounties fantasy, Democrat Jason Crow and Republican Liz Cheney co-sponsored an amendment to the NDAA that would have limited President Trump’s ability to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
In the wake of the US withdrawal, members from both parties reiterated their frustration that the war had ended.
The notion that any of these lawmakers have anything to “investigate” is ludicrous and the last thing anyone needs to see is how well they can feign outrage and confusion just to take the heat off themselves.
They’ve known for years exactly what was happening in Afghanistan, yet still have the nerve to launch an investigation that promises to study “the challenges of corruption across the entire spectrum of the Afghan Government” as well as “the efficacy of counter-narcotic efforts.”
Perhaps the most interesting section in the bill promises to assess “the extent to which public representations of the situation in Afghanistan before Congress by United States Government officials differed from the most recent formal assessment of the intelligence community at the time those representations were made.”
There are lots of people to blame and the folks in Congress need everyone to understand that none of those people are them. The ultimate proof of just how absurd this planned investigation is going to be is rooted in the fact that Congress is repeating its past mistakes as we speak.
There’s no telling how or when the war in Ukraine will ultimately end but when it does, will Senator Duckworth demand an investigation to look into why sending weapons to Ukraine was a bad idea? How about a set of hearings to uncover why going to war with China to defend Taiwanese sovereignty was a mistake?
US policy in Afghanistan wasn’t a series of errors, but rather a string of deliberate actions. We shouldn’t allow Congress to pretend to investigate them as if they weren’t the ones who’d made them.