S4 Episode 9 - "Peace Walker"

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwin. And this is Season 4, Episode 9, Peace Walker. Last episode, we saw the Bush administration occupy Afghanistan. Far more thrifty than their big government Soviet predecessors, the Americans paid off warlords, ex-Mujahideen, and Taliban alike, handing the country's development over to private companies and contractors.

Just as in Iraq, an insurgency wearing the colors of militant Islam struck back. And by 2006, Taliban and ex-Mujahideen were piling up their own bodies. By the end of the Bush era, Vice President Dick Cheney himself was the target of a suicide attack at Kabul airport. In 2008 Democratic candidate Barack Obama upon promising to end the war in Iraq

also promised to inject new vigor into the war in Afghanistan. In fact, as should have been apparent to President Bush and Senator McCain, the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq. And it never was. And that's why the second goal of my new strategy will be taking the fight to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

we will now see the carousel of Generals McKiernan, Petraeus, and McChrystal dispatched to the front. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her abrasive advisor Richard Holbrook are on deck. This team's job will be to sell, quote, the mirage of the good war, as the writer Tariq Ali put it. And we'll see how that mirage was maintained. It is unacceptable.

that almost seven years after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on our soil, the terrorists who attacked us on 9-11 are still at large. Osama bin Laden. Zawahari. Presenting as smart pragmatists after eight years of reckless cowboy rule, Obama administration officials touted statistics that distorted what was really happening, writes Craig Whitlock.

The Bush administration had done the same, but Obama staffers in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department took it to a new level. It was an eight-year campaign of denial. Fantasia, and sometimes outright lies, as Afghanistan suffered more corruption, more violence, and historic election fraud by the Americans' hand-picked ruler, Hamid Karzai.

Al Qaeda has an expanding base in Pakistan that is probably no farther from their old Afghan sanctuary than a train ride from Washington to Philadelphia. If another attack on... our homeland comes, it will likely come from the same region where 9-11 was planned. And then there is the matter of Pakistan, America's seeming forever frenemy in Central Asia.

The new Obama administration had promised to get tough on Pakistan. What might that mean for the terrorists and the Taliban that the Pakistanis were protecting and sponsoring? And what might it mean for America's original justification for war in the first place? The hunt for Osama bin Laden.

After eight years, some of those years in which we did not have I think either the resources or the strategy to get the job done, it is my intention to finish the job. The top foreign policy issue in Obama's campaign had been ending the Iraq War. As we saw in Season 1, that goal was partially, even inadvertently, achieved by 2011.

when the U.S. failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement with the Iraqis and packed their bags and left. And happening alongside the drawdown in Iraq was the escalation of war in Afghanistan. The good war would finally enjoy its day in the sun. The first item of the day was a troop increase, which Obama was prepared to do to the tune of 17,000 new soldiers. What Obama and his top advisers didn't realize...

writes Michael Hastings, journalist and author of the book The Operators, quote, is that 17,000 troops were just the beginning. 17,000 became 21,000 a month later. And it wouldn't stop there. As the Pentagon asked for more and more troops, there was another snag. Only a few months after the president's inauguration, he fired his top general, David McKiernan.

U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan. Many noted that the last time a president had fired a commander at this level was when Harry Truman relieved a subversive Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War.

But what was McKiernan's subversion, asks Whitlock. Quote, he had violated an unspoken rule. He became the first general to admit the war in Afghanistan was going poorly. This was not the message the White House was looking to send. The Afghan war was getting a makeover, both in words and in deeds. Bush-era terminology, things like a global war on terror against radical Islam, These were now being sanitized. A March 2009 email to Pentagon staff read,

overseas contingency operation. In fact, Obama's people couldn't resist proclaiming success in Afghanistan, even after just a few months. But during this very period, violence was going up, not down. The Taliban stronghold of Kandahar was no closer to U.S. occupation, and small numbers of Taliban were tearing through NATO lines. This would not do. The Obama administration was determined to make Afghanistan

a success story, whatever the facts on the ground. But if the war was to be saved, it needed a savior, a star general, to put a face to the new policy, whatever that actually ended up being. And so...

In May 2009, Obama gave General Stanley McChrystal the nod to assume command in Afghanistan. We are here in Afghanistan. It's my fourth trip back because this is it. That surge you talked about is arriving with 30,000 troops, and the pressure is on the man in charge here, General Stanley McChrystal. Stanley McChrystal.

is gaunt, wiry. Quote, the 54-year-old McChrystal portrays himself as an ascetic taskmaster who absorbs audiobooks while running eight-mile circuits, writes Whitlock. He pushes himself mercilessly. writes the New York Times Magazine, sleeping four or five hours a night, eating one meal a day. A veteran of the war on terror, McChrystal had been there for everything from Pat Tillman's scandalous death to the surge in Iraq.

He had presided over the dreaded JSOC task force in Iraq, that's the Joint Special Operations Command, commanding a highly secretive unit of hunter-killers.

McChrystal and his men not only orchestrated the capture of Saddam Hussein, but became a key plank in the Iraqi surge. There were dark spots on his resume. One of his units charged with hunting ISIS founder and designated boogeyman Abu Masaba Zarqawi, fell into scandal for running secret prisons in Baghdad, where detainees were tortured and killed.

but his men's highly loyal and secretive protocol allowed McChrystal to stay on the right side of public relations. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry into the scandal in June 2005, reported the New York Times. after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70% of its computer files had been lost.

Here, the Obama White House found its bold and cerebral man of the moment. McChrystal, however, wouldn't be going to Afghanistan alone. He also brought... his boys along with him, a tight-knit group of senior military men, including his executive officer, Charlie Flynn, and his brother, General Michael Flynn, later to become National Security Advisor.

and foreign influence peddler for President Donald Trump. These men and others became, quote, the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan, according to Michael Hastings. who embedded with the group as a journalist for Rolling Stone the following year. And by now, Stan McChrystal's military superior was General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command.

The two saw eye to eye on what needed to happen. As soon as McChrystal took over in summer 2009, he ordered yet another review of the war strategy, a clear signal that the conflict had deteriorated further.

and that he did not think the president's plan would work, end quote. McChrystal, with Petraeus smiling from above, wanted to turn to an Iraq-style counter-insurgency program. COIN, for short. Last we heard, you said we needed A quantum shift. We needed something dramatic, something to shift the momentum. Have you done it? Have you turned the tide? I believe we're doing that now. I believe that we have changed the way we operate in Afghanistan. We've changed some of our structures.

And I believe that we are on the way to convincing the Afghan people that we are here to protect them. Already? We've been at this for about seven months now. McChrystal's theory centered around the idea that the U.S. and NATO forces could open up space for the Afghan government to deliver basic goods and services, thereby sapping public support for the Taliban. The point, so the pitch went, was less about killing the enemy.

and more about winning hearts and minds. In 2006, Atreus and others authored a new so-called coin bible, which caught on and helped him to score the job of administering the surge in Iraq. and now an overhaul of the war in Afghanistan. Hastings, quote, The book is downloaded 1.5 million times in a month. It became the model for America's new war.

planners. What was McChrystal's wish list? 60,000 more troops, about double what was under discussion already. Massive aid infusion and tightening of the rules of engagement. to limit civilian casualties, since they understandably poisoned the Americans' relationships with the Afghans, Whitlock writes. Glossed over here was a central question. Who

exactly was all of this supposed to defeat? Who was the enemy? Afghan President Hamid Karzai, sincerely or not, had been asking this same question since the late Bush years. I'm confused, Karzai told the new Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, during a meeting in Kabul. I understand what we were supposed to be doing from 2001.

to 2005. It was the war on terror. Then all of a sudden I start hearing people in your government saying that we didn't need to kill bin Laden and Mullah Omar. And I didn't know what that meant. A fundamental flaw with the coin agenda was that it presumed most Afghans saw the Taliban as a clear enemy, when in fact, quote, the South and East, heavily populated by fellow Pashtuns, End quote. This was something Richard Holbrook.

new special advisor for Afghanistan and Pakistan, could not ignore. Like Charlie Wilson before him, Holbrook was inspired by John F. Kennedy to enter public service. With a sharp intellect and a blunt demeanor, He climbed the ranks as a career diplomat. Holbrook served first as an ambassador for a united Germany post-Cold War. He then negotiated the Dayton Accords during the wars in Bosnia, and he became an advisor.

to now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And his ultimate goal, those who knew Holbrook said, was to someday become Secretary of State himself. Holbrook was more than a bit of a loudmouth, as his biographer George Packer concedes. Happy to put his feet up on just about anybody's desk, including, as we'll see, President Hamid Karzais.

What worries India is whether Taliban leaders like the Haqqanis would ever be involved in any power sharing arrangement in the country. Would that ever be acceptable to the United States? It's hard to imagine any circumstance under which the Haqqanis... can be reconciled. They are nihilists, they're destroyers, they stand for nothing. They're closely associated with Al-Qaeda. So it doesn't sound to me like that's in the ballpark.

Holbrook did not buy into McChrystal's coin cult. And neither did Carl Eikenberry, one-time commander of NATO forces, who was now ambassador to Afghanistan. and who sent cable after cable begging the administration to crack down on safe havens in Pakistan rather than to expand operations in Afghanistan.

Between his generals requesting 60,000 more troops and some of his diplomats requesting a drawdown, Obama split the difference and sent 30,000 troops, with an increase from other NATO members as garnish. This, notes Peter Dale Scott, put U.S. troop levels at around 100,000, along with 32,000 non-U.S. foreign troops and 104,000 American paid mercenaries, provided through private companies.

Like Blackwater. It was tens of thousands more men than the Soviets could have hoped to throw at Afghanistan back in the 1980s. With the troop levels finalized, Obama then decreed one last thing. that almost no one supported. An 18-month deadline on the new coin strategy, which both state and the Pentagon thought was a huge mistake. Even the Pentagon skeptic State Department official, Barnett Rubin,

assistant to Richard Holbrook, was quote-unquote stupefied when Obama announced the timeline. With that deadline, he said, you can't use that strategy. Instead of resolving the inherent contradictions, Whitlock writes, Obama administration officials presented a unified front in public. Sitting next to Ambassador Eikenberry, who was more or less opposed to his own agenda, Stanley McChrystal told the Senate

in a December 2009 hearing. The most important thing we will have done by the summer of 2011 is convince the majority of the Afghan people that in fact we are going to win, we and the Afghan.

government are going to win. On November 19, 2009, Hillary Clinton beamed at Hamid Karzai at his inauguration. As everyone attending his inauguration knew, Whitlock writes, Karzai had stolen the election three months earlier. His supporters had committed fraud on an epic scale, stuffing ballot boxes and fixing vote totals.

A UN-backed investigation showed that Karzai cooked up one million illegal votes, a quarter of all that had been cast. And 30,000 more troops were on their way to prop up this government. UN officials have said there is widespread fraud. That's a direct quote. Widespread fraud in the election. There were irregularities. There must have also been fraud committed, no doubt. But...

The election was good and fair and worthy of praise, not of scorn, which the election received from the international media. That makes me very unhappy. That rather makes me angry. Karzai was never sold on democracy. Stephen Hadley, a Bush national security advisor, told government interviewers, despite the years of freedom talk from his own boss.

But there was a further wrinkle to Karzai's massive fraud. As Whitlock tells it, the Americans, who had long ago soured on Karzai, some such as Holbrook hated him, stirred the pot during the election season. and met with Karzai's opposition, backing them to run against the incumbent. Karzai, feeling betrayed, started cutting deals with guys like Mohammed Fahim, one-time Northern Alliance commander,

and CIA client, and war criminal Rashid Dostam, who we know very well by now. Karzai, quote, stacked the Election Oversight Commission with his cronies and turned his back on his American patrons.

Karzai could also point out the massacres of civilians by American troops, many of which were denied and never accounted for. Errant airstrikes would wipe out wedding parties, killing dozens of women and children. These were often met with denials, like one in July 2008, where First Lieutenant Nathan Perry, a military spokesman, said, quote,

Airstrike killed civilians when the missile actually struck militant extremists we were targeting. On this occasion, however, Karzai ordered an investigation. It concluded that 47 people were killed. mostly children and women, including the bride. A month later, when U.S. troops, gunships, and drones leveled a village in Helmand province, as many as 92 civilians, most of them children,

died in a single day. One American officer later said that the army was usually, quote, focused on consequence management, paying Afghans for damages, and condolence payments. From Karzai's perspective, it was unclear whether the Americans wanted him to be a genuine leader who stood for what he believed in, or a mere puppet.

All this tension bubbled to the surface before Obama was even president, with Vice President-elect Joe Biden storming out of a dinner with Karzai over accusations of malfeasance that went both ways. Things got so hairy that at one point, Karzai, who had once been attached to the hip of his American sponsors, he threatened to join the Taliban if the Americans didn't leave him alone.

We have heard from members of the UN Commission there that as many as 30% of the votes were fraudulent in some provinces. Isn't that...

Isn't that reason to cast doubt on the entire election? No. In 2010, Kabul Bank, Afghanistan's largest financial institution, turned out to be a pyramid scheme. with a billion dollars in deposits vanishing into separate accounts of some lucky elites. A whistleblower with a guilty conscience fingered the shareholders, which included not only the brother of a leading warlord, but also the brother of President Karzai himself. Neither man faced prosecution. Meanwhile, writes reporter Craig Whitlock,

Tens of thousands of Afghans mobbed Kabul bank branches to rescue their savings. An emergency $300 million was airlifted in from abroad to back up the depositors' missing money. How this had happened with hundreds, if not thousands, of American advisors inside of Afghanistan was never explained. As part of its Afghan overhaul and the expectations of the coin strategy,

The Obama administration ordered the military, the State Department, and USAID to start spending dump trucks of money. Troops and aid workers constructed schools, hospitals, roads. And soccer fields, writes Whitlock, anything that might win loyalty from the populace, with little concern for expense. In 2009, the Army published a handbook titled Commander's Guide to Money.

As a weapons system. Spending tripled from $6 billion in 2008 to $17 billion in 2010. The real problem wasn't the spending per se. It was the C word. Corruption. Despite, or perhaps because of all this cash, the Afghan government was no more legitimate than it had been under Bush. In fact, things had only gotten worse. Afghanistan had, under U.S. occupation, become one of the most corrupt states in the world. American money was a day late and a dollar too much.

And so, with Obama's troop surge came, quote, a surge in wartime entrepreneurship, writes the journalist Susie Hansen. A strange ecosystem, she writes, of soldiers, aid workers, businessmen, journalists, and other civilians flourished in the base of the bowl-like city of Kabul. Modern mid-level high-rises and wedding halls as gaudy as anything in Vegas rose above the traditional mud houses. SUVs in white had ascended to prominence as the power status symbol of choice.

Much of the money, she writes, ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt officials, while U.S. finance schools, clinics, and roads fell into disrepair due to poor construction or maintenance. That is, if they were built at all. What would it take for you to say to yourself, this can't be done? I think that it would be a belief that the Afghan people have lost faith that the future can be better and that we can help them get there.

In early 2010, Stan McChrystal began putting his much-awaited, coin-style Afghan surge into action. That February, the New York Times highlighted an operation in the southern Afghan town, of Marjah in a front-page story. It was part of a broader campaign in the South to dispel Taliban and other opponents of the Karzai government. Quote, is not the model. But, as the reporter noted, sparing civilian life may not be easy, especially in the close quarters combat that lies ahead.

In southern Afghanistan, the small farming district of Marja has become a gauge of progress in the war. In February, NATO forces drove out the Taliban, and the hope was it would serve as a model for other military operations. Instead... Violence has returned to Marja, and restoring government services has not been easy. The operation was a failure. After less than six months, the Marines who had taken the area started coming under routine assault.

from Taliban forces. Pakyar, a 33-year-old merchant, says the security situation has deteriorated over the past few weeks.

Obama official Michelle Flournoy. who had trumpeted success a bit too prematurely in the first months of 2009, now sounded more modest in a 2010 Senate hearing. General David Petraeus was quiet as well, but that was because... Halfway through an answer, he slumped forward onto the table. Rather than set an arbitrary timeline, the best way to...

We're going to recess now for a few moments. Petraeus turned out to be fine, merely the victim of dehydration in the swampy D.C. summer. But it was an omen of sorts. A week later, his protege, Stanley McChrystal, was out of a job. General McChrystal is on his way here. And I am going to meet with him. Secretary Gates will be meeting with him as well. I think it's clear that the article in which he and his team appeared showed a poor.

showed poor judgment. In mid-June, Rolling Stone published The Runaway General, a long profile of McChrystal, written by Michael Hastings. The journalist had been given full... on-the-record access to McChrystal. The goal had been to make Obama's Afghanistan commander seem like a rock-and-roll general, an army maverick. Instead, the story killed his career.

General McChrystal has issued an apology and it says in part, throughout my career, I have lived by the principles of personal honor and professional integrity. What is reflected in this article falls far short of that standard. McChrystal and his freewheeling advisors managed to make offensive, over-the-line comments about virtually every major U.S. and Afghan player.

Vice President Biden was rebranded as Vice President Bite Me. Richard Holbrook was a wounded animal. National Security Advisor Jim Jones was a clown. And Ambassador Eikenberry... only cared about his own flank. Hamid Karzai was the man with a funny hat. McChrystal and the boys even had a nickname for the hat itself. The gray wolf's vagina. End quote.

Two different reporters for the New York Times defended McChrystal on television. Journalist Laura Logan, then of 60 Minutes, declared she did not believe Hastings. Is what General McChrystal and his aides were doing so egregious? that they deserved to, I mean, to end a career like McChrystal's. I mean, Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has. And Geraldo Rivera said that firing McChrystal would be akin to al-Qaeda's assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud.

You don't think it's likely that McChrystal and his team assumed that some of their joking, that some of their banter would be treated by you as off the record? I think you'd have to ask General McChrystal and his team what they assumed, but... For me, when I go in to write a profile and no ground rules are laid down, and I'm there to write an on-the-record profile and cover readings while in the room, then that means it's on the record. But the nicknames were probably besides the point.

The general's gravest sin was remarking to a source that Obama, quote, didn't seem very engaged on Afghanistan. This appeared to be the ultimate crime in an administration obsessed with presenting a Hollywood sheen on an increasingly maddening and hopeless war. The Rolling Stone article was published on June 21st. On June 23rd, McChrystal was back in Washington, where Obama met with him in the Oval Office, and, as these things tend to go, accepted.

his resignation. So now what? Well, with the Iraq surge now in the rearview mirror, America's other star army general was freed up for duty. The original coin guru, General David Petraeus. was now selected to win the war in Afghanistan. In short order, he was shuttled into the same office where Obama had just canned McChrystal and accepted the job.

Back in 2009, during the honeymoon period, long before his firing, Stanley McChrystal and his command sat on Kandahar airfield, waiting on details for the Afghan election. Suddenly, writes Sarah Chase, a former American advisor, an aide bent over by McChrystal's ear. An Afghan provincial police chief had just been assassinated. This had been no roadside explosion.

No Taliban suicide bombing. It was Afghan army soldiers that had gunned the police chief down. The Kandahar Strike Force had done it, Chase writes. A special unit that worked for... and lived with the CIA. The circumstances of the shooting were almost unbelievable. A full-blown commando raid on the chief prosecutor's office with snipers on the roof.

The strike force was purportedly trying to spring a friend out of jail, but the jailed man wasn't even being held at that location. Then she is remembered. Ahmedwali Karzai, brother of the president and a known drug lord, had provided every member of the Kandahar Strike Force to the CIA, personally guaranteeing them all. The shooters had been his men. The next year, a Karzai aide, Muhammad Zia Salehi,

was arrested by Afghan police, caught red-handed in a massive corruption scandal, and was quickly sprung from jail by his president. As it turned out, Salehi was a bag man for the CIA. In other words... Writes Chayes, a secret CIA agenda, which involves enabling the very summit of Afghanistan's kleptocracy, was in direct conflict with the anti-corruption agenda.

The basic structure of the corruption was simple. Rather than a system of political patronage, where the top dogs send money downstream to bureaucrats and governors, Karzai and the elite were paid from the bottom up. just like a mafiodon who receives weekly envelopes from his kapos. No matter how inconsequential the subordinate might be, writes Chase, quote,

had to extend their protection right to the bottom. The Afghan government, Chase writes, quote, was not incapable. It was performing its core function with admirable efficiency, governing The exercise that attracted so much international attention was really just a front activity. Stolen funds, drug money, it didn't matter. The money all left Afghanistan in suitcases to Dubai.

or wires to Swiss accounts, or to whichever bank currently served as the BCCI of the moment. In plain English, Chase writes, why would a farmer stick out his neck to keep the Taliban out of his village, if the government was just as bad. No one would dirty his clothes getting near this government, said one Kandahar area farmer. Some Afghans drew a further conclusion. Quote, This hunch matches up with the testimony of one veteran of foreign corruption litigation, who told Chase,

Every time I tried to prosecute officials, I got pushback from the State Department. The CIA was not joining our anti-corruption meetings to help, Chase writes. Its aim was to learn our moves and protect its people. She wanted the agency out. I lost that battle. The CIA retained its seat at meetings. Its silent representatives taking meticulous notes. In 2011, General David Petraeus left Kabul to himself become director of the CIA.

With McChrystal gone, the military command in Afghanistan lost interest in talking to the enemy, Hastings reports. When Holbrook brought up the subject, Petraeus dismissed it. He imposed his iron will on the war, bringing full-spectrum counterinsurgency with a lethal edge, as Packer puts it. The civilians were squeezed out and then blamed for not holding up their end. End quote. For Holbrook, time had run out. That December, he died of a ruptured aorta.

By the end of the Bush administration, Afghanistan had soared above any other country in one export. Heroin. Under American occupation, the country had been transformed into the dope capital of the world. supplying 93% of global product, according to the United Nations. Obama's surge proved incapable of undoing this, if indeed it was ever meant to.

Dawood Dawood, Afghanistan's young and to many appealing minister of counter-narcotics, writes Sarah Chase, quote, was also, according to multiple separate strands of information, one of the biggest drug traffickers in the country. We would soon be digging through indications that he had influenced the dispatch of an Afghan army unit into a pointless skirmish.

in order to protect his control of a major smuggling route on the border with Tajikistan, end quote. And of course, Ahmed Wali Karzai, big-time warlord and brother of the president, was himself accused... of being one of the country's top drug kingpins. And his reign came to an end in July 2011 with a bullet to the head from his own bodyguard.

Drug money had by now turned Afghanistan into a 21st century oligarchy. The narco-state went hand in hand with the limitless corruption and gangsterismo, producing a new class of the hyper-rich. The most obvious proof was in Kabul. The Afghan elite lived in enormous poppy palaces, the Central Asian disco version of a McMansion, writes Susie Hansen. Whitlock saw the same.

The garish estates featured pink granite, lime marble, rooftop fountains, and heated indoor pools. Architects concealed wet bars and basements to avoid detection by judgmental mullahs. Some poppy palaces rented for $12,000 a month, an incomprehensible sum to impoverished Afghans who lived hand-to-mouth." For the elites. be they Afghan, Pakistani, Middle Eastern or indeed Western, all that was required was a place to put the dirty money.

Quote, money launderers lugged suitcases loaded with a million dollars or more on flights leaving Kabul so that crooked businessmen and politicians could stash their ill-gotten fortunes offshore. Much of the money landed in the Emirate of Dubai, where Afghans could pay cash for Persian Gulf luxury villas with few questions asked.

The fact was, the lion's share of the drug money went not to the Taliban or other insurgents, but to friends of the American occupiers. And so the war on drugs in Afghanistan... was directed only at the minority of dealers opposed to the Americans and their warlord partners. As Peter Dale Scott puts it, the aim has been to alter market share.

Indeed, Kirk Meyer, a career DEA officer serving in Afghanistan around this time, remarked that the Americans in charge did nothing to crack down on the heroin trade. Quote, of the American national security staff were the worst of the cockroaches, he said. They just scuttled for the dark corners. Facing a possible death sentence.

Raymond Davis has been catapulted from an obscure job at the American embassy in Pakistan to the center of a diplomatic meltdown with a critical ally. The Taliban had not just made a comeback, they were at their zenith, and by most accounts, they and their partners in al-Qaeda had regrouped and recruited across the Durand line, in the safe haven of Pakistan.

And so in that year, more CIA drone strikes were launched on Pakistan than in any other country. A few years later, a report estimated that this campaign of drone strikes had already killed at least 2,000 people. The strikes were viewed as mission critical by David Petraeus. They were also deeply unpopular in Pakistan. In 2008, a policy changed by George W. Bush regarding drone strikes.

had eliminated prior warning of Pakistan's government. And furthermore, according to journalist Mark Mazzetti, The CIA had approval from the White House to carry out missile strikes in Pakistan even when the agency's targeters weren't certain about exactly whom they were killing." Under Obama, unlike under Bush.

The longstanding and paradoxical alliance between America and Pakistan seemed like it was now ready to come apart. Davis is protected by a longstanding treaty which grants diplomats in foreign countries immunity from local laws.

but he has been held in a Pakistani jail for nearly three weeks. Pakistani discontent boiled over in late January 2011. A Blackwater mercenary named Raymond Davis on contract with the CIA was arrested for a double murder in Lahore, Pakistan. A former Green Beret, Davis is an unlikely diplomat and no one has explained why he was carrying a gun. Mazzetti has the story. Quote,

Davis shot two young men who approached his car on a black motorcycle, their guns drawn, at an intersection congested with cars, bicycles, and rickshaws. Davis took his semi-automatic Glock pistol and shot through the windshield. shattering the glass and hitting one of the men numerous times. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his car and shot several rounds into his back. Davis radioed the American consulate.

and within minutes, a Toyota Land Cruiser was in sight, careening in the wrong direction down a one-way street. The SVU struck and killed a young Pakistani motorcyclist, and then drove away. Inside Davis' car, An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia was found, including a black mask, approximately 100 bullets, and a piece of cloth bearing an American flag. The camera inside Davis' car contained photos.

of Pakistani military installations, taken surreptitiously. The Davis incident sparked protests all over Pakistan. Mazzetti's New York Times Magazine feature about the incident was titled, only somewhat hyperbolically, quote, How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States.

Not long after Davis' arrest, reports Mazzetti, quote, the grieving widow of one of his victims swallowed a lethal amount of rat poison and was rushed to the hospital in Faisalabad, where doctors pumped her stomach. The woman... Shumayla Fahim, was certain that the United States and Pakistan would quietly broker a deal to release her husband's killer from prison, a view she expressed to her doctors from her hospital bed. End quote.

The widow was right. The Pakistani and American governments worked out a deal in which the CIA Blackwater man was forgiven for the price of $2.3 million.

Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands. of innocent men, women, and children. The operation to kill Osama bin Laden is by now the stuff of American myth.

Daniel Boone, Chris Kyle, and a secret night raid into Pakistani territory. After 9-11 and Tora Bora, all those years before, the U.S. government had said bin Laden was attempting to run al-Qaeda remotely. At least a dozen recordings and videos had been attributed to bin Laden since 2002, some of which showed him and Ayman al-Zawahiri strolling through the Afghan-Pakistan border region.

But as far as the American public knew, the trail had gone cold. And then, late at night on May 1st, 2011, first dribbling out on social media,

and then confirmed by the White House itself, the news arrived. Bin Laden was dead. Navy SEALs had arrived at a compound in Pakistan, and after a firefight, in which bin laden reportedly used a woman as a human shield the master terrorist was no more it didn't take long for news to spread after president obama's statement late last night let me say to the families who lost loved ones on 9 11.

that we have never forgotten your loss. As hundreds took part in the celebration. It's a great hour for USA, great day for USA. In Philadelphia, instead of the game, baseball fans were glued to their phones. Americans across the country immediately gathered in public to celebrate, including outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Navy SEALs, another unit of JSOC, like Stan McChrystal's hunter killers,

became overnight media celebrities. You are about to meet one of the men who shot Osama bin Laden. So you start on the first floor, make your way up to the third. We started on the first floor. They cleared that. Mark Owen. recently left the navy's elite counter-terrorism unit

seal team six i recently spoke with former navy seal robert o'neill he and his special operations team killed osama bin laden in 2011. mark owen is not his real name it is the name that he used to write a new book about the assault o'neill says He fired the shots that killed the leader of al-Qaeda. Obama's approval rating enjoyed a healthy spike, and Hollywood's myth-makers went to work. If you're right, the whole world's gonna want in on this.

The film Zero Dark Thirty, depicting the Jack Bauer-style dirty work it took to catch Osama, premiered to critical acclaim and box office success only 18 months after the raid, with a script

supervised by the CIA. But beneath the fanfare, there were some odd details. As we've seen since 9-11, Pakistan's ISI had been working multiple angles with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We've seen how the Taliban and groups like the Haqqani Network actually worked to serve Pakistani interests, and this went for transnational groups.

like Al-Qaeda, as well. As dangerous as these outfits were, and as unambiguously toxic as they appeared to Americans, Pakistan's deep state found them to be a necessary pawn in their struggle for influence in the region, particularly against India. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates needed to be managed, manipulated, not destroyed. In addition to this balancing act,

writes Carlotta Gall. The ISI, like its American counterpart, the CIA, was also highly compartmentalized. A former senior intelligence official, she writes, said that after 9-11, One part of the ISI was engaged in hunting down militants while another part continued to work with them. There were facts that no one could ignore about bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad.

For a man supposedly on the run, his compound had no armed security, nor any escape hatches, or secret exits in case of a raid. And anyone with a map could see that the most wanted terrorist in the world... was living less than a mile from the Pakistani military academy, and only a few more miles from a military base. Only after badgering everyone I met did I finally uncover a bombshell Ghal reports.

The ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle bin Laden in Abbottabad. The top bosses knew about the desk, I was told. One ex-ISI chief told Gall. They hid bin Laden in order to keep the war on terror on the boil and U.S. financial assistance flowing, while continuing to cooperate by capturing and handing over lesser al-Qaeda figures.

Some correspondence revealed that bin Laden and his aides were discussing the idea of a deal with Pakistan in which al-Qaeda would refrain from attacking Pakistan in return for protection inside of the country. End quote.

Control over bin Laden was no small thing. In 2007, a jihadi revolt against Pakistan at the famous Red Mosque in Islamabad turned into an outright siege. The Islamists who occupied the mosque had fully turned against the pro-US Pakistani government, which promptly laid waste to the insurgents. But it was becoming harder and harder to keep the holy warriors in check.

and bin Laden remained one hell of a bargaining chip. According to bin Laden's own alleged correspondence, writes Gall, he had warned colleagues of betrayal by Pakistan. He relied on Pakistan to hide him, but knew it could not last forever.

Four years after the Bin Laden raid, investigative reporter Cy Hirsch published a major scoop in the London Review of Books, The Killing of Osama Bin Laden. Hirsch's 10,000-word story, opened by questioning the premise of bin Laden's captivity. Would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town 40 miles from Islamabad

would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaeda's operations? And the more one looks at the bin Laden raid, the less it makes sense. And, according to Hirsch, very little of what's been said about it by the government. is true. The CIA's narrative, dramatized in Zero Dark Thirty, was that torture had landed the Bin Laden fish. Obama's White House and liberal lawmakers such as Dianne Feinstein insisted

that the intelligence had come from watching al-Qaeda couriers. But according to Hirsch, it was neither torture nor detective work that scored the bin Laden intel. Quote, The CIA did not learn of bin Laden's whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House had claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret...

in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the United States. A key detail in Hirsch's report. While the White House said that the Pakistanis had not been told about the raid, that it was a daring mission carried out in secret to hell with the Pakistanis. Hirsch reports that in fact, Pakistan's military leadership was notified and, quote, had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the seals to Abbottabad

could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms, end quote. In other words, if the U.S. knew that the ISI was keeping bin Laden under supervision, Why would the White House find it more desirable to barrel into a nuclear-armed Allies airspace rather than simply cut a deal that the Pakistanis had been expecting to make for years? After all...

Deal-making had been enough to secure the freedom of Raymond Davis, Blackwater contractor and double murderer. Why wouldn't it work for bin Laden? And one of the other supposed big scores of the raid... The reams of Al-Qaeda intel lifted from the compound, according to Hirsch, was totally bogus. One of Hirsch's sources said that most of the materials from Abbottabad were turned over to the U.S.

by the Pakistanis, who later raised the building. The ISI took responsibility for the wives and children of bin Laden, none of whom were made available to the U.S. for questioning. Once Bin Laden was dead, you could say two different operations went into effect. The first and most obvious was an election season PR campaign trumpeting the president's gutsy call to finally do what it took.

to kill Osama bin Laden. The second operation, according to Hirsch, was to preserve a cover story that papered over a much more banal and ultimately ignoble. Truth. Cy Hirsch, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Joining me now, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell. Andrea, can you tell me what you guys have reported tonight and sort of where it aligns and then stops aligning with this report?

under review of books, which obviously has precipitated a tremendous amount of discussion, pushback in Washington today. The fact is that there are you to believe Cy Hirsch's. version of this today, you have to believe that Mike Morrell, the acting CIA director who contradicted it strongly today, Leon Panetta in interviews with me and in his book, I...

Absolutely believe all of the multiple sources that we've had all these years. Speaking on the record with Al Jazeera, a former head of the ISI suggested that, naturally, Bin Laden had been picked up by the Pakistanis in the 2000s. He was an obvious and appealing bargaining chip. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. As bin Laden's own correspondence had indicated, he knew his haven in Pakistan would not last forever. But perhaps the myths surrounding it will.

As the president said last night, the United States is meeting the goals he set for our three-track strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By the end of the Obama years, the biggest myth of all... had become the war in Afghanistan itself. All through this period, most of what Americans and the world heard about was progress, however modest. Economic growth is up. Opium production is down.

Under the Taliban, only 900,000 boys and no girls were enrolled in schools. By 2010, 7.1 million students were enrolled and nearly 40 percent of them girls. Afghan women. have used more than 100,000 microfinance loans. Infant mortality is down 22%. Now, what do these numbers and others that I could quote tell us?

Clinton's address was revealed to be based on cooked books. That was not an isolated incident. For an administration that branded itself as the 21st century's best and brightest, you couldn't seem to get away. from a lot of bad data. A special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction later said that U.S. officials, quote, knew that data was bad, yet bragged about the numbers anyway.

In internal interviews, says Craig Whitlock, U.S. military officials and advisors described explicit and sustained efforts to deliberately mislead the public. Even at this late date, quote, nobody had bothered to reliably track Afghan casualties. Defense officials didn't like to answer questions about civilian deaths, much less talk about who was responsible.

The last program to track civilian casualties was set up in 2005, way back in the Bush years, and it was quickly dropped, quote, for unspecified reasons.

Put up first this video just coming in, a new video that appears, appears to show really disgusting behavior by United States Marines in the presence of dead bodies. Maintaining the illusion got even harder in 2012. In January, a video made the rounds showing U.S. Marines pissing on the corpses of purported Taliban fighters. The next month, Whitlock records, U.S. personnel at Bagram burned copies of the Koran in a trash pile.

which set off demonstrations. The very next month, an army staff sergeant massacred 16 villagers in Kandahar province. Insurgents had also begun infiltrating the national police and the army. killing both Americans and whoever they saw as Afghan collaborators. In autumn 2012, over the course of two months, 16 of these kinds of attacks killed scores of U.S., NATO...

and Afghan soldiers. In March 2012, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who had been putting the best spin he could on a string of Taliban victories and assassinations, He was himself targeted by a suicide attacker in Kabul. After many denials, akin to the attack on Cheney years earlier, the military admitted that Panetta could have been killed. But…

there was still a chance to deliver a satisfying narrative. The administration could tout the death of Osama bin Laden as the kind of victory that could justify a drawdown of troops in Afghanistan. maybe even an end to the war. Was this not the original reason America had invaded? If polls were any indication, the American public certainly thought so.

In 2012, only 38% of Americans said the war had been worth it, compared to the 90% in the early 2000s. The White House decided to start withdrawing troops. By summer of 2012, they would ratchet roughly 100,000 soldiers down to 67,000, another choice data point for that year's upcoming election. But to actually finally exit Afghanistan...

one would ideally leave behind a functioning state. That did not yet exist there. The National Police was, quote, more of a paramilitary force than a crime-fighting agency, end quote. The Army, meanwhile, supposedly 350,000 strong, contained tens of thousands of listed personnel who in reality simply did not exist. It was soon discovered that the same went for the police.

And who could blame you for sitting things out? Quote, researchers calculated that more than 64,000 Afghans in uniform had been killed by the 2010s. Again, Obama. the Peace Walker, declared that things were steadily improving. This theater climaxed in 2014, when the White House announced that the war was, in fact, over. Today marked a turning point in Afghanistan as the U.S.-led coalition formally ended its combat role in that country.

In 2014, at the ceremony in Kabul, announcing... The end of the war in Afghanistan. President Obama was conspicuously absent. He didn't actually bother to attend. Instead, he sent a written statement from his vacation in Hawaii. It was a lack of effort that, perhaps, reflected the entire state of the war. Much like the more infamous mission-accomplished photo op delivered by George W. Bush over a decade earlier.

The chief of NATO forces celebrated the end of combat mission, boasting new statistics, quote, Since the start of the war, the commander said, life expectancy for the average Afghan had increased by 21 years. You times that by about 35 million Afghans represented here in the country, that gives you 741 million years of life. Apart from sounding more than a little bizarre,

These numbers were again grossly exaggerated. A 2017 audit found the statistics to be based on spurious data. True enough, an enormous drawdown had occurred. US troop levels had, by 2014, sunk to a little under 11,000 soldiers. But thousands upon thousands of contractors, a good share of them private mercenaries, remained. And around this time, the United States was returning to Iraq.

Another war that was supposed to be over. This morning, US forces at the ready. President Obama authorizing targeted airstrikes to protect American personnel in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, now. threatened by ISIS militants. Yet over in Afghanistan, the White House deployed the exact line used in Iraq three years earlier. America would be drawing down, leaving security up to the Afghan army and police.

the parts of them that existed anyway. But in fact, quote, the Pentagon carved out numerous exceptions that in practice made the distinctions almost meaningless, says the Afghanistan papers. On the ground, U.S. troops still carried out

counter-terror operations with vague rules of engagement that left the door wide open to do whatever the commanders on the ground deemed necessary. Old faces remained. Warlords like Rashid Dostum and Ismail Khan continued to enjoy backing from Washington and Kabul. The late bin Laden's mentor, Abdul Sayyaf, had outlived his pupil and since become a member.

of Parliament. On the other side, the Haqqani Network, founded by Charlie Wilson's one-time hero, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and allied with the Taliban, were leading the charge against the U.S. Soon, Haqqani's sons would emerge as Taliban leaders in their own right. The CIA's original Mujahid, Golbadin Hekhmachar, was now the head of one of the most feared insurgent groups in the country.

killing both soldiers and civilians, Americans and Afghans. Hekmat Yar's forces distinguished themselves in 2013 by executing the biggest attack against Americans that year.

Then there was Karzai. After one last standoff, blocking a status of forces agreement with the U.S., the Afghan president stepped down in 2014, constitutionally barred from seeking a third term. But he received, quote, a lavish parting gift, reads a Radio Free Europe bulletin. Quote, the Afghan government is restoring an old palace, once occupied by the monarchy, for Karzai to live in. Karzai's replacement, Ashraf Ghani, had run on a ticket...

with Rashid Dostam. Bald with severe features, Ghani had fled Afghanistan in the late 1970s, becoming an academic, then a World Bank economist. He had lived outside Afghanistan, until the US invasion in 2001. Ghani had served as Karzai's finance minister, but bricked during the 2009 election. A report in Al Jazeera suggests that his partnership with Dostum in 2014 was a way of making sure he could collect more votes this time around. The election proved messy, writes Gall.

even more fraudulent than that of 2009. Preliminary results had been scheduled to be released today but were delayed after continued allegations of fraud. In September, the Taliban captured Kunduz, a major city north of Kabul. The next month, quote, in the early morning darkness, a U.S. gunship repeatedly strafed Akundu's hospital with cannon fire, killing 42 people, end quote.

was run by Doctors Without Borders. Though the White House blamed the attack on the fog of war, the U.S. in fact possessed the friendly hospital's coordinates. There was no excuse for the attack, Whitlock writes.

Despite the 2014 announcement that the war was coming to an end, at some point, the White House simply stopped pretending, leaving the remaining troops in the country. For his part, in 2015, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani signed a decree that allowed the government to imprison anyone suspected of terrorist links without due process or trial. He then... made a deal to pardon Gulbadin Hekhmachar, who, once again, switched sides, picking up the anti-Taliban script and backing the central government.

ISIS's new foothold in Afghanistan. Their aim is to have their networks all over the world. When I saw these young children who learned how to kill people, how to do jihad, I was thinking the war will never end. 2016, the U.S. had long abandoned the hope of defeating the Taliban. It would, in fact, quote, put the Taliban into a nebulous new category. It was still a hostile force, but not necessarily the enemy.

End quote. The U.S. government had finally concluded that the only way the war could end was with some kind of peace deal and power sharing with, of course, the Taliban. And besides, around this time.

The so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, had expanded into Afghanistan and Pakistan, mostly made up of Taliban who wanted a leaner and meaner operation. Quote, therefore imposed new rules of engagement, under which U.S. forces could freely attack the Islamic State and the remnants of al-Qaeda, but they could only fight the Taliban in self-defense. In January 2017, Barack Obama left office, with the war in Afghanistan set on autopilot. The promised final drawdown never took place.

About 8,500 troops and thousands more private mercenaries remained in Afghanistan.

On December 7th, 2010, a week before his death following heart surgery, Richard Holbrook met with Vice President Joseph Biden. I saw Biden alone when I mentioned the issue of Afghan women Biden erupted. Almost rising from his chair, he said, I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women's rights. It just won't work. That's not what they're there for.

This shocked me, and I commented immediately that I thought we had a certain obligation to the people who had trusted us. He said, fuck that. We don't have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it. Less than a week later, Holbrook died after nearly a full day in surgery. The bulldog diplomat, who had always dreamed of becoming Secretary of State,

hadn't pulled off peace in Afghanistan. But even as Holbrook was being rushed into surgery, he couldn't stop thinking about the war. On his way into the operating room, he got into an argument with the hospital staff. Combative as ever. Quote, at one point, according to his colleague, the medical team said, you've got to relax. Holbrook kept rattling off work that needed to be done.

The team of surgeons led by a Pakistani then joked that if Holbrook would relax, they'd deal with Afghanistan. Holbrook, smartass till the end, responded, Yeah. See if you can take care of that. Including ending the war.