No chance of working

The Washington Post has surfaced a trove of US government documents which show that both military and civilian operatives in Afghanistan have known for years that the "mission" was FUBAR -- deadly, ill-considered, usually pointless.

As is so often the case about this country's wars of empire, it was possible to know at the time though mainstream and alternative media, even from half the circumference of the planet away, much of what is now "revealed" here.

I was struck in particular by what they have surfaced about the drug trade. In 2006 and 2007, I wrote on this blog about the history of drugs in our wars and the rise of opium of production under US occupation. Here's what's now come out:

From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money from the drug trade was powering the insurgency.

No single agency or country was in charge of the Afghan drug strategy for the entirety of the war, so the State Department, the DEA, the U.S. military, NATO allies and the Afghan government butted heads constantly.

“It was a dog’s breakfast with no chance of working,” an unnamed former senior British official told government interviewers.

The agencies and allies made things worse by embracing a dysfunctional muddle of programs, according to the interviews.

At first, Afghan poppy farmers were paid by the British to destroy their crops — which only encouraged them to grow more the next season. Later, the U.S. government eradicated poppy fields without compensation — which only infuriated farmers and encouraged them to side with the Taliban.

“It was sad to see so many people behave so stupidly,” one U.S. official told government interviewers.

Afghanistan was never "the good war" as the early Obama administration hopefully asserted. Like Iraq, it was and is misbegotten and lethal to no good end.