Lies Have Kept Us in Afghanistan. But the Truth May Not Set Us Free.

By Ross Douthat

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In fighting successfully to publish documents showing that United States officialdom has been telling lies for years about our military endeavors in Afghanistan, The Washington Post has shown how little has changed since the Vietnam era — and yet also how much more sustainable, strangely, our own era’s quagmires seem to be.

The sameness lies in the substance of the revelations. In the Afghanistan document trove, as in the Pentagon Papers, you can see military and civilian officials feeding the press over-optimistic assessments of a likely unwinnable conflict, conducting clever statistical manipulations to create illusions of success, telling hard truths in private while lying subtly or baldly in their public statements. All quagmires seem to require a similar culture of bureaucratized dishonesty, a similar mask of optimism with the death’s head underneath.

The differences begin with the absence of a draft and a much lower American casualty rate, but they extend to the larger political and cultural landscape as well. The Pentagon Papers weren’t the first great disillusioning moment of the Vietnam era; by the time they came out, public trust in government had already fallen considerably from its early-1960s high.

But the country had not yet fully lost the capacity to be shocked by official lying, and the political and military establishments had not yet grown used to conducting foreign policy without strong public support. As Americans decided the war was unwinnable and its architects dishonest, policymakers responded by abandoning the war itself. The agony of Vietnam seemed endless at the time, but the American troop presence rose and fell in a simple arc, climbing from 1964 until 1968 and falling thereafter. Three years after the Pentagon Papers were published, we weren’t in Vietnam anymore.

The Afghanistan revelations, on the other hand, arrive in an America already so distrustful that it’s hard to imagine how it could be disillusioned further. Over 50 percent of the country still trusted the federal government to do the right thing at least most of the time in the early Nixon years; today the equivalent figure is 17 percent. The Washington Post’s reporting should be shocking, but in the current environment it’s hard to imagine any reader actually being shocked.

And with the absence of shock, it seems, comes an absence of antiwar energy as well. The newly disillusioned America of 1971 wanted withdrawal from Vietnam and got it within a few short years; the more cynical America of 2019 has favored withdrawal from Afghanistan for almost a decade without getting it.

This disconnect has no doubt contributed something to the instability of our politics; both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, in their different ways, drew on forever-war fatigue in their winning presidential runs. But the permanence of the policy is the more remarkable fact: American disillusionment with the war in Afghanistan has been substantial and stable since 2012, and yet without much domestic controversy, or even much attention, thousands of American soldiers are still there.

Admittedly, our troop presence has declined substantially since the Obama-era surge of troops and the much smaller early-Trump-administration troop increase. So it’s possible that in a Trump second term or a Bernie Sanders presidency it will finally trace a slow descent to zero — with or without a deal of some sort with the Taliban — and after 20 years or so we’ll finally discover that even endless wars can end.

But it’s also possible that in cutting troop numbers the Pentagon is groping toward sustainability rather than an endpoint — toward some figure that’s deemed sufficient to manage stalemate, to preserve certain American objectives and prevent the embarrassment of real defeat.

In that case, despite the similar pattern of deception and denial, Afghanistan could represent something very different from the Vietnam experience. Vietnam proved that despite a certain amount of patriotic naïveté, Americans ultimately wouldn’t put up with a seemingly unwinnable war founded on lies and self-delusion. But Afghanistan may yet prove that given an all-volunteer military, the right amount of cynical detachment at home and a low enough casualty rate in the theater itself, Americans will accept a war where there is no prospect for victory, and no clear objective save the permanent postponement of defeat. More even than our Indochina debacle, it could bury George Patton’s dictum about our addiction to victory, our contempt for defeat, by proving that 21st-century Americans have learned to swallow stalemate.

In which case the documents published by The Post will tell a story of how policymakers lied their way not toward a Vietnam-style debacle but through a strategic transition — one which, when complete, won’t require quite so much official lying, because nobody will even be paying attention anymore.

Seen in this sort of hypothetical hindsight, the first 10 years of the Afghanistan War represented a last experiment in conventional war, nation-building, idealistic democracy promotion … but in the second decade, the conflict gradually became just the largest example of the endlessly multiplying, low-casualty police actions that have defined our grand strategy under Obama and now Trump.

And this strategy, for all its possible defects, has one obvious advantage for national security policymakers: It frustrates popular opposition by never supplying a strong reason — whether in mass casualties or clear military defeats — for antiwar sentiment to leave the rightward and leftward fringes and become a major popular concern. As Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School put it last year in a perceptive essay for The New Republic, the more “contained” American warfare becomes — the more our wars look like Afghanistan in 2019, rather than Afghanistan in 2010, Iraq in 2005 or Vietnam in 1968 — “the more likely it is that the war will continue indefinitely.”

You can agree with this diagnosis without fully embracing antiwar anguish or despair. As with other features of our decadence, a Pax Americana sustained by indefinite police actions, indefinitely frozen conflicts and indefinite postponements of defeat is hardly the worst geopolitical scenario imaginable, and definitely preferable to certain bloodier alternatives.

But there is still something unusually grim about reading The Post’s catalog of the official deceptions that have carried us through 18 years in Afghanistan, and then considering the possibility that it could be years, decades, even generations before the last American soldier finally dies for these mistakes.