What did Stefanik do to stop Afghanistan?

Finally getting to hold the book in my hands

Aug 24, 2021

Morning Update

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

By Ken Tingley

Twice in December 2019, I wrote about the “Afghanistan Papers.”

My guess is that few paid much attention so here is a review.

As far back as 2008, Congress was concerned enough about the direction of the war in Afghanistan that it established the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.

Six years later, the agency launched a project allied “Lessons Learned” to diagnose the policy failures in Afghanistan. The staff interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience of the war. Many were granted anonymity so they could speak candidly.

When The Washington Post got wind of the project, it filed Freedom of Information requests to find out more. They were at first ignored, then denied. The Post’s legal battle went on for three years.

Publicly, the administrations of three presidents assured Americans the war effort was going well, privately many were saying it was an “unmitigated disaster.”

During this time, our congresswoman Rep. Elise Stefanik was on the House Armed Service Committee, yet we heard little concern from the congresswoman.

With the debacle of the evacuation of the Afghanistan, we have heard quite a lot about the current administration’s failures. But the true failure is our government’s failure to tell us the truth about Afghanistan for nearly 20 years.

The Afghanistan papers revealed a consistent and pervasive case of top government officials lying about the progress of the war in Afghanistan, including our previous three presidents.

In December 2019, I suggest it might be the most significant news story of the year. But it was mostly ignored.

Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as White House Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told interviewers for the “Lessons Learned” project in 2015, “What are we trying to do here? we didn’t have the foggiest notion.”

Do any of us remember that?

“If the American people knew the magnitude of the dysfunction,” Lute said while blaming the 2,300 Americans deaths at the time and the more than 20,000 wounded on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has been on the front lines with House Armed Services Committee since she was elected, must of had some inkling of the dysfunction.

In 2019, Rep. Elise Stefanik co-sponsored a bill calling for 10,000 troops remain in Afghanistan for another year despite the dysfunction.

She said in a press release that Afghan security forces “need to be at the tip of the spear,” and bragged about the U.S. military’s ability to train the Afghans to maintain the security of their country.

We had heard this repeatedly over the past two decades.

The “Lessons Learned” project described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. None of the military interviews believed the Afghan army and police could ever defeat the Taliban.

Turns out they knew what they were talking about.

Yet, members of Congress like Rep. Stefanik did nothing to stop the madness. She just played the political game. And she did raise a lot of money during that time period. Just ask her.

Book promo

The book has been printed. This weekend, I got my copy in the mail. Work on the book started over a year ago. I reviewed over 150 past columns and reduced the number for the book to a final 83.

It has been an interesting, sometimes frustrating, and rewarding journey to get to this point. To see it as a “31 hot new release” was also gratifying.

Those that preordered the book should be getting it soon and I’m preparing to do some events and get the book in some retail outlets. I will keep you informed. The Post-Star will be running ads on how to get the book as well.

But for now, it felt really good just to hold it in my hands and to know that the stories about so many local people will be preserved for history is great to know.

Thanks again to Margaret Sullivan for writing the foreward and all my past colleagues for giving it an initial read and providing reviews.

The book can be order by clicking the button below or on amazon.com.