Leon Panetta fingered a string of rosary beads as he sat in a CIA conference room in Langley, Virginia, his 73-year-old eyes glued to a secure video link that showed U.S. helicopters flying in the darkness over Pakistani terrain. At Mass that morning—May 1, 2011— Panetta prayed to God that the daring, secret mission he had hatched would work.
A former congressman and White House chief of staff, Panetta had served in government long enough to know that his job and reputation were at stake. As CIA director for the past two years, he had overseen the faltering hunt for Osama bin Laden, the most-wanted terrorist in the world. He had just asked for presidential approval to send two dozen Special Operations forces deep into Pakistan—a prickly nuclear power—based on the CIA’s guess that a recluse living behind the walls of a $1 million compound in the city of Abbottabad was actually bin Laden. If the operation failed, the fallout would be impossible to contain.
Panetta watched two of the helicopters land at the compound via a live video feed transmitted by stealth drones circling over Abbottabad. But the airborne cameras could not see inside the compound walls. When a team of Navy SEALs barged into the building, all Panetta could do was listen and wait. After an interminable fifteen minutes, the team radioed back: They had found the target and killed him.
The spymaster resisted the urge to celebrate until the Special Operations forces returned safely to their staging base in Afghanistan and confirmed bin Laden’s identity. Panetta smiled and thought of his old friend Ted Balestreri, a restauranteur in Monterey, California, who had once promised to open the most prized possession in his wine cellar—an 1870 Chateau Lafite Rothschild—if Leon ever caught the 9/11 mastermind. Panetta phoned his wife, Sylvia, at their home. Call Ted and tell him to turn on CNN, Panetta said, he owes me a bottle of wine.
Bin Laden’s death appeared to mark a genuine turning point in the star-crossed war in Afghanistan. The whole purpose had been to eliminate bin Laden and his network. As long as the al-Qaeda leader remained free, no president could realistically consider ending U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. Now, after ten long years, the United States had finally won vengeance for 9/11 and an opportunity seemed at hand.
Two months later, Panetta traveled to Kabul. President Obama had just appointed him secretary of defense and this was his first overseas trip to meet the troops. He had good news to share.
Obama had decided to start bringing U.S. troops home. From a peak of 100,000, the number of troops would drop to 90,000 by the end of the year and shrink to 67,000 by the summer of 2012. On the surface, the U.S. war strategy looked like it might pan out. Panetta felt relaxed and loose.
Unlike his predecessors, who weighed every spoken word for their blowback potential, Panetta demonstrated a flair for blunt, unscripted comments during his visit to Afghanistan and the region. He blabbed away about the CIA’s clandestine presence in Afghanistan, called bin Laden a “son of a bitch” and marveled to the troops at every stop how improbable it was for him—a part-time walnut farmer from California and the son of poor Italian immigrants—to end up in charge of the most powerful military in the world.
In a more serious-minded discussion with reporters traveling with him, Panetta characterized bin Laden’s death as the beginning of the end of the so-called war on terror. Thanks to an unrelenting CIA drone strike campaign, Panetta estimated al-Qaeda had only ten to twenty “key leaders” still alive in Pakistan, Somalia, North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. None was left in Afghanistan, where U.S. military officials guessed al-Qaeda could only draw on fifty to one hundred low-level fighters. “We’re within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda,” Panetta said. “I think now is the moment… We can really cripple al-Qaeda as a threat to this country.”
The success of the bin Laden raid gave Obama a huge political lift. But it also raised the public’s expectations and intensified pressure to show that his policies in Afghanistan were working. Obama had promised to turn around the war when he first ran for the White House. He would face the judgment of the voters the following year.
“We take comfort in knowing that the tide of war is receding,” Obama declared in June 2011, when he announced the troop reduction. Under his withdrawal timetable, 33,000 troops would come home by August 2012, three months before Election Day.
The reputations of his senior military commanders were also on the line. They had sold their counterinsurgency strategy to the president and the American people two years earlier. Ever confident, they continued to predict success.
“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told television talk show host Charlie Rose in June 2011. “From a strategy standpoint it really appears to have worked as we had hoped.”
But the upbeat, reassuring rhetoric obscured the truth: Despite massive investments, Obama’s war strategy was failing. The United States and its allies could not fix some fundamental problems. The Afghan security forces showed little sign they could ever safeguard their own country. Taliban leaders slept soundly in their sanctuaries in Pakistan, biding their time until the foreign forces decided to leave. Corruption deepened its grip on the Afghan government, alienating and angering the people it supposedly served.
U.S. officials wanted to pull out but feared the Afghan state would collapse if they did. Bin Laden had hoped for this exact scenario when he planned 9/11: to lure the U.S. superpower into an unwinnable guerrilla conflict that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence.
“After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan,” Jeffrey Eggers, the Navy officer who served as a National Security Council staffer for Bush and Obama, said in a Lessons Learned interview.
To paper over the problems, U.S. officials repeatedly downplayed bad news from the front, sometimes twisting it to the point of absurdity.
In September 2011, a cloud of bleak headlines trailed Panetta when he went to Capitol Hill to testify before a Senate committee. An assassin had killed a former Afghan president in charge of peace overtures. The Taliban also had carried out a rash of suicide bombings and coordinated assaults on high-profile targets in Kabul—supposedly the most protected part of the country—including the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters.
But even the blunt-spoken Panetta had to uphold the illusion of success. He drew a mostly sunny picture for lawmakers, citing “undeniable progress” and saying the war was “headed in the right direction.” He called the assassination and suicide attacks “a sign of weakness of the insurgency,” arguing that the Taliban resorted to such tactics only because it was losing territory to U.S. forces.
When Panetta returned to Afghanistan for a visit in March 2012, another string of public-relations disasters followed. Moments after the defense secretary’s Air Force C-17 landed at a NATO base in Helmand province, an Afghan assailant drove a stolen truck onto the tarmac and tried to run over a U.S. Marine general and others in Panetta’s welcoming party. The attacker set himself on fire and crashed the truck, later dying of his injuries. Panetta had not yet disembarked from his plane and no one else was hurt, but it was a close brush with catastrophe.
Just as they had five years earlier when a suicide bomber targeted Vice President Cheney at a different base in Afghanistan, U.S. military officials tried to cover up the incident. For ten hours, they withheld news of the attack from reporters who were traveling on the same plane with Panetta, releasing sketchy information only after British news media broke the story.
At first, Panetta and other officials suggested the timing of the attack was a coincidence and said they had no reason to believe it was aimed at him. But they subsequently acknowledged that if the attack had occurred five minutes later, the speeding truck could have struck Panetta as he walked off the plane.
During his trip, Panetta also had to deal with the fallout from one of the worst atrocities of the war. A few days before his arrival, a lone U.S. soldier, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, strode into two Afghan villages in Kandahar province in the middle of the night and inexplicably massacred sixteen sleeping villagers, most of them women and children. The mass murder inflamed Afghans and the Taliban exploited it as propaganda fodder.
Despite all that, Panetta called his visit “very encouraging” and said the United States was “very close to accomplishing” its mission. “The campaign, as I’ve pointed out before, I think has made significant progress,” he told reporters in Kabul. “We’re on the right path. I’m absolutely convinced of that.”
To reinforce the message, Obama administration officials touted statistics that distorted what was really happening on the ground. 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, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false.
“We have broken the Taliban’s momentum,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Senate committee in June 2011. As evidence, she quoted an array of metrics: Afghan schools had enrolled 7.1 million students, a seven-fold increase since the fall of the Taliban; infant mortality had decreased by 22 percent; opium production was down; hundreds of thousands of farmers had been “trained and equipped with new seeds and other techniques”; and Afghan women had received more than 100,000 micro-finance loans.
“Now, what do these numbers and others that I could quote tell us?” Clinton said. “Life is better for most Afghans.”
But years later, U.S. government auditors would conclude that the Obama administration had based many of its statistics regarding infant mortality, life expectancy and school enrollment on inaccurate or unverified data.
John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told Congress in January 2020 that U.S. officials “knew the data was bad” yet bragged about the numbers anyway. He said the lies were part of “an odor of mendacity” that permeated the government’s portrayal of the war.
In Lessons Learned interviews, U.S. military officials and advisers described explicit and sustained efforts to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common in the field, at military headquarters in Kabul, at the Pentagon and at the White House to skew statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. commanders in 2013 and 2014, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
At military headquarters, “truth was rarely welcome” and “bad news was often stifled,” Crowley said. “There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small—we’re running over kids with our MRAPS [armored vehicles]—because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome.”
John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand province in 2011, said military officials in the field devoted an inordinate amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results. “They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview. “There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures, or this is not a scientific process behind this.”
But Garofano said nobody dared ask whether the charts or numbers were credible or meaningful. “There was not a willingness to answer questions such as, what is the meaning of this number of schools that you have built? How has that progressed you toward your goal?” he said. “How do you show this as evidence of success and not just evidence of effort or evidence of just doing a good thing?”
Military officers and diplomats hesitated to pass negative assessments up the chain of command for another reason: careerism. Nobody wanted the blame for problems or failings on their watch. As a result, regardless of conditions, they claimed they were making progress.
“From the ambassadors down to the low level, [they all say] we are doing a great job,” Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who oversaw military intelligence during Obama’s troop surge, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Really? So if we are doing such a great job, why does it feel like we are losing?”
For the duration of the war, U.S. Army brigade and battalion commanders were given the same basic mission upon their arrival in Afghanistan: to protect the population and defeat the enemy. “So they all went in for whatever their rotation was, nine months or six months, and were given that mission, accepted that mission and executed that mission,” Flynn said. “Then they all said, when they left, they accomplished that mission. Every single commander. Not one commander is going to leave Afghanistan… and say, ‘You know what, we didn’t accomplish our mission.’ ”
The data regarding bombings, attacks and other violent encounters grew bleaker every time Bush or Obama conducted another review of the war strategy. It was impossible to square the negative trends with the optimistic public messaging about progress, so U.S. officials kept the complete datasets confidential.
“Every time data is shared it showed that everything was getting worse, especially with these strategic reviews,” an unnamed senior U.S. official who served under Bush and Obama said in a Lessons Learned interview.
In another Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed National Security Council staff member said the Obama White House and Pentagon pressured the bureaucracy to produce figures to show that the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.
“It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture,” the National Security Council staff member said. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”
Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the White House and Pentagon would spin them in their favor. They portrayed suicide bombings in Kabul as a sign that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. They said a rise in U.S. troop deaths proved that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.
“It was their explanations,” the White House staff member said. “For example, attacks are getting worse? ‘That’s because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.’ Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? ‘It’s because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it’s actually an indicator that we’re winning.’ ”
U.S. military officials tossed out so many different types of statistics and metrics that the public had no idea which ones really mattered.
Lawmakers also wondered. During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in April 2009, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) asked Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, how the Obama administration would know if the troop surge was successful.
“How will we know if we’re winning?” Collins said. “How will you know whether or not this new strategy is working? It seems to me that you need a set of clear benchmarks, clear metrics going in.”
Flournoy gave a muddled answer. “There are a whole host—much more developed set of inherited metrics, given that we’ve been conducting these operations for a long time,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is sort through these more carefully. Some of them are more input related. And what we’re really trying to focus on is outcomes and actual impacts. So we aren’t starting with a blank sheet, but we are in the process of refining the metrics that have been used in Afghanistan.”
As troops surged into the war zone, military commanders refined the art of cherry-picking statistics to make the case that their strategy was working.
At a July 2010 news briefing with reporters at the Pentagon, Army Maj. Gen. John Campbell, the commanding general of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, said the Taliban had carried out 12 percent more attacks during the first half of the year compared to the first six months of 2009.
Aware that might sound bad, Campbell quickly added that “the effectiveness of those attacks have gone down about 6 percent.” He did not explain how the military measured “effectiveness” with such precision. But he reassured reporters that the war was going well.
“Winning is achieving progress, and I think every single day we are achieving progress,” he said.
In March 2011, the House Armed Services Committee summoned General Petraeus to provide an update on the war. He bombarded lawmakers with a fusillade of disjointed figures. Petraeus cited “a fourfold increase” in weapons and explosives caches “turned in and found.” He said U.S. and Afghan commandos were killing or capturing “some 360 targeted insurgent leaders” in a “typical ninety-day period.” In Marja, a town in Helmand province that had been pried loose from Taliban control, 75 percent of registered voters had cast ballots in a community council election. Throughout Afghanistan, the number of surveillance blimps and towers had increased from 114 to 184 since August.
“In closing,” Petraeus said, “the past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress.”
Military officers in the field knew the blizzard of numbers meant little. “Unfortunately, with numbers you can spin them any way you want,” Army Maj. John Martin, a self-described “staff bubba” who served as a planner at Bagram Air Base, said in an Army oral-history interview. “For example, if last year there were 100 attacks and this year there were 150, does that mean the situation has gotten worse because there have been more attacks?” Martin added. “Or does that mean now you have more guys going to more places and finding more bad guys, so there are more attacks, but you’re making the situation better because you are finding more bad guys?”
Other senior officials said they placed great importance on one statistic in particular, albeit one that the U.S. government rarely mentioned in public. “I do think that the key benchmark is the one I’ve suggested, which is how many Afghans are getting killed,” James Dobbins, the U.S. diplomat, told a Senate panel in 2009. “If the number’s going up, you’re losing. If the number’s going down, you’re winning. It’s as simple as that.”
Up to that point, however, nobody had bothered to reliably track Afghan casualties. For the Pentagon, the subject was a touchy one. Defense officials didn’t like to answer questions about civilian deaths, much less talk about who was responsible. Tracking the number of wells dug and schools built was easier and generated more favorable publicity.
In a Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed senior NATO official said the alliance started to track civilian casualties in 2005 and set up “what was supposed to be the mother of all databases.” But the program was dropped for unspecified reasons. “It should be a standard operating procedure from the start to record civilian casualties, but it wasn’t,” the senior NATO official said.
In 2009, the United Nations expanded a campaign to count civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan. The U.N. program became the first comprehensive tally of civilian casualties, but the numbers were discouraging and growing worse. On average, dozens of people were dying each week.
As U.S. troops surged into Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011, the annual number of civilian deaths rose from 2,412 to 3,133. The total dipped in 2012, but increased in 2013 and kept rising, reaching 3,701 deaths in 2014.
That meant the number of Afghan civilians getting killed had soared 53 percent over five years. Under Dobbins’s simple rule, the United States and its allies were losing badly.
The United Nations survey blamed insurgents for most of the deaths. But regardless of who was responsible, the casualty figures showed that Afghanistan was growing more unstable and insecure—the exact opposite of what the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy was supposed to accomplish.
U.S. intelligence assessments also cast doubt on the war’s progress. Intelligence analysts in the CIA and the military prepared reports that were far more pessimistic than the pronouncements from commanding generals in the field. But intelligence officials rarely spoke in public and their reports remained classified.
Once a year, Congress summoned senior intelligence officials to testify in open session about global threats to U.S. national security. They spoke in monotones and jargon, but their comments about Afghanistan were uniformly dour.
In February 2012, Army Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, gave a brief but dreary assessment to the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said Obama’s troop surge and war strategy had done little to deter the insurgency.
He said the Afghan government was plagued by “endemic corruption” and that the Afghan army and police were riddled with “persistent qualitative deficiencies.” In comparison, he described the Taliban as “resilient” and said it had been able to withstand losses inflicted by U.S. troops.
“From its Pakistani safe havens, the Taliban leadership remains confident of eventual victory,” Burgess added.
At the same hearing, lawmakers asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to explain why U.S. intelligence agencies held such a negative view while military commanders were so optimistic. Clapper replied that the same disconnect emerged during the Vietnam War when intelligence officials knew the U.S. military was stuck in a quagmire but the generals didn’t want to admit it in public.
“If you’ll forgive a little history,” Clapper said, “I served as an analyst briefer for General [William] Westmoreland in Vietnam in 1966. I kinda lost my professional innocence a little bit then when I found out that operational commanders sometimes don’t agree with [intelligence officials about] their view of the success of their campaign.”
Indeed, when it was their turn to testify one month later, U.S. military commanders remained resolute: They were making progress.
“The progress is real and, importantly, it’s sustainable,” Marine Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2012. “We have severely degraded the insurgency.”
Senator Collins, the Maine Republican, pointed out that Allen and other generals had been singing the same refrain for years. “I recall that I’ve heard very similar assessments from our commanders for ten years now, that we’re making progress,” she said. “Why are you optimistic that ultimately we will be successful and prevail?”
“Ma’am, if I didn’t think it was doable, I would tell you,” Allen replied. “And I’d tell you very quickly, because I wouldn’t want to spend another life in this fight if it wasn’t doable.”
The false narrative of progress became harder to maintain as more American troops withdrew. In 2013, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan dipped below 50,000 for the first time in four years. The Afghan army and police struggled to fill the void left by the Americans. The Taliban revived its forces and spread into new territory.
But the generals doubled down on their talking points. They also embraced a word they once avoided: winning.
When General Allen completed his nineteen-month stint as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in February 2013, he sounded more buoyant than ever. He said the Afghan security forces had improved and that the Afghan government was ready to take responsibility for its own security.
“This is victory,” he said at his change-of-command ceremony in Kabul. “This is what winning looks like. And we should not shrink from using these words. This campaign is, and always has been, about the Afghan people and about winning.”
Until that moment, commanders rarely promised outright victory. But other generals soon adopted Allen’s language and bravado.
“I talk a lot about winning these days and I firmly believe that we’re on a path to win,” Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., Allen’s successor, said at a military ceremony in Kabul in May 2013.
Dunford’s deputy, Army Lt. Gen. Mark Milley, echoed his boss at the same ceremony when he addressed Afghan troops on the parade ground. “You will win this war and we will be there with you every step of the way,” Milley said. He proclaimed that they were “on the road to victory, on the road to winning, on the road to creating a stable Afghanistan.”