The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

In May 2003, President Bush rode in a fighter jet to land on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declare the end of major combat operations in Iraq. That same day, Secretary Rumsfeld announced that the war was mostly over in Afghanistan, a claim that stunned the soldiers on the ground engaged in constant fights with the Taliban and other militants. The invasion of Iraq not only required the administration to split its attention between two wars, but Iraq was also a much larger effort that commandeered the bulk of military resources. The Bush administration began plans for invading Iraq within months of invading Afghanistan, based on the assumption that the Taliban had been defeated. When a deadly insurgency began to take root in Iraq, the administration insisted that any remaining resistance in both countries was nothing but “pockets of dead-enders” (47). As the situation in Iraq became increasingly dire, Afghanistan was experiencing rapid turnover in its command, poor coordination between the military and diplomats, and reliance on less experienced reservists with the bulk of active-duty forces bound for Iraq.

In late 2003, some of Rumsfeld’s memos expressing concern about the wars were leaked to the press, and he then angrily denied that his sunny public predictions had been deceitful.