C H AP T E R 1
Lipstick on a Pig Warning Signs in Afghanistan Guard against arrogance, avoid underestimating the enemy, and be well prepared. —Mao Tse-tung, November 1949 British prime minister Winston Churchill is purported to have said that “Americans will always do the right thing . . . once they have exhausted all the alternatives,” which is a nice way of saying that we Americans have a nasty habit of repeating different variations of the same mistake over and over again until, usually by sheer happenstance, we finally get it right. Churchill’s words are as meaningful today as they were seventy years ago. Newly declassified documents and leaked Pentagon and State Department cables show that at the time Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, the U.S. and NATO militaries were still making exactly the same mistakes in Afghanistan that American commanders had made in Vietnam over forty years earlier, and that, with some slight variations, the Soviets had repeated during their disastrous war against the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s. A decade after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the White House is still, to paraphrase Churchill, exhausting all the alternatives in the search for a formula for victory. This is the story of how we got there, as seen through the eyes of American and NATO intelligence officials. The summer of 2008 was an uneasy time for America. The economy was in a state of free fall, ultimately leading to the near-total collapse of the U.S. banking sector four months later. Nearly every evening, the network news led with stories about falling home prices and the collapse of a number of major mortgage lending institutions. The stock market was beginning to fluctuate 10
206-48169_ch01_5P.indd 10
10/8/11 5:08 AM