The former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan defended his record on Monday following the release of a trove of documents laying bare the war’s multiple failures.
Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded U.S. forces from July 2010 to July 2011, told the Washington Examiner that the gains made during his tenure were “indisputable.” His statement follows the Washington Post’s publication of the Afghanistan Papers — thousands of pages of documents which show many officials had doubts about the war, despite publicly supporting it for nearly two decades.
“We clearly reversed the momentum on the battlefield of the Taliban — who had been steadily taking districts from our forces and the Afghans for several years prior to 2010,” said Petraeus, who took over when Gen. Stanley McChrystal was fired.
Petraeus, 67, oversaw the tail end of the Obama administration’s troop surge in Afghanistan and became CIA director in September 2011 before resigning in November 2012 over an affair. In June 2015, Petraeus pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information by sharing it with his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell, and was sentenced to two years’ probation.
He said coalition forces took back “key areas” under his command — several districts in the notoriously violent Kandahar province. “Of course, Osama bin Laden was also brought to justice during my final months in Afghanistan. And the number of weekly attacks was down significantly, year-on-year, after nine years of steady year-on-year increases, and that continued for over a year, well after my departure.”
But these victories came at a price. Four hundred ninety-eight U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan in 2010, and 415 were killed in 2011 — the two deadliest years on record. “We were pursuing a comprehensive counter-narcotics strategy (with viable crop substitution programs),” Petraeus said.
But those programs failed to stem the tide of opium production in Afghanistan permanently. In the years following Petraeus’s command, opium production has generally increased, with a record crop produced in 2017.
Petraeus did admit “there were endless frustrations” with corruption and other issues. “That said, there was undeniable progress on the security front, and I stand by what I told Congress and the national security team during that time,” he said.
In the documents, one unidentified U.S. military officer told government interviewers: “Petraeus was hell-bent on throwing money at the problem. When Petraeus was around, all that mattered was spending. He wanted to put Afghans to work.” In his own “Lessons Learned” interview, Petreaus said: “What drove spending was the need to solidify gains as quickly as we could knowing that we had a tight drawdown timeline. And we wound up spending faster than we would have if we felt we had forces longer than we did.”
