We seek to understand the world, but it's made harder when part of it is hidden from us.
Leaked documents, represent a kind of ground truth, showing how the world really works. Telling us what's for sale, what the real agendas are, how powerful spies are, and how coordinated governments are. They are almost the opposite to conspiracy theories, as they present observations that can prune conspiracy theories.
But there are too many documents to read, so let's compare notes. What surprised you and caused you to update your view of the world?
Feel free to give a low effort reply, it's better than nothing.
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Notes -
The Afghanistan Papers revealed that if the truth is sufficiently awful people will refuse to believe it or discuss it because they are convinced it's more plausible that racially biased people are making unfounded accusations.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1457753480840372231 (US forces unable to stop child rape and because 'it's their culture')
"Homosexuality was taboo among adults but it was not uncommon for afghan men of means to commit a form of sexual abuse known as bacha bazi, or boy play. Afghan military officers, warlords, and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves. US troops referred to the practice as "man-love Thursday" because Afghan pederasts would force boys to dress up or dance on Thursday evenings before the start of the afghan weekend. Although American soldiers were sickened by the abuse, their commanders instructed them to look the other way because they didn't want to alienate allies in the fight against the taliban"
I also recall an old Foreign Affairs article that made an addendum to why it happens on Thursday. Broadly speaking, many Afghans believed that prayer on the Islamic holy day, friday, cleansed them of their sins. So if you rape someone on Thursday, pray on friday, you are then clean and worthy of paradise on saturday. Of course the sin was the homosexuality, not the rape.
What makes it doubly insane is that Bachi Bazi was a source of illegitimacy among the wider populace. which means destroying it would have an actually removed a source of Taliban legitimacy.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1366444372972081153 (bachi bazi as source for taliban support)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELZD1UIU0AE8WxU?format=jpg&name=large (Afghan governor was a drug dealer and tyrant but his province was actually stable)
When the US was stuck between a hardliner who could keep the peace and total anarchy it was incapable of biting the bullet as a matter of policy. If stuck between a plan that had proven successful but icky or a plan that would be unsuccessful but sounds good it went with the sounds good.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELZE6_TUUAI9rdH?format=jpg&name=large (US aid would filter through contractors over and over again until about 1/20th actually made it to the country)
Literal actual corruption would have been more efficacious then what the US did. The US would spend outrageous amounts of money on domestic actors and not make any use of the purchasing power difference of Afghanistan being dirt poor. Who do we have to thank for this lighting money on fire policy? Thank staunch conservative senator Jessie Helms.
"...because when the soviet union fell apart we had to cut a deal with Jessie Helms to continue our aid programs. The deal with Jessie Helms was that we would spend the money in the United States. We would buy American products, American grain, American consultants, American Security experts, and they would implement our aid programs."
Finally just for a final kicker. Rural Afghanistan could be so isolated that it would literally inbred. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FDr8Z6lVIAMK_O6?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 ("I hate to say it, but there was a lot of inbreeding. The district chief had three thumbs" he said in an Army oral-history interview.)
That's a lot of scattered stuff. So lets return to my central point. When the truth is so awful people will take accurate descriptions of the situation as proof of racist evil rather than of tragic suffering.
It would have been tragic but true to describe Afghanistan as a land of inbred child rapists who believe that Islam means that if you commit a sin on Thursday then on Friday its cleansed away. That stability at the hand of tyrants would have been more valuable for producing peace than Western european style metrics about the percentage of women in parliament. And that literal direct bribery and corruption applied at the point of local discretion by the military would have been order of magnitude more effective than actual policy. And that the cause of restricting the military's discretion and demanding Made in America contractor corrupt fiscal suicide was due to a Conservative Senator.
But could you have said that? Does anyone believe that you could walk around in polite society and talk frankly about such issues and how we are going to approach solving them. Could you ever imagine Obama making destroying culturally acceptable religiously justified child rape as his first priority in an hearts & minds strategy?
Twitter personality InverseFlorida invented the term Sanewashing to describe how people watered down "Abolish the Police" into something sane sounding. That people would get angry at you for saying "Abolish the Police means exactly what it says and the people who first started saying it are very clear about this" because those people had actually come to believe that X actually meant Y. People who sanewash really believe their revised version of a statement to be the real meaning of the original statement.
The Afghanistan papers showed that people will Sanewash away not just Insanity, but also Evil. If forced to confront uncomfortable truths they will not just disbelieve a statement but they will go through a process of putting it through a sanewash sieve. Once they have their watered down pseudotruth they will then use that 'truth' as proof that the actual truth is just a racist overexaggeration.
Now consider how many people are unwilling to believe the accusations that Hamas uses hospitals as munitions bunkers & military HQ's. And you will be unable to unsee the instinct to Sanewash Evil.
Anecdote for further illustration.
A buddy was a contractor in Kabul. Late 00's - early 10's timeframe. Had local Afghan police / mil in the compound all the time, they even had their own bank of desks. One day, by buddy is walking through there and catches one of the Afghan's looking at gay porn. He tells him to cut it out. Bit of a facepalm, whatever. Plenty of American soldiers would trade porno DVDs back and forth. A few days later, it happens again, but not with by buddy as the witness. Instead, a military police type (I'm forgetting exact details here) saw it. He (the MP) decides to strictly follow protocol and report it to the Afghan porn watcher's local chain of command. My buddy hears about this as literally drops his lunch to sprint down to the Afghan commander's office. He assures / pleads with the commander that it's really not that big of a deal and they can set up his computer so that porno sites of any kind won't load.
Why would my buddy do this? Why did he sprint to do it? Because the next day, base security found that original Afghan (he of the gay porn) shot dead in a ditch at the edge of the base. The Afghan commander had considered it embarrassing and dishonorable for the dude to have been watching that in a setting where foreigners could (and did) catch him. When my buddy told this story, he got more emotional than when he told his story about seeing one of his best friends take a direct mortar hit and getting vaporized. To him, it was just the mindless and totally preventable cruelty of it (compared to the random chance of warfare that did in his friend).
"Oh, we have to be tolerant of the cultural differences."
Silvering lining concluding tangent: Afghanistan, way more than Iraq, really did see the development of meaningful and long-lasting partnerships between Afghan and American forces. During the hasty withdrawal in 2021, I knew a bunch of MAGA types (and others, to be sure) with multiple combat tours who took extended time off of work to help find ways to get their interpreters / local ANA / ANP buddies out of the country before Taliban could clip them.
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