10 things you didn’t know about the Afghan war

Based on Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s new book “Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan,” here are 10 things you might not know about the Afghan war.

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1. Deja vu all over again

In the 1950s, dozens of American engineers built a vast network of irrigation canals aimed at bringing modern agriculture to southern Afghanistan. Six decades later, U.S. Marines fought and died in those same canals as they sought to beat back the Taliban. Those canals recently have been used to sustain fields of opium-producing poppies.

Chris Hondros / Getty Images

2. One soldier, one year = $1 million

It costs American taxpayers roughly $1 million to keep a member of the U.S. military in Afghanistan for a year. Do the math: That means the bill for the war in 2011 was more than $100 billion. The United States spent more that year to keep Marine battalions in two districts of Helmand province than it provided the entire nation of Egypt in military and development assistance.

Lucas Jackson / AFP/Getty Images

3. Missed opportunities at the start...

Most of the first wave of new troops authorized by President Obama in 2009 were not sent to the most critical part of the country. Instead of going to Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city, which was at risk of falling to the Taliban, more than 10,000 Marines were sent to neighboring Helmand province, which was of far lower strategic value.

Sebastian Abbot / Associated Press

4. ...Because the White House thought the Pentagon had it covered

As Obama battles for reelection, White House aides have sought to depict the president as an engaged and decisive leader on national security. But the initial deployment to Helmand exposed the limits of his understanding of Afghanistan — and his unwillingness to confront the military — early in his presidency. “Nobody bothered to ask, ‘Tell us how many troops you’re sending here and there,’” said a senior White House official involved in war policy. “We assumed, perhaps naively, that the Pentagon was sending them to the most critical places.”

Jim Watson / AFP/Getty Images

5. Sharp elbows

Before deploying to Afghanistan in 2009, U.S. Marines made a series of highly unusual demands that hindered the war effort. Among them: that overall operational control of the Marine force rest with a three-star Marine general at the U.S. Central Command, not the supreme coalition commander in Kabul. That meant Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal lacked the power to move the Marines to another part of Afghanistan or change their mission in anything other than minor, tactical ways.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

6. Punching the ticket

With hazard pay and bonuses, some civilians working for the U.S. government in Afghanistan earned as much as $300,000 a year. Others opted to participate in the State Department’s “civilian surge” to get their tickets punched for a promotion or a posting to a comfortable embassy in Western Europe. “It’s rare that you ever hear someone say they’re here because they want to help the Afghans,” said development specialist Summer Coish, who worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Kabul from 2010 to 2011.

Peter Parks / AFP/Getty Images

7. Not Atlantic City, but...

The main NATO base in Kandahar has a wooden boardwalk ringed with a Nathan’s hot dog stall, a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand and a brick-and-mortar TGI Friday’s where Bangladeshi waiters sporting flair serve burgers and fajitas. The American-run supermarket sells Harley-Davidson motorcycles for delivery upon a soldier’s return home.

Paula Bronstein / Getty Images

8. Party out of bounds

In 2010, the U.S. embassy’s social committee threw a Mardi Gras party that almost ended all parties on the embassy compound. The organizers had procured more than enough liquor, but the partygoers had access to only two restrooms. The queue for the toilets grew so long that inebriated attendees began to relieve themselves elsewhere. The deputy Turkish ambassador urinated on the wall of the chancery building. So did two American men who worked at the embassy. A female staffer pulled off her underpants and squatted on a patch of grass near the flagpole. Photo shows embassy security guards at a 2009 party. (The boxes were inserted into the photo before The Washington Post acquired the image.)

Courtesy of Project on Government Oversight

9. Funding out of bounds?

USAID sought to pump so much money into Afghanistan that in some districts the handouts exceeded the local annual per capita income. In 2010, the U.S. reconstruction budget for Afghanistan was $4.1 billion. The following year, President Obama cut spending and announced that “it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”

Musadeq Sadeq / Associated Press

10. From Gitmo to Fighting America, Again

The Taliban’s top military leader, Mullah Zakir, used to be an inmate at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. After being judged by the U.S. military to be of only medium risk to the United States, he was transferred to the custody of the Afghan government in 2007. A few months later, the Afghans inexplicably released him and he quickly made his way to Pakistan.

/ AFP/Getty Images

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