Netflix documentary: “Spy Ops”: The longest war in a nutshell

It should be a relaxing evening after a tiring research trip and many days of writing. “Netflix and chill” simply. I sit in front of my TV and go through the streaming media library. The oversaturation of the series market is becoming clear once again. But something good will happen. Under the “New Releases” section, I’m curious about a title that recently came across on X, formerly Twitter: “Spy Ops” – a documentary series about the CIA’s supposedly top-secret operations. Episode one covers the war in Afghanistan. With the premonition that my work will catch up with me again this evening, I press play.

After just a few minutes I find myself in a post that has nothing to do with journalistic care and critical research. Instead, Netflix actually decided to stage a propaganda piece 20 years after the Americans lost their “longest war” in Afghanistan. In just under an hour there is almost not a single minute that cannot be refuted. One reason for this is certainly the fact that a large part of the stage is given to former CIA agents. In addition, there are some of their Afghan allies who benefited from US operations, became multimillionaires and were part of mafia-like warlord structures for two decades.

A particular focus is on the now deceased CIA agent Gary Schroen. He is considered the main insider of the Afghanistan episode and, it is said, knows the country and region like no other. However, Schroen is no stranger to connoisseurs of Anglo-Saxon political literature. Back in the 1990s, he was in northern Afghanistan on a “secret mission.” What remains unmentioned in “Spy Ops”: Schroen visited the famous Mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud to collect missing Stinger missiles. Those Stinger missiles that just a few years earlier had been distributed by the same Americans to various factions of the Mujahideen rebels to fight the Soviet Army.

First of all, the Stingers were actually important and valuable in the fight against Soviet helicopters that had destroyed numerous Afghan villages. According to many contemporary witnesses, they prevented further destruction and mass murder. But at some point after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Washington became concerned that the weapons could end up in the “wrong hands” – keyword Al Qaeda – which is why the CIA was commissioned to collect them again. This only happened with moderate success and there are still numerous myths in Afghanistan today about what happened to the missing rockets and whose hands they ended up in.

Especially today, it would be important to explain the consequences of short-sighted arms deliveries to an overly young audience, such as those found on Netflix. A somewhat general history lesson on the region would also have been appropriate in this context. In “Spy Ops,” the war in Afghanistan practically begins with the attacks on September 11, 2001. At that point, the country had already been at war for more than 20 years. None of this matters and remains unmentioned, although the CIA continued to operate in devastating clandestine ways in the region in the 1980s, for example by allying itself primarily with the most brutal and extremist mujahideen groups in the fight against them the Soviets massively rearmed and not only tolerated corruption and drug dealing, but also practically encouraged it.

An important point raised by CIA agents in the episode, but put into perspective in every way, are the suitcases full of cash that were distributed shortly before the US invasion to chosen Afghan allies, i.e. notorious militiamen and warlords . According to the agents, this was necessary. Anyone who needed money got it. This bought the loyalty of the allies. The producers simply ignore the fact that this step was essentially one of the biggest system errors in the Afghan Republic after 2001 and ultimately caused its collapse. It is now generally known that corruption was one of the main problems of the entire operation and the associated “nation building” – and that this was promoted from the start by means of cash payments from the CIA.

Because of this practice, everyone sensed big money in the “War on Terror” and invented new ways to get it. The result of corruption in the Hindu Kush is a few rich people, mostly politicians, so-called contractors who worked for the US troops, as well as the well-known warlord mafia, while to this day there is no infrastructure whatsoever in most regions of the country.

Ironically, suitcases of cash also made some headlines during NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Initially it was said that the country’s last president, Ashraf Ghani, installed by Washington, had left the country with bags and suitcases full of cash. According to some reports, this was a targeted disinformation campaign by the Russian embassy in Kabul, which is said to have first spread the news. However, it later turned out that it wasn’t so wrong after all. The Afghan National Directorate of Security, which was set up by the CIA, alone had an annual budget of 225 million US dollars, of which at least 70 million were in cash. On August 14, 2021, one day before Ghani fled and Kabul fell to the Taliban, these funds disappeared.

The warlord Abdur Rashid Dostum, who together with US soldiers and CIA agents embarked on what was probably the last cavalry ride in military history, is also mentioned extensively in “Spy Ops”. The alliance between Dostum and his militias and the Americans was also the subject of the 2018 film “12 Strong”. What was not covered in either the film or the Netflix documentary: the Dasht-e Laili massacre in 2001, in which Dostum left thousands of prisoners of war to burn and murder in containers in the desert. The victims included not only Taliban fighters, but also numerous young men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Experts in the region consider the massacre, in which the Americans were complicit, to be one of the worst war crimes in modern Afghan history.

A similar ignorance and whitewashing can also be found in the context of the numerous US bombings that took place in the first days of the military operation. It is estimated that at least 4,000 Afghans were killed by traditional aerial bombings and drone strikes. Both the US military and the CIA were responsible for these operations. The victims of these attacks receive no attention in “Spy Ops”. Instead, the image of a clean anti-terror war that only eliminated the “bad guys” is propagated. An image that has been repeatedly deconstructed in recent years.

Once again, August 2021 was more than symbolic of this, when many Taliban leaders who had been declared dead in previous years after supposedly precise drone operations triumphantly marched into Kabul. But no one, not even woke Netflix, has so far asked what is probably the most obvious question: Who were all the Afghans who had to die in the fire of bombs and rockets instead of high-ranking Taliban?

“Spy Ops”, eight episodes (35 to 52 minutes each), already completely online on Netflix