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he US’s longest war in history, is also turning out to be its most disastrous. The nearly eleven year long American mission in Afghanistan, launched in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was aimed at toppling the Taliban. However, despite an easy win just weeks into the mission, within a few years, Afghanistan slipped back into the grip of what is considered today’s Taliban, or as some call them, the “neo-Taliban,” primarily through serious missteps on the part of the US. From choosing to work with corrupt and criminal warlords right from the start, the US government, then under President George W. Bush, set the tone for the failed war. Flooding Afghanistan with cash, ignoring deliberate duplicity on the part of their Afghan allies, encouraging the drug trade, appointing criminals to positions of power, using soldiers to build infrastructure, and being distracted by the Iraq war, are only a few of the disastrous errors that have left Afghanistan in a worse mess than in 2001.

Today, the Taliban are stronger than ever before, and there is extensive documentation that US dollars have been siphoned directly into their insurgency. Now, a new book by award winning, independent journalist Douglas Wissing, chronicles how the US has in effect, funded both sides of its war in Afghanistan. In “Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban,” Wissing establishes a shocking pattern of policies in the Afghanistan war, and their consequences, based on existing research and his own first-person interviews with soldiers, policy makers, and ordinary Afghans. Wissing has reported widely on the Afghanistan war, and contributed hundreds of stories to media outlets such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, the LA Times, and more.

GUEST: Douglas Wissing, author of Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban

Visit www.douglaswissing.com for more information about Wissing’s work.

Special thanks to WFIU Public Radio in Indiana.