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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWaPo Exclusive: US officials misled public about War in Afghanistan
By Craig Whitlock
Dec. 9, 2019
A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.
The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.
In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.
With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.
Click any underlined text in the story to see the statement in the original document
We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan we didnt know what we were doing, Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White Houses Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: What are we trying to do here? We didnt have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.
If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction .?.?. 2,400 lives lost, Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. Who will say this was in vain?
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Modern-day Pentagon Papers!
mucifer
(23,478 posts)Nature Man
(869 posts)virtually unreported by corporate state run complicit media.
18. Fucking. Years.
3Hotdogs
(12,324 posts)Nothing.
exboyfil
(17,862 posts)That is what is going to be done about it.
ismnotwasm
(41,965 posts)She knew this back in the day. Russia learned a very hard lesson there prior to us going in. Theres an entire history there
This is what makes negotiating with the Taliban so horrifically surreal. We lost this war and never should have gone in in the first place.
greatauntoftriplets
(175,729 posts)zaj
(3,433 posts)We don't know what to do exactly, but we do know walking away will be bad? Sorta like Vietnam, only with far fewer dead?
jalan48
(13,841 posts)bucolic_frolic
(43,044 posts)It's what the Pilgrims did, after all
jalan48
(13,841 posts)Botany
(70,447 posts)Before Kennedy was killed he was starting to get us out because he knew that he was being lied to
about the war and body counts.
BTW We could have killed bin Laden and thrown the Taliban from power w/in 3 months* but instead
Rummy/Cheney let him get away so they could keep a "boogie man" out there. And so we became
bogged down in an endless just war like the Russians, Ghingas Khan, and many more fools who
thought they could fight a war in Afghanistan.
* And be seen as the good guys when we left.
bucolic_frolic
(43,044 posts)became a long term profit machine for defense companies and their owners. Can't help wondering if the profit motive doesn't drive the ideology so the policy can be created and enacted to fulfill the cash flows. WMD in another form.
Dennis Donovan
(18,770 posts)...after awhile you're talking about real $$$.
AllaN01Bear
(17,987 posts)other secret wars we dont know about.
tblue37
(65,227 posts)mahatmakanejeeves
(57,290 posts)BeyondGeography
(39,346 posts)This disaster transcends party.
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)But for some reason I can't quite pin down, I suspect that most of the media coverage will be devoted to the time period of 2009 through 2016. The person who will receive the brunt of the criticism will be the president. There won't be any coverage of any caterwauling by a certain party about cutting and running or dishonoring the war dead by refusing to add to their ranks. There will be no discussion about Congress refusing to consider or authorizing funds for shutting down the concentration camp at Guantanamo. And for sure there will be no acknowledgement that a certain segment of the population called this from the earliest days, because they're just dirty fucking hippies.
Call it a hunch.
BeyondGeography
(39,346 posts)This is an earthquake; some of the details are hard to stomach even if you shouldn't be shocked. I'm still processing it, tbh. But you know the media will be goaded by twittler into doing just that (focusing on 09-16) and they will cave.