Yes…our longest ever war, almost 2 decades, has been a mess from the very beginning……something that I and most other foreign policy geeks have been writing and saying for many years….and now we are vindicated!
Just as the Pentagon Papers blew the lid off the Vietnam War so shall the “Afghan Papers”……
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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 They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.
If you one of those that think that the WaPo is radical Left literature than here is a FOX report as well…..https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-misled-public-afghanistan-officials-vent
Trillions spent and NO one has any idea what the mission is suppose to be or accomplish…..
The Washington Post is out with a damning picture of the 18-years-and-counting Afghanistan war, and it’s based on the government’s own interviews with key players in the conflict. The upshot: US officials have lied to the public repeatedly since the war began in 2001, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable,” writes Craig Whitlock. The newspaper obtained the interviews—conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR—after a three-year legal fight under the Freedom of Information Act. The fallout could be big: Media writer David Folkenflik of the NPR calls this “the pentagon papers of our times.” A quick taste:
- A top general: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing,” Gen. Douglas Lute, who served as Afghan war czar under presidents Bush and Obama, told the government interviewers in 2015. “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
- More from him: “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … 2,400 lives lost,” said Lute, who blamed what the Post describes as “bureaucratic breakdowns” in Congress, the Pentagon, and the State Department.
- Skewed numbers: “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Army Col. Bob Crowley told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
Acknowledgment: The head of SIGAR, the group that conducted the interviews as part of a “Lessons Learned” government project, says the documents show “the American people have been constantly lied to.”
Dig into the Post investigation here.
5 Infuriating lessons from the Paper…..
1) The government suppressed its own “Lessons Learned”
2) Staggering Amount of Money Wasted
3) Who are the ‘Bad Guys’?
4) It was all fake news, lies and spin
5) Eighteen Years In, two parties responsible, no one accountable
Read the breakdown in the American Conservative……https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/5-infuriating-findings-in-the-afghanistan-papers/
But for those that have a hard time with the big words…..there is a video….
I would bet, if I were a gambling man, that this report will have the same effect on veterans as the Pentagon Papers did……veterans will be pissed……
hen the Defense Department’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, was leaked in 1971 and revealed how the government had long misled the public about the progress the United States had made during the Vietnam war, combat veterans like 22-year-old Marine Guy Mazzeo, were enraged at then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
On Monday, Mazzeo, now 70, said he understood the anger from veterans of the Afghanistan war over a damning report in The Washington Post which details how presidents, politicians and Pentagon officials misled and, in some instances, lied to the U.S. public about the war effort in America’s longest-running war.
The documents created by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, were obtained by the Post under the Freedom of Information Act, and only after the Post sued SIGAR on two separate occasions in federal court to compel the release of the documents. SIGAR argued that the records were privileged and that the public had no right to see them, reported the Post.
This is typical of the Pentagon…they are seldom ready for that “next war”……https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-us-armys-worst-tradition-never-ready-for-the-next-war
Vets are pissed by the report but what about the rest of American society? Will they take the time away from Swamp People to learn the truth about our longest war?
My thought is…they WILL NOT!
And it will get even worse with the amount of amateurs we have running our foreign policies……
I want to read the whole report for myself….but that is just me.
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Sadly, the truth about our involvement in Afghanistan will never come out. The real reasons for being there have nothing at all to do with those ‘stated aims’.
Best wishes, Pete.
Like I wrote..I want to read the full document and decide for myself…..chuq
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. —SOUNDS TO ME LIKE what happened during the Vietnam war.
It did and very little changes…propaganda is the way of the government. chuq
Yes it is — and the way of the MSM as well.
Yep once corporations own the news it becomes propaganda……chuq