Luther12
Elder Lister
1. AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH
2. Afghanistan shows the dangers of relying on the Pentagon to assess war
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 They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.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.
2. Afghanistan shows the dangers of relying on the Pentagon to assess war
The Washington Post’s publication of the Afghanistan Papers in December revealed that the Pentagon, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, misled the public “to make it appear that the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.” Three administrations consistently — and falsely — assured Americans that they were achieving their goals.
While the reporting is painful to read, the bottom line wasn’t surprising. Countless media reports, travelers to Afghanistan and think tank experts almost uniformly named the serious contradictions that made “victory” unlikely all along. Likewise, intelligence analysis consistently depicted the war in all its ugly reality.
And yet, official messaging remained relentlessly positive. One reason is the public’s increasing reliance on our military leaders to provide unbiased appraisals rather than expecting updates from civilian officials. As the public trust in the military has grown, administrations have increasingly ceded messaging to military leaders and often failed to include input from diplomatic and intelligence voices that might add more a more comprehensive and less positive spin.