The Afghanistan Papers

The Washington Post recently won a three-year court battle to make public secret government documents about the war. This is being compared to the Pentagon Papers regarding the Vietnam war.

At war with the truth
The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war

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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.

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Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans. “What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.” The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

You can think of at this way: at some point early on, they must have realized that the war was unwinnable.

Even though we couldn't win, we could still sort of prevent the Taliban from winning at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. The goal is only to maintain a sort of perpetual stalemate. We can't win, but neither can they as long as we stay there and keep pouring more billions into it. It's clear to me that there's little reason to remain there now, other than some kind of national pride. We hate to admit that we failed.

Most Americans have kind of forgotten about the war, in the sense that it isn't really front page news anymore. News is still reported, but it's buried in the obscure sections of the notional newspaper. Unlike Vietnam, it can drag on indefinitely because the public doesn't care about it all that much. Nobody is being drafted to fight the war, it's all volunteers. And it's all being paid for with debt payable at some indefinite point in the future (since the government just finances its debt with more debt, it isn't clear when, if ever, the bill will actually come due). So nothing to really get worked up about, since it doesn't affect most people's lives directly.

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Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, 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.” John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

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