Afghanistan Papers reveal many secret doubts

Bravo to The Washington Post for bringing the Afghanistan Papers to light.

According to a comprehensive package published by The Post Dec. 9, the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump concealed pessimistic assessments of the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan.

You can read it on the internet at Afghanistan Papers – Washington Post.

Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said reporter Craig Whitlock and dozens of other Post staffers worked on the project for three years. On the front page, under the allcaps headline “AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH,” Whitlock begins the main story with these two paragraphs:

“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 18year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence that war had become unwinnable.

“The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest 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 They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.”

Since 2001, when U.S. and allied forces invaded Afghanistan as a safe haven for terrorists, about 2,300 Americans have died there and nearly 21,000 have been wounded in action.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a threestar Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers.

The interviews with Lute and about 400 others were conducted as part of a “Lessons Learned” project by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Most are not identified.

“The American people have constantly been lied to,” SIGAR chief John Sopko told Whitlock.

Other news providers, including The Associated Press, picked up the Afghanistan Papers story, giving credit to The Post.

The American people have constantly been lied to.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction

The Afghanistan Papers have been compared to the Pentagon Papers, the secret chronicle of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

The Pentagon Papers were leaked, first to The New York Times and then to The Post. But The Post obtained the Afghanistan Papers through the Freedom of Information Act and lawsuits.

The Post also obtained memos dictated by Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave,” Rumsfeld said in a memo to several generals and senior aides.

“Help!” he added.

Paul Janensch, of Bridgeport, was a newspaper editor and taught journalism at Quinnipiac University. Email: paul.janensch@quinnipiac.edu.