For more than 18 years, U.S. military forces have been engaged in the war in Afghanistan. More than 2,300 Americans have been killed — including at least 60 from Washington — and more than 20,000 have been wounded.
Now, a special report from The Washington Post adds to questions about the purpose of the war, its success, and its ultimate outcome. Under the headline “At War With the Truth,” The Post details how the administrations of three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — have misled the American public about what is going on halfway around the world. As the sub-headline says, “U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.”
The report was derived from more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes from government interviews of people involved with the war, ranging from generals to Afghan officials. The Washington Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, following a three-year legal battle.
Fake news? No, just the grimy truth that American officials have tried to cover up.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general told interviewers in 2015. “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.
“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … 2,400 lives lost,” Lute continued. “Who will say this was in vain?”
The war in Afghanistan was launched in 2001, following the attacks of Sept. 11. Afghanistan, under the rule of the Taliban, had harbored terrorist training camps that helped facilitate attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The Post reports that — according to calculations by the Costs of War Project at Brown University — the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated about $950 billon for the 18-year conflict. That does not include money spent by agencies such as the CIA and Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care of veterans.
The war in Afghanistan is the United States’ longest military conflict, and an estimated 13,000 U.S. troops remain in the country. As the war has dragged on, the interviews reveal that American officials have deceived the public. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Army Col. Bob Crowley said. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right, and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
The subterfuge is despicable, an affront to the American public and, in particular, to those who have bravely served the interests of their nation overseas. In the process, the echoes of the Vietnam War ring clear. U.S. leadership has failed to learn pertinent lessons about engaging in an unwinnable war and has repeated mistakes born of hubris by placing Americans in harm’s way and lying to the public.
As The Post reports, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote, “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 stability that will be necessary for us to leave.”
That was in 2002, six months after the start of the war. U.S. officials are still looking for that stability, and the American people are still paying the price for its absence.
