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2019-12-11 Government
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The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History Of The War. U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, states a confidential trove of government documents.
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[WashingtonPost] 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 They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.
"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan ‐ we didn’t know what we were doing," Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: "What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.
The text is extensively hyperlinked to the source documents. Please click through, because linking from external source isn't working.
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."
Two major consistent themes from the documents are‐
1.the manipulation on a mass scale of statistics fed to the public in order to hide the true disastrous nature of the war; and...
2.US leaders "turning a blind eye" to large scale theft of US tax payer dollars by corrupt Afghan officials.
The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko’s agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.
In 2014, at Sopko’s direction, SIGAR departed from its usual mission of performing audits and launched a side venture. Titled "Lessons Learned," the $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.
The next time...Jesus. How about we stop invading countries? Just think of all the nice things we could have had with that $1,000,000,000,000. Bernie Sanders' "free college" plan, widely mocked as unaffordable, was $60 billion a year. Trump's wall is $25 billion one-time. We could have a continent-spanning fast rail system. We could have free medical care for all US citizens. What do we get instead? A worthless war that's old enough to go to college itself, thousands of dead Americans and hundreds of thousands more maimed for life physically or mentally, and no end in sight. 
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Posted by Herb McCoy 2019-12-11 00:00||
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Posted by trailing wife 2019-12-11 18:25||
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