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Documents Show U.S. Officials Misled Public on Afghanistan War
Documents show US leaders misled public on progress in Afghanistan War: report
Senior U.S. officials knowingly lied to the public about their progress throughout the 18-year war in Afghanistan, consistently painting a rosier picture of the state of the war than they knew to be true, according to a cache of documents obtained by the Washington Post.
In private interviews conducted by a watchdog that span the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations—which the Post obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request—U.S. officials frequently acknowledged a lack of understanding, strategy and progress in a war they regularly described publicly as being on the cusp of success.
“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,” retired Navy SEAL Jeffrey Eggers, a White House staffer in the Bush and Obama administrations, said in a private interview.
Interviewees also describe a deliberate disinformation campaign meant to spin discouraging statistics as evidence the U.S. was prevailing in the war.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel and senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, said in an interview.
“Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone,” he added.
In 2015, Ret. Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who served as a top advisor on the war during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” according to the Post.
Lute went on to lament the deaths of U.S. military personnel that he blamed on bureaucratic entanglements between the State Department, the Pentagon and Congress.
Also at CNN.
The Afghanistan Papers - A Secret History of the 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.
[...]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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fustakrakich on Monday December 09 2019, @09:28PM (10 children)
The reason for going there in the first place was to reopen the opium pipelines the Taliban so effectively cut off [bbc.co.uk]. In that regard, the war was a trivial matter and very successful.
Yep, it's an opium war, just like the old days. You can put all that righteous indignation over the Bin Laden BS to rest. Funny how everybody rags on about Iraq and gives this one a complete pass.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 09 2019, @10:45PM (2 children)
Tell me you're not one of them "jet fuel can't melt steel" folks.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday December 09 2019, @11:09PM
What makes you think that? It's not even relevant to the intrigue.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @12:42AM
Ah, so you're a bootlicker. Not surprised, but you spend an awful lot of time trying to convince everyone you're anything but. Now to see what conusions you draw from this comment. Of course making predictions or even announcing I'm curious skews the experiment. Likely just reduced you to some flippant trollmark.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday December 09 2019, @11:14PM (6 children)
Bin Laden worked on US during previous Afghan war, but after certain events in middle east he thought that US betrayed him. And hence the Twin Towers attack.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday December 09 2019, @11:22PM (5 children)
Yeah, there's a title foreword for one of the Rambo III praising the "Brave Muhajadeen." [imgur.com] It was of course later changed.
But what happened here is that the (((Neocons))) made us go to war in Afghanistan because it was the only way it would be palatable to the Americans to segue-way into the also-disastrous Iraq war. Of course non-Jewish Americans also profited obscenely from both wars, and Dubya got to take out the man who tried to kill daddy. Now we're bankrupt and people are walking all over the place with missing limbs.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday December 09 2019, @11:35PM
Presumably they corrected the spelling [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @01:32AM (2 children)
Getting the drunken rants out before the big holiday huh?
Smart move, you're family is probably debating whether to even invite you this year.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @03:12AM (1 child)
My guess is that his family hasn't invited him in a number of years. Hence the reason he treats all of us to his garbage year round!
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday December 10 2019, @04:15AM
HA! You Shiksas can suck my fucking cock. Durham is after you fucks on the federal level, and I am after you fucks on the street level.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @02:21PM
Dick Cheney is Jewish? News to me. The entire point of invading Iraq was to funnel money to Halliburton. Nothing more, nothing less.