Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday December 09 2019, @08:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the why? dept.

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.


Original Submission #1, Original Submission #2

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Tuesday December 10 2019, @01:44PM (5 children)

    by Coward, Anonymous (7017) on Tuesday December 10 2019, @01:44PM (#930544) Journal

    Oh, well. The US did get bin Laden, and I'm sure they caused the Taliban plenty of pain. Those things should have been enough to declare victory and go home, having reinforced the notion that attacks from foreign soil will not be tolerated. The US can reserve the right to bomb the shit out of Afghanistan whenever they want, because Afghanistan attacked the US and no peace was ever made.

    For that message, it would have helped to also make Saudi Arabia feel the consequences, but the US hasn't had a President who would do that. I wonder what the Saudi's leverage really is.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday December 10 2019, @01:53PM (3 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Tuesday December 10 2019, @01:53PM (#930546)

    The US can reserve the right to bomb the shit out of Afghanistan whenever they want

    Problem is that that's a completely empty threat, I've usually heard similar expressed as "bomb them back into the stone age", but most of Afghanistan already is in the stone age. There's literally nothing you can do to threaten them because they're already in whatever bad shape you're threatening to put them in.

    I agree with your comment that the sensible thing to do would have been to go in, thrash the Taliban, and then declare victory and leave. There's not much else you can achieve by staying.

    I wonder what the Saudi's leverage really is.

    Oil and the fact that they support whatever the US wants to do in the region. As long as they keep having/doing both of those, they're free to do whatever else they want. Oh, except attack Israel, which they've shown no sign of doing, since they know what side their... um, pita isn't buttered on. OK, gotta work on those analogies.

    • (Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Tuesday December 10 2019, @08:05PM (1 child)

      by Coward, Anonymous (7017) on Tuesday December 10 2019, @08:05PM (#930741) Journal

      But a war with Saudi Arabia would be popular, and their oil is not really needed in the US. Obeisance to the Saudis goes beyond what the known facts suggest.

      • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:48AM

        by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:48AM (#931340) Journal

        Obeisance to the Saudis goes beyond what the known facts suggest.

        Serving at the pleasure of Her Majesty the Queen. She rings that little bell...

        --
        La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 11 2019, @02:46AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @02:46AM (#930923)

      the sensible thing to do would have been to go in, thrash the Taliban, and then declare victory and leave.

      I gained a lot of respect for George Bush Sr. when he pulled out of Iraq so quickly.

      Insert Barbara joke here about W.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 10 2019, @10:13PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday December 10 2019, @10:13PM (#930815)

    The US did get bin Laden

    ... via a small and fairly simple operation in neighboring Pakistan. Either the US had lousy intel about where bin Laden was, or they had a completely failed operation to capture him and he escaped to Pakistan, most likely because they were distracted by trying to take over the entire country rather than concentrating their forces on their objective.

    Those things should have been enough to declare victory and go home, having reinforced the notion that attacks from foreign soil will not be tolerated.

    Then why did the US blow up 2 countries that had far less to do with 9/11 than Saudi Arabia did?

    My impression from those who actually pretend to believe the justifications for those wars is that they wanted to blow something up in revenge, and didn't much care what that thing was or who was going to be killed in the process. Like when they were blowing up Saddam Hussein's palaces, and there were people disbelieving that Saddam Hussein wasn't inside, and I'm thinking "Of course he's not, that would be as dumb as leaving the US president inside the White House during a global nuclear war, which you don't do if you can help it. You killed the janitors and a few low-ranking military people who probably just wanted a decent-paying job, congratulations."

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.