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Documents Show U.S. Officials Misled Public on Afghanistan War

takyon writes:

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

DeathMonkey submitted a story on this as well: THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS - A secret history of the war at The Washington Post:

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