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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

 
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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:47PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:47PM (#930798) Journal

    The saying "God preserve me from the fangs of the cobra, the jaws of the tiger, and the wrath of the Afghans" isn't just empty words, it means you don't start a war in that place, no matter who you think you are.

    Not at all. You're coming from the POV that the reason for the US going to war is to "win" same.

    That's not the case. The reason for our going to war is to fluff the military-industrial complex. WW2 notably excepted, although it worked out that way anyhow.

    Certainly the US powers-that-be use agitprop, demonization and claims that they are attempting to win to keep the gullible population in line, which works fine for extended periods of time, but no, that's not even close to the reality of the thing.

    The US oligarchy is perfectly happy to have gone to war in Afghanistan. It wasn't an accident by any means, and none of the latter gave then, or gives now, the south end of a northbound horse, if said war could be "won." All they care about is money. And power. Both of which the prosecution of wars produce in copious, bloody amounts.

    But our oligarchs are unhappy that the population is beginning to figure it out. They knew it would happen eventually, just as it did with Vietnam... but they're still not happy about it.

    You can look forward to a new and (moderately) different US very-expensive-war-on-someone soon, of course.

    --
    I am so glad I don't have to hunt for food.
    I don't even know where spaghetti lives.

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