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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:33PM (1 child)
There was no "invasion" at any point in Crimea. Just to clarify, there were two big issues in Ukraine. In February after the coup, violent separatist movements broke out in eastern Ukraine around the Donbass region on the Russian border. This region has nothing to do with Crimea and is an entirely different issue. Around August Russia started providing direct (though unmarked) material support to the separatists. That conflict continues to this day, and Donbass is still a part of Ukraine. Crimea is an entirely different region in the south that's basically an island - they're connected to Ukraine through a tiny natural land bridge. What Russian presence there was positioned to ensure the referendum was able to be carried out without Ukraine simply stopping it by force of arms. Perhaps you might argue that was their right since Ukraine was their territory but on the other hand, would you not say that people have a right to self determination? If 80% of California wanted to secede and create their own little country, should they not be able to? As always, I am not asking rhetorical questions. I see that there are arguments for both sides, but I think people have more a right to decide their own destiny than a government has to "claim" them by self granted rights.
As for the polls, everybody knew the referendum was going to pass by a landslide so there wasn't much point in participating if you didn't want the annexation. Nonparticipation could also be used to try to undermine the polls later (as we did). Regardless, the results stated by Russia have now been verified numerous times by various western agencies. This [forbes.com] article gives an overview of some of those polls. Gallup found 82.8% of all Crimeans stated that the decision to secede reflected the will of the people. 73.9% said it would make life better for them and their family, 5.5% said no.
They also cover a German poll which found similar results. But they also asked an interesting question. They polled Crimeans on their perception of the honesty of the Ukranian media. 1% said they provide entirely truthful information, 4% said it was more often truthful than deceitful. Guess who's media representation of what happened in Crimea corresponds strongly with the Ukranian version? Russia has become the bogeyman since 2016 so it's easy to forget how regularly our media colludes when it comes to spreading propaganda for war, or otherwise furthering our geopolitical ends.
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The ethnic conflicts are caused because the Russians don't like what the Ukrainians are doing and the Ukrainians don't like what the Russians are doing. That was the point. Same issue in the US. There's no issue with e.g. blacks because they're black, the issue is a people that make up 13% of the population being responsible for the majority [fbi.gov] of murders with similar over-representation in many other forms of crime, particularly violent ones. That's a huge problem, probably attributable in no small part to 'hood culture' (in which I grew up). But you can't even critique this because doing so is labeled racism when it has nothing to do with race beyond the fact that e.g. blacks are disproportionately driven to these cultures. Ukraine and Russia will probably, sooner or later, sort out their issues - but that's only because they can actually focus on their issues instead of both sides just declaring the other racist.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 12 2019, @03:31PM
February 28, 2014 [ibtimes.com].
That was written within a week of the invasion of which I spoke. When you're that wrong right out of the gate there's no point to writing any more. As to the referendum, who authorized it? Wikipedia alleges it was by the legislature of Crimea, but that was under Russian control [theguardian.com] at the time:
[...]
What new lies shall we hear from you next?