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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Documents show US leaders misled public on progress in Afghanistan War: report [thehill.com]

Senior U.S. officials knowingly concealed evidence showing a lack of progress throughout the 18-year war in Afghanistan, according [washingtonpost.com] to a cache of documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The interviews, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, span the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations and reveal U.S. officials frequently acknowledged the nation was wasting vast amounts of money attempting to transform and Westernize the nation.

"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, retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who served as a top adviser 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 [cnn.com].

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