Officials repeatedly told the
public "progress" was being made, but new documents show they knew
that wasn't true.
Monday, December 09, 2019
A major Washington Post investigation released
Monday is a confirmation of the peace movement's message that "there's no
military solution in Afghanistan."
That's according to Paul
Kawika Martin, senior director of policy and political affairs at Peace Action,
replying to "The
Afghanistan Papers." The report exposes how top officials spanning the
George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations waged a deliberate
misinformation campaign to conceal the total failures of the 18-year war in
Afghanistan.
The bombshell from
investigative reporter Craig Whitlock "broadly resembles the Pentagon
Papers," and it is based on over 2,000 pages of notes from interviews with
a federal agency that "bring into sharp relief the core failings of the
war that persist to this day" and belie comments by officials
"who assured Americans year after year" of progress made in the war.
The Post also
published this accompanying video:
The paper obtained the cache
of documents following a legal battle that lasted three years and included two
lawsuits.
The documents came out of a
project from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction (SIGAR), an agency now headed by Obama-appointee John Sopko.
That project, entitled Lessons
Learned, was meant to assess "the U.S. reconstruction experience in
Afghanistan." While it has released a number of reports beginning 2016,
those public documents had major omissions, namely "the harshest and most
frank criticisms from the interviews" SIGAR conducted.
As the Post reported,
the interviewees, who were directly involved in the war effort, were
forthright, believing their remarks would not be made public. They revealed
that officials continually misled the public about the war's success, there was
no strategy, their efforts fueled corruption, and the U.S. was clearly losing
ground as well as tens of thousands of lives and at least $1 trillion.
The trove includes transcripts
and notes from over 400 interviewers between 2014 and 2018. SIGAR blacked out
names of roughly 85 percnet of interviewees.
"It was impossible to
create good metrics" about the troop surge, one unnamed senior National
Security Council official said in a 2016 interview. "We tried using troop
numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted
an accurate picture." They added, "The metrics were always
manipulated for the duration of the war."
That theme was similar to Army
colonel Bob Crowley's remarks in a 2016 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," Crowley said.
Ryan Crocker, who was the top
U.S. diplomat in Kabul from 2011 to 2012, said in a 2016 interview, "Our
biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the
development of mass corruption."
The Post's reporting also
used previously
classified memos known as "snowflakes" from former Pentagon
chief Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.
"I have no visibility
into who the bad guys are," Rumsfeld said in a 2003 memo. "We are
woefully deficient in human intelligence."
"Take the time to read
every word of this," progressive commentator Krystal Ball said on
Twitter of Whitlock's new investigation. "Three administrations have lied
to us about Afghanistan. How many lives have been lost and fortunes spent for
nothing??"
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said
the takeaway from the reporting was clear: "18 years later it's time to
get out. Now."
Read the full Washington
Post investigation.
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