AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found. https://www.washingtonpost.com/grap...apers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/ 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. The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials. The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle. THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 1: At war with the truth 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. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,”Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added:“What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,”Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department.“Who will say this was in vain?” Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures. (Very lengthy and good article at above url. Note the Afghanistan re-building effort adjusted for inflation cost more than the entire Marshall plan for western Europe after WW2.) Series of articles PART 1 At war with the truth U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it. PART 2 Stranded without a strategy Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail. PART 3 Built to fail Despite vows the U.S. wouldn’t get mired in “nation-building,” it has wasted billions doing just that PART 4 Consumed by corruption The U.S. flooded the country with money — then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled PART 5 Unguarded nation Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption PART 6 Overwhelmed by opium The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn INTERVIEWS AND MEMOS Explore the documents Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history POST REPORTS ‘We didn’t know what the task was’ Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn THE FIGHT FOR THE DOCUMENTS About the investigation It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records MORE STORIES ‘We were right’: Veterans react to revelations in The Afghanistan Papers A visual timeline of the war Interviewees respond
Maj. Danny Sjursen: America’s War Machine Refuses to Let Afghanistan Go by Moderator August 27, 2021 "On this week's "Scheer Intelligence," the veteran weighs in on the U.S. exit from Afghanistan and Gen. David Petraeus’ dangerously false narrative about our country’s longest war. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of NATO and International Security Assistance Force troops in Afghanistan, visits the 1-16th Infantry 2nd Battalion at Qalat Mangwal, Afghanistan, during a battlefield circulation, in support of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. [ U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Joshua Treadwell] "When Kabul swiftly fell to the Taliban in recent weeks, war hawks emerged from all corners of the U.S. government and mainstream media to criticize the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw from America’s longest war. One such figure is General David Petraeus, the U.S. military official who commanded all forces in Iraq and later in Afghanistan during his 37-year military career before being confirmed as CIA director in 2011. The general was forced to resign in disgrace in 2012 after it was revealed that he shared highly classified information with his biographer–a journalist with whom he was having an extramarital affair. "Despite having to resign in ignominy, Petraeus has continually been handed a megaphone by some of the most popular U.S. publications and shows, including The New Yorker, which recently published a somewhat fawning interview with the general regarding Afghanistan in which the author refers to Patraeus as “the most famous and revered member of the armed forces during the war on terror and the war in Iraq.” Not so, says West Point graduate and historian Maj. Danny Sjursen, who fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq under Patraeus’ command after the September 11 attacks. The author of “A True History of the United States,” Sjursen described Patraeus’ words in the interview as “a cartoonish depiction of himself by himself” and derided the general’s strategies in both countries as failures, adding that the vast majority of troops supported withdrawal from Afghanistan. "On this week’s edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” Sjursen joins Robert Scheer to discuss what the retired major calls the fully debunked myths at the heart of Petreaus’ arguments about Afghanistan. Sjursen thoughtfully goes through each of the disgraced general’s arguments–all of which he views as fallacious at best. He also criticizes the revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense sector, in addition to other obscenely profitable industries, that allow former military officials to gain money and status despite having led the country through disastrously failed wars. “The former generals who are now in the military industrial complex are the same people who are appointed to give advice to the president [or] are unofficially giving public advice on CNN,” says Sjursen. “The whole system locks out most people and [allows] these same insiders to control the narrative even after they’re out of uniform.” "The Eisenhower Media Network director and a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy (CIP) highlights the double standard with which generals like Petraeus and whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning are judged: The general not only seems to have gotten off relatively scot-free for his actions, but has also gone on to have a lucrative career in finance and punditry, whereas Manning has served time in prison more than once. Sjursen and Scheer also speak at length about the folly of the 20-year war in Afghanistan and how the U.S. empire’s insatiable militarism is the one thing many in leaders and pundits refuse to acknowledge as the source of the occupation. Listen to the full discussion between Sjursen and Scheer as they tackle one of the biggest U.S. foreign policy blunders of the 21st century." Listen here
You realize the Afghan papers dropped 2 yrs ago and you are quoting an ancient article OP? You can thank yours truly for delivering the obvious to the forum back then too.
And the previous admin did nothing for two years...tsk, tsk... And we've got ppl. who still wanted a few more years in there....tsk, tsk..
Dude, that's a video game. Buildings don't blow up like that, shrapnel doesn't fly like that, and you cannot get footage like that from the defense department. Don't be naive. Oh, too late. Here's what it really looks like.