On Monday, The Washington Post reported that they had obtained thousands of US government documents on the US-Afghan war conflict clearly showing that the US deliberately misled the public about the nature of the war.
According to the documents obtained by The Washington Post, Senior US officials who claimed gave off the opinion that progress was being made in Afghanistan despite clear contradictory evidence.
The Washington Post has revealed that it has collected more than 2000 pages of notes of interviews. This includes interviews with top US military officers, diplomats, aid workers, Afghan officials and others who played vital roles in the almost two decade old war.
The newspaper has claimed that the documents “contradict a long chorus of pubic statements from US presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the was war worth fighting”.
The Post continued, “The interviews make it clear that officials issues rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable”.
The newspaper has labelled these documents “The Afghanistan Papers”, a reference to the Pentagon Papers which revealed the hidden history of America’s involvement in Vietnam and were essential in swaying public opinion against the war.
According to The Post, the documents are a part of the ‘Lessons Learned’ project conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The newspaper managed to obtain them via the Freedom of Information Act requests.
The head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, John Sopko admitted to the Post that that documents display “the American people have constantly been lied to”.
In addition to the ‘Lessons Learned’ papers, the Post has also obtained hundreds of memos written by Donald Rumsfeld, who served as defence secretary under then President George W Bush.
Following the September 2001 attacks on the twin towers, the USA invaded Afghanistan to eliminate the threat from Al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban.
Nearly 20 years later, some 13,000 troops still remain in Afghanistan and the Taliban still continue to pose a threat to the Afghan government.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan- we didn’t know what we doing” explained Douglas Lute, a three-star army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar under presidents Bush and Obama in a 2015 interview.
In the interview, Lute asks “what are we trying to do here?” and adds, “we didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking”.
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