Post by rmarks1 on Dec 9, 2019 12:25:47 GMT -5
But I thought we could trust government officials!
Bob
Senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign — and hid “unmistakable evidence” that it was unwinnable, according to a damning report by the Washington Post.
The paper, which obtained a cache of government documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle, reported that the American officials made “rosy pronouncements they knew to be false” about the longest armed conflict in US history.
The trove includes over 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war during the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, including generals, diplomats, aid workers and Afghan officials, according to the Washington Post.
The paper referred to its reporting as The Afghanistan Papers — a reference to The Pentagon Papers, the top-secret Defense Department study of American military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, which was published by the New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971.
In the case of Afghanistan, hundreds of insiders offered blunt criticism of how the US became mired in almost two decades of warfare, offering a mix of pent-up grievances, frustrations and confessions, as well as 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 was the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015.
“What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” Lute added, according to the report.
nypost.com/2019/12/09/afghanistan-bombshell-report-shows-us-officials-misled-public-about-war-for-nearly-2-decades/
The paper, which obtained a cache of government documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle, reported that the American officials made “rosy pronouncements they knew to be false” about the longest armed conflict in US history.
The trove includes over 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war during the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, including generals, diplomats, aid workers and Afghan officials, according to the Washington Post.
The paper referred to its reporting as The Afghanistan Papers — a reference to The Pentagon Papers, the top-secret Defense Department study of American military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, which was published by the New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971.
In the case of Afghanistan, hundreds of insiders offered blunt criticism of how the US became mired in almost two decades of warfare, offering a mix of pent-up grievances, frustrations and confessions, as well as 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 was the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015.
“What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” Lute added, according to the report.
nypost.com/2019/12/09/afghanistan-bombshell-report-shows-us-officials-misled-public-about-war-for-nearly-2-decades/
Bob
