In what’s already being hailed as a defining and explosive “Pentagon papers” moment, a cache of previously classified documents obtained by The Washington Post show top Pentagon leaders continuously lied to the public about the “progress” of the now eighteen-year long Afghan war.
The some 2,000 pages of notes from interviews of senior officials who have shaped US strategy in Afghanistan confirm that “senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false… hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable,” according to the bombshell Post report.
The internal interviews and statements were unearthed via Freedom of Information Act request and span the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. The trove further confirms that US leaders knew vast amounts of money was being wasted in a futile attempt to “Westernize the nation”.
Watchdog groups commonly estimate total US spending on the war has hit $1 trillion by end of 2019. More importantly, America’s ‘endless war’ has cost at least 2,351 American lives and over 20,000 wounded.
The internal Pentagon project conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) had sought to get as honest assessment as possible as to the status of America’s longest running quagmire panning multiple administrations. It was to be a classified “Lessons Learned” assessment of sorts to prevent future missteps.
“What did we get for this $1tn effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” one retired Navy SEAL who had advised the Bush and Obama administrations observed in one of the documents. “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.”
The internal interviews and statements were unearthed via Freedom of Information Act request and span the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. The trove further confirms that US leaders knew vast amounts of money was being wasted in a futile attempt to “Westernize the nation”.
Watchdog groups commonly estimate total US spending on the war has hit $1 trillion by end of 2019. More importantly, America’s ‘endless war’ has cost at least 2,351 American lives and over 20,000 wounded.
The internal Pentagon project conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) had sought to get as honest assessment as possible as to the status of America’s longest running quagmire panning multiple administrations. It was to be a classified “Lessons Learned” assessment of sorts to prevent future missteps.
“What did we get for this $1tn effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” one retired Navy SEAL who had advised the Bush and Obama administrations observed in one of the documents. “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.”
Here’s more undeniable evidence that you were lied to about the war in Afghanistan, for anyone who needed more undeniable evidence that you were lied to about the war in Afghanistan.https://t.co/3AVYnBNKch
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) December 9, 2019
Another top official, former White House Afghan war czar Douglas Lute under Bush and Obama, confessed, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were doing.” He added that “we didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking” after the 2001 invasion.
“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … 2,400 lives lost,” he added.
Two major consistent themes from the documents are—
- the manipulation on a mass scale of statistics fed to the public in order to hide the true disastrous nature of the war; and…
- US leaders “turning a blind eye” to large scale theft of US tax payer dollars by corrupt Afghan officials.
US aid was looted “with impunity” according to the released documents, and provide undeniable evidence that top defense officials knew years of rosy public statements were a mountain of lies.
Almost hard to get infuriated about the blatant spinning by government agencies anymore. The effort to cover up the failures of US foreign policy whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Yemen has worn us down. Hard to remember what honesty is. https://t.co/PFDiAmwveQ
— Joshua Landis (@joshua_landis) December 9, 2019
Over 400 people close to the decision-making process were interviewed as part of the internal DoD investigation; however among those 366 names were redacted, given that as more damning testimony was given, the Inspector General deemed they should be treated as ‘whistleblowers’ and informants.
But for all the hand-wringing and outrage Monday’s WaPo bombshell will unleash this week, it must be remembered that the establishment in both parties have consistently pushed to stay at war, not to mention going to war in the first place.
As independent journalist David Mizner observes of the new ‘Afghan Papers’ it remains that “US politicians lie to stay at war, every time. The real crime was going to war in the first place — and almost no US politicians, pundits, and or journos with large platforms opposed the war.”
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A video tour of the damning new ‘Afghanistan Papers’ revelations and their significance:
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing.” So said Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the US war on Afghanistan under Presidents Bush and Obama. Eighteen years into the longest war in US history, we are finally finding out, thanks to thousands of pages of classified interviews on the war published by the Washington Post last week, that General Lute’s cluelessness was shared by virtually everyone involved in the war.
What we learned in what is rightly being called the “Pentagon Papers” of our time, is that hundreds of US Administration officials – including three US Presidents – knowingly lied to the American people about the Afghanistan war for years. This wasn’t just a matter of omitting some unflattering facts. This was about bald-faced lying about a war they knew was a disaster from almost day one.
Remember President Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld? Remember how supremely confident he was at those press conferences, acting like the master of the universe? Here’s what he told the Pentagon’s special inspector general who compiled these thousands of interviews on Afghanistan: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”
It is not only members of the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations who are guilty of this massive fraud. Falsely selling the Afghanistan war as a great success was a bipartisan activity on Capitol Hill. In the dozens of hearings I attended in the House International Relations Committee, I do not recall a single “expert” witness called who told us the truth. Instead, both Republican and Democrat-controlled Congresses called a steady stream of neocon war cheerleaders to lie to us about how wonderfully the war was going. Victory was just around the corner, they all promised. Just a few more massive appropriations and we’d be celebrating the end of the war.
Congress and especially Congressional leadership of both parties are all as guilty as the three lying Administrations. They were part of the big lie, falsely presenting to the American people as “expert” witnesses only those bought-and-paid-for Beltway neocon think tankers.
What is even more shocking than the release of this “smoking gun” evidence that the US government wasted two trillion dollars and killed more than three thousand Americans and more than 150,000 Afghans while lying through its teeth about the war is that you could hear a pin drop in the mainstream media about it. Aside from the initial publication in the Washington Post, which has itself been a major cheerleader for the war in Afghanistan, the mainstream media has shown literally no interest in what should be the story of the century.
We’ve wasted at least half a year on the Donald Trump impeachment charade – a conviction desperately in search of a crime. Meanwhile one of the greatest crimes in US history will go unpunished. Not one of the liars in the “Afghanistan Papers” will ever be brought to justice for their crimes. None of the three presidents involved will be brought to trial for these actual high crimes. Rumsfeld and Lute and the others will never have to fear justice. Because both parties are in on it. There is no justice.
Just days after the “Afghanistan Papers” were published, only 48 Members of Congress voted against the massive military spending of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. They continue as if nothing happened. They will continue lying to us and ripping us off if we let them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb8Wn6byq6M
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