U.S. officials ‘repeatedly lied about Afghanistan war for 18 years and hid the fact it was unwinnable’, bombshell Washington Post report claims
US officials repeatedly lied to the public about the war in Afghanistan for its 18 year duration by hiding the fact that it was unwinnable and troops were out of their depth, The Washington Post has claimed.
In a lengthy article published on Monday, the Post claims that top officials knew the military’s chances were slim but that they routinely hid the grave reality and made ‘rosy pronouncements’ about it instead.
The cache of documents includes interviews that the government carried out with senior military personnel which the newspaper obtained through a Freedom of Information request.
Among the interviewees is General Douglas Lute, who served under Bush and Obama.
He blamed the 2,400 lives lost in the war to ‘bureaucratic breakdowns’ and said the problems began because the US lacked a ‘fundamental understanding’ of Afghanistan.
He told government interviewers in 2015: ‘What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.
In a lengthy article published on Monday, the Post claims that top officials knew the military’s chances were slim but that they routinely hid the grave reality and made ‘rosy pronouncements’ about it instead. US troops are shown in Afghanistan in August 2018
‘If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … 2,400 lives lost…’
John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, whose agency was in charge of the investigation, told the newspaper: ‘The American people have constantly been lied to.’
Others interviewed by Sopko’s teams described how information and research was skewed to make it appear as though the US had a good chance at victory when in fact it was highly unlikely.
Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, said: ‘Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible.
‘Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.’
He also claimed ‘truth was rarely welcome’ within the Combined Anti-Armor Team and that ‘everyone’ on the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force ‘just wanted to hear good news.’