WASHINGTON: Secret documents that were obtained by The Washington Post newspaper have revealed that top US officials had consistently misled the American public about the war in Afghanistan. This was done so as to conceal doubts that the US could be successful in the nearly 20-year conflict, the paper reported in a major investigation on Monday.
The Washington Post, in a bombshell report, said it had obtained more than 2,000 pages of documents through a Freedom of Information Act request made three years ago. The Post was seeking a report titled "Lessons Learned" that examined "the root failures" of the Afghan war.
The report carries interviews of more than 600 people who were directly involved with the lengthy war. Besides US officials, armed forces personnel, politicians, a number of foreigners connected to NATO and 20 Afghan officials also presented their viewpoint.
According to the paper, the interviews "bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day." It said "US officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation."
It said: "Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the US government to deliberately mislead the public.
"They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case."
The Post claimed the newly-disclosed defence documents "broadly resembles the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history of the Vietnam War." It said most of those people interviewed assumed that their statements and honest assessments would not become public.
The newspaper said Douglas Lute, "a three-star Army general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar" under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told interviewers "we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan -- we didn't know what we were doing." Lute added: "What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, asked, "What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion? "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 former official said.
The first interviews for the report were conducted in 2014 and seven parts of the report have been published since 2016.
The Post said former Pentagon chief Rumsfeld wrote in a memo: "I may be impatient. In fact I know I'm a bit impatient ... We are never going to get the US military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave."
The newspaper claimed "throughout the Afghan war, documents show that US military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam — manipulating public opinion."
A senior National Security Council official said according to the paper, that "even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad ... the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity."
Michael Flynn, a retired three-star Army general admitted: "From the ambassadors down to the low level, [they all say] we are doing a great job. "Really? So if we are doing such a great job, why does it feel like we are losing?"
