The US government across three White House administrations misled the public about failures in the Afghanistan war, often suggesting success where it did not exist, according to thousands of pages of documents obtained by the Washington Post.
The documents reveal deep frustrations about the US’ conduct of the Afghanistan war, including the ever-changing US strategy, the struggles to develop an effective Afghan fighting force, and persistent failures to defeat the Taliban and combat corruption throughout the government.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star US Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the administration of former US presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told government interviewers in 2015.
Photo: Reuters
The interviews were conducted as part of a “Lessons Learned” project by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) over the past several years.
SIGAR has produced seven reports so far from the more than 400 interviews, and several more are in the works. The Post sought and received raw interview data through the Freedom of Information Act and lawsuits.
The documents quote officials close to the 18-year war effort describing a campaign by the US government to distort the grim reality of the war.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, a US Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers, according to the Post.
“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 said.
The Pentagon released a statement saying there has been “no intent” by the department to mislead Congress or the public.
US Department of Defense (DOD) officials “have consistently briefed the progress and challenges associated with our efforts in Afghanistan, and DOD provides regular reports to Congress that highlight these challenges,” department spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Campbell said. “Most of the individuals interviewed spoke with the benefit of hindsight. Hindsight has also enabled the department to evaluate previous approaches and revise our strategy, as we did in 2017 with the launch of the president’s South Asia strategy.”
SIGAR has frequently been vocal about the war’s failures in reports going back more than a decade, including extensive questions about vast waste in the nearly US$1 trillion spent on the conflict.
The Post said SIGAR head John Sopko acknowledged that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”
SIGAR was created by Congress in 2008 to conduct audits and investigations into waste of government spending on the war in Afghanistan.
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