{UAH} UNDER THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, NOT ONLY FBI GOT SCREWED SO WAS THE AFGHANISTAN WAR

Documents show top U.S. officials misled public about Afghan war

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff

Published 2:04 pm PST, Monday, December 9, 2019

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U.S. Marines monitor Afghan National Army soldiers during a 2017 improvised explosive device training exercise at a military camp in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

Photo: Wakil Kohsar / AFP / Getty Images

Documents show top U.S. officials misled public about Afghan war

 

WASHINGTON — Thousands of pages of documents detailing the war in Afghanistan released by the Washington Post on Monday paint a stark picture of missteps and failures — and delivered in the words of prominent U.S. officials, many of whom publicly had said the mission was succeeding.

After a quick but short-term victory over the Taliban and al Qaeda in early 2002, and as the Pentagon’s focus shifted toward Iraq, the U.S. military’s effort in Afghanistan became a hazy spectacle of nation building, with a small number of troops carrying out an unclear mission, the documents show.

Even as the Taliban returned in greater numbers and troops on the ground voiced concerns about the U.S. strategy’s growing shortcomings, senior U.S. officials almost always said that progress was being made. The documents obtained by the Washington Post show otherwise.

 

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” said Douglas Lute, a retired three-star Army general who helped the White House oversee the war in Afghanistan in both the Bush and Obama administrations.

“What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” he told government interviewers in 2015.

The 2,000 pages of interviews were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and years of legal tangling with the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as SIGAR, according to the Post. Formed in 2008, SIGAR has served as a government watchdog for the war in Afghanistan, releasing reports quarterly on the war’s progress, many of which clearly depicted the shortcomings of the effort.

In one interview obtained by the Post, a person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said the Obama White House, along with the Pentagon, pushed for data that showed President Barack Obama’s announced surge in 2009 was succeeding.

 

“It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture,” the official told interviewers in 2016. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”

The tension between rosy public statements and the reality on the ground has been one of the key elements of the war in Afghanistan. Now, 18 years into the war, the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan has all but cut off outside access to U.S. troops in an attempt to execute their mission in near-secrecy.

Since 2001, more than 2,200 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan, along with hundreds from allied countries that contributed forces to the war.

 

Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a New York Times writer.

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