A newly obtained trove of 2,000 government documents shows that US officials lied about the war in Afghanistan in a bid to convince the public that the United States was winning the conflict when this was in fact not the case, the Washington Post reported on Monday
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th December, 2019) A newly obtained trove of 2,000 government documents shows that US officials lied about the war in Afghanistan in a bid to convince the public that the United States was winning the conflict when this was in fact not the case, the Washington Post reported on Monday.The documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, include previously unpublished notes of interviews with war planners, generals, diplomats, aid workers and Afghan officials, among others. The interviews were conducted as part of a Federal project that aimed to examine the root failures of the war in Afghanistan, the report said.
"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan - we didn't know what we were doing," Douglas Lute, an Army general who served as the de facto war czar for Afghanistan during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said in an interview in 2015. "What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
The interviews show that the US war strategy for Afghanistan was fatally flawed and that Washington largely wasted billions of Dollars trying to build up the country into a modern nation, the report said.
Allocations from the State and Defense Departments along with the US Agency for International Development have totaled up to $978 billion in inflation-adjusted terms, the report noted.
"What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion," retired Navy SEAL and former White House staffer Jeffrey Eggers told government interviewers.
The documents undermine the repeated claims of successive US presidents that progress has been made in the Afghan war and show that efforts were made to manipulate information, the report said.
"Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible," Bob Crowly, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to US military leaders in 2013 and 2014, said in his government interview.
The interviews were conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) as part of its Lesson's Learned project.
The Washington Post first sought the release of the documents in August 2016 through a FOIA request. The released documents include the Names of 62 people who were interviewed, but other names have been redacted.
The newspaper said it is involved in an ongoing legal battle to release the names of all the officials who were interviewed for the SIGAR project, and a final decision is forthcoming from the US District Court in Washington.
The paper said it published the documents ahead of the final ruling so that the US public could be informed as President Donald Trump's administration considers plans to withdraw the last 13,000 troops from Afghanistan.
