![\"afghan_poppies.jpg\"](\"\/blog\/wp-content\/media\/images\/afghan_poppies.jpg\" "\\"afghan_poppies.jpg\\"")
<\/p>\nby Tyler Durden via ZeroHedge.com<\/p>\n
In what’s already being hailed as a defining and explosive “Pentagon papers” moment, a cache of previously classified documents obtained by\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0show top Pentagon leaders continuously\u00a0lied to the public about the “progress” of the now eighteen-year long Afghan war.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The some 2,000 pages of notes from interviews of senior officials who have shaped US strategy in Afghanistan confirm that\u00a0\u201csenior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false… hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable,”\u00a0according to the bombshell\u00a0Post\u00a0report.<\/p>\n
The internal interviews and statements were unearthed via\u00a0Freedom of Information Act request and\u00a0span the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. The trove further confirms that US leaders knew vast amounts of money was being wasted in a futile\u00a0attempt\u00a0to “Westernize the nation”.<\/p>\n
Watchdog groups commonly estimate\u00a0total US spending on the war has\u00a0hit $1 trillion by end of 2019. More importantly, America’s ‘endless war’ has cost at least\u00a02,351 American lives\u00a0and over 20,000 wounded.<\/p>\n
The internal Pentagon project conducted by\u00a0the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) had sought to get as honest assessment as possible as to the status of America’s longest running quagmire panning multiple administrations. It was to be a classified “Lessons Learned” assessment of sorts to prevent future missteps.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did we get for this $1tn effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?\u201d one retired Navy SEAL who had advised\u00a0the Bush and Obama administrations observed in one of the documents.\u00a0\u201cAfter 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here’s more undeniable evidence that you were lied to about the war in Afghanistan, for anyone who needed more undeniable evidence that you were lied to about the war in Afghanistan.https:\/\/t.co\/3AVYnBNKch<\/p>\n
Another top official, former\u00a0White House Afghan war czar Douglas Lute under Bush and Obama, confessed,\u00a0\u201cWe were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan \u2013 we didn\u2019t know what we were doing.\u201d\u00a0He added that “we\u00a0didn\u2019t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking\u201d after the 2001 invasion.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction \u2026 2,400 lives lost,\u201d\u00a0he added.<\/p>\n
Two major consistent themes from the documents are\u2014<\/p>\n
US aid was looted “with impunity” according to the released documents, and provide undeniable evidence that top defense officials knew years of rosy public statements were a mountain of lies.<\/p>\n
Almost hard to get infuriated about the blatant spinning by government agencies anymore. The effort to cover up the failures of US foreign policy whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Yemen has worn us down. Hard to remember what honesty is. https:\/\/t.co\/PFDiAmwveQ<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery data point was altered to present the best picture possible,\u201d Bob Crowley, an Army colonel and senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders testified.<\/p>\n
Over 400 people close to the decision-making process were interviewed as part of the internal DoD investigation; however among those 366 names were redacted, given that as more damning testimony was given,\u00a0the\u00a0Inspector General deemed they should be\u00a0treated as ‘whistleblowers’ and informants.<\/p>\n
But for all the hand-wringing and outrage Monday’s WaPo bombshell will unleash this week, it must be remembered that the establishment in both parties have consistently pushed to stay at war, not to mention going to war in the first place.<\/p>\n
As independent journalist David Mizner observes of the new ‘Afghan Papers’ it remains that “US politicians lie to stay at war, every time. The real crime was going to war in the first place \u2014\u00a0and almost no US politicians, pundits, and or journos with large platforms opposed the war.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Tyler Durden via ZeroHedge.com In what’s already being hailed as a defining and explosive “Pentagon papers” moment, a cache of previously classified documents obtained by\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0show top Pentagon leaders continuously\u00a0lied to the public about the “progress” of the now eighteen-year long Afghan war. The some 2,000 pages of notes from interviews of senior […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":556,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555\/revisions\/556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}