The Afghanistan War - A False Story?
(Baonghean) - Three administrations in the White House have just been "exposed" for lying to the public about their failures in the war in Afghanistan. According to thousands of pages of documents collected by The Washington Post, instead of being honest with the people, they often exaggerated successes that did not exist.
The truth is "distorted"
According to the US news agency AP, the above documents have revealed many deep disappointments about the leadership and management of the world's number 1 superpower in the war in Afghanistan. These humiliations also include Washington's constantly changing strategy, the struggles to develop an effective fighting force in Afghanistan and countless consecutive failures in defeating the Taliban and fighting corruption in the local government.
 |
| US President Donald Trump addresses troops during a surprise Thanksgiving visit to Bagram base in Afghanistan on November 28. Photo: AFP |
“We completely lack basic understanding of Afghanistan."
“We had a complete lack of basic understanding of Afghanistan—we had no idea what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as commander of the Afghanistan war under former Presidents Bush and Obama, told a government interview team in 2015.
The interviews were conducted as part of the “Lessons Learned” project, which the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has been conducting for the past several years. SIGAR has so far released seven reports from more than 400 interviews, with several more in the works. The Washington Post sought and obtained the raw interview data through Freedom of Information Act and litigation.
The documents, which cite officials closely involved in the 18-year-long U.S. war effort, describe a campaign by the U.S. government to distort the harsh truth about the long war.
 |
| US generals in Afghanistan in 2019. Photo: US Department of Defense |
“Every data point has been altered to present the best possible picture.”
“Every data point was altered to present the best possible picture,” Bob Crowley, a US Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers, as quoted by the Post. “Surveys, for example, were completely unreliable, but they reaffirmed that everything we were doing was right, and we became self-serving,” he added.
The Pentagon issued a statement on December 9, saying it had “no intention” to mislead Congress or the public. Defense Department officials “have consistently reported progress and challenges associated with our efforts in Afghanistan, and the Department of Defense provides regular reports to Congress highlighting these challenges,” said Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell, a department spokesman. “Most of the individuals interviewed spoke after the fact. The fait accompli has also allowed 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.”
 |
| First two photos: A corner of a camp for displaced people in Kabul, Afghanistan; Photo 3: Women wait for passersby to give alms outside a camp in Kabul. Photo: AP |
Failure in the quagmire
In fact, SIGAR has been vocal about the failures of the Afghanistan war through reports that date back more than a decade, including in-depth issues related to the waste of nearly $ 1,000 billion spent on this conflict. John Sopko - head of SIGAR, confirmed that the documents they collected showed that "the American people have been repeatedly lied to." According to AP, SIGAR is an agency established by the US Congress in 2008 to conduct inspections, audits and investigations into wasteful government spending on the war in Afghanistan.
Reacting to the new revelations about the story of America's involvement in Afghanistan over the past 18 years, as expected, Democrats on Capitol Hill were quick to express their support.
“The war in Afghanistan is a terrible bipartisan failure,” California Rep. Ted Lieu tweeted. “I have long called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that quagmire. It now appears that U.S. officials have misled the American people about the war. It is time to leave Afghanistan. Now.”
 |
| US trains Afghan soldiers. Photo: Task&Purpose |
Also through this channel, Congressman Ro Khanna expressed: “775,000 of our soldiers were deployed. 2,400 Americans were killed. More than 20,000 Americans were injured. 38,000 civilians were killed. It cost trillions of dollars. Rumsfeld said in 2003: “I don’t know who the bad guys are.”
Meanwhile, from the perspective of a professor specializing in government and international relations at Cornell University, expert Sarah Kreps asserted that the interviews revealed a major disconnect between what military and civilian leaders knew about the war, compared to what the American people knew, especially in terms of costs.
 |
Not stopping there, The Post - the first to discover this shocking information, asserted that while the interviews contained very few revelations about military campaigns during the war, they contained a lot of criticism, showing that the story that officials often "bragged" about the progress achieved was just a "fake story".
James Dobbins, a former senior US diplomat who served as special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush and Obama, gave a candid assessment of the war in an interview. Here is a quote in lieu of a conclusion: “We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich. We don’t invade dictatorships to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful, and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”
.jpg "Mỹ đưa tàu chiến ra khỏi căn cứ Trung Đông khi Iran giáng đòn nặng nề vào Israel")
