THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS PART 1: Interviews with top officials in the Afghanistan War

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A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.More storiesTHE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 1: At war with the truthPART 1At war with the truthU.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.PART 2Stranded without a strategyBush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.PART 3Built to failDespite vows the U.S. wouldn’t get mired in “nation-building,” it has wasted billions doing just thatPART 4Consumed by corruptionThe U.S. flooded the country with money — then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueledPART 5Unguarded nationAfghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruptionPART 6Overwhelmed by opiumThe U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turnINTERVIEWS AND MEMOSExplore the documentsKey insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. historyPOST REPORTS‘We didn’t know what the task was’Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael FlynnTHE FIGHT FOR THE DOCUMENTSAbout the investigationIt took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview recordsMORE STORIES A visual timeline of the war Interviewees respond Share your story about the warIn the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction ... 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERSSee the documents More than 2,000 pages of interviews and memos reveal a secret history of the war.Part 2: Stranded without a strategy Conflicting objectives dogged the war from the start.Responses to The Post from people named in The Afghanistan PapersWith most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

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