The Washington Post won the release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle
The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war
At war with the truth
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Since 2001, more than 775,000 US troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defence 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.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”
The interviews are the by-product of a project led by Mr Sopko's agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as Sigar, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone . . .
-- excepts from https://www.independent.co.uk/news
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”
The interviews are the by-product of a project led by Mr Sopko's agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as Sigar, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone . . .
-- excepts from https://www.independent.co.uk/news
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U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.
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The Graveyard of Empires Strikes Back -
The British-Afghan War of 1919 I THE GREAT WAR 1919
» SOURCES
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Heathcote, TA. The Afghan Wars (Spellmount, 2003).
Jacobsen, M H. The Third Afghan War and the External Position of India, 1919-1924. Defense Technical Information Center Archive report ADA195401, 1988.
Monro, Charles. Despatch from His Excellency the Commander-in-Chief in India regarding the operations against Afghanistan, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Army Department. Second Supplement to the London Gazette, 15 March 1920 https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/i...
Molesworth, George (1962). Afghanistan 1919—An Account of Operations in the Third Afghan War. New York: Asia Publishing House
Robson, Brian (2007). Crisis on the Frontier: The Third Afghan War and the Campaign in Waziristan 1919–1920. The History Press.
Sykes, Percy. A History of Afghanistan vol II. (London Macmillan 1940)
Wyatt, Christopher M. “Change and Discontinuity: War and Afghanistan 1904-1924,” Asian Affairs, 01 September 2016, Vol.47(3): 366-385.
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