DISTORTING THE TRUTH

Secret Documents Show We Were ‘Constantly Lied to’ by U.S. Officials Over ‘Unwinnable’ Afghan War

Thousands of pages of secret documents reveal how Americans have been repeatedly misled over the 18-year conflict.

The Washington Post has published more than 2,000 pages of secret notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the Afghanistan War, laying bare the failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. The interviews from more than 400 people show that U.S. officials didn’t tell the truth about the war, making positive statements they knew were wrong and concealing evidence that the war wasn’t winnable. Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general, said in 2015: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” Some said it was normal to distort statistics to make it seem as if the U.S. was winning the war when that was far from the case. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said Army Col. Bob Crowley. “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, head of the federal agency that carried out the interviews, told the newspaper the files show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”