THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS

  THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS

(The Washington Post: Afghanistan Papers)

 A secret history of the war

"In a cache of previously unpublished interviews and memos, key insiders reveal what went wrong during the longest armed conflict in U.S. history.

For 18 years, America has been at war in Afghanistan. As part of a government project to understand what went wrong, a federal agency interviewed more than 400 people who had a direct role in the conflict. In those interviews, generals, ambassadors, diplomats and other insiders offered firsthand accounts of the mistakes that have prolonged the war.

The full, unsparing remarks and the identities of many of those who made them have never been made public — until now. After a three-year legal battle, The Washington Post won release of more than 2,000 pages of “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Those interviews reveal there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict."

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Part of the Main Stream Media propaganda machine surprisingly reveals important information about the farce that is U.S. foreign policy. The rest of Main Stream Media pretends not to notice.

That war is a racket has been obvious to objective observers of history, and followers of independent journalism for over a hundred years.

Noam Chomsky - The Crimes of U.S. Presidents 
(Interview on YouTube)

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Tomgram: William Hartung, Lessons From Battling the Pentagon for Four Decades 
(TomDispatch.com)

"The other day, after a three-year legal struggle, the Washington Post broke a story about a secret Afghan War project of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Its focus was hundreds of interviews with American figures -- from top officials and generals to lesser actors of every sort -- involved in that misbegotten conflict. The overwhelming conclusion reached in private by the very people who prosecuted that never-ending war: that the American people were eternally lied to and kept out of the loop when it came to the “progress” being made there at any moment since 2002. As the Post put it, “In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going -- and especially when it is going badly -- they emphasize how they are making progress.”

I already hear the gasps of TomDispatch readers. Okay, I’m kidding (in a grim sort of way). While it's significant that the Post is doing a six-part series based on those previously hidden interviews, the story is being presented as a kind of Pentagon Papers of the twenty-first century.  After all, it features admissions that the U.S. dumped untold amounts of money into Afghanistan over 18 years to no positive effect whatsoever, creating a staggering kleptocracy and corruption on a titanic scale, while essentially building nothing of value or ever achieving actual “progress” in the war against the Taliban. It was, in a word, all lies (sometimes backed by fake or manipulated statistics), constantly promoted by key government officials and U.S. military commanders one after another after another after another.

TomDispatch is proof, however, that this set of revelations, though interesting, adds up to anything but a Pentagon Papers. If you happened to be reading this site or others like it instead of the Washington Post in these years, just about all of this would already have been obvious to you, a set of commonplace conclusions, discussed repeatedly."

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CHRIS HEDGES

 On Contact: Afghanistan Papers with Spenser Rapone 

On Contact with Chris Hedges (video interview) 

"Chris Hedges talks to Spenser Rapone, former combat veteran and US Army officer, about the Washington Post’s series the ‘Afghanistan Papers’. Drawing on thousands of pages of international government documents about the war in Afghanistan, the series exposes the lies, deceit, mismanagement, waste, corruption, fraud, and failed schemes that both Democratic and Republican administrations pursed in Afghanistan, the longest conflict in US history (18 years and counting), which has claimed tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money."

BONUS VIDEO

 The Afghanistan papers, voter suppression in Wisconsin, digital reputation scrubbing 
 (Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp)

Whistleblower Proves Tulsi RIGHT On Syria & Afghanistan Wars 
(The Jimmy Dore Show)