U.S. officials misled the public on the Afghan war
From the NYT morning briefing:
Top American officials hid pessimistic assessments of how the 18-year military campaign in Afghanistan was going, according to documents published by The Washington Post.
The Post said the documents had come from 2,000 pages of Pentagon interviews conducted from 2014 to 2018 in order to write a series of unclassified “Lessons Learned” reports. They were released after a long legal battle with the government’s watchdog for the war. (Read The Post’s report here.)
Quotable: “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” said one retired general who helped oversee the war.
Response: A Pentagon spokesman said “there has been no intent” by the Defense Department “to mislead Congress or the public.” He said that “most of the individuals interviewed spoke with the benefit of hindsight.”
Closer look: The Times found that there was little to show for the $2 trillion spent on the war, during which more than 38,000 Afghan civilians and 2,400 American soldiers have died.
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
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Originally Posted by wacojoe
...Ben
