Special Inspector General for Afghanistan: “The American People Have Constantly Been Lied To.”

John GlaserTheWashington Post has obtained a huge cache of internal government documents containing hundreds of interviews with U.S. officials on the war in Afghanistan. The documents reveal a broadly shared official view that America ’s longest war has been a failure, essentially from the start. Over the years, official assessments of the war were consistently positive, optimistic, hopeful, and confident in the progress being made on the ground. But behind closed doors, official assessments were starkly different.Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes:Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that eve rything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”…[The] interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false.A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said th...

Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 9, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: John Glaser Source Type: blogs