Deja Vu (All Over Again)

An 18-year, trillion-dollar conflict was known to be failing from an early stage. This knowledge was concealed from the public and revealed in an article in the Washington Post on December 9.

The Post 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.

Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Will Griffin (also Global Network board member) reports on this hot and very sad story.

He rightly compares the story to the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers.

Will quotes Afghanistan veteran Matthew Hoh (Marine Captain and state department official who resigned over US policy in Afghanistan):

I’m choking on the hypocrisy of the Post. Find me a a media outlet that has banged the war drum louder, conducted less adversarial journalism, and ignored that everything in these lessons learned docs has been said ad nauseam by critics of the war going back to 2001 than the Post.