A Secret History of the War in Afghanistan

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For nearly two decades, U.S. government officials crafted a careful story of progress to justify their ongoing military campaign in Afghanistan. Newly disclosed documents reveal to what extent that story was not the reality of the war. Today, one former Marine speaks about the missteps the government concealed for years. Guest: Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a reporter in The New York Times Washington bureau and a former Marine infantryman and Eric Schmitt, who covers terrorism and national security for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading:Afghans have endured four decades of conflict, with little prospect of peace. This is the story of the last 18 years since the American invasion, as told by the men and women who’ve lived it.“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” one retired three-star Army general said in hundreds of classified memos obtained by The Washington Post.Here are our key takeaways from the declassified documents.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, unlike a Bavaro, this is the Daily.
0:10.0	Today, newly disclosed documents reveal that for the past two decades,
0:16.0	there was the story of the war in Afghanistan that US officials told the public
0:22.0	and the reality of the war that they actively conceal.
0:27.0	Times reporters Thomas Gibbons-Nef and Eric Schmidt on what we're learning from the Afghanistan papers.
0:44.0	It's Monday, December 16.
0:51.0	So Tim set the scene for me on this day.
0:54.0	So it's the first week of December in 2009.
0:58.0	I'm a 22-year-old Marine Corporal long before I was in your Times reporter.
1:03.0	I had just walked into a subway shop off base in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
1:08.0	It was kind of a downtime between my last deployment to Afghanistan that came to a close in September of 2008.
1:14.0	And we had been training for more than a year now for whatever came next.
1:18.0	We were kind of in this weird limbo.
1:20.0	And we knew that President Obama was making a speech.
1:24.0	So we had walked in and the lady behind the counter put it on the television and there was Obama and she turned up the volume.
1:31.0	As Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan.
1:42.0	After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.
1:46.0	These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.
1:58.0	This would come to be known as Obama's surge.
2:01.0	The Taliban had been quickly resurging and this would be the first attempt to kind of go in, stabilize certain parts of the country where the Taliban had returned and allowed both the Afghan government and the Afghan military to come in behind the American forces.
2:15.0	And an attempt to prevent a complete Taliban resurgence.
2:19.0	The 30,000 additional troops that I'm announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010. The fastest possible pace.
	...

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