Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the

Taliban regime. At the same time, the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity

of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine,

and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan.

The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people.

The name of today's My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest today is Craig Whitlock. He is an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, where he covers national security.

His book, his best-selling book, is The Afghanistan Papers,

A Secret History of the War, which The Guardian calls a superb expose of a war built on lies full of gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities.

It is based on a trove of documents that Mr. Whitlock obtained through Freedom of Information requests,

a lot from these so-called lessons learned interviews that the Special Inspector General

for Afghanistan Reconstruction put together.

And it exposes the disjunction, the difference between the story that was told about the Afghanistan war publicly

by successive administrations and what was being discussed internally by those fighting the war

and those planning the war. Mr. Whitlock, thank you so much for joining us here on current affairs

today.

Of course. Thanks for having me.

So let's start with, in 2001, after 9-11, when the Bush administration made the decision

to go into Afghanistan, based on what you have put together about the internal conversations

that were happening in the administration at that time, what is it that the administration

believed its objectives were or that it was trying to do with the Afghanistan operation.

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