Love this podcast.

Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature.

It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment.

Just click the link in the show description to support now.

What we think was news from the Afghanistan Papers were really the raw admissions of failure, particularly from people at the top.

You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the

front lines.

Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host Matthew Gault. Last week the

Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers, a blockbuster piece of reporting that

details every little thing about what's going wrong with the Afghan war. As the war

grinds through its second decade, the Afghanistan Papers make clear what many defense

reporters, government officials, and soldiers have known for years.

The Afghanistan War is a costly, pointless, unwinnable mess.

Here to walk us through the Afghanistan Papers and its implications is Craig Whitlock.

Whitlock is the author of the Washington Post report and an investigative reporter who specializes

in national security issues. He's covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin Bureau Chief,

and reported from more than 60 countries. Craig, thank you so much for joining us.

Sure thing. Glad to be here.

All right, so as we like to do kind of at the top of the show is get some basics out of the way. So the bulk of the Afghanistan Papers is based on the work of Cigar and one man in particular in his team John Sopko.

So here at the top can you kind of tell us what Cigar is and who Sopko is? Sure, so Cigar is an acronym for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

It's an agency that was created by Congress about a decade ago to monitor fraud, waste, and abuse in the war zone.

You're primarily like a normal inspector general would do accounting investigations, things like that.

...