The Afghanistan Papers, revisited

Post Reports

The Washington Post

Daily News, Politics, News

4.4 • 5.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2021

⏱️ ? minutes

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Summary

This week, Americans watched in disbelief as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in a matter of days — and we wondered what Craig Whitlock was thinking. Two years ago he and a team at The Post published a prescient and ground-breaking project called “The Afghanistan Papers,” revealing hundreds of secret interviews with U.S. officials candidly discussing the failures of the war.

The interviews with some 400 people were part of a project called “Lessons Learned,” undertaken by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, and The Post obtained them after a three-year legal battle. These Afghanistan papers are a secret history of the war, Whitlock tells Martine Powers, and “they contain these frank admissions of how the war was screwed up and that what the American people were being told about the war wasn’t true.”

“They really do bring to mind the Pentagon Papers, which were the Defense Department’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War,” Whitlock says.

These recordings have new resonance this week.

Read excerpts from Craig Whitlock’s new book, ‟The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War”.

Deceptions and lies: What really happened in Afghanistan

The grand illusion: Hiding the truth about the Afghanistan war’s ‘conclusion’

Transcript

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0:00.0	Most Americans hadn't been paying attention to the war in Afghanistan because they've
0:06.5	been dragging on for so long.
0:09.0	Then all of a sudden, before everyone's eyes, it was back in the news again and you see
0:13.2	the Taliban running around Kabul and I think people were shocked and wanted to know how
0:17.7	this had happened.
0:19.5	Craig Whitlock knows how it happened.
0:22.1	Two years ago, with the help of a team at the post, he published a project called The
0:26.0	Afghanistan Papers.
0:27.8	He uncovered hundreds of secret interviews with officials in the government and the military
0:31.8	who ran the war and they admitted in private what they never said in public that things
0:37.4	in Afghanistan were going very badly.
0:40.4	These weaknesses, these warning signs were there all along with the Afghan government
0:44.5	and with the Afghan army and police, that the flaws in their training, the lack of morale,
0:52.2	the gathering strength of the Taliban, you know, certainly these problems were known
0:57.2	with the Afghan government and, you know, they came to pass.
1:01.1	Today, what we can learn by revisiting the Afghanistan Papers.
1:06.2	From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports.
1:09.2	I'm Martin Powers.
1:11.2	It's Friday, August 20th.
1:13.1	Let me be clear.
1:15.6	Any America wants to come home.
1:18.4	We will get you home.
	...

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