The Long Lie about Afghanistan

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Cato Institute

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4.5 • 979 Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2019

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Newly revealed interviews show the misrepresentations and frustrations over a U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that went badly awry. John Glaser argues that one clear lesson is to stay skeptical of government justifications for war.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This holiday season, please consider supporting the Cato Institute and specifically the Cato Daily Podcast,
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0:27.6	This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 11th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.
0:36.6	For almost two decades the federal government has been lying about the war in Afghanistan
0:40.8	saying to the public that the longest military engagement in U.S. history
0:44.8	has been going better than it has in fact far better. Thousands of pages of interviews
0:50.0	unearthed by the Washington Post reveal the frustrations over this long-term
0:54.1	and widespread failure. Cato's John Glazer comments. The special inspector
0:59.8	general for Afghanistan reconstruction is a government body that is supposed to look at the
1:08.6	Afghan war, look at its shortcomings, look at the aid that we're engaging in, look at the troop presence, and try to analyze,
1:18.4	try to track how it's going, whether these are successful missions, whether we're making progress and so on.
1:25.6	And it turns out that although Special Inspector reports like this get churned out every once in
1:30.8	a while and they have a lot of damning information in them because
1:33.7	you know the numbers in Afghanistan are not very favorable.
1:39.2	What we know what we found out here as a result of this Washington Post report is that the post itself went through two to three years of legal battles with the office of the Special Inspector General to try to get these interviews released and what
1:56.0	they have now is this massive cash of you know thousands of pages of interviews with 400 people, everyone from ambassadors and
2:06.7	State Department people to Defense Department people to troops on the ground to
2:11.2	aid workers, all interviewing them about progress in Afghanistan.
	...

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