It’s official: We have no idea who anybody is in Afghanistan. Maybe that’s why we have so much trouble figuring out what we’re doing there, and why. American and Afghan officials were deep in negotiations with a man they thought was Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most powerful Taliban commanders. (That’s assuming we even understand their hierarchy.) It now looks like he’s an impostor. From the Times:

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

So who was he? The Times mentions the possibility that he was a Taliban agent or a “freelance fraud.” The Washington Post adds Pakistani military-intelligence agent and “lowly shopkeeper” from Quetta. That leaves tinker, tailor, sailor, and beggarman as unclaimed options. An Afghan official that the Post spoke to left it as, “He was a very clever man.” (And some Afghan officials, according to the paper, still hope he might know the mullah or maybe talk to him sometimes.)

The Times called it “an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel,” and the Post a “daring ruse,” but in some ways it’s more at the level of the trick play that a Texas middle-school football team pulled off this month—it’s all over YouTube—when the quarterback pretended he wasn’t quarterbacking, and just walked straight through the lines. But this impostor didn’t have to walk very far:

The fake Taliban leader even met with President Hamid Karzai, having been flown to Kabul on a NATO aircraft and ushered into the presidential palace, officials said.

That’s fitting: The fake Taliban leader meeting with the fake democratic leader, in an event we paid for and stage-managed. How many American soldiers risked their lives to get him safely to Kabul?

And then there’s this passage, from the Times article:

Last month, White House officials asked The New York Times to withhold Mr. Mansour’s name from an article about the peace talks, expressing concern that the talks would be jeopardized — and Mr. Mansour’s life put at risk — if his involvement were publicized. The Times agreed to withhold Mr. Mansour’s name, along with the names of two other Taliban leaders said to be involved in the discussions. The status of the other two Taliban leaders said to be involved is not clear.

If the Times had printed the name, would we have found out a month sooner that we were being played? Hard to say. This is not to fault the Times in this case, or to say that our government should never ask a paper to hide the identity of someone who might get killed or that media outlets should generally say no, when there is good reason. (Not all names, like those of children in certain cases, should be published.) But one would think that White House officials, before asking the Times to be quiet about what it knew, would have had solid knowledge of whom it was they were protecting. Or are such requests made casually, about things that aren’t really secrets or even true—part of the overclassification of our wars? That would be a problem. How are reporters supposed to know when a story might really get someone killed, or when an Administration is trying to save itself from embarrassment—and, as a result, carry on with policies that themselves cost lives? There is a point, in all things, when responsible compliance comes to mean complicity in our own government’s recklessness.