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The Washington Post recently published the Afghanistan Papers, drawing parallels to the Vietnam War’s Pentagon Papers. Throughout the report, the Post alleges that the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations all lied to the public about America’s progress in the war in Afghanistan.

Michael O’Hanlon joined Dany and Marc to explain that the Afghanistan Papers’ narrative is fundamentally wrong. Far from a duplicitous cover up, American leaders and generals never played the war effort up as a great success for public consumption.

Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow, and director of research, in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, where is specializes in US defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He is an adjunct professor at Colombia, Georgetown, and Syracuse universities, and was a member of the external advisory board at the CIA from 2011-12.

Download the transcript here.