For more than eighteen years, the United States has been waging a war in Afghanistan that has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans. The conflict shows few signs of ending, despite ongoing peace talks with the Taliban. Despite some success in lowering the infant-mortality rate and enrolling more women in school, very few of the original, post-9/11 goals of the war have been met. The Taliban controls significant territory; the Afghan government remains weak and divided; the Afghan military and police force cannot secure the country on their own; and civilian casualties are rising.

In 2008, Congress, ostensibly concerned about wasting money in Afghanistan, created the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR); five years ago, SIGAR began conducting interviews for several reports on what had gone wrong in the country. But many of the interviews were kept secret, until the Washington Post filed two federal lawsuits and gained access to hundreds of the interviews through the Freedom of Information Act. The result is a series of stories, on everything from the reëstablishment of the opium economy to the problems with training Afghan forces and the wasted money on misconceived reconstruction efforts, that puts in a harsh light almost every aspect of the war. Overhanging each individual failure is the fact that policymakers and military leaders—under Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump—were consistently dishonest about their lack of success.

Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter who has been with the Post for over two decades, wrote the entire series. We spoke by phone recently, in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity. In it, we discussed the similarities between the SIGAR interviews and the Pentagon Papers, why the people who spoke to SIGAR didn’t blow the whistle publicly, and whether the war ever had a chance of succeeding.

Did you come away from this project feeling that your understanding of the war in Afghanistan is now vastly different than it was before? Or is your general understanding of it the same, but now there is much stronger evidence of things many people suspected?

I think the fact that the war wasn’t going well was inherently obvious. If you are in a war for eighteen years, by definition it is not going very well. And, certainly, over these eighteen years, it has been pretty well reported that there were problems with things like corruption and the Afghan security forces and overspending. But I think what’s different about these documents we obtained, and what personally leapt out at me, was just to read and to hear the blistering commentary from the people who were in charge, or played even a low-level role. It was very eye-opening.

To people who have not read the source material: What was it about listening to the tapes or reading the transcripts? It sounds like there was something visceral about doing so.

Yeah. One of the interviews I read first was with General Douglas Lute. He was an army three-star general, retired now, but he was the Afghan war czar for both Bush and Obama in the National Security Council. [After retiring from the Army, Lute served, during Obama’s second term, as the Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council at NATO.] And, in the transcript of his interview, he starts off by saying we didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking in Afghanistan, we didn’t have a fundamental understanding of the country. He said, “Twenty-four hundred lives lost: Who will say this was in vain?” To hear the war czar for two Presidents throwing around that kind of language suggests that people at the top had grave misgivings about this war, yet that message clearly wasn’t being communicated to the American people.

Another example. The first interview we got was the transcript and the recording of Michael Flynn. Nowadays he has a lot of political baggage, but when he was in the military, he had a pretty strong reputation in military-intelligence circles and special operations. He gave this ten-page interview where he was just unsparing about how the war was being presented to the public. He said on the ground, with the military-intelligence reports, the news was always bad. And yet, by the time it filtered up the chain of command at the Department of Defense to the White House, they would always say, “We are winning.”

One takeaway from your story is that the lying was not just being done by people in Washington. A retired Army colonel says that at military headquarters in Kabul, the “truth was rarely welcome.” It feels like lack of forthrightness filtered through every part of the government.

I think that is very much accurate, and Flynn says this. Flynn says it is not just the military; he says it is the diplomats, it is the ambassadors. And there were other interviews where officials who worked in the White House under Obama said the statistics and metrics were always distorted, that people in the National Security Council would try to change them. If casualties were rising, they would spin that as taking it to the enemy. This was a systematic approach.

Do you have a sense of why people throughout government, in the military, in the bureaucracy, in the various Administrations, who coöperated with this project and spoke honestly about some of the problems in Afghanistan, and some of the deception of their colleagues, did not speak publicly about these things?

That’s a really good question, and I think there are different answers. I am guessing a little bit on some of it, but for people who are not senior, they were worried they will be shot down, that their careers will be frozen or they will lose their jobs. Why wouldn’t General Lute or General Flynn speak up? That’s a good question. I think, though, that the irony of these documents is that most of the people spoke honestly and forthrightly and extremely candidly, because they thought their names would never become public. It is like that old joke in Washington that people tell the truth as long as their name isn’t associated with it. People opened up because they thought it wouldn’t come back to haunt them. And yet our argument was that these are public records, and we have been able to strip back that layer of secrecy somewhat.

How did you come across this story? Do you have experience in Afghanistan?

I do have some experience in Afghanistan. I am an investigative reporter now at the Post, but I used to be a foreign correspondent. The first time I went to help cover the war was in late 2001, and I ended up in Pakistan. I have never been a bureau chief or full-time correspondent there, but I have covered the military and have been in and out.

Over the past ten years, I have been covering national security full time in Washington. The way we found out about these documents was the old-fashioned way. We got a tip back in August of 2016 that Michael Flynn had given this unpublished interview about the Afghan war. We heard he said some really interesting things. You have to remember that it was not long after the Republican National Convention, when he became notorious for yelling “Lock her up!” He was a big supporter of Trump. But he was known as a general who spoke his mind, and so we were curious what this guy said about the war in Afghanistan.