The top officials at the Pentagon are rejecting the narrative of a massive inspector general’s survey that government officials over multiple administrations deceived the public and Congress over the state of the war in Afghanistan and the troubled efforts to rebuild the country.

During a Friday press conference at the Pentagon, Army Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, strongly denied military and government officials have been misleading the public about Afghanistan for almost two decades, even while privately despairing of the war effort.

“I know there’s an assertion out there of some coordinated lie,” he said, standing next to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. “I find it more than a bit of a stretch. I find it a mischaracterization.”

The comments came in response to recent reporting by The Washington Post based on the “Afghanistan Papers” — a set of internal documents from the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction - known as SIGAR. The office has issued a string of reports over the years sharply critical of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

The 18-year Afghan war is the longest in American history, but the U.S.-backed Kabul government is still struggling to rebuild the economy or subdue the radical Islamist Taliban insurgency.

The original objective of going into Afghanistan in 2001 was to prevent the country from being used as a platform to launch terrorist attacks against the United States, Gen. Milleysaid.

“That has what we set out to do and, to date, that has been successful,” he said.

From the beginning, military officials have said the mission in Afghanistan would not end with some sort of complete surrender by the Taliban, the general said. Diplomats, not soldiers, will be needed to conclude the mission.

“There’s only one way this is going to end and it’s a negotiated settlement with the Taliban,” he said. “It’s going to have to be an Afghan to Afghan solution. That’s what we’ve been saying for years.”

The insinuation of some large-scale conspiracy to hoodwink the American people about combat operations in Afghanistan is “ridiculous,” Mr. Esper said.

“The media has been over there. Congress has been over there multiple times. This has been very transparent,” he said. “It’s not like this war was hiding somewhere and all of a sudden there’s been a revelation.”

An official with the Washington Post said they are standing by their reporting.

“The stories and the documents they rely upon speak for themselves,” a Post spokesman said in a statement to The Washington Times.

While he called it a “very good piece of investigative journalism,” Gen. Milley said the Washington Post’s “Afghan Papers” shouldn’t be compared to the New York Times’ “Pentagon Papers,” which was a secret report commissioned by the Pentagon itself to chronicle the U.S. involvement in Vietnam over more than two decades.

The Pentagon Papers, Milley said, amounted to dozens of volumes worth of official documents written in advance of any decision-making. The “Afghanistan Papers” was essentially a 2,000-page document of after-the-fact interviews to determine what lessons might be learned for the future.

“I think they’re fundamentally different in both nature and scale,” he said.

Gen. Milley said he wouldn’t be able to look at himself in the mirror if he thought he was part of an operation that needlessly wasted the lives of young American service men and women in Afghanistan.

“I don’t think anyone has died in vain,” he said.

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