A trove of documents obtained and published by the Washington Post detail how the United States’ nearly two-decade involvement in Afghanistan wasted billions of dollars, cost nearly 2,400 American lives and implicated three presidential administrations in lies to the public about military progress.

The Post obtained the documents after a legal battle with the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which spent $11 million on a Lessons Learned project that involved interviews with over 600 people with firsthand experience with the country the U.S. invaded in 2001. SIGAR published sanitized reports based on their findings, but the underlying commentary from the Americans, NATO allies and Afghan officials they interviewed provided deeper insight into the war that began as an effort to topple the Taliban government, which had been harboring the terrorist network al-Qaida.

The disclosures are reminiscent of the “Pentagon Papers,” the Defense Department study of the origins of the U.S. war in Vietnam, which was leaked to the New York Times by researcher Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 and showed, according to the Times, that the administration of President Lyndon Johnson “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.” Read more

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A trove of documents obtained and published by the Washington Post detail how the United States’ nearly two-decade involvement in Afghanistan wasted billions of dollars, cost nearly 2,400 American lives and implicated three presidential administrations in lies to the public about military progress.

A trove of documents obtained and published by the Washington Post detail how the United States’ nearly two-decade involvement in Afghanistan wasted billions of dollars, cost nearly 2,400 American lives and implicated three presidential administrations in lies to the public about military progress.

A trove of documents obtained and published by the Washington Post detail how the United States’ nearly two-decade involvement in Afghanistan wasted billions of dollars, cost nearly 2,400 American lives and implicated three presidential administrations in lies to the public about military progress.