What emerges from a tranche of documents, obtained by The Washington Post, outlining the abject failure of the war in Afghanistan and the decades of lies told about it, is the inescapable notion that the American government refuses to be honest with itself.

For years, military and civilian leaders said that the mission to rebuild Afghanistan was not only possible, but succeeding. Yet in private, the men and women who ran the war acknowledged to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction what has long been clear to all but the most blinkered observers.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, an Army general who served in the Obama and Bush administrations, said during a 2015 interview with the inspector general.