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In that case, despite the similar pattern of deception and denial, Afghanistan could represent something very different from the Vietnam experience. Vietnam proved that despite a certain amount of patriotic naïveté, Americans ultimately wouldn’t put up with a seemingly unwinnable war founded on lies and self-delusion. But Afghanistan may yet prove that given an all-volunteer military, the right amount of cynical detachment at home and a low enough casualty rate in the theater itself, Americans will accept a war where there is no prospect for victory, and no clear objective save the permanent postponement of defeat. More even than our Indochina debacle, it could bury George Patton’s dictum about our addiction to victory, our contempt for defeat, by proving that 21st-century Americans have learned to swallow stalemate.

In which case the documents published by The Post will tell a story of how policymakers lied their way not toward a Vietnam-style debacle but through a strategic transition — one which, when complete, won’t require quite so much official lying, because nobody will even be paying attention anymore.

Seen in this sort of hypothetical hindsight, the first 10 years of the Afghanistan War represented a last experiment in conventional war, nation-building, idealistic democracy promotion … but in the second decade, the conflict gradually became just the largest example of the endlessly multiplying, low-casualty police actions that have defined our grand strategy under Obama and now Trump.

And this strategy, for all its possible defects, has one obvious advantage for national security policymakers: It frustrates popular opposition by never supplying a strong reason — whether in mass casualties or clear military defeats — for antiwar sentiment to leave the rightward and leftward fringes and become a major popular concern. As Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School put it last year in a perceptive essay for The New Republic, the more “contained” American warfare becomes — the more our wars look like Afghanistan in 2019, rather than Afghanistan in 2010, Iraq in 2005 or Vietnam in 1968 — “the more likely it is that the war will continue indefinitely.”

You can agree with this diagnosis without fully embracing antiwar anguish or despair. As with other features of our decadence, a Pax Americana sustained by indefinite police actions, indefinitely frozen conflicts and indefinite postponements of defeat is hardly the worst geopolitical scenario imaginable, and definitely preferable to certain bloodier alternatives.

But there is still something unusually grim about reading The Post’s catalog of the official deceptions that have carried us through 18 years in Afghanistan, and then considering the possibility that it could be years, decades, even generations before the last American soldier finally dies for these mistakes.