Everything is so screwed up at this point that it’s hard to find anything about our politics or our government that doesn’t look like it was designed by an unholy hybrid of Edsel Ford and Mr. Natural. Ever since we opened the shebeen, we have had one simple question about the continuing United States military involvement in Afghanistan, in which it has been involved longer than it ever has been involved anywhere else—namely, what exactly are we still doing there?

So, last week, the Washington Post published the equivalent of The Pentagon Papers in which we learn that all or most of our leaders for the past decade and a half don’t know either, but that they were not any more inclined to share that with us than were McNamara, and Abrams, and the rest of those guys back in the 1960s.



Or, as was said by a certain former Democratic candidate for president, how do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?

An Afghan National Army soldier fires an artillery shell during an anti-Taliban operation at Farah province in 2018. HOSHANG HASHIMI Getty Images

This has been a bipartisan cock-up right from jump. None of the three administrations involved in it comes out of this report looking like people you’d trust to wash your car. One trillion bucks and climbing, and what have we learned? Basically, that we haven’t learned anything. It took the Post three years to pry these documents loose (and there’s nothing that Post editor Marty Baron likes better than prying documents loose—just ask the Archdiocese of Boston), and we find that the old Vietnam Syndrome wasn’t kicked very far during our walkover wars in the 1980s and 1990s.

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting. Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

Frankly, and maybe it’s because I persist in believing that the activism of the 1960s actually accomplished something lasting, I can’t believe that we’ve gone down this road again. Hell, we’ve made hit movies about the Pentagon Papers. That was a watershed. Everybody learned a lesson from those documents, right?

And, of course, the most damning thing about these revelations is that they vanished from the media almost immediately, lost in the din of the barely organized crazy that this administration has brought to Washington. This was a monumental scoop, the result of dogged work by the entire news operation of the Washington Post, and most people know far more about Giuliani’s insane overseas ramblings than know anything about the archived failure and waste present here.



Everything is awful.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io