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by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Reason.com
The U.S. government has been lying about the war in Afghanistan practically since it started. “Every data point” about American efforts there “was altered to present the best picture possible,” according to Bob Crowley, an Army colonel and former senior counterinsurgency adviser to military commander in Afghanistan. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
This and many more damning quotes about the now three-presidency-spanning U.S. war in Afghanistan come via some remarkable efforts by The Washington Post, which fought with federal agencies for more than three years to obtain a trove of documents that the paper is calling the Afghanistan Papers.