The Afghanistan Papers were always hiding in plain sight

Why the Pentagon never fooled America about the Afghanistan war

Soldiers.

The war in Afghanistan is lost, and has been for years. That's not just my opinion — it is also that of top officials in the American occupation, according to a vast document trove obtained by Craig Whitlock for The Washington Post. It calls the project The Afghanistan Papers — a reference to the famous Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon report about the Vietnam War leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. "What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking," Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, Afghan war adviser to both President Bush and President Obama, told a government interviewer.

Yet the only major new information here is the identity of those making the criticisms. They come from "Lessons Learned," a confidential report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that collected testimony from top government officials that the Post obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. It's good to know, but anyone with eyes to see has known for years that the war in Afghanistan is hopeless.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.