We were lied to about Vietnam and, surprise surprise, we’ve been lied to about Afghanistan.
A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
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.
I’m old enough to remember Vietnam. Old enough to have in theory been drafted at the tail end of it, but in the lottery I got a high number (and likely would have failed the physical anyway). It was on the news all though middle school and into high school. Night after night on the 10 O’clock news, they scrolled through a list of service members from the tri-state area (NY/NJ/CT) who’d been reported killed that day. Sometimes just a few, sometimes many dozens. The last helicopter left Saigon when I was a college freshman.
The lying about Vietnam went on for years. Through the administrations of both parties. Nixon tried to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers but SCOTUS ruled against him. With Afghanistan, the lying has again been party-neutral. Two Republican Presidents and a Democrat. Lies from them all. Again trying to suppress the truth about those lies.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing.” — Lieutenant General Douglas Lute
It’s a safe bet that the lies are ongoing, and not limited to Afghanistan. Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and the dozens of smaller conflicts that are ongoing. Lies about Iran, lies about China, lies about countries that most Americans couldn’t find on a map.
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