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  For Jenny and Kyle,

  with love and admiration

  Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.

  —Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, in his concurring opinion in New York Times Co. v. United States, also known as the Pentagon Papers case, June 30, 1971. In a 6–3 decision, the Court ruled that the U.S. government could not block The New York Times or The Washington Post from publishing the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam War.

  Foreword

  Two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, as the United States girded for war in Afghanistan, a reporter asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a straightforward question: Would U.S. officials lie to the news media about military operations in order to mislead the enemy?

  Rumsfeld stood at the podium in the Pentagon briefing room. The building still smelled of smoke and jet fuel from when American Airlines flight 77 exploded into the west wall, killing 189 people. The defense secretary started to reply by paraphrasing a quotation from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Rumsfeld explained how the Allies, prior to D-Day, ran a disinformation campaign called Operation Bodyguard to confuse the Germans about when and where the invasion of western Europe would take place in 1944.

  Rumsfeld sounded as if he were justifying the practice of spreading lies during wartime, but then he pivoted and insisted he would never do such a thing. “The answer to your question is, no, I cannot imagine a situation,” he said. “I don’t recall that I’ve ever lied to the press. I don’t intend to, and it seems to me that there will not be reason for it. There are dozens of ways to avoid having to put yourself in a position where you’re lying. And I don’t do it.”

  Asked if the same could be expected of everyone else in the Defense Department, Rumsfeld paused and gave a little smile.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

  The Pentagon press corps laughed. It was classic Rumsfeld: clever, forceful, unscripted, disarming. A former star wrestler at Princeton, he was a master at not getting pinned down.

  Twelve days later, on October 7, 2001, when the U.S. military began bombing Afghanistan, no one foresaw that it would turn into the most protracted war in American history—longer than World War I, World War II and Vietnam combined.

  Unlike the war in Vietnam, or the one that would erupt in Iraq in 2003, the decision to take military action against Afghanistan was grounded in near-unanimous public support. Shaken and angered by al-Qaeda’s devastating terrorist strikes, Americans expected their leaders to defend the homeland with the same resolve as they did after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Within three days of 9/11, Congress passed legislation authorizing the Bush administration to go to war against al-Qaeda and any country that harbored the network.

  For the first time, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invoked Article 5, the alliance’s collective commitment to defend any of its member states under attack. The United Nations Security Council unanimously condemned the “horrifying terrorist attacks” and called on all countries to bring the perpetrators to justice. Even hostile powers expressed solidarity with the United States. In Iran, thousands attended candlelight vigils and hardliners stopped shouting “Death to America” at weekly prayers for the first time in twenty-two years.

  With such strong backing, U.S. officials had no need to lie or spin to justify the war. Yet leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department soon began to make false assurances and to paper over setbacks on the battlefield. As months and years passed, the dissembling became more entrenched. Military commanders and diplomats found it harder to acknowledge mistakes and deliver clear-eyed, honest assessments in public.

  No one wanted to admit that the war that started as a just cause had deteriorated into a losing one. From Washington to Kabul, an unspoken conspiracy to mask the truth took hold. Omissions inexorably led to deceptions and eventually to outright absurdities. Twice—in 2003 and again in 2014—the U.S. government declared an end to combat operations, episodes of wishful thinking that had no connection to reality on the ground.

  * * *

  President Barack Obama had vowed to end the war and bring all the troops home, but he failed to do so as his second term neared an end in 2016. Americans had grown weary of endless conflict overseas. Disillusioned, many people stopped paying attention.

  By then I had logged almost seven years as a beat reporter covering the Pentagon and the U.S. military for The Washington Post. I had covered four different secretaries of defense and five war commanders, traveling with senior military officials to Afghanistan and the surrounding region on many occasions. Before that, I had reported overseas for six years as a Washington Post foreign correspondent, writing about al-Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

  Like many journalists, I knew Afghanistan was a mess. I had grown dismissive of the U.S. military’s hollow statements that it was always making progress and on the right track. The Washington Post and other news organizations had exposed systemic problems with the war for years. Books and memoirs had delivered insider accounts of pivotal battles in Afghanistan and political infighting in Washington. But I wondered if everyone had missed the big picture.

  How had the war degenerated into a stalemate with no realistic prospect for an enduring victory? The United States and its allies had initially crushed the Taliban and al-Qaeda in 2001. What went wrong? No one had conducted a thorough public accounting of the strategic failures or provided an unsparing explanation of how the campaign fell apart.

  To this day, there has been no Afghanistan version of the 9/11 Commission, which held the government responsible for its inability to prevent the worst terrorist attack on American soil. Nor has Congress convened an Afghanistan version of the Fulbright Hearings, when senators aggressively questioned the war in Vietnam. With so many people from both parties responsible for a multitude of errors, few political leaders have wanted to assign or accept blame.

  In summer 2016, I received a news tip that an obscure federal agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, had interviewed hundreds of participants in the war and that many had unloaded pent-up frustrations. SIGAR had conducted the interviews for a project titled Lessons Learned, which was intended to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes in the future.

  That September, SIGAR began to publish a series of Lessons Learned reports that highlighted problems in Afghanistan. But the reports, weighed down with leaden government prose, omitted the harsh criticism and finger-pointing that I heard the interviews contained.

  An investigative journalist’s mission in life is to find out what truths the government is hiding and reveal them to the public. So I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with SIGAR seeking transcripts, notes and audio recordings of the Less
ons Learned interviews. I argued the public had a right to know the government’s internal criticisms of the war—the unvarnished truth.

  At every turn, SIGAR delayed and resisted the requests—a hypocritical response for an agency that Congress had created to provide accountability for the enormous sums of taxpayer dollars being spent on the war. The Post had to file two federal lawsuits to compel SIGAR to release the Lessons Learned documents. After a three-year legal battle, SIGAR finally disclosed more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with 428 people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

  The agency redacted portions of the documents and concealed the identities of most of the people it interviewed. But the interviews showed that many senior U.S. officials privately viewed the war as an unmitigated disaster, contradicting a chorus of rosy public statements from officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan.

  Speaking frankly because they assumed their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials confessed to SIGAR that the war plans had fatal flaws and that Washington had wasted billions of dollars trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation. The interviews also exposed the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

  Many of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said officials at military headquarters in Kabul—and at the White House—routinely distorted statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was plainly not the case.

  Astonishingly, commanding generals admitted that they had tried to fight the war without a functional strategy:

  “There was no campaign plan. It just wasn’t there,” complained Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who twice served as the U.S. commander during the Bush administration.

  “There was no coherent long-term strategy,” said British Gen. David Richards, who led U.S. and NATO forces from 2006 to 2007. “We were trying to get a single coherent long-term approach—a proper strategy—but instead we got a lot of tactics.”

  Other officials said the United States flubbed the war from the start, committing missteps on top of miscalculations on top of misjudgments:

  “We did not know what we were doing,” said Richard Boucher, who served as the Bush administration’s top diplomat for South and Central Asia.

  “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” echoed Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who served as the White House war czar under Bush and Obama.

  Lute lamented that so many U.S. troops had lost their lives. But in a shocking departure from convention for a three-star general, he went further and suggested that the government had squandered those sacrifices.

  “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction… 2,400 lives lost,” Lute said. “Who will say this was in vain?”

  Over two decades, more than 775,000 U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan. Of those, more than 2,300 died there and 21,000 came home wounded. The U.S. government has not calculated a comprehensive total of how much it spent on war-related expenses, but most estimates exceed $1 trillion.

  * * *

  With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government’s determination to conceal them from the public, the Lessons Learned interviews broadly resembled the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War. When they were leaked in 1971, the Pentagon Papers caused a sensation. They revealed that the government had long lied to the public about how the United States came to be embroiled in Vietnam.

  Bound into forty-seven volumes, the 7,000-page study was based entirely on internal government documents: diplomatic cables, decision-making memos, intelligence reports. To preserve secrecy Defense Secretary Robert McNamara issued an order prohibiting the authors from interviewing anyone.

  The Lessons Learned project faced no such restrictions. SIGAR staffers carried out their interviews between 2014 and 2018, mostly with officials who served during the Bush and Obama years. Unlike the Pentagon Papers, none of the Lessons Learned documents was originally classified as a government secret. Once The Washington Post pushed to make them public, however, other federal agencies intervened and classified some material after the fact.

  The Lessons Learned interviews contained few revelations about military operations. But running throughout were torrents of criticism that refuted the official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the Trump administration.

  To supplement the Lessons Learned interviews, I obtained hundreds of previously classified memos about the war in Afghanistan that Rumsfeld dictated or received between 2001 and 2006. Dubbed “snowflakes” by Rumsfeld and his staff, the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon boss dictated to his underlings, often several times a day.

  Rumsfeld made a select number of his snowflakes public in 2011, posting them online in conjunction with his memoir, Known and Unknown. But most of his snowflake collection—a blizzard of paperwork, composed of an estimated 59,000 pages—remained confidential.

  In 2017, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University, the Defense Department began releasing the remainder of Rumsfeld’s snowflakes on a rolling basis. The Archive shared them with me.

  Worded in Rumsfeld’s brusque style, many of the snowflakes foreshadowed problems that would continue to haunt the U.S. military more than a decade later. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan,” Rumsfeld complained in a memo to his intelligence chief—almost two years after the war had started.

  I also obtained several oral-history interviews that the nonprofit Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training conducted with officials who served in the U.S. embassy in Kabul. Those interviews provided a blunt perspective from Foreign Service officers who vented about Washington’s fundamental ignorance of Afghanistan and its mishandling of the war.

  As I gradually absorbed all the interviews and memos, it became clear to me that they constituted a secret history of the war—an unflinching appraisal of the never-ending conflict. The documents also showed that U.S. officials had repeatedly lied to the public about what was happening in Afghanistan, just as they had in Vietnam.

  Drawing on the talents of a legion of newsroom staffers, The Washington Post published a series of articles about the documents in December 2019. Millions of people read the series, which included a database of the interviews and snowflakes that The Post published online as a public service.

  Congress, which had largely ignored the war for years, held multiple hearings to discuss and debate the findings. In testimony, generals, diplomats and other officials admitted the government had not been honest with the public. Lawmakers of all political persuasions expressed anger and frustration.

  “It’s a damning record,” said Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “It underscores the lack of honest public conversation between the American people and their leaders about what we were doing in Afghanistan.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called The Washington Post’s series “extraordinarily troubling. It portrays a U.S. war effort severely impaired by mission creep and suffering from a complete absence of clear and achievable objectives.”

  The revelations touched a nerve. Many Americans had suspected all along that the government had lied to them about the war, and they were angry. The public hungered for more evidence, for more truth-telling about what really happened.

  I knew the U.S. Army had conducted some oral-history interviews with soldiers who had served in Afghanistan and had published a few academic monographs abou
t them. But I soon discovered that the Army had a huge trove of these documents.

  Between 2005 and 2015, the Army’s Operational Leadership Experience project—part of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas—interviewed more than 3,000 troops who had served overseas in the “Global War on Terror.” Most had fought in Iraq, but a large number had deployed to Afghanistan.

  I spent weeks sifting through the unclassified, fully transcribed interviews and set aside more than 600 that featured Afghanistan veterans. The Army oral histories contained vivid, first-hand accounts, mostly from junior officers posted in the field. I also obtained a smaller number of oral-history interviews that were conducted by the U.S Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C.

  Because the Army authorized the interviews for historical research, many of the troops were more open about their experiences than they likely would have been with a journalist working on a news story. Collectively, they presented a raw and honest perspective about the war’s faults, the flip side of the talking points peddled by the brass at the Pentagon.

  I found another cache of revelatory documents at the University of Virginia. Since 2009, the Miller Center, a nonpartisan affiliate of the university that specializes in political history, has directed an oral-history project of the presidency of George W. Bush. The Miller Center interviewed about a hundred people who worked with Bush, including key administration officials, outside advisers, lawmakers and foreign leaders.

  Most consented to the interviews on the condition that the transcripts remain confidential for many years—or until after their deaths. Starting in November 2019, the Miller Center opened portions of its George W. Bush archive to the public. For my purposes, the timing was perfect. I obtained a dozen transcripts of oral-history interviews with military commanders, cabinet members and other senior officials who oversaw the war in Afghanistan.