Liberation: How did Washington lie about the war against the Taliban?

French newspaper Liberation said that documents published by the American Washington Post show how successive American governments have hidden their doubts that they have been able to achieve victory in their struggle with the Afghan Taliban since 2001.

The newspaper said that many statements by US political and military officials reassured the people that the war in Afghanistan was close to victory, but the fact that these same officials were admitting in their private meetings was that the war in Afghanistan was moving toward defeat, and that they did not know what to do.

On Monday, the American newspaper published a public investigation related to the lying of successive American governments since 2001, and its refusal to report publicly what you know about the conflict that slipped and resolved in a country that you do not know much about.

The Washington Post acquired these important "Pentagon Papers" after three years of conflict in the courts, and was built on interviews with 400 US political and military officials by Inspector General John Sobco, the superintendent for reconstruction in Afghanistan.

Douglas Lute, the national security official in Iraq and Afghanistan, admitted in 2015 that "we are essentially ignorant of Afghanistan, even if the Americans are aware of the amount of this imbalance ...", especially since the war cost America more than a trillion dollars and the lives of 2,400 soldiers.

A former Special Forces soldier asks, "What did we get for a trillion dollars? Is it worth all of this? After bin Laden's death, I thought he might laugh in his grave because of what we spent."

Distorted facts
The newspaper said that reading two thousand pages of interviews makes one come up with the idea that the strategy is absent, because the war that started after the attacks of September 11, 2001 by al-Qaeda, hosted by the Taliban government since 1996, has begun to change little by little.

Although the Taliban regime fell within a few weeks, and that Al Qaeda elements were killed, captured, or fled, the war went on without the White House or the Pentagon knowing where they were going, as it was no longer just a matter of fighting terrorism but building a state and establishing democracy.

"Our policy - which is to form a strong central government - was stupid, because Afghanistan has no history of strong central governments," a State Department official said in 2015.

With the passage of time - the newspaper says - American forces sank into the swamp and the Taliban reappeared, but political officials are trying to hide this at any cost, as Colonel Bob Crowley, senior adviser to the NATO mission in Afghanistan between 2013 and 2014, says, "Every piece of data is being altered." To present the best possible image. "

Crowley added that "polls were not reliable, but reinforced the idea that everything we did was good, and the newspaper concludes that the facts were distorted to the point of absurdity, so that the increase in the number of attacks in Kabul turned into evidence that the Taliban were no longer able to Fighting foreign forces, and even the number of soldiers killed means that the US military is intensifying the fighting. "

"This situation continued for two reasons: to show that all those involved have an interest, and to make it appear as if the situation in the country will get worse if the forces are withdrawn," he said.

Strategic flounder
The newspaper said that American officials attended - helplessly - the rise of corruption among Afghan elites to the top of the state, where corruption was creeping everywhere, in ministries, police stations, and remote provinces, which gradually led to the rejection of power by the people who turned some towards The Taliban.

The diplomat Ryan Crocker - who has been in Afghanistan for many times - says that the largest project we have accomplished in Afghanistan inadvertently is the development of major corruption, and that the levels that corruption reached when I was there have complicated matters very much, if not say, made it impossible to solve the problem.

And Liberation pointed out in conclusion that what was reported by the Washington Post does not mean that the US administration is the only one involved in this matter, but it may even give a picture of the strategic flop of the rest of NATO countries, including France, which had four thousand soldiers, but it does not have a supervisory body such as Those headed by John Sopko, and therefore no parliamentary committee has ever genuinely evaluated French action in Afghanistan.