Fraud and deception regarding the Afghan war are unfolding before the American public

US lawmakers, veterans, and experts have expressed shock and surprise, after a report by The Washington Post last Monday revealed 18 years of distortion, lying and deception by US officials regarding the course of the war in Afghanistan. Documents, including 2,000 pages, revealed many failures and catastrophic failure over the war, conducted with more than 400 people, from ambassadors and down to forces on the ground. Despite this, three successive presidential administrations have insisted that the war is moving in the right direction.

"We must put an end to the deadly vicious circle of misinformation, unspecified and unsupported strategies," says Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, calling for public hearings with the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, and other officials. "The Senate Armed Services Committee must hold hearings on the state of the conflict in Afghanistan, the outrageous details, and the alleged lies that have come to us today," said panel member Senator Ghosh Hawley.

These legislators ’statements come after the veterans began looking at their war through a new lens. A Marine Corps veteran, Dustin Kelly, says that the report awakened in us a painful feeling again that we were exactly ignorant of the endeavor for which the comrades were sacrificed . "We were not supposed to suffer such a traumatic shock in our lives, and our friends should not die on the other side of this planet," added Kelly, who worked in Helmand Province in 2010 to restore the Taliban stronghold.

No intention of misleading

The Pentagon denies that it was seeking to mislead lawmakers and the public, and says that this “belated realization” drawn from the lessons learned and from the secret records collected by the Office of the Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has helped to review and derive the ministry’s strategy. "There was no intention of the Ministry of Defense to mislead (the Congress) or the public," said Defense Department spokesman Lieutenant-General Thomas Campbell, in a statement. "Defense officials have been continuously explaining the progress and challenges associated with our efforts in Afghanistan, and the Department of Defense provides periodic reports To (the Congress), these challenges arise, and the information contained in the interviews is submitted to the Office of the Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction for inclusion in the general reports of this office. "We will remain in Afghanistan to protect our national interests and ensure that Afghanistan is not used again as a safe haven for terrorists who threaten the United States," Campbell asserts. Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus defended the reports he provided from Afghanistan during his time there as commander of US forces in 2010 and 2011.

Petraeus said in a statement sent via e-mail to the newspaper "Daily Beast": "I stand beside the assessments that I presented as a leader in Afghanistan," stressing that "the progress we have made, despite the efforts we made and despite its fragility, is indispensable for us." He adds that "there has been undeniable progress on the security front, and I remain committed to what was reported by (the Congress) and the national security team during that time." "The mission was not so clear, even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could not have identified the enemy after several years of that," says a former Army infantry soldier, Rob William, who was involved in two deployments in Afghanistan. "We did not know who was the enemy we were fighting," he said, referring to deployments between 2007 and 2011.

Truth

William and other veterans ask whether the truth in the report is fully clarified for veterans all the time. Kelly believes that heavy fighting indicates the extent of the insurgents' despair, after his unit understood that its mission in Afghanistan is to become essentially one of the war gears that has gone from bad to worse. "Nobody can look back, and chant," Yes, we have won, "he says.

Defense officials, leaders, and government workers have reduced from the outset the complexities of the fighting, as documents have revealed, as the war spiraled out of control, when the mission goal of expelling "Al Qaeda" and "Taliban" fighters shifted to another goal. And the mission became "building a nation on a superstructure from a government of thieves wreaking astonishing corruption, which applies to the level of police patrols, and the result is the death of 43 thousand and 74 Afghan civilians, 2200 American soldiers, 64 thousand and 124 Afghan soldiers and police in a war unprecedented in severity in any time ago.

The absurdity of war

Field leaders often reject the fundamental principle of the "Pentagon" strategy is to build the capacity of Afghan forces, as these leaders were more inclined to fight than to train Afghan forces. This may have "spent the entire effort from the start," says Charles Duncan, a former US military intelligence officer, who served in Afghanistan in 2013. He added: "I used to think that the absurdity of the war was only visible to those below us, but now I know that this pessimistic vision is shared by officials along the chain of command, yet we all acted as if we had won the war." Lawmakers used this report to call for an end to the war in Afghanistan, and to abolish the president's broad authority, which he uses to strike terrorist groups, which critics say has kept the war on terrorism on an endless path. Republican Senator Todd Se Young says the story indicates that "the time has come for serious oversight, and to act responsibly to bring our troops home from Afghanistan." Robin Galligo, a Democratic Rep. Of the House Armed Forces Committee, says he was not shocked by the report, but he attributes the failings to the leaders, who issued rosy statements, and to the lawmakers, who defended them. He told the newspaper "The Post": "Every general and policymaker has made sure that he is not the one who ends the war, so that people later stigmatize him as the person who caused America's loss of Afghanistan, rather than the person who ends this quagmire."

“There is no business strategy, no transparency, as the war in Afghanistan is the longest armed conflict in US history, and it has claimed the lives of thousands of American servicemen and Afghan civilians,” said Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. It is time to bring our troops home. ”

The former Department of Defense official said during the administration of President Barack Obama and the veteran warrior in Afghanistan, Andrew Exum, that the fierce reactions from the lawmakers were "deceptive" in view of their supervisory duties, and had seen the reports of the Office of the Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan for years.

Joe Kent, a former expert in the US Army Special Forces, who served in Yemen and parts of Africa, says that turning the attention of the American people away from the war in Afghanistan allowed three presidents to wave the war without any pressure from the electorate.

In 2009, Kent listened to President Obama discussing an end to the war in Afghanistan, and 10 years later his wife, marine coder, Shannon Kent, was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria this year. Joe Kent called the United States to withdraw from Syria, Afghanistan and other war zones, as the United States was mired in mire, and believed that officials were continuing to buy time to engage in a fallacy, which would eventually justify further sacrifices.

Deals

The state-building model, which places accountability without representation on the shoulders of Afghans, has been doomed to failure. When the United States dealt with the Afghans, it constantly made bad choices. The Americans and their allies concluded deals with the warlords, whose human rights record was no better than that of the "Taliban" itself. When the influence of the United States began to expand in the country, the United States repeatedly ignored Afghan calls to negotiate for peace. The "Pentagon" classified Afghan men, young and old, as insurgents, and Afghan civilians were often harassed, killed, and imprisoned, with no evidence that they had anything to do with the "insurgency." In some cases, wearing the Casio wrist watch was sufficient evidence to detain any Afghan for terrorism. Afghans, who were recruited into the security forces to protect their fellow citizens, were threatened and marginalized, and about 65,000 of them lost their lives.

Democracy

Amidst these hardships, a generation of Afghan youth continued to fight to secure democracy and rebuild their country. A recent Asia Foundation study revealed that Afghanistan is a country of high levels of optimism, and democracy, women's rights and the new constitution top the list of priorities that Afghans want to protect in any peace negotiations. The Afghan government has made great progress in building the institutions that protect and involve its citizens, including parliament, where 28% of legislators are women, and entrepreneurship, media and entertainment industries are growing every year. This fall, young people in Kabul staged a march for climate justice, in solidarity with their peers in New York, London and Berlin. Such activity is not confined to urban areas, as thousands of Afghan women all over the country finally gathered to invite to participate in peace talks, nonviolence movement has flourished nationwide from northern Afghanistan, and cross-country marches, sit-ins and vigils have gathered many generations of Afghans.

The end of the conflict

Certainly, Afghans and Americans want an end to this conflict. Current efforts to negotiate peace with the Taliban are testimony to this. The publication of these papers represents an opportunity to learn from the mistakes made over decades of intervention in Afghanistan, which have claimed the lives of 1.5 million Afghans (estimates vary, and most Afghans believe that more lives are lost), and finally thousands of American soldiers, whose sacrifices deserve a new approach And studied foreign policy, respect and protect human life.

What the Afghan people need now is a strong commitment to a long-term diplomatic process, which places them at the center of peace negotiations, a commitment to development and reconstruction, and support for those who are at grave risk if the United States goes ahead with its current plan to make the Taliban their partner in counterterrorism in the region. Anything else would be a repeat of another history of stigma in the forehead of the American people.

The Pentagon denies that it was seeking to mislead lawmakers and the public, and says that this “belated realization” drawn from the lessons learned and from the secret records collected by the Office of the Inspector General for Reconstruction of Afghanistan has helped to review and derive the ministry's strategy.

A former Army infantry soldier, Rob William, who had been involved in two deployments in Afghanistan, says the mission was not so clear that even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself could not identify the enemy after several years of that.

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Afghan civilians were killed, in addition to 2,200 American soldiers, and 64,124 Afghan soldiers and policemen were in a war unprecedented in intensity.