The title and the contents echo the Pentagon Papers, the leaked inside story of the Vietnam war in which the long road to defeat was paved with brittle happy talk. The Afghanistan Papers is a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years. The contrast with the upbeat version of events presented to the public at the same time, often by the very same people, is breathtaking. In the Sigar files, and other interviews carried out by military institutes and research centres, Whitlock found that soldiers of all ranks and their civilian counterparts were вЂњmore open about their experiences than they likely would have been with a journalist working on a news storyвЂќ.Д«lunt appraisals were left unvarnished because they were never intended for publication. His book is based on documents obtained through freedom of information requests, most from вЂњlessons learnedвЂќ interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a watchdog mandated by Congress to keep tabs on the hundreds of billions flowing into Afghanistan. The story is one of many gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities uncovered by Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post. But no amount of editing could disguise the fact that after eight years of bloody struggle, the US and its allies were unclear on what they were doing and who they were fighting. In the second draft, al-Qaida was included and the conflict was hazily defined as вЂњnot a war in the conventional senseвЂќ. And the US could not agree with its Nato allies on whether to call it a war or a peacekeeping or training mission, an issue with important legal implications. Al-Qaida, the original justification for the Afghan invasion, was not even mentioned in McChrystalвЂ™s first draft. It quickly became clear there were two significant problems. Hired by Barack Obama, McChrystal produced a 66-page rethink of the Afghan campaign, calling for a вЂњproperly resourcedвЂќ counter-insurgency with a lot more money and troops. There was some excitement in Washington about the author, Gen Stanley McChrystal, a special forces soldier who cultivated the image of a warrior-monk while hunting down insurgents in Iraq.

The afghanistan papers