Afghanistan Papers

 "leak"
Afghanistan Papers (limited hangout)

The Afghanistan Papers are a set of document, mostly interview transcripts.

Etymology

The name "papers" invites comparison with the "Pentagon Papers", a set of documents presanted by Daniel Ellsberg about the Vietnam War.

Reporting

The Washington Post introduced them as:

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.

Reaction

Caitlin Johnstone, wrote for Consortium News that "it was a very good and newsworthy publication, and those who did the heavy lifting bringing the Afghanistan Papers into public awareness deserve full credit. The frank comments of U.S. military officials plainly stating that from the very beginning this was an unwinnable conflict, initiated in a region nobody understood, without anyone being able to so much as articulate what victory would even look like, make up an extremely important piece of information that is in conflict with everything the public has been told about this war by their government. But the most significant revelation to come out of this story is not in the Afghanistan Papers themselves."

James Corbett was disappointed in reporting and highly critical of the "leak"; he suggested that it was a psychological operation to derail criticism of the war. He stated that he had found nothing revelatory in the papers> He opined that they were intended to seed opposition against the war with the official opposition narrative that it was a "mistake" and "not worth" fighting, because the costs outweighed the gains.

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References

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