The Afghanistan Papers

The Washington Post, after several years of legal battles, acquired a massive trove of internal govt. documents detailing much about the Afghanistan War that was either not known, or downplayed in a major fashion by officials. I have a very simple take on this.

Bin Laden won.

His stated goal, very early on, was to harm our economy by getting us to spend untold fortunes on ineffective warfare. We have spent a trillion dollars there in cash alone, lost nearly 2400 service personnel and nobody knows how much will be spent caring for the thousands of wounded, maimed and disabled veterans in their lifetimes, I dare not guess. I daresay our economy might be considerably different if not for our folly there. Yes I supported it for a very long time.

The Washington Post is a pay site that many can’t read but here is a paragraph from a Reuters article and a link to the full article. It’s pretty depressing, though we all know more or less that the situation is a lose lose one.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/afghanistan-papers-reveal-tragedy-not-170050447.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmVhbGNsZWFycG9saXRpY3MuY29tLzIwMTkvMTIvMTkvdGhlX2FmZ2hhbmlzdGFuX3BhcGVyc19yZXZlYWxfYV90cmFnZWR5X25vdF9hX2NyaW1lXzQ5NTk0My5odG1s&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAN6oOlqa1Ia7gOhKN716yOknMEKJIw5mZC3lAKj1WMg9Z1kJfS8rxghlMBCan3PCRWLbRAwbu9Gc71IDL2esJmRTz9tjWyfxKo8Q9W8lEB23L6zf9whVFXqbIFXxp9JGtjUz8tJUzBp3NzaGnqYu94zHgZgBhLHlYQYuNZqI2aAY

(Bloomberg Opinion) – Is America’s two-decade war in Afghanistan a tragedy or a crime? A recent series in the Washington Post contends that it is more the latter than the former. For years, the argument goes, U.S. officials systematically lied regarding the prospects for success, while blithely downplaying the corruption and dependency American intervention fostered. The title of this series — “The Afghanistan Papers” — is meant, clearly, to echo the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers. It implies that we should see this conflict, like Vietnam, as a misbegotten war fought in the service of illusions and lies.

12 posts were merged into an existing topic: Not surprisingly, the United States Government lied its ass off about Afghanistan