The Washington Post on Monday published “The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war” based on the U.S. government’s own documents. The main piece is titled “At War with the Truth: U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.”
Common Dreams reports: “‘Astonishing Moral Cowardice’: Sanders and Khanna Denounce $738 Billion Bipartisan Pentagon Giveaway.”
MATTHEW HOH, matthew_hoh at riseup.net
Hoh resigned his appointment with as a Political Officer with the State Department in Afghanistan in 2009 over the escalation of the war by President Obama. His decision to resign, and the debate it stirred within the Obama administration, was profiled in detail in a front page expose by the Washington Post in October 2009.
Hoh, a former Marine Corps officer who fought in Iraq, is now a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Policy. He is based in North Carolina.
In response to the Washington Post’s release of documents charting U.S. officials through three administrations lying to and misleading the public about the war in Afghanistan, Hoh said:
“While observers and critics of the war in Afghanistan have stated many of the issues brought up in the Post’s report, this report shows persistent malfeasance on behalf of national security officials in the military, State Department and White House for nearly two decades. The larger context of this report should be considered as it should be read with the memory of the Pentagon Papers of Vietnam as well as the lies of the Bush Administration that led to the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq.
“As the thousands of pages the Post has released are read and understood, the contents, meaning and consequences of them should be directly addressed by the presidential candidates, the members of Congress and U.S. media. The British Parliament has twice now conducted official inquires into recent wars, Iraq and Libya, and found the British public was lied to systemically and intentionally in each case. No such official review or investigation has been conducted in the United States despite the overwhelming evidence of perjury and lying by Bush, Obama and Trump officials. Contrast this with the current impeachment hearings in Congress — ostensibly about U.S. national security — yet the wars in which hundreds of thousands of U.S. personnel have been killed, wounded and psychologically scarred, and likewise millions of Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, Somalis, Pakistanis and Libyans, have been left untouched by a cowardly and irresponsible Congress.”
Hoh’s recent pieces include for CounterPunch: “Authorizations for Madness; The Effects and Consequences of Congress’ Endless Permissions for War” and “Time for Peace in Afghanistan and an End to the Lies.” See his interviews this year on C-SPAN and the program “Democracy Now!”
BETTE DAM, bettedam at gmail.com, @Bettedam
Dam is based in Brussels and has reported on and about Afghanistan for over a decade. She is author of A Man and a Motorcycle, How Hamid Karzai came to Power. See her recent TED talk on war reporting. Dam said today: “We in the West have lived in a predominately Western narrative if we look at the coverage of Afghanistan. We Western mainstream media basically interviewed mainly ourselves about what was happening in Afghanistan. We mostly quoted the U.S. government and their local allies in Kabul, all embracing the War on Terror. That’s why we overlooked crucial moments in Afghan history. We not only overlooked the tremendous lack of progress the U.S. army was achieving as the Washington Post shows, but more importantly, we overlooked that the War on Terror was actually not necessary in Afghanistan after December 2001.
“In December 2001 the U.S. government blocked a local peace deal that ended the war. The Taliban had found a deal with the new Afghan government, and withdrew. But the U.S. government chose to fight and sent troops and started the war.”