The Afghanistan Papers

The claim

From 2001 to 2021 the public account of the war in Afghanistan was one of steady progress: the Taliban were being defeated, Afghan security forces were growing in number and capability, governance and development were taking hold, and each setback was a turning point. Three presidents, their generals, and their ambassadors said so in briefings, testimony, and speeches. "We are making progress" and its variants were the official vocabulary of two decades.

In December 2019 the Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers: more than two thousand pages of notes and transcripts from "Lessons Learned" interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the congressional watchdog for the war, with more than four hundred officials, generals, diplomats, and aid workers. The paper obtained them after a three-year Freedom of Information lawsuit. In the interviews, speaking in private and after the fact, many of the same people said the opposite of what they had said in public. A three-star general who oversaw the war at the White House said the United States "didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking". A senior adviser to the commanders said that "every data point was altered to present the best picture possible". The inspector general, John Sopko, said the documents showed that "the American people have constantly been lied to."

What the record shows

The Papers are not a single inquiry's finding but a body of testimony, and they should be read as such: candid, retrospective, and from people with their own positions to defend. What they document is a gap between two accounts of the same war held by the same institutions at the same time. The public account was built from metrics, numbers of trained troops, districts under government control, schools built, and the private account said the metrics had been chosen, defined, and sometimes altered to show progress, and that officials who raised doubts were asked to keep them inside.

The inspector general's own public reports had been saying parts of this since 2008, in quarterly documents that few read. The interviews gave the pattern a voice. Whitlock's book of 2021 assembled the material into a history and matched the private statements to the public ones they contradicted, year by year.

The techniques, in order of weight

Misleading Statistics was the instrument. Troop strengths that counted men on paper rather than in units, district control measured by whoever could be reached by telephone, and "trained" forces counted at the end of a course, produced numbers that rose whatever the war did. One official described changing the definition of success whenever the old one was not met.

Card Stacking: briefings reported the measures that improved and not the ones that did not; the inspector general's reports, which carried both, were public and unread.

Message Discipline: "progress" was the word, across administrations and commanders, and the interviews describe the pressure to use it.

Glittering Generalities: "progress", "turning the corner", "the Afghan people", and "the mission" stood in for an account of what was being attempted and whether it was working.

Minimization: setbacks were described as temporary, local, or already addressed; the scale of corruption, the strength of the insurgency, and the dependence of Afghan forces on American support were understated for years.

Burying The Lede: the facts were, in many cases, in the public record, in inspector general reports and congressional testimony, and the official account simply led with something else.

What cut the other way

The Papers are interviews, not findings, and several of the officials quoted have said their words were taken out of the context of specific periods or decisions. The war's public account was not uniformly false: the Taliban were driven from power in 2001, elections were held, and life expectancy, schooling, and women's participation in public life changed materially in the cities. The inspector general's public reports had documented the problems throughout, which means the information was available to anyone who sought it, and the gap was between what was said in briefings and what was said in footnotes rather than between truth and lie. Officials also argue, with some force, that public pessimism would have undermined allies and troops. Those are the terms of the dispute; the gap itself is not disputed.

What happened

The Papers were published in December 2019 and produced hearings, commentary, and little immediate change. The United States withdrew in August 2021, the Afghan government and army collapsed within days, and the Taliban retook Kabul. The collapse was read, by most observers, as the Papers' private account made public: the forces that had been counted for twenty years did not exist as counted. Congress later established a commission on the war; its work continues.

What it teaches

The Afghanistan Papers are the case for a technique that needs no false statement: the metric chosen to be met, the briefing that leads with the good number, the word that replaces the assessment. The private interviews show the people who did it knew what they were doing and believed, mostly, that it was necessary. A reader who meets a long official narrative of progress can look for the measure that would show failure, and ask whether anyone is reporting it.