WASHINGTON: A confidential trove of the United States government has revealed that it had been telling lies to the world all along the line about the Afghan war for nearly two decades.

The Washington Post (WP) has published information availed from the documents which contains interviews of senior US officials about the 18-year long ongoing war in Afghanistan. The documents reveal that America had been claiming victory in the unwinnable war. The information was basically gathered to sum up the causes of the failures in the longest armed fight in the US history. It contains statements of about 400 people who were directly involved in the conflict, from generals and envoys to Afghan officials and workers.

The trove of 2,000 pages of ‘Lessons Learned’ project had not been made public for seriousness of the issue. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), the organization dedicated to eliminating embezzlement and inefficiency in the US war, had compiled the report. The WP had to fight a legal battle for three years to get hold of the information.

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The interviewees have made blunt criticism of awful blunders during this decades-long campaign in the barren foreign land.

They expressed their opinion that the US military had stuck in a mire by entering the more than one trillion dollar useless war. They accepted that they had no fundamental understanding of Afghanistan.

“We didn’t know what the task was and what we were doing,” said Douglas Lute, the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama’s governments. “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction. . . 2,400 lives lost… Who will say this was in vain?”

The US officials had been saying that they were making progress, while they were not and they knew it very well. The orchestrator and the carrier presidents of the war had polar-opposite plans for achieving success here and both were destined to fail. The US poured a lot of money in the country in the name of rebuilding it and then deliberately ignored the graft it had fuelled.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” said Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and former White House official. He said, “Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent.”

Talking about the Afghan security forces officials, US military men their performance was pathetic. “A third of them were either drug addicts or the Taliban.”