--:-- Shamita Basu: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Shamita Basu. Every weekend, we bring you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Nearly two decades ago, in the weeks after the September 11th attacks, President George W. Bush announced the United States was going to invade Afghanistan. Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At the time, the U.S. had widespread domestic and international support for this campaign. And the first few months were a success. The Taliban lost its grip on power, and al-Qaeda was forced out of the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But then, the war didn't end. And as years went by, the U.S. lost sight of its objective, a strategy, a clear purpose in Afghanistan. Money and resources were wasted. Americans and Afghans died, including more than 47,000 Afghan civilians.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The bulk of the war spanned three presidential administrations. With each president giving falsely positive reports to the public. From George W. Bush...
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today, five short years later, the Taliban have been driven from power, al-Qaeda has been driven from its camps, and Afghanistan is free. That's why I say we have made remarkable progress.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To Barack Obama...
--:-- Shamita Basu: The landscape has changed. We have removed our troops from Iraq. We are winding down our war in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda's leadership on the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been decimated. And Osama bin Laden is no more.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And then Donald Trump.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Our troops have fought with unmatched valor. And thanks to their bravery, we are now able to pursue a possible political solution to this long and bloody conflict.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Despite the repeated promises that progress was being made, each one of these presidents and the officials in their administrations were well aware of the many red flags raised by their generals on the ground, the ones who said we were certainly not winning the war.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The mismatch between what each administration knew and what they told the public was brought to light by reporter Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A few years ago, Whitlock obtained a trove of official documents and government interviews with people who played a role in the war in Afghanistan. Conducted for a project called Lessons Learned, in which they were trying to figure out what went wrong in Afghanistan so that the U.S. government could avoid these mistakes in the future.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It took three years and multiple lawsuits for Whitlock and his colleagues at the Post to get a hold of these records. And now, after further investigation, Whitlock is coming out with a book this month called The Afghanistan Papers, A Secret History of the War.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can read excerpts of Whitlock's book in The Washington Post on Apple News. In my conversation with Whitlock, we discussed in detail each administration's failures in the war and the ways in which they lied to the public.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He explained how we got to this point of U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban's return to power. And the book is not yet out, but you have released some reporting based on these documents. And it really paints a picture of how the U.S. government misrepresented our strength in Afghanistan for decades.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In your opinion, was this knowing dishonesty? Was this wishful thinking? Was this some kind of diplomatic strategy?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: I think there was some wishful thinking, but if you go back and examine these documents over the years in contrast with what people were saying in private and their personal feelings during the years and what was being said in public by senior U.S. officials, there's such an enormous contrast.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: You can't help but come to the conclusion that this was intentional deception designed to just make the American people think that the war was progressing and things were going well, when in fact, many U.S. officials had already come to the conclusion that it was an unwinnable war.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: There are even some interviews which show that there was a very calculated effort to put out misinformation or deceive the American people. For instance, there was an interview with an official in the Obama White House at the National Security Council who said, you know, we always manipulated the metrics.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And by metrics, he meant, you know, the measurements to show if they were making progress or not on the battlefield or with aid delivery, schools being built, things like that.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And he said, you know, this went all the way up to the president, that if the metrics didn't look like the way we wanted, that painted a happy picture of what was going on. They would they would change them around. They would redefine them and distort them because, you know, the end result was they wanted to tell the American people they were making progress, even when their own metrics showed the opposite.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So let's go back to the Bush administration. What was the objective going into Afghanistan?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: The objective 20 years ago was pretty simple. It was to respond to the attacks of 9-11 and prevent al-Qaeda from carrying out a similar attack.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: The military objective in Afghanistan was to try and go after Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership and dismantle or destroy the terrorist organization.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: There was also, because Afghanistan had hosted bin Laden and al-Qaeda leaders, President Bush said the other objective was to degrade the Taliban's military capability.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But he was careful at the start of the war not to say that the objective was to replace the Taliban government. He was saying they just wanted to weaken it.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So that was it in the beginning. That was all. Things changed pretty quickly in the first few months. The Taliban regime was displaced. It was the Taliban leaders fled and that left a big security vacuum in Afghanistan.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But the original objectives, which were to try and eliminate or destroy al-Qaeda, were really accomplished within six months. By March of 2002, there was virtually no al-Qaeda presence left in Afghanistan. All of their leaders had been killed or captured or fled to other countries like Pakistan.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So at that point, once al-Qaeda was no longer considered a serious threat, What became the stated goal?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Well, there really wasn't a stated goal at that point. And that's this critical moment when the war really begins to start to drift.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And there were a few things going on. In Afghanistan, the country was just a wreck. It had been through 20 years of war ever since the Soviet invasion in 1975.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: There was a very, very brutal and destructive civil war in Afghanistan during the 90s. So this country had no functioning government There was real fear that there could be a famine You know the buildings the infrastructure were just shattered
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So even though the initial war was successful in toppling the Taliban and chasing away al Qaeda you know what was left was a mess and a security vacuum And the United States was you know responsible to a large degree for helping the Afghan people
--:-- Craig Whitlock: The problem was President Bush had campaigned for office when he first ran for the presidency in 2000 on what he said no nation building He had been very critical of the Clinton administration for using the military to try and stabilize and build up countries like Somalia and Haiti and in the Balkans.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So Bush had promised the American people no nation building in Afghanistan, but that's exactly what it needed at that point. So So in public, again, the mission at that point just was left very, very vague, very unstated.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And what about internally? I mean, are there any powerful testimonies that are in the source materials you're referring to that really stick in your mind about this particular point in the war when things were sort of adrift?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Yes, there are several. Some of the documents we obtained were thousands of memos that were written or dictated by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Rumsfeld, I think people still remember him as this very outspoken, self-assured Defense Secretary. And in public—
--:-- Craig Whitlock: These were the snowflake memos, right? Exactly. These memos were called snowflakes because at the Pentagon, he dictated so many of them, dozens or scores a day.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And then they would print them out on white paper and they would sort of drift down on everyone's desk because they would have to respond to them. So they called them snowflakes, but it was almost like a blizzard of them.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But from a historical perspective, they're very valuable because you go back and you see exactly what Rumsfeld was thinking. And these have only been made public in recent years thanks to another freedom of information lawsuit that was filed by a nonprofit group in Washington called the National Security Archive.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But if I could cite a couple of these snowflakes. So in public, Rumsfeld was being, you know, he was being very confident and saying, you know, we've been victorious in Afghanistan. We've destroyed the Taliban.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And even though several months into the war, there were already questions about, well, are we going to get stuck? Is this going to be like what happened with the Russians where they invaded, replaced the government, but got stuck in this quagmire for 10 years?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Rumsfeld would always mock people who asked this if the United States was going to be stuck in a quagmire. But his snowflakes show something completely different.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Just a year into the war, he's sending a snowflake, a memo to some of his top generals at the Pentagon saying, we're never going to get out of Afghanistan unless we have a plan to build up the Afghan government.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And he ended the memo by saying, help. So he was already in private, very worried that the United States would get stuck, even though in public he was saying the opposite.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And if I could cite another memo, this is almost my favorite. And this shows just how much at that point the other critical factor was, you know, after the Taliban was toppled, the Bush administration very, very quickly turned its attention to a different country, to Iraq.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: There are already plans underway to prepare for an invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. And it really, they took their eye off the ball in Afghanistan.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And the best example of this is one year into the war, there's another Rumsfeld snowflake. And he's recounting a trip he took to the White House, to the Oval Office, to meet President Bush.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And he told Bush, he said, you know, our General Tommy Franks, who is the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, he's going to be around next week. Would you like to have a meeting with him?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And I think you should also have a meeting with General Dan McNeil, an army general in Afghanistan. And according to Rumsfeld's memo, Bush's response was, who's Dan McNeil?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And Rumsfeld said, well, sir, he's the commander of our forces in Afghanistan. And Bush says, well, why would I need to meet with him? I don't need to meet with him.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And he was very dismissive about it. So, again, this gets the state of mind of the president himself. He had stopped paying attention to Afghanistan. He didn't know who his own commander was. He was already fixated on what was going to come in Iraq.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: U.S. military presence there in the country, it also enabled a lot of corruption. Certainly over the years, an enormous amount of corruption.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Part of the problem was we allied ourselves with some very unsavory characters who are commonly known in Afghanistan as warlords.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: These were militia commanders, essentially, who would dominate a certain area, a certain part of the country, or a certain tribe or ethnicity.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And over the years, because Afghanistan had been a failed state, it was really run at the mercy of these warlords.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And there was a coalition of warlords known as the Northern Alliance, which was opposed to the Taliban.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And because we were fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban had supported al-Qaeda, we enlisted the support of these warlords in the Northern Alliance.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But many of them were war criminals, quite frankly, as well as thieves who kind of had plundered their own country for a number of years.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But as the war progressed, we were joined at the hip with these warlords. We enlisted them to join the new Afghan government. We enlisted them to help fight the Taliban.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So these were our allies. And that really was at the root of the corruption that slowly but surely kind of engulfed the Afghan government.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn to the Obama years, or as you say, and you're reporting the fantasy of Obama's promise to end combat in Afghanistan. What was Obama's stated promise publicly and how far removed from reality was it?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Well, let's set the stage a little bit first. Obama comes into office and Afghanistan had been, quote unquote, the forgotten war compared to Iraq.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Bush had really been preoccupied and consumed by the debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan had gotten short shrift.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So when Obama came into office, he had promised in his campaign that he would end the war in Iraq, but he would fix the war in Afghanistan.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And by Obama's second term, when he ran for office a second time, he promised the American people he would also end the war in Afghanistan and that all U.S. troops would leave by the end of his second term in 2016.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Of course, this didn't happen, even though in public they kept clinging to a different story.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: The best example of this is at the end of 2014, in December of 2014, there was a ceremony at NATO, U.S. and NATO headquarters in Kabul, in which they announced the end of the combat mission.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: They had sort of like a little parade around in a gym where they furled the flag from the combat mission. And they said that the Afghan security forces were now taking responsibility for their own country.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And Obama promised an end to what he called the combat mission. He, in fact, had a famous statement in which he said, the war in Afghanistan is drawing to a responsible conclusion.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So, of course, he's delivering the message to the American people that, OK, the war is, you know, all but over.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: He acknowledged they were still going to keep some U.S. troops here to serve as advisors. But the way he portrayed this is that the Americans would be sitting on the sidelines. They wouldn't be involved in the fight. They were just there to advise the Afghans.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: None of this was true. As we report in the Afghanistan papers, combat kept happening.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: I mean, it certainly wasn't as intense involving U.S. troops as it had been a few years earlier, but there were still thousands of U.S. troops there.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: They were still fighting and dying on the battlefield. They were in a combat zone. The Pentagon continued to give them all combat pay and combat decorations
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And people lost their lives dozens of people even though Obama had said the combat mission was over
--:-- Craig Whitlock: The point of all this is the public support for the war had been flagging. So Obama and his administration were really trying to create this narrative that the war had wound down, that there weren't any troops left.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: They certainly They weren't fighting in combat because he knew this would cost him politically. But again, none of it was true. We continued to fight.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And the most obvious way, the most apparent way this was happening is we continued to carry out hundreds of U.S. airstrikes each year.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And even though it had been fewer than during Bush's term or Obama's start of his term, you know, there were still hundreds, if not thousands, of Afghans getting killed, civilians each year.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And to them, of course, the war hadn't subsided at all. It was as intense as ever.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: The other part of this is the fact that the U.S. invested so much money into training this army in Afghanistan.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And yet the way it's described in some of these accounts in these papers is that the military there ended up being terribly under-resourced, badly equipped and corrupt.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: How is it that that happened?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Well, that's right. So over 20 years, the United States has spent about $85 billion to train and equip the Afghan army and police forces.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Up until a couple of weeks ago, U.S. taxpayers were paying the salaries of all these people. This was really a proxy force that was paid for and trained by the United States.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And again, in public, during the Bush administration, during the Obama administration, during the Trump administration, White House officials, three presidents, and the generals at the Pentagon kept telling the public that the Afghan security forces were getting stronger and stronger, more and more effective, that they would be able to defend their country against the Taliban without U.S. help.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: That was the public message. But in private, in the Afghanistan papers, in these interviews we obtained, these army officers who were responsible for training the Afghans just gave these blistering accounts of how badly it was going.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: There were just a number of reasons for this, but at its core, the United States was trying to set up an army modeled on the United States Army, a very complex, large organization with a lot of command control, expensive weapon systems, complicated logistics.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But they were trying to do this with Afghan recruits who more than 90% of them could not read or write.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And we see this time and again in the interviews where the trainers would say, you know, it was impossible to train these people.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Not only could they not read or write, but many of them couldn't count. There was one interview with a guy named Jack Kim, who was the deputy director of training during the Obama administration.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: He said, And, you know, an Afghan recruit, he might be able to tell you the names of his brothers and sisters. But if you asked him how many brothers and sisters he had, he couldn't say four or five.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: He could just rattle off their names. Others didn't know their colors. So just something as simple as when they would hand out at basic training, hand out rifles or weapons, they couldn't just put a label on the weapon with their name on it because they might not be able to read it.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So, you know, when people can't read or write or count, how can you hope to train them to use, you know, advanced weapon systems or fight in the model of the U.S. Army?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: It was just a really, really difficult thing to do. But even beyond that, there were just these enormous problems with corruption and a lack of motivation.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: We were spending so much money to build up the Afghan forces, you know, billions of dollars each year.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: You know, many Afghan commanders, you know, these warlords saw this as an opportunity to get rich, to line their pockets.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So even though the United States was supposed to be paying the salaries of these Afghan soldiers and police, the payments would go through their commanders.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And by and large, they would siphon off the money or just pocket it entirely.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And so when you have an army set up like that, you know, it's not much surprise that when things got tough against the Taliban, they would often throw in the towel or defect or just give up.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: You know, this really became an unsustainable approach to trying to win the war.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And U.S. officials knew it all along. You know, what's also notable is after 2014, so when Obama made that end of combat mission announcement, the years that followed were very deadly for Afghan civilians.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: From the Afghanistan papers you're reporting, you're sourcing there, what else did we learn about the atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Well, you would see this again and again, too, that throughout the Bush years and the Obama years, and frankly, continued in the Trump years when the airstrikes grew even more intense, that there would often be an airstrike.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: There would be claims of civilian casualties on the ground that the U.S. Air Force hit the wrong target. And time and again, the reflexive response from the U.S. military at the time would be, no, we were attacking terrorists.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: These were Taliban fighters. These were insurgents. And you would see this. There are a number of cases all throughout Afghanistan where U.S. military would insist they hadn't killed civilians, but in fact they had.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But the Afghanistan papers show that, again, put to lie this notion that there were subsequent investigations that were kept under wraps that found that, yes, they were civilians. No, it wasn't Taliban.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But again, the U.S. throughout the war really tried to suppress the findings of these investigations.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And not only are these individually tragic incidents where civilians were getting killed, innocent civilians, but it was backfiring strategically on the United States because the Afghan people would understandably get infuriated by how many civilians were getting killed in the war by the United States or by their allies in the Afghan government.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And so this really reduced popular support for the Afghan government and, frankly, for the U.S. military presence.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And so even though many Afghans saw the Taliban as brutal as not an ideology they wanted to support, they hated the Afghan government and the Americans even more.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So people who ordinarily wouldn't have supported the Taliban ended up supporting them or backing them or sending their children to fight for them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's move on to the Trump years. How did the peace deal that was eventually signed in February of 2020, what kind of trajectory did that deal set into motion?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Well, in the end, as we know, not a very good one. There was a peace deal that was finally reached in February of 2020 where the United States agreed to withdraw from Afghanistan.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Trump said he would pull out all troops by March of 2021. Of course, he lost re-election, so he wasn't around for the end of that.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But President Biden essentially agreed to abide by pretty close to that timeline that the United States would withdraw.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Now, there are a number of big flaws with this agreement. For one, the Taliban agreed, it promised it would no longer allow al-Qaeda into Afghanistan.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But, you know, there's not much evidence they've held up their end of the bargain to that. They also made a number of other promises about their dealings with the Afghan government and with civilians and that they wouldn't attack urban areas while the Americans left
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So the Taliban kept their end of the deal But the United States you know Trump was committed to pulling out So he kept drawing down U forces
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And Joe Biden was also committed to withdrawing. There was just a real frustration with how long this word lasted.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: It didn't have any popular support in the United States. So both Biden and Trump, you know, this may seem strange, but their policies in Afghanistan were very similar.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Both wanted to get the United United States out of the war. And, you know, the Taliban knew this. They sensed that the Americans were leaving and that they sensed that they had, that time was on their side.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And that, you know, as long as the Americans kept withdrawing, the Taliban was like, okay, we're not going to, we're not going to fight the Americans anymore. We're going to limit our fight to the Afghan government. We're not going to do anything that might make the Americans change their mind.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Because we know as soon as they leave, we're strong and the Afghan government's weak. And it's just, you know, a matter of time till we take over.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So they very patiently prepared for the moment when the Americans would finally pull out entirely.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And that moment came this summer. And when that happened, the Taliban had really laid the groundwork for a pretty strikingly fast takeover of the entire country.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And as we've seen, the Afghan government collapsed in short order and the Taliban took over.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And that's how we are where we are.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Was it strikingly fast? I mean, to you, knowing what you know, having studied these documents and these accounts in the Afghanistan paper so closely, were you still surprised by the speed with which the Taliban was able to take over?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Well, yes, I was. I mean, I don't think anybody could, I mean, think about it, you know, in eight days to have a whole army, a whole government just kind of evaporate and throw down their arms is, there aren't too many comparable cases like that in human history that happened pretty quickly.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: That said, it was clear that the Afghan army and police force were, you know, they were a rotten tree trunk, right? You know, it might look like a big tree that had cost $85 billion to plant and care for over the years.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But at the core, there was not much there. And it just took a little wind at the end to sort of topple it over.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So it was clear from the Afghanistan papers that the Americans knew that this colossus of an army and police force they had built up, you know, it was just beset by desertion, by corruption, lack of motivation to fight for the Afghan government.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And I think the best examples of this were a number of reports in recent months before the Taliban took over. The Taliban had really controlled the countryside and many Afghan police and army outposts were surrounded or, you know, they would give up.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And you'd hear these stories about how the Afghan soldiers or police would say, look, we had no choice. We didn't have food. We ran out of ammunition. We hadn't been paid in months and months and months.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And while that sounded tragic, you have to remember the United States is still spending billions of dollars a year to pay those people and to equip them.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So on one hand, it just didn't make any sense. Here's the Afghan army and police having units surrender because they said they didn't have ammunition or food.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Well, it wasn't for a lack of resources. The United States is still spending $3 or $4 billion a year to pay for their salaries, to equip them, and to feed them.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So clearly something's happening to that money somewhere along the way. It's getting pocketed by the warlords and commanders in Afghanistan and just leaving their own troops high and dry.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: But that really sums it up for you why I think the Afghan army collapsed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, Craig, what I find so fascinating is clearly, as revealed in the Afghanistan papers, there was this ongoing attempt internally to document, to assess, to quantify whether the mission was going successfully.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: How come all of that introspection and all of those accounts didn't lead to some sort of change in action? Were the accounts being ignored or were they just never shared up the chain?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Well, they were being shared up the chain. They were being ignored. But we see in the Afghanistan paper themselves time and time again, where army officers or diplomats would say, you know, they would write up the report saying that, you know, the Afghan army is doing terrible or, you know, we, this unit isn't capable of taking over security for this district, uh, or I can't certify, uh, that this brigade is ready to take over this province.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And this would get sent up the change of command or the chain of command, but then they would get sent back down or they would get reversed that the commanders would say, the American commanders say, nope, we're going to certify that they're ready.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Uh, we're going to, we have to, we have to stick with our plan to pull out eventually, and we have to perpetuate this fiction that the Afghan security forces are capable of taking over.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So this is documented time and time again, where at the lower levels, there were clear warnings, there were assessments, there were conclusions that things weren't going well, that these warning bells going off.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And yet the higher up the chain of command they went, the more resistance there was to accepting it. So people knew, but they didn't want to tell the public.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And none of the presidents wanted to admit that the war was failing. You have to remember, when we went into Afghanistan, there was such popular support for what was going on.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And the American people thought we had won this war within six months. We pretty much declared victory in Afghanistan by 2002.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So what American president wants to be known is the one who lost a war that once had popular support and had been won. Nobody wants to admit that. Nobody wants to take responsibility for failure. Nobody wants to blow the whistle to the public on how bad things are.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Everybody just kept covering it up and the war kept drifting along.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Biden has also said, now that a few days have passed, he said that there was no way to avoid chaos when withdrawing. Would you say that's a widely held opinion that chaos was unavoidable, or did others seem to think that there was a path to a peaceful, successful withdrawal of U.S. forces?
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Well, actually, I think in that sense, Biden's sort of telling the truth. I think there was a fear there was going to be chaos. I think there wasn't much faith that the Afghan government hold.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: I mean, the best case scenario was that the Afghan government might hold on for a few months, maybe even a year after the U.S. military withdrew. But all along, dating back to Obama's first term, this was the fear that if we pull out, the Taliban will take over and there will be a disaster, a humanitarian disaster.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: And how do we get out of this war? And that goes back to when Obama was talking about pulling out all troops by the end of his second term, and he wasn't able to keep that promise because he was worried about this chaos taking place.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: This is exactly the kind scenario he feared. But the problem was, again, the presidents weren't telling this to the American public. They kept reassuring them that we were making progress and turning the corner.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: So I think in the end, Biden may be right. Maybe there was no way to avoid that chaos that this was going to get ugly at the end.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: The problem was that isn't what his predecessors had said. And that wasn't even what Biden had said just a few weeks earlier.
--:-- Craig Whitlock: Craig Whitlock, thank you so much for your time and for your reporting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You bet. Thanks for talking with me.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Excerpts from Whitlock's book, The Afghanistan Papers, A Secret History of the War, are available now on Apple News.
