THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS

Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes a fascinating narrative that reveals how United States government officials deceived the American public by distorting statistics, hiding internal dysfunction and disarray, wasting taxpayer dollars, and masking the military's highly flawed (and often totally absent) strategy for a costly war that many senior officials privately concluded was unwinnable.

The United States' reasons for invading Afghanistan were clear: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet even when the U.S. removed the Taliban from power, the war did not end. Distracted by the war in Iraq, the U.S. military soon found itself in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict with a strange enemy in a country it did not understand. Instead of admitting failure, Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump continued to promise victory, sending more troops to Afghanistan even though they knew the best they could hope for was a stalemate.

In December 2019, The Washington Post delivered an extraordinary scoop of historical significance by publishing a confidential trove of government documents that revealed senior U.S. government officials systematically failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan for the duration of the 18-year conflict. The documents, numbering more than 2,000 pages, were dubbed the Afghanistan Papers. Whitlock reveals the extent of the lies and deceit by government officials in this new book.

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post and has covered the global war on terrorism for the Post since 2001 as a foreign correspondent, Pentagon reporter, and national security specialist. In 2019, his coverage of the war in Afghanistan won the George Polk Award for Military Reporting, the Scripps Howard Award for Investigative Reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Freedom of Information Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for international reporting. He has reported from more than sixty countries and is a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.