The New Yorker:
On September 14, 2001, speaking from the high altar of the National Cathedral, in Washington, D.C., President George W. Bush said, “Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” The distance of history eludes Americans still, especially since the consequences of what Bush set in motion after the 9/11 attacks are still unfolding. Yet the start of a reckoning can be seen in the Washington Post’s publication, this week, of “The Afghanistan Papers,” previously classified memos and interviews with U.S. officials—Pentagon figures, combat leaders, diplomats, and aid workers—who have long presided over the war in Afghanistan, now in its eighteenth year. The officials’ indictment of policies for which they themselves were responsible lays bare the massive institutional deceit that forms the heart of what the United States has done.
The interviews had been conducted by a special inspector general who was charged with assessing the “lessons learned” in Afghanistan. One lesson, according to John F. Sopko, of the inspector general’s office, is that “The American people have constantly been lied to.” That was the lesson of the Pentagon Papers, half a century ago: how the U.S. government refashioned itself, for the sake of a lost war, as a structure of lies. And it is the lesson here.
Early in the Afghanistan war, its architect, the ever-confident Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, wrote a memo in which he acknowledged, “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.” Years later, a general on whom President Barack Obama depended for advice admitted, about the conflict, “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
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