- President Biden, not long after he took office,
made a decision that he's going to complete
the withdrawal of US military troops from Afghanistan,
who have been there for almost 20 years.
- I will not send another generation of Americans
to war in Afghanistan.
- This is something that his three predecessors
had all tried to do.
- And, by the end of next year,
our war in Afghanistan will be over.
- Of course, thousands of troops remained in Afghanistan
and continued to fight and continued to die.
- A bombshell series of investigative
reports in The Washington Post.
- Of a trove of government documents.
- Officials deliberately misled the public about what, exactly,
was going on.
- My name's Craig Whitlock
and I'm an investigative reporter for The Washington Post
and an author of the book
"The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War".
The Afghanistan Papers are a collection of documents,
they're interviews, most of them,
with more than 400 people who played a direct role in the war.
And these were interviews done by a government agency
called the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan,
in which they were confidentially asking people
what went wrong during the war.
For our book "The Afghanistan Papers,"
one thing we've obtained were hundreds
of additional oral history interviews,
government reports, and diplomatic cables.
What was being told to the public
was completely at odds with reality on the ground.
- We have made remarkable progress.
- We're not losing a war out here, by any means.
- We are prevailing.
- They knew the war had been unwinnable.
There were literally commanding generals saying,
"We had no strategy.
Not just a bad strategy, we had no strategy at all".
Our initial goal in invading Afghanistan,
back in 2001, was very clear, at the time.
- On my orders,
the United States military has begun strikes.
- To try and eliminate al Qaeda
and prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks.
Al Qaeda was pretty much gone
within the first six months of the war.
It fled Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden went to Pakistan.
And then, it became blurrier.
Who were we fighting? Who was the enemy?
Was it just al Qaeda?
Was it the Taliban?
And that's where the mission really started to go awry,
was there was no real consensus
on what the United States was trying to achieve.
- Routing out the Taliban was important.
But building a school is equally important.
- From democracy to women's rights,
to infrastructure, to education.
- I think the United States got ahead of itself.
It tried to accomplish too much, too quickly.
The dollar cost was at least a trillion dollars,
but Afghanistan was so poor and destitute,
it couldn't possibly absorb that much money
in that short a period of time.
So, much of the money was wasted.
It went into people's pockets.
It corrupted many Afghan officials.
Afghan people became less and less confident
in their government.
Obama tried to go in with a lot more troops,
in hopes of persuading the Taliban
to cut a peace deal with the Afghan government.
The whole strategy was to train the Afghan security forces
so they could defend their own country,
so they could defeat the Taliban on their own.
The United States was really trying to build
a whole new military in its own image.
We're paying for up to 350,000 Afghan soldiers
and police officers.
The Taliban was, frankly, much more motivated,
much better organized,
and, as US military officials make clear in the Afghan Papers,
the Afghan security forces
really didn't have any motivation to fight.
More than 90% of the recruits in the Afghan Army were illiterate.
It was such an enormous task,
it was kind of doomed to failure from the beginning.
- The United States has conducted
an operation that killed Osama bin Laden,
the leader of al Qaeda.
- Since bin Laden was killed,
it's harder to say what we've accomplished in Afghanistan,
despite what the generals and diplomats
were telling the American public all along.
- Our troops will fight to win.
- President Trump was going to try and persuade the Taliban
to negotiate a peace deal.
- We are not nation building again.
We are killing terrorists.
- And the way he was going to try and get the Taliban
to the bargaining table was,
for lack of a better description,
he was going to try and bomb the hell out of them.
The number of air strikes became higher under Trump
than it even did under Obama,
when we had the surge of 100,000 troops,
and, in some respects, that worked.
The Taliban did come to the negotiating table.
- When I came to office,
I inherited a diplomatic agreement,
duly negotiated between the government of the United States
and the Taliban,
that all US forces would be out of Afghanistan.
It's time to end America's longest war.
It's time for American troops to come home.
- I think the tone coming out of President Biden
is different from what we've heard in the past.
Before, we always heard that we were going to win.
- Mr President, if this is a "Mission accomplished"
moment, what is it, in your view?
- No, there's no mission accomplished.
- How would you describe it?
- The mission was accomplished in that we got
Osama bin Laden and terrorism
is not emanating from that part of the world.
- The human cost is so staggering.
More than 2,300 US troops were killed in Afghanistan.
Tens of thousands more were wounded and came back.
This doesn't even include the much bigger cost borne
by the Afghan people.
Well over 100,000 Afghans have also died in the war.
This is a country that's been at war
or in conflict for more than 40 years,
and the United States spent all this money
and spent more lives trying to fix it,
but it really didn't accomplish a whole lot, on that front.