Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock appeared on MSNBC with host Medhi Hasan on Monday to talk about the explosive reporting he has done uncovering the secret documents the United States government kept about the war in Afghanistan.
In a series of award-winning reports, Whitlock documented how a series of behind-the-scenes interviews conducting during the Afghanistan war revealed that American foreign policy officials knew for years that they were losing the war, but nonetheless lied to the public to create an illusion of success.
"One of the most astonishing ones from these documents we obtained were the number of generals and ambassadors and White House officials who acknowledge they didn't have any clue as to how things worked in Afghanistan," he said. "They didn't have a strategy, and really they thought the war was unwinnable. Yet in public, they told the American people that they were making progress."
Whitlock said that this was a bipartisan problem, as former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all pushed out rosy projections about victory being at hand when the reality was far from that.
"You know, all along, just each president has said we're winning or we're going to win -- Bush, Obama and Trump -- all said we're going to win even though the signs were at best we could hope for a stalemate," he said. "So, no, there hasn't been an accounting and congress has been missing in action on that, too."
Watch the video below.
US Afghanistan war was a house of cards and officials 'didn't have any clue' what they were doingwww.youtube.com
