This bombshell report by Craig Whitlock and the Washington Post reveals the mendacity of U.S. civilian and military leaders spanning the past three presidential administrations. Whitlock, a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and Post investigative reporter, plumbs the murky depths of the U.S.'s longest and costliest war, uncovering the government's sustained effort to mislead the American people on the war in Afghanistan. Based on more than 1,000 interviews and 10,000 documents--many of which were obtained from two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits the Post filed against the federal government--the book is a damning account of "what went wrong and how three consecutive presidents and their administrations failed to tell the truth."
After achieving a clear-cut goal of destroying al-Qaeda in Afghanistan post-9/11, the U.S. fell victim to mission creep and the absence of an overall strategy, which haunted three diverse administrations all loathe to admit defeat in the "graveyard of empires." The mountain of interviews and quotes from those directly involved--senior officials, generals, soldiers, aid workers and Afghani allies--form the bulk of Whitlock's report and serve as a necessary truth tonic to the toxic evasions and lies of the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, which Whitlock details extensively. In the words of one top diplomat under President Bush, "we did not know what we were doing." It is a refrain throughout much of the book, and readers will be astonished by the starkly contrasting nature of these revelations, set against the glib dishonesty of senior U.S. officials predicting "victory on the horizon." --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver