Then a Rumsfell Donald Runel to Cobble

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Rumsfeld said major combat operations in afghanistan were over a year and a half into the war. That was a lie, according to senior army officials on the ground at the time. There was never an order to end combat operations. We still had lots combat operations going on,. Things didn't change. So here is romsfeld saying one thing for public consumption that he knew was false. And this is yet another example of it. Ther they're trying to make the american people think everything's in hand - when actually things were slowly but gradually going in the wrong direction. I'm fascinated by obviously brilliant, super smart guys, and how they get themselves trapped in these seemingly

Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains startling revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war, from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. The Afghanistan Papers is a shocking account that will supercharge a long overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.