Afghanistan - The US Government's Miscalculation

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The us. Government has not calculated a comprehensive total of how much it spent on war related expenses, but most estimates exceed one trillion dollars. Over two decades, more than 775 thousand us. Troops deployed to afghanistan. Of these, more than 23 hundred died, and 21 thousand came home wounded. We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking, echoed army lieutenant general douglas lote who served as the white house warzar under bush and obama. They're just, we didn't have a strategy at all in the early years," said richard boucher, who served as top diplomat for south and central asia.

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.