"The Afghanistan Papers"

The Afghanistan Papers, published by the Washington Post after a three-year court battle, portrays a policy of deliberate misinformation, wishful thinking, massaging of figures and cruel waste of lives – civilian and military – and a trillion dollars spent in pursuit of an unwinnable war.

According to Paul Kawika Martin, senior director of policy and political affairs at Peace Action, replying to "The Afghanistan Papers." The report exposes how top officials spanning the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations waged a deliberate misinformation campaign to conceal the total failures of the 18-year war in Afghanistan.

The documents based upon transcripts and notes from over 400 interviewers between 2014 and 2018  revealed that officials continually misled the public about the war's success, there was no strategy, their efforts fueled corruption, and the U.S. was clearly losing ground as well as tens of thousands of lives and at least $1 trillion.

Ryan Crocker, who was the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul from 2011 to 2012, said in a 2016 interview, "Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption."