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The groundbreaking investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America's longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock.

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. 

Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military became mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory. 

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. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground. 

Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander - and didn’t want to make time to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are”. His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” 

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.

"The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War" by Craig Whitlock is a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism that exposes the hidden history of the United States' longest war. Based on a trove of more than 2,000 pages of secret government documents, the book provides a comprehensive and unflinching account of the war in Afghanistan from its inception in 2001 to the present day.

Whitlock, a Washington Post reporter, spent years interviewing hundreds of government officials, military leaders, and ordinary Afghans to piece together the real story of the war. His findings are both shocking and sobering, revealing a conflict that was characterized by mismanagement, deception, and a fundamental lack of understanding of Afghanistan's history and culture.

The book begins with the Bush administration's decision to invade Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Whitlock shows how the invasion was driven by a desire for revenge and a belief that the Taliban regime was harboring al-Qaeda terrorists. However, the U.S. government soon found itself embroiled in a complex and costly war that it was ill-prepared to fight.

Whitlock reveals how the U.S. military was plagued by a lack of intelligence, poor planning, and a revolving door of commanders. He also exposes the widespread corruption and waste that plagued the Afghan government, which was propped up by billions of dollars in U.S. aid. As a result, the war in Afghanistan dragged on for years, with no clear end in sight.

In "The Afghanistan Papers," Whitlock provides a devastating indictment of the U.S. government's handling of the war in Afghanistan. He shows how the war was based on a series of miscalculations and false assumptions, and how it has had disastrous consequences for both Afghanistan and the United States. The book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the true story of the war in Afghanistan.