- It's been 20 years since the attacks of 9/11 and the start of the war on Afghanistan.

Now as American combat troops are leaving Afghanistan for the last time, we sit down with an author who has pieced together a secret history of the war.

He's Craig Whitlock, this week on "Story In The Public Square."

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to a "Story In The Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with The Providence Journal.

- Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests, authors, reporters, journalists, and more to make sense of the big stories shaping public life in the United States today.

This week we're joined by Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter with the Washington Post whose new book, "The Afghanistan Papers" is available now.

Craig, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks very much for having me, Jim.

- Craig, you and I spoke earlier this week about the book and I think I said to you then that I think this is maybe one of the most important books that I've read in some time.

Tell us a little bit about it from that 30,000 foot perspective.

- Sure.

So "The Afghanistan Papers" are what we call at The Washington Post a collection of documents.

These are hundreds of interviews that a federal agency had conducted with people who were involved in the war in Afghanistan over the 20 year course of the war.

These were interviews with generals, diplomats, aid workers, people who worked in the White House and the interviews were kept private.

They weren't released to the public and once the Washington Post found out about them, we sued the government to obtain them because we thought it was really important to find out what these people who were involved in the war were saying about what went wrong in Afghanistan or what lessons should be learned.

And what we found was pretty striking.

But in a nutshell, what they were saying in private about how the war had gone was completely at odds with what the public had been told throughout the Bush administration, the Obama administration and the Trump administration.

In these documents, in these interviews, again, you had generals, ambassadors and other US officials complaining that they really didn't have a strategy that was functional.

They overspent by billions and billions of dollars in Afghanistan, that the war had kind of gotten hopeless and unwinnable after several years.

This is completely different from the story they were telling the public, which they were always telling the public that the US was making progress, that it was turning the corner, that things were getting better, that this strategy is working.

So this complete contradiction is really at the heart of what "The Afghanistan Papers" are.

- Yeah, I don't want, I don't want to get too meta about this because we want to get into some of the specifics of the book, but is this an indictment of our military leadership, an indictment of our political leadership and indictment of us as citizens because this war lasted for 20 years and as you document there wasn't really a plan for winning from its earliest days.

- That's right.

And I think it's an indictment of all of the above, but particularly of the political leaders and of our military leadership.

Because again, these people have been constantly reassuring the American people that things were going well, that even though they, the taxpayers in the United States were spending hundreds of billions of dollars in war in Afghanistan, they said, it was money well spent that the objectives were correct and again, that we were making progress.

So you can certainly say that the American public should have tuned in or paid more attention as the war went on, but you really can't blame them in the sense that I think the public knew something was amiss.

I mean, after all, if you have a war that that drags on for 20 years, and is the longest war in American history, by definition things aren't going well.

So I think the American people knew that, but what's really, again, that still stands out in "The Afghanistan Papers" are the depths to which US officials admitted that this was an unwinnable war.

You know, again, completely different from the story they were telling in public.

- Were any of the latest military or political saying that in public?

I mean, you had access to a lot of previously classified documents, internal communications and things the public never saw, but were there any instances of somebody raising his or her hand and saying, "You know what folks, this is not winnable?"

"We're not winning."

- It's extremely rare.

Really the only general who said this was a army general named David McKiernan, who is the was commander at the end of the Bush administration and the start of the Obama administration, so 2008 and 2009.

At that point, the war wasn't going well, the Taliban was resurgent, the United States had its hands full still with the war in Iraq.

Things weren't going well in Afghanistan at all.

And McKiernan started to say this publicly, when reporters would ask him, are we winning?

He would say, "Well, you know, things, "aren't going very well, that I need more troops.

"The direction is going the wrong way."

Now he would say, "We can win.

"We can get back on track," but he was blunt for a general admitting that things weren't going well.

Well then what happened to General McKiernan is he got fired in 2009 by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.

What was odd was when Gates and Mullen announced McKiernan's firings and surprised the Pentagon Press Corps by doing this, they really didn't give an explanation for why McKiernan was fired, or at least not a very satisfying one.

They just said they wanted a change in leadership, a new phase, some new thinking behind the war.

But what was strange was that Gates and Mullen had both hired McKiernan just a year before.

They had put him in the job, they never issued any public complaints about the job he was doing but all of a sudden, one day he gets sacked.

And in the interviews we found as part of our research with "The Afghanistan Papers," McKiernan had himself had sort of seen this coming.

He had spoken to other army officers and said, "Maybe we've done too good of a job explaining just how bad "things are over here."

And he was talking about internally and internal channels, but also to the public.

So whether they intended it or not, Gates and Mullen at the Pentagon had sent this message to other generals, which was, "Don't say things aren't going well, "don't be critical of the strategy.

"Don't make the American public think we might not win.

"If you do that, you could lose your job."

And sure enough, for the next 10, 12 years, no other general repeated what McKiernan did.

- So these leaders, both political and military, knew the cost of the war in terms of obviously taxpayer dollars, but also in terms of numbers of American lives, lost soldiers, soldiers who returned alive, but who were physically or mentally wounded, some for life.

Was there any moral or ethical concern about that?

That here we are waging a war that we know is not winnable, or we at least don't have a strategy to win and yet we're causing all this suffering and death.

And also to innocent people in Afghanistan.

- I think there is some of that in "The Afghanistan Papers."

Maybe not as much as you might think, but one of the most striking documents I read was a transcript of an interview with Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute.

He was the war czar as his title was informally known under both Bush and Obama in the White House.

He was serving on the National Security Council, but in his interview, he was lamenting just how much money was spent in Afghanistan, how it was wasted.

We were throwing money at problems because we didn't know how to solve them.

But at one point he said, "2,400 lives lost, "who will say that these lives were lost in vain?"

And he was referring to the number of US troops who have died during war in Afghanistan and for an army general to even suggest that any US service member may have sacrificed their life in vain is just something that was shocking to me, but is unheard of in the US military because the military always honors the sacrifices that it's service members have given to their country.

And Lute, don't get me wrong, he wasn't saying they wasted their lives or that it was in vain but just for him to raise the question, I think does show that he and others were really grappling with the question you raised.

- Is there any historical precedent for going into a war and sustaining a war for, I mean, for this incredibly long period of time without having a strategy for winning a precedent, both in this country or across the globe?

- Maybe even before answering that question, it's one of the alarming revelations in the book is that from the earliest days of the war, there appears to have been no strategy for victory.

So, maybe unpack that a little bit for us and then, to Wayne's question about, is there any, is there any precedent for that?

- Sure, so that was something that really stood out to me.

One of the first interviews I read in "The Afghanistan Papers" was with an Army General named Dan McNeil.

He was a two-time war commander in Afghanistan during the Bush administration.

And he was very blunt.

He says, "We didn't have a strategy."

He didn't say we'd a misguided strategy, or we needed to refine it or it just had some mistakes, he just said "We didn't have a strategy."

He says his "Marching orders were to go to Afghanistan, "to hunt terrorists and to kind of keep a lid on the place."

But he says, "We didn't have a strategy."

And I thought maybe this was an outlier.

Maybe he was just spouting off a little bit, but there was another interview with his successor in Afghanistan, a British General named David Richards.

He commanded both the NATO troops in Afghanistan and US troops.

He said the same thing, he said, "We didn't have a strategy."

He said, "We had a lot of tactics, "but we didn't have a proper strategy."

By that, they mean, we really didn't have objectives defined, well-defined goals, what we were trying to accomplish.

We were just over there fighting an enemy that we really didn't understand, and I'm not a trained military historian, but I can't think of another war where you had generals, after the fact, say that we didn't have a strategy at all.

Not even, not a very good strategy, but just, we didn't have one.

But I think that kind of sums up the war in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies were over there fighting a war but after a while, we didn't really know what we were trying to accomplish.

There was no really well-defined end game to what we were trying to get to.

We were fighting an enemy that wouldn't go away and so we kept fighting.

- Craig, I got from your book in multiple administrations, again, that the military officers prosecuting the war, kept looking to the White House for strategic leadership and strategic guidance.

Why was, was there just a disconnect in language between the civilians who run the military and the military officers who execute the orders?

Why wasn't there a strategy?

- You know, it's the million dollar question and that frankly, it's hard not to untangle.

I think it's something that the civilian leadership and the military leadership were equally guilty of.

I mean, one thing you read about with the Obama administration is Obama in particular and his civilian aides were worried that the military leadership was trying to scheme role them, was trying to push them into sending more troops all the time, that they always wanted to send more troops, more weapons, spend more money.

And they felt kind of hemmed in by this, that if they had resisted this or cut things short, that they would be seen as soft on national security.

So there's a real tension there throughout all the administrations between the civilian leadership and the military leadership.

During the Bush administration, there is this incredible tension between Donald Rumsfeld, who was the Defense Secretary and the military commanders.

Frankly, the opposite was true during the Bush administration.

The military commanders were petrified of Rumsfeld.

There were some interviews with military officers in Kabul who said they would have this weekly teleconference, video conference with Rumsfeld and they would spend all week getting ready for this conference with Rumsfeld, but that they were trembling in their boots about it because they're so worried Rumsfeld would ask tough questions or yell at them or make them feel like they didn't know their job.

But this British officer who was present during the meeting said he was shocked.

He said, "You know, these are American, "top notch, military officers, "but they were like the jellies when they got in front "of Rumsfeld," was his description.

So yes, there was this constant tension between the military and civilian leadership.

But again, neither one of them could quite get it right.

They were both guilty of not figuring out where they were going.

- So we're talking historical precedents.

Did any of these leaders, military and political, not look to the relatively recent past before 9/11, which was the Soviet occupation and fight in Afghanistan, which ended in complete disaster for the Soviet Union.

I mean, that would seem to be, you know, large as a lesson.

Did anyone heed that, care about it?

What did you find out?

- Well, yes they did.

And that's what's incredible as they were well aware of what happened with the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld would write these memos, these classified memos, all the time, where he'd warn people at the Pentagon.

He'd say, "We can't send more troops.

"We have to keep a light military footprint in Afghanistan "because we don't want to end up like the Russians did.

"We're worried that the Afghans have this history "of teaming up to expel foreign invaders.

"They don't want to be occupied, "so we have to keep the number, "our troop levels really low in Afghanistan."

So they were aware of it, but they still in the end, fell into the same trap where this insurgency slowly built up over time.

And the only thing they knew to do was to send in more troops to try and defeat it.

But really the same thing happened as with the Russians, except for us, it took 20 years instead of 10 years to decide that we needed to get out.

- So that notion of getting out, so we didn't have a strategy to win, but over the success of administrations, again, both Republican and Democrat, there was a increasingly a notion of, we need a way to get out that to borrow a term from the 2000 campaign, sounds a lot like nation building.

Can you explain that for us?

- Right, and so this, I think the Bush administration belatedly acknowledged that the only way the United States was going to be able to withdraw is to stabilize the country enough that the government in Kabul could defend itself, defend itself against the Taliban or any other insurgents or Al-Qaeda or whoever.

So there was this recognition that we needed to help build up the Afghan government, so it could provide basic services to its people, but also most importantly, to build up the Afghan army and police.

So there is this attempt to spend an awful lot of money building up this massive Afghan security force.

And Obama's administration took that to the next level to try to build them up even more.

So this was the idea that we had to build up the Afghan government so they could take care of their own problems but over 20 years, that failed that even though there were all these warning signs, year after year, that what we were trying to do wasn't working, that the Afghan army wasn't effective, that it was incompetent, that there is a lot of corruption.

We kept frankly, spending, throwing good money after bad.

And that's another major reason why the war lasted as long as it has.

- So despite that overall failure of building up Afghanistan, were there any successes along the way during the 20 years?

Any areas where the lives of people in Afghanistan were improved by our presence there?

- There were certainly some successes, but whether they're enduring successes is a whole nother question.

The United States and its allies spent billions of dollars building up roads, dams, electricity, schools, building up Afghan government institutions.

But most of those successes as they were, that were often touted to the American people and to the rest of the world, they didn't last.

The roads fell apart.

They got bombed.

The dams didn't work.

We'd build these schools, this was a major thing, particularly the Obama administration would do, is build schools, build schools, build schools to show that Afghan children regain education, particularly Afghan girls.

An Afghanistan paper show that military officers would say we built these schools where nobody asked for them and they sit empty or the Taliban would take them over, turn them into bomb-making factories.

So I don't mean to minimize the effort that went in to try and transform Afghanistan, but in terms of enduring successes, there aren't that many we can point toward.

And certainly whether there'll be there in five or 10 years from now is a very open question.

- You know, Craig, you, the title of your book, "The Afghanistan Papers" evokes "The Pentagon Papers."

And I'm guessing that was not an accident.

- Not at all and there are some parallels, but some real differences with "The Pentagon Papers," "The Pentagon Papers" of course, was a classified history of what happened in the Vietnam War that was commissioned by then Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, during the Johnson administration.

This was kept secret.

It was classified.

There are only a few copies that were kept.

It was a little unclear why McNamara asked for this to be done.

But finally they were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg who worked at a defense department think tank and was one of the authors of "The Pentagon Papers."

And first, the New York Times and the Washington Post and other newspapers published these, and they really transformed the public's understanding of what happened in Vietnam, but at its core, what it showed was that the government had lied to the American people about what it had done in Vietnam, how the US got stuck in the war and above all, how the war was going during the 14 years we were there.

That's really the parallel with "The Afghanistan Papers."

"The Afghanistan Papers" were not originally classified.

Unlike "The Pentagon Papers," they consist almost entirely of interviews with people involved in the war.

But again, at the core, they showed that the government lied to the American people about what had happened and how we got stuck in this quagmire there, but it was completely different from what was being said publicly.

- So talk about The Freedom of Information Act.

The Washington Post used that in suing the government and just talk in general about how that was so important to you, but also sort of an Uber view of why that Freedom of Information Act is so important to journalism and to the American public.

- Yeah, so I'll tell a little story how we got started on this.

It wasn't that we had set out to write this history of the War in Afghanistan.

This was in 2016, I'd gotten a tip that Michael Flynn, who was an Army General, he had just retired.

He was getting well known at that point for serving on Donald Trump's campaign.

He was a guy who showed up at the Republican National Convention, shouting, "Lock her up, lock her up," about Hillary Clinton.

But we heard he had given this interview to this federal agency about the War in Afghanistan.

I wanted to see what he had said because Flynn was known when he was in the military as, as a pretty blunt spoken, straight shooter when things weren't going well.

So we put in a simple public records request with this federal agency for a transcript of what Flint had said.

And the agency at first said, "Sure, we'll get it to you in a few weeks."

Long story short, they dragged their feet and they said, "No, we're not going to give it to you."

Trump won election.

And it was clear that Flynn was going to work for him so they really put the clamps on this interview.

We had to sue under the Freedom of Information Act, which entitles the public to have access to government records.

We won, it took awhile, but we won and we saw Flynn's interview.

And along the way we heard that it wasn't just Flynn's interview, there were hundreds of other interviews done.

And by then we knew this was a real story.

We wanted to know what all these people had said about what had gone wrong in Afghanistan.

So we had to sue the government again for all the other interviews, and it took us more than three years, but we finally won and we got these documents and we published all of them online so the public could see for themselves because after all these are public records that the public paid for and the public has a right to see them and to see what people said about what went wrong in the war.

- So among the items you obtain hundreds of pages of previously classified memos that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote and received that he called snowflakes, which is sort of an odd name to begin with.

Tell us about the snowflakes.

I mean, we have a different understanding of it in the current era, but what were they and why were they important to, to the book and to your account?

- So snowflakes are memos and the reason he called them snowflakes, is Rumsfeld, I'll give you an example.

He dictated these memos to people in the Pentagon, and he'd do these one page memos and there were so many of them, he'd do dozens of them a day that they would fall on people's desks (Wayne laughing) and these white pieces of paper, and so they called them snowflakes.

And they're, Rumsfeld, just sometimes it'd be a few paragraphs, sometimes it'd be a little longer, but they were pretty succinct.

And Rumsfeld had actually dictated thousands and thousands of these during his time as Defense Secretary.

There was an outfit called the National Security Archive.

It's a private nonprofit based at George Washington University had found out that Rumsfeld had written all these snowflakes and he'd actually included a few of them in his memoir.

So under the Freedom of Information Act, once again, the National Security Archive had sued The Pentagon for all of Rumsfeld's snowflakes, or like 60,000 pages of them.

And they were kind enough to share the ones with me that he wrote about Afghanistan.

And for the first time, we were able to cite a lot of those in our reporting in the Afghanistan papers.

And once again, like the other interviews, they showed that what Rumsfeld was seeing in his snowflakes, seeing in his memos, was completely at odds with what he was seeing in public and I think some of the best examples of that were two years into the war, Rumsfeld sent a memo to his top general saying, "I have no visibility into who the enemy is in Afghanistan," which is pretty shocking for the defense secretary.

And there was another one where he warned them and said, "If we don't get a plan to get out of Afghanistan soon, "we'll be stuck there forever," which is in fact what happened, but this was completely different what he was saying in public.

- What do you say to those who might not uncharitably say, "Yeah, but you know, military commanders, "they can't say too much in public because you don't want "to give any advantage to the adversary."

- But that's not what happened here, Jim.

What they were telling the American people in public was that they were making progress.

They weren't talking about specific battles or operations or for secret missions or things like that and they needed to withhold important details of those, they were just telling the American people why we were in Afghanistan, why the war needed to continue, why we needed to keep sending more troops, and most importantly, they reassured the public that the war was going well, it was going in the right direction, that this would pay off in the end.

And yet when you read these documents in private, you find out they didn't believe that, where if they did, they had so many more doubts than they were expressing in public that if people had known all along the reservations and doubts they had held, the public opposition in the war would have been far, far greater and frankly, the war wouldn't have gone on as long as it did.

- You know, we got just about a minute left in this and I feel like we've just scratched the surface and we could keep talking with you all day.

But I'm curious now, President Biden has announced the end of America's military involvement in Afghanistan.

I'm wondering, you know, as we approach the 20th anniversary of the initiation of combat activities in that country, what's the legacy of the Afghanistan War?

- Well, we don't know.

It's going to play out and we may not know for 10 or 20 years.

It really is a question of what happens in Afghanistan, who holds power there.

There's going to be war going on in Afghanistan, unfortunately for the foreseeable future among the Afghans themselves.

There's going to be involvement from foreign military powers, whether at a distance or whether it's financial support.

I mean, the United States, isn't, maybe the troops have withdrawn from Afghanistan, but we're still spending billions of dollars to prop up the government in Kabul.

So it's not that the United States has washed its hands entirely of its involvement in Vietnam, or certainly of its responsibility for what's going on there.

You know, I know it's a cliche, but as they say in the military, it's a lot easier to start a war than it is to end one.

And certainly that's what's happened here.

- That is a powerful place for us to leave it.

Craig Whitlock, the book is "The Afghanistan Papers."

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you want to know more about "Story In The Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit Pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story In The Public Square."

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