The Vietnam War had its "Pentagon Papers", the leak of confidential documents revealing the lies of successive American governments on the course of the conflict. Nearly fifty later, it is the turn of the secrets and failures of the war in Afghanistan to be exposed, in the thousands of documents analyzed and published by the Washington Post, Monday, December 9th.
This information confirms questions raised in recent years about the merits of the US engagement in Afghanistan and shows that the promise of President George W. Bush in October 2001 to learn from the Vietnam War has not really been held.
Eighteen years of war, more than 775,000 US troops deployed, 2,300 killed, 20,500 wounded, tens of thousands of victims on the Afghan side, hundreds of billions of dollars spent: all for war " unwinnable ", With changing goals and dubious results, led by three successive presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
"Who will say that this war was waged in vain? "
Interviews of hundreds of politicians, military personnel and diplomats carried out between 2014 and 2018 by the supervisory authority responsible for the reconstruction of Afghanistan and obtained by the American newspaper after several years of legal proceedings, depict their disillusionment with the relevance of the conflict, their doubts about the American strategy and the chances for the United States to emerge victorious. They also reveal the efforts of the Republican and Democratic administrations to present to public opinion a biased image of a conflict that has become increasingly unpopular.
But " who will say that this war was waged in vain? In 2015, Douglas Lute, a general responsible for monitoring the White House conflict under the Bush and Obama administrations, wondered: If public opinion knew the extent of the malfunctions … "
This publication comes as Donald Trump pledged to " end wars without end And that the United States resumed negotiations with the Taliban in Doha (Qatar) on Saturday (December 7th) after a brutal break-up of the dialogue in September. The Taliban demand the withdrawal of some 13,000 US troops still deployed on the spot.
