Prominent American officials, many of whom publicly had said the war in Afghanistan was succeeding, detailed the many missteps and failures of a conflict that has lasted 18 years and claimed 2,300 U.S. lives in thousands of pages of documents released Monday by The Washington Post.
"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn't know what we were doing," Douglas Lute, a retired three-star Army general who served in the Bush and Obama administrations, told investigators in 2015.
"What are we trying to do here?" Lute asked. "We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.
"If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction ... 2,400 lives lost," he added. "Who will say this was in vain?"
More than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly, since 2001, the Post reports.
Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department data cited in the report.
According to the Post, the interviews underscored how three U.S. presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump — and their military commanders "have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan."
Since 2001, three U.S. agencies — the Defense Department, State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development — have spent or appropriated $934 billion to $978 billion for Afghanistan, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated for the Post by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
"What did we get for this $1 trillion effort?" Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL, asked government interviewers. "Was it worth $1 trillion?
"After the killing of Osama bin Laden [in 2011]," Eggers later added, "I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave, considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan."
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