Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley defended the 18-year war in Afghanistan, saying that the war in Afghanistan has achieved its objectives to prevent another 9/11-style attack on the US soil.
“I know there’s an assertion out there of some sort of coordinated lie over the course of 18 years,” Milley told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday morning. “I find that a bit of a stretch. More than a bit of a stretch, I find that a mischaracterization.”
MIlley said that too many officials across too many agencies worked on Afghanistan to cover-up some sort of deliberate lie.
“I just don’t think you can get that level of coordination to do that kind of deception,” he said.
He said:
“Those were honest assessments and they were never intended to deceive either the Congress or the American people.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper also thought the idea of officials deliberately lying about the war wasn’t plausible.
“For 18 years now, the media has been over there. The Congress has been there multiple times. We’ve had the SIGAR there. We’ve had IGs there. This has been a very transparent—it’s not like this war was hiding somewhere and now all of a sudden there’s been a revelation.
“Some type of insinuation that there’s been this large-scale conspiracy is, to me, ridiculous,” Esper said.
This comes a few days after the publication of some classified documents revealed by the Washington Post showed that the US officials seemed to be privately telling a different narrative about the war than the government and military was telling to the public.
More than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished “confidential” documents were released by the Washington Post last Monday containing, in many cases, very candid appraisals by government officials, diplomats, military officers and aid workers of the post-2001 war effort in Afghanistan. Many of the reports were critical of how the war was conducted—on every level—and how falsely it was reported up the chain of command and to the public.
The Washington Post characterized the interviews as revealing that “senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”
