Author Description

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. 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.The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.More storiesTHE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS Part 1: At war with the truthPART 1At war with the truthU.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.PART 2Stranded without a strategyBush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.PART 3Built to failDespite vows the U.S. wouldn't get mired in "nation-building," it has wasted billions doing just thatPART 4Consumed by corruptionThe U.S. flooded the country with money -- then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueledPART 5Unguarded nationAfghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruptionPART 6Overwhelmed by opiumThe U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turnINTERVIEWS AND MEMOSExplore the documentsKey insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. historyPOST REPORTS'We didn't know what the task was'Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael FlynnTHE FIGHT FOR THE DOCUMENTSAbout the investigationIt took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview recordsMORE STORIES A visual timeline of the war Interviewees respond Share your story about the warIn the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfa