While the War in Afghanistan has been a catastrophe for most, it has been tremendously profitable for multinational corporations that do business with the U.S. military.

U.S. Government officials systematically deceived the American public about the reality of the War in Afghanistan over the past 18 years, according to an investigative report from the Washington Post published on Monday. The report, based on thousands of confidential documents, shows how officials distorted statistics, gave false announcements about progress in the conflict, and concealed evidence that they knew the war “had become unwinnable.”

“The American people have constantly been lied to,” John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, told the Post. Sopko’s agency, The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.

More than 2,400 American soldiers and more than 38,000 Afghan civilians have died in the 18-year war, and the New York Times estimates that the final cost of the conflict will be well over $2 trillion. The Times notes that the U.S. borrowed heavily to finance the war, meaning the U.S. will pay more than $600 billion in interest on loans through 2023, with years of debt payments to follow.

“It was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case,” wrote the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock, who authored the report with over 2,000 pages of notes from SIGAR’s interviews with people involved in the war effort, including generals, diplomats, aid workers, and Afghan officials. The documents were obtained after a three-year legal battle.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

The interviewees speak frankly of massive corruption, the absence of strategy, the waste of human life and public funds, and the misinformation campaign they maintained to mislead the public about the failures of the war. SIGRA blacked out around 85% of the interviewees’ names as the speakers did not know their candid views would be made public, although some notable names, like former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, made an appearance.

“For a while [the operational successes on a daily basis] might have made me feel good, but after 2006, for me, it was actually irrelevant because we were just killing so many people and it wasn’t making any difference at all,” Flynn, the director of intelligence for the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] in Afghanistan from June 2009 to October 2010, told his questioners.

“Commanders and policymakers, on the spectrum of news, they want always to be good news,” said Flynn. “Operational commanders, state department policymakers and Department of Defense policymakers are going to be inherently rosy in their assessments. They will be unaccepting of hard-hitting intelligence.”

U.S. Government’s History Of Lying About Wars

Some critics viewed the revelations as merely the latest episode in a long history of deceptions by the U.S. government and military about its foreign engagements.

“The US military & security state lie constantly, reflexively & by design,” tweeted journalist Glenn Greenwald. “The more important the issue, the more they lie. It’s horrific that we’re always required to treat their pronouncements as honorable & credible. It’s even more disturbing that they now fill news outlets.”

The most obvious parallel to Monday’s Afghanistan Papers is the Pentagon Papers, the massive trove of secret government documents leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 that revealed how the U.S. government systematically deceived the public about the United States’ engagement in Vietnam, as well as its bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia.

From the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to recent evidence indicating that the U.S. pressured the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to mislead the public about chemical weapon attacks in Syria, critics argue that these deceptive tactics continue to be used with minimal scrutiny from lawmakers or the media.

Current Situation In Afghanistan

The Washington Post’s report comes as peace talks between the United States and the Taliban have reinitiated after President Trump abruptly withdrew from months of negotiations in September after a suicide blast in Kabul killed an American soldier and 11 others. The Taliban carried out a series of almost daily attacks after the president’s cancelation.

During a trip to Afghanistan over the Thanksgiving holiday, Mr. Trump said the United States would maintain its military presence in Afghanistan until the two countries strike a deal or the U.S. has achieved a total victory, causing the Taliban to “want to make a deal very badly.” Trump said he wanted to reduce the American military presence in the country to 8,600 troops, down from its current number of around 14,000.

In September, the percentage of Afghans who described their life situation as “suffering” reached 85%, the highest amount recorded since Gallup began surveying public well-being. Of the respondents, most of whom were 35 or younger, 52% said they felt worry for much of the previous day, an increase from 42% in 2016. Only 36% of respondents said they laughed or smiled the previous day, another record for Gallup.

Gallup attributes Afghanistan’s status as the most miserable country in the world to the lack of safety and security and the inability to repair infrastructure that would allow the population to improve their economic well-being. Monday’s Washington Post report found that much of the U.S. spending on reconstruction programs was wasted on corruption and poorly planned projects.

“American dollars went to build hospitals that treated no patients, to schools that taught no students (and sometimes never existed at all) and to military bases the Afghans found useless and later shuttered,” wrote the New York Times’ Sarah Almukhtar and Rod Nordland. 

“If you look at the overall amount of money spent in Afghanistan, you see a tiny percentage of it went to help the people of the country,” Robert Finn, the United States ambassador to Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, told investigators. “It almost all went to the military and even most of that money went for local militia and police training.”

The Afghan Army’s high casualty and desertion rates force it “to train new recruits totaling at least a third of their entire force every year,” as per the Times.

Despite $10 billion invested in counternarcotics operations, Afghanistan is now the source of 80 percent of illegal global opium production.

A senior source in the Afghan government provided a series of confidential documents to the Nation that warn of the rampant corruption in the mining industry and the likelihood of greater violence by the Taliban and other groups if the U.S. pursues increased mineral exploitation.

“Exploitation of the country’s resources seems destined to further inflame an already unstable climate,” wrote Loewenstein. “The Trump administration likely knows this but doesn’t care, so long as American companies are making a profit.”