The Armstrong and Jetty Show. Well, we've been saying all day long that the wrong story is going to get most of the headlines. That is impeachment and or the Inspector General report coming out. The biggest story in America should be the Afghanistan papers that are out in the Washington Post. US officials misled public about Afghan war. Confidential documents reveal for eighteen years we were misled or lied to, uh, which I'm not surprised by, but I'm still very angry about.
Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, and we are very grateful that Craig carved us out a couple of minutes today on the day of the release of this blockbuster story. Craig, how are you, sir? Very good? Thanks for having me. What's our pleasure? I'm I'm so mad reading through this um we we had been saying on the air for years, what are we trying to ACCOMPLI It doesn't look to me like we
have a goal. It seems to me like if we left today would be the same result as if we left five years from a how or five years ago. It turns out behind the scenes, they were saying the same sorts of things, right, that's right. I mean those are pretty basic questions, and you think people in position of power would have been asking them, and it turns out they were, and they didn't have very good answers. And this has been going on for many, many years.
They didn't know why we were there, how it would end, or how would we would get out. How did you get this information? So this started over three years ago. I'm I'm a slow reporter, I guess, but we we filed freedom information at requests with an obscure government agency called the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan. We'd heard they had done an interview with Michael Flynn, the retired army general.
This was back in ten and Flynn was in the news, of course for a support of Trump during the presidential campaign. But we had heard Flynn had given this long, very blunt interview about Afghanistan and the were there. So we've put in a public records request and uh, we thought we were going to get it, and we had to file a lawsuit and this agency really dragged its feet
for three years. It turned out that in addition to the Flynn interview, there were hundreds more, and so we had to sue and file more freem Information Act requests for those two and it just it took a long time to pry them lose out of the government. They didn't want to cough them up. Well, it's encouraging in a way, Craig, that those documents exist at all. There seemed to have been a serious effort to understand what our strategies are, how they're working, and whether they're likely
to bear fruit. It's just that once many of those answers, or preliminary answers were learned, they were buried, which is frightening. Well, that's right. And the context of this, this was a special project that this Inspector General f Afghanistan had started. And the timing is important because everybody thought the war was coming to an end, right Obama had said I'm gonna pull all you troops out by the end of my presidency. Uh, and that's where people thought things were going.
We were drawing down the number of troops there. So they thought they'd do this project and interview hundreds of people to see what went wrong in Afghanistan, so that you know, in the future, if we ever got stuck in another war, we wouldn't repeat the mistakes. But of course it turned out we we didn't leave Afghanistan, and Obama left several thousand troops there and Trump sent several
thousand more and the war is still going on. So these were these were lessons that were not learned, and subsequently the government was trying very hard to to keep them suppressed. As you pointed out, do you get any sense that there was um much difference in the attitudes behind the scenes in the Obama administration versus the Bush administration, or did it just once you got at the level of the military kind of be the same direction of
let's just keep stumbling along doing our best. I think both of them were trying to to operate the war as best they knew. But what was striking is behind the scenes, both of them are equally guilty of not being forthcoming with the American people about how things were going.
I mean, we went back and we separately we got these memos that Rumsfeld had written, thousands of them from an outfit called the National Security Archive, which is a nonprofit group that had sued the Pentagon to get these memos.
Rumsfeld had written, there's one back in April of two thousand two, so six months after the war started, he writes a memo to several generals and he says, I may be impatient, in fact I know him a bit impatient, but we are never going to get the U. S. Military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave. Then
he ended it with one word, he said, help exclamation point. Again, this is back in two thousand two, well saying we're never going to get the troops out. Uh. And and that's a guy, you know, nobody was told this back then, and he was a Vietnam era guy, so he he understood how that momentum happened, that inertia, right. Craig Whitlock
is on the line of the Washington Post. Craig, it's it's disturbing if the generals or the politicians say, uh, you know, we have x number of this and we have pacified this amount of score mileage and therefore it's clear we are making progress. I mean, if if if their example is not good evidence, that's disturbing. But if the evidence itself was faked, up. That's just extra galling in.
According to your article, down to the lowest level, a lot of the statistics were being faked up, that's right, and you know, to be honest, I wasn't shocked by that. I covered the Pentagon in the West Military for several
years ro the post, particularly during the Obama administration. For that it was a foreign correspondent, and we would get told all the time by commanders, uh, you know, that they were making progress, and they would couch by saying that, you know, it's a tough fight and there's going to be setbacks. But they would throw out these statistics all the time, and they always they always seem cherry picked, you know, one's you know, meant to show a certain
certain portrait. But to see people admit in these interviews, these confidential interviews, that yeah, we we did doctor them up. We distorted the statistics. We only pulled the ones that made things look good and we buried the others. And we funneled these all the way up to the White House like that. You know, it's one thing to see it in black and white them admit it. Craig a thousand apologies. We are up against a hard break but this is some some serious, great journalism. It's stuff the
American people ought to be reading. And uh and we thank you not only for the work you did, but your time today. Man, thanks, thank you. Take care of