We didn’t know what we were doing’

New York Times.

Thousands of pages of documents detailing the war in Afghanistan released by The Washington Post paint a stark picture of missteps and failures — as well as misleading public statements about how the war was going.

After a short-term victory over the Taliban and Al Qaeda in early 2002, the U.S. military’s efforts in the country grew hazy. Even as the Taliban grew and troops voiced concerns about the U.S. strategy’s shortcomings, senior officials almost always said progress was being made. But the documents show they knew otherwise.

Details: The Post said the documents come from 2,000 pages of Pentagon interviews conducted between 2014 and 2018 to write a series of unclassified “Lessons Learned” reports. They were released after a long legal battle with the government’s watchdog for the war.

Quotable: “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” said one retired general who helped oversee the war in Bush and Obama administrations.

Cost breakdown: The Times found there was little to show for the $2 trillion spent on the 18-year war. More than 38,000 Afghan civilians and 2,400 American soldiers have died.