Based on thousands of interviews, reports, and documents uncovered by The Washington Post in 2019, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War provides an in-depth look at America's longest war that is nevertheless still accessible, nuanced, and even sympathetic. Craig Whitlock takes what could have easily been a dry a confusing tome--an expectation that has undoubtedly dissuaded many curious readers from picking it up--and instead delivers a straightforward analysis of the twenty-year military conflict, beginning in the wake of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks and ending with President Biden's announcement for a complete withdrawal in 2021.

Focusing most heavily on the Bush years, Whitlock's reporting makes it clear how deep in over their heads the Americans were, not only with eradicating potential security threats in Afghanistan, but also in preventing chaos from ravaging the country upon leaving. None of the four presidents who oversaw operations in Afghanistan--Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden--had ever served in uniform, and all found themselves taking inspiration from military leaders who had spent most of their careers determined to win this war. Rather than greed or hubris, Whitlock attributes the USA's blusters to idealism and naivety. Wave after wave of efforts were made to connect with the Afghan people and help establish a functioning democracy in place of Afghanistan's tribal war lords, typically to no avail. The frustration was endless: the longer the military stayed in Afghanistan, the more demoralizing a potential withdrawal became. This sunk-cost fallacy kept the war going for two decades, even as it became ever more clear that the cultural divide between the two nations was too great to bridge.

Each successive president grew more desperate to leave Afghanistan behind, and the sections on each man's tenure are, in turn, shorter than the last. This unfortunately causes the last third of The Afghanistan Papers to feel rushed and not nearly as thorough as the earlier chapters. How operations in Afghanistan failed under Bush and Obama are explored in great detail, but the process that led to its conclusion is not given as much analysis (nor does the book cover the chaotic and controversial withdrawal itself). Regardless, Whitlock does a marvelous job of taking political minutiae and turning it into something we the audience can easily understand. The Afghanistan Papers is an excellent resource for anyone yearning to know what went wrong during our greatest forever war, and why it took the United States so long to finally accept defeat.

Excellent! This book is full of details regarding the decision-making and conditions in and around the US involvement in Afghanistan from 9/11 until present. Drawing heavily from various interviews of key figures, this book contains an open, raw assessment of the many trials and shortcomings the US has encountered and created in pursuing activities in the country. Very informative.

Mr. Whitlock chronicles a sad steady decline of leadership responsibility concerning the twenty-year war just now ending. The sheer volume of tax dollars let alone lives wasted by thoughtless meandering do-gooder policy is shown from the first page. It is a slow-moving expensive train wreck with costs still yet to come.

The problem with calling anything The Afghanistan Papers is that they will always exist in the shadows of the Pentagon Papers and the standard that the Pentagon Papers set. Because of the standards of the time, the Pentagon Papers was a jarring political event that burst into the open the idea that the American people aren’t getting the full story here. Forty years later, the battlefield and the American people have changed.

I would contend that we are a far more cynical and skeptical nation and have a mistrust of government to the point where I ask “Is anything in the Afghanistan Papers really all that shocking”? That political and military figures disagree, often times using colorful language does not exactly shatter Earth in 2021. Actually, I would be seriously concerned if there wasn’t colorful language at this point.

It’s a very interesting insiders type look at the Afghanistan conflict that does cover a lot of interesting ground, but calling it the Afghanistan Papers sounds like more of a marketing ploy than this book containing anything that will carry a shock close to the Pentagon Papers for the reader.

In a master stroke of timing, Craig Whitlock (Washington Post reporter, winner of three Pulitzers) has a new book about the war released as the last U.S. troops depart Kabul. My view of the war was that it was a quagmire, and we should have left years ago...and OMG The Afghanistan Papers made me realize that things were even worse than I imagined.

After 9/11, there was near-universal support for military action to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent any more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. It didn’t take long for the Taliban forces to be removed from power...but then no one seemed to know what to do next.

President Bush was the first of four Presidents in charge of the efforts in Afghanistan. But he soon became so involved in Iraq that Afghanistan was little more than a distraction. Reading about this period was shocking. I remember hearing that Bush didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims -- but even worse, he didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander—and didn’t want to make time to meet with him.

The U.S. “jumped into the war with only a hazy idea of whom it was fighting -- a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose notes were a huge resource for the author, admitted he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are” The “military drew little distinction between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, categorizing them all as bad guys...Just because someone carried an AK-47 didn’t automatically make them a combatant.” Seriously, no one wore uniforms, everyone looked the same, and everyone kept trying to determine who the bad guys were. Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” YIKES!

The military leaders had no specifics or benchmarks for achieving lofty goals that were unclear to everyone and constantly shifting. The only constant was the flow of money that was poured into the country, but seemed to all go to corrupt leaders, drug lords, and/or contractors.

Once the war was really rolling, no President wanted to be the one to admit it was a failure. After all, it had begun as a just cause, right? So there we were, in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country we did not understand. The Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they KNEW there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory.

The book presents stunning details from people in the White House and the Pentagon, journalists, and many soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. Universally, they all say that any “strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government.” More than 1,000 people (all of whom knew that the government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground) contributed to this book, both through interviews and notes from the time as well as tons of documents unearthed by the author as he investigated and pursued facts via FOIA requests.

SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, has a “Lessons Learned” Program (LLP), which “identifies and preserves lessons from the U.S. reconstruction experience in Afghanistan, and makes recommendations to Congress and executive agencies on ways to improve efforts in current and future operations. To date, LLP has issued 13 reports, including 11 full lessons learned reports. To produce these reports, LLP staff conduct hundreds of interviews—in Afghanistan, Europe, and throughout the United States—and review thousands of documents. These reports have identified over 195 specific findings and lessons and made over 146 recommendations to Congress, executive branch agencies, and the Afghan government.” So yeah, it is thorough with tons of sources cited.

I was pleasantly surprised at how readable it was -- seriously, this could have been a deadly dull book. I hope the U.S. really takes a hard look at the “Lessons Learned,” and that they have an impact similar to The Pentagon Papers… I also hope that MANY people read this epic book. Five stars, with thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley, who provided a copy in exchange for this honest review.

You can read my review at Shelf Awareness:
https://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=1052#m18346

Certainly one of the timeliest book releases in recent memory, this book should be required reading for everyone as it explains in painful detail the mess that was the war in Afghanistan.

This book started off very strong for me, but continued to seem more and more like a hodgepodge of everything that went wrong for the US in Afghanistan. The author pieces together a narrative through candid interviews records with high-serving US officials both in White House administrations and the military that he attained through the Freedom of Information Act. The [short] chapters provide an overview on how no one truly knew what the US's goals were in the war in Afghanistan. Just diminishing al-Qaeda following 9/11? Punishing Afghanistan for harboring 9/11 conspirators? Nation-building? And when no one knows what the goals are, how do we measure "success" and "effectiveness" of US & NATO troops there? While I have no doubt that everything included is factual (and it left me questioning more and more the rationale behind a war that never seemed fully logical and has been going on since my childhood), I do question why the presentation is very one-sided, though the author is not shy to share faults of the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. It is still a great read, and I would still recommend it, but I do also question why, of the thousands of hours of interviews, it seems like the author cherry-picked the remarks that make the administrations look the worst.

Wow, what an eye-opening book. I feel I could roughly give an overview of what happened in Afghanistan and why, and who the key players are but this book really fills in the details in a spectacular way.

Furthermore, it shows what an outright tragedy it remains. A military escapade built on blunder and ignorance, mismanagement and idiocy. Whitlock's work will make it clear to you that this is a comedy of errors, and one on a massive deadly scale. It's hard to miss the connection to Vietnam. The sheer ignorance of our military and executive branch really frustrated me; at times making me walk away from reading and to come back later.

My only criticism is that I would have like Whitlock to take the last few pages a step further- where does it seem to be going? What are the consequences of the US leaving vs staying?

To be sure, it's easy to look back on history and see the screwups, but it's another thing that it was so blatantly obvious at the time. Once again, American exceptionalism seems to have gotten the better of us (and continues to do so). If you want an great overview of the quagmire, read this.