ldquo;I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan"--words all the more disturbing because they were penned by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a confidential memo he wrote two years after U.S. troops invaded that country. It took Washington Post national security reporter Whitlock and his employer three years and two federal lawsuits to pry loose a U.S. government report, Lessons Learned, an insider analysis of the war comprising 10,000 documents, including oral histories, interviews, and memos emanating from American military brass, diplomats, and security personnel, as well as Afghan officials and many others. In a haunting doppelgänger of the Pentagon Papers, Lessons Learned--and the narrative Whitlock weaves from it here--presents an utterly damning account of American naivete (starting, tragically, with our conflation of the indigenous Taliban with the foreign al-Qaeda), profligacy, and hubris in Afghanistan, all carried along on a river of lies by three administrations. Of particular note here are the sheer depth and extent of Afghan corruption, and America's misguided, fruitless, even ultimately corrupting side war on Afghanistan's opium industry. An important, timely account, especially in the run-up to the U.S. troop withdrawal scheduled for September.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, Whitlock (Washington Post) gained access to hundreds of oral-history interviews that reveal how badly botched the endless war in Afghanistan was. The original 2001 US invasion was quick but lacked any strategy to leave behind a coherent country, let alone a democracy. Ignorant of Afghanistan's fragmented religions, languages, culture, and economy, administrations from Bush through Obama to Trump tried everything, but the situation worsened over time. Ill-conceived projects worked at cross-purposes. Eradication of opium poppies left farmers broke and resentful. Illiterate Afghan soldiers and police deserted, but crooked officers took the pay of "ghost soldiers." Only the Taliban, mostly Pashtuns, had the coherence and motivation to fight. Unaudited billions, much of it skimmed and smuggled to Dubai, created ineradicable corruption that even funded the enemy. As with the war in Vietnam, truth was bifurcated--fanciful progress reports for the public and Congress, grim mutterings among deployed Americans. Ellsberg's 1971 release of what became The Pentagon Papers drew exclusively from formal documents, but Whitlock draws material from bitter, working-level officers, heavily weighted toward those in the US Army. This reader concludes that the undertaking was inherently infeasible; nothing would have worked. While it will be usable in the classroom, the book is essential for practitioners. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Michael G. Roskin, emeritus, Lycoming College

With this book about the United States' invasion of Afghanistan, beginning in 2001, Whitlock presents an essential, extensive account of the longest war in U.S. history. Whitlock, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Washington Post, relies on extensive primary sources, including firsthand interviews and official documents, to detail the positions and actions of various U.S. officials who received indications from soldiers and diplomats throughout the years that the Afghanistan War was a failure, politically and diplomatically. For instance, Whitlock argues, Donald Rumsfeld's messages to Defense Department officials in the six months after 9/11 show that his public positions contradicted his understanding of events in Afghanistan. Whitlock makes the compelling case that the Bush administration was confident about the war in Afghanistan but never had a plan to end it; subsequent administrations approached the war in the same manner. What sets this book apart is the insight on the war from the perspective of Afghans, including leaders of local provinces. VERDICT Complete with American and Afghan viewpoints, Whitlock's book is a dense, nuanced analysis that will likely become an invaluable source for researchers and a valuable addition to military history collections at public and academic libraries.--Edwin Burgess, Kansas City, KS

U.S. government and military officials took part in an "unspoken conspiracy to mask the truth" about the war in Afghanistan, according to this searing chronicle. Expanding on a series of articles published in the Washington Post, Whitlock explains how he learned, in 2016, about a government program to interview hundreds of participants in the war for a report on policy failures in Afghanistan called "Lessons Learned." Drawing on these transcripts and other oral history projects, Whitlock paints a devastating portrait of how public messaging about the conflict consistently belied the reality on the ground. He details internal rivalries in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, and the fatigue and pessimism of soldiers on the front lines. ("We were just going around killing people," says one special forces officer.) A costly program to eradicate opium poppy fields in Helmand province backfired spectacularly, turning the region into a "lethal stronghold for the insurgency" and earning harsh criticism from veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke and others. Whitlock also delves into the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, the Obama administration's skewing of statistics to support its war strategy, evidence of Afghan government corruption, and the Trump administration's complex peace plan with the Taliban. Rigorously detailed and relentlessly pessimistic, this is a heartbreaking look at how America's leaders "chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift." (Sept.)

A veteran Washington Post investigative reporter delivers a dispiriting history of the 20-year Afghanistan debacle. The war in Vietnam was always controversial. The longer quagmire of Afghanistan, writes Whitlock, "was grounded in near-unanimous public support" when it began in 2003. There was no need, then, for the Pentagon brass to lie about the war, but lie they did, despite that fact that there was not a clearly articulated mission. The mission crept into a vaguely defined exercise in nation-building even as more than 775,000 U.S. troops cycled in and out of the country. Whitlock's impressively documented book contains interviews with more than 1,000 participants in the war. The author also examines a report titled "Lessons Learned," which, though inches thick, seems to have emerged only long after the damage was done (and $1 trillion disappeared into the ether). One curious diagnostic among many uncovered in this comprehensive overview: Early on, American troops had to fly their laundry to Uzbekistan, since there were no facilities in Afghanistan, whereas the base at Bagram soon sported "a shopping mall, a Harley-Davidson dealer and about 30,000 troops, civilians and contractors." Bush administration officials could never wrap their heads around the fact that the Taliban and al-Qaida were distinct entities and were convinced that anyone willing to fight against them was a friend of the U.S. Those presumed allies milked a gullible U.S. dry. One interviewee notes that the U.S. misadventure could have ended in weeks if direct negotiations with the Taliban had been undertaken. Instead, enemies were misidentified and innocent people killed so frequently that one officer reported that some units were "focused in consequence management, paying Afghans for damages and condolence payments." That Joe Biden was able to order America's withdrawal redefined the terms of victory to say that the U.S. "had achieved its original objective long ago by destroying al-Qaeda's stronghold in Afghanistan"--rather than acknowledge that the Afghans had defeated their second superpower. By this authoritative account, the Afghanistan War has been a colossal failure that should have been ended years ago. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.