Angry Planet - A Brief History of Lying About Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Afghanistan. If you’re listening to this show you’ve probably been following the news. Despite what the Pentagon or White House will tell you, the evacuation isn’t going great. There is a dichotomy between what officials tell us and what’s actually happening that—in the age of mass communication—seems … insulting.That dichotomy and how it affected America’s view of Afghanistan is at the heart of the new book—The Afghanistan Papers. Craig Whitlock, its author, is here with us today. Whitlock is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post who has covered America’s War on Terror since the beginning.Recorded August 25, the day before the attacks.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world, their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Field. Afghanistan. If you're listening to this show, you've probably been following the news. Despite what the Pentagon or the White House will tell you, the evacuation doesn't seem to be going great. There is a dichotomy between what officials tell us and what's actually happening that in the age of mass communication seems insulting. And that dichotomy in how it affected America's view of Afghanistan and the wider war is at the heart of a new book. The Afghanistan Papers, a secret history of the war. Craig Whitlock is its author, and he

here with us today. Whitlock is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post who has covered America's War on Terror since its beginning. Craig, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks very much for having me. Okay. A lot of what's in your book where we have got this Politico story where the former State Department official accuses the White House of gaslighting the American public. We've got lots of pictures from the DOD of the evacuation process that look quite harrowing. We have, and we have a White House in a Democratic establishment that seemed to be saying that this is the best evacuation that we've ever had.

Literally, I'm quoting some senators and congresspeople now, that it could not have gone any better. And this was always going to be the way Afghanistan ended. What do you make of all of this kind of dichotomy? Well, of course, it could have gone a lot better. And clearly, the Biden administration didn't plan for this sufficiently. I think they thought they had a lot more time. They knew that the Afghan government was perhaps, if not probably going to collapse.

But I think they just were colored by other experiences that they thought they would have months to prepare for something like this, that they could do it gradually. I think it really didn't dawn on them that the Taliban could take over the country so quickly and come into Kabul in a matter of days. They thought they had weeks or months and they clearly weren't prepared. You know, it's interesting you talk about the images of the harrowing scenes at the airport. real problem we have right now in assessing what's really going on is we've lost our visibility from independent journalists in Afghanistan and in Kabul. You know, most Western news organizations

have evacuated their staffs. We get occasionally some still photographs that the Defense Department puts out about some, you know, very heartwarming scenes about U.S. troops helping Afghan kids and babies. And look, you know, I get it. That's important. And that is heartwarming. But those are carefully selected images. And the Defense Department is not putting out photographs or video of the crowds at the airport gates or, you know, we don't see what it's like from the Afghan perspective to have your family out in the broiling sun having to navigate these Taliban checkpoints to get to the airport only to get turned back. We're hearing all this second hand. We aren't seeing it firsthand. And so we really do have limited visibility into what's going on there.

So I have a very basic question, but it's a broad one. How could we have gotten it this wrong? I mean, we had Vietnam where we got it pretty wrong, maybe very wrong. We've had other instances like the Cold War itself, where our intelligence was so bad that we thought the Soviets were able to keep up with us. And then the collapse happened as far as we were concerned. Oh, my God, it collapsed. How surprised we are. So why are we surprised again?

That's a really good question. And most important question of all, how could we have not seen this coming, not just in recent weeks, but over 20 years? And my perspective is that I think the U.S. government and people who were in charge of the war and people involved in it, we never really fundamentally understood Afghanistan. and we didn't understand the culture, we didn't speak the languages. Our insights were skewed because we were getting messages and information and intelligence and advice from our Afghan allies in the government, which would tell us what they thought we wanted to hear or what might benefit them. But one thing you hear over and over again in the documents and interviews that I was able

attain for the Afghanistan Papers book are people saying, you know, we just lacked, we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. That was a direct quote from Lieutenant General Doug Lute, who was the war czar under both Bush and Obama. He was talking, he said, we didn't have the foggiest idea of what we were doing in Afghanistan. And while Lute put that pretty bluntly, you heard that from other people. There was Ambassador Richard Boucher, who was the top diplomat for South Asia during the Bush administration. He also said, we didn't know what we were doing and we didn't know the languages. We didn't think this through. But I think Afghanistan was, you know, just such a foreign place for Americans. We didn't have a history there.

Most Americans had never been there. But even after 20 years, we cycled people in and out after several months or a year. So we never gained any institutional expertise or understanding of how things worked in Afghanistan. We could never even define who the enemy was in this war. adequately. Were we fighting al-Qaeda? Were we fighting the Taliban? Where we stuck in these tribal conflicts? That's something we never really figured out. So I guess in some ways, it shouldn't be surprising that we were caught flat-footed and by surprise by how things ended. Well, this leads us, I think, quite neatly to the book. What can you give us kind of the elevator

pitch for it? And what makes the Afghanistan papers different from this kind of swath of memoirs and assessments of why we lost, essentially, that have come out over the last 10 years? Yeah, that's a really good question. So the reason the Afghanistan papers are different is just, you know, it's based on thousands of pages of documents, which are almost all notes and transcripts of interviews or oral history interviews with people played in the war, played a role in the war over 20 years, ranging from white house officials to commanding generals to grunts on the ground or aid workers. And most of these interviews came from a project that the special inspector general for Afghanistan had done called Lessons Learned, where they interviewed more than 400 people

played a part of the work. And the reason these interviews are different from the memoirs or a lot of what was said publicly is most of these people who were interviewed, they thought they were confidential, they thought they could speak openly and frankly and forthrightly. So they didn't hold back. You know, they were, to be honest, they told the. truth for the first time about what they thought really went wrong. And so some of the most eye-opening quotes and commentary and, you know, explanations for how screwed up things were, I think would have never come out if people had just, you know, if they'd written their memoir, or even if I had interviewed them as a journalist for the Washington Post, they would have been

much more careful. They wouldn't have been critical of their administration. They would have held back. The other back, the biggest batch of oral history interviews comes from the U.S. Army. They had done with mid-career officers after they had served in Afghanistan. And these were often done a year or two after they had served there. And again, these people, I think, were given permission for the first time to speak for the historical record. And they were told that, you know, to speak the truth. And, you know, people did. They kind of unburdened themselves. But they were also thinking, one, I can't get in trouble for this, because this is sanctioned by the army. Two, it's for historians, which is going to be years down the line.

So again, this isn't going to blow back up in my face. So people, for the most part, were very honest and forthright. And I think that's what makes all these documents and interviews different from anything else we've seen, because people for the first time thought they could tell the truth for whatever reason. They weren't constrained by fear of blowback or pushback or getting in trouble with their careers. And so really people were honest for the first time. And that's what I think when you read their accounts, their statements, their anecdotes, you really do get honesty here, not people just trying to posture for the public, but giving their true feelings. Can you give us just very briefly like an explanation of what Cigar is? Like who are they?

What was, how long have they operated and kind of what was their remit? Sure. So Cigar is the acronym for Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. It's a mouthful. And it's an agency that was set up by Congress about 15 years ago. Most Americans haven't heard of it, but their job, their remit was to investigate all this money we're spending in Afghanistan to see if any of it was wasted or go into people's pockets or embezzled or what. And they've done that for many years. But in 2015, they decided to start up this new side project called Lessons Learned, where they would interview people who were involved in the war under Bush and Obama. to see what mistakes were made with the idea of being,

let's learn from our mistakes so we don't repeat them again in the future. At that time, the assumption was the war was ending. Obama had promised to end the war by the end of his second term. So the idea was, well, people speak a little more freely now, the war is almost over. In the end, Sigar, the inspector general, published a handful of public reports about what went wrong in Afghanistan and problems with corruption or building the Afghan army

and things like this. But they left out all the good parts from their interviews, all the quotes that kind of make your hair stand on end about people saying we didn't know what we were doing, how screwed up it was. Because these were government reports, they really sanitized what people said and watered it all down. The Washington Post back in 2016 decided that we really want to know what these people

said. The public has a right to know what they said in these interviews. This was a taxpayer finance project by the inspector. General. None of it was classified at the time. So we had to file two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits in federal court to force the Inspector General to release these documents. You know, it took us a few years, but we finally won. And that was the basis for our original series we published in December 2019. And it's also, we drew heavily on those documents for the book that's just come out. What's interesting, though, and I guess some of it definitely, I mean,

I should say, a lot of it came out in 2019, thanks to the lawsuits. But I know that we've been hearing for a long time that we don't speak the language, we don't understand the culture, we are having trouble building dams because they don't have rivers. You know, in other ridiculous examples. I just, it feels like the military and the civilian leadership must have known all this stuff forever. The reporting has been out there forever. Why no change? Why keep doing the same thing over and over again when you know it's insane? Well, that's another really good question. Why would you keep doing it? And after doing all my reporting and writing the book, the best answer I could come up with is people didn't want to admit they were losing a war that was once very popular with the American people, that people thought we had won back in 2001, 2002.

You know, this war is different for many of the other wars we fought in the last, you know, 50 years, 60 years, in that the American people really supported the idea of going to war in Afghanistan in 2001 because they saw it as a war of self-defense to prevent another September 11th style attack to defeat Al Qaeda. You know, this was seen as a just war, a just cause. And we all thought we had won that war because within six months, the Taliban had been removed from power. Al-Qaeda's leaders had been killed, captured, or had disappeared from Afghanistan. So we thought we won this war. But what president, what general, what ambassador wants to admit that they slowly lost that war on their watch, that they allowed it to go backwards, that it wasn't working out that. They let victory slip through their fingers.

Nobody wants to admit that. So I think what happened was over the subsequent 18, 19 years is we just, they kept, they couldn't admit to themselves or the public that things weren't going well. So they kept standing up and saying, we're making progress. Things are turning a corner. And they kept promising we would win because who could bear to admit that this was a failure or maybe this had turned into a stalemate or an unwinnable war? no politician wants to admit that. No senior general wants to admit that because they know that could be the end of their career.

So there's just an unwillingness to be frank with the American people about it. And so instead they let the word drift and keep going on and on and on until finally, you know, Biden decided to pull the plug. I want to push back on something real quick, if I may. You said that Cigar had released a handful of reports. I would say it was substantially more than a handful. I mean, they've kind of been documenting how nightmarish this has been, I think, in very clear language for a very long time. The Lessons Learned Report that you got kind of the raw access to finally came out on August 16th. It's 140 pages long.

I think it's pretty, you know, it doesn't have everything that your book has or that your reporting has, certainly. But I think it's pretty damning and pretty clear from that report. Like we have, I just pulled up a random page, a USAID official here talking about the problem. of corruption and how it caused all these downstream effect. You know, quote, during the surge, there was massive amounts of people and money going into Afghanistan, a former USAID official told Cigar, it's like pouring a lot of water into a funnel. If you pour it too fast, the water overflows, that funnel onto the ground, we are flooding

the ground. You know, they talk about, they talk about opium. They talk about this issue that you brought up about, you know, people are only there for a year or two, then they would cycle out. The new people would come in and have no idea what they were doing. I think one of the big stories, one of the big things that I really latched on to when I read it was the, they didn't have enough police officers. So they pulled helicopter pilots and then made, and the helicopter pilots didn't know what to do. So they watched NCIS and COPS DVDs as training.

You know, this stuff is in there and it's documented. And I don't want to, I'm not trying to be combative, but I do like, I feel like the cigar stuff has been out here for so long. And I'm glad that we have a lot, like much more detail from your reporting. But I like, I like, what do you think that they did their job? What do you think that they should have done more? No, I don't think they did for a few reasons. One, to clarify, Cigar's been doing a number of reports and audits for a number of years. When I talked about a handful of reports, I was talking specifically about lessons learned reports that they conducted these 400 interviews.

So I'm making a distinction between the regular reporting on all. audits and waste and abuse and things like that and this Lessons Learn project. They've since come out with several over the last five years. But when we first started asking for these interview reports was in the summer of 2016. At first, they agreed to release some of them, but then they sat on it and they forced this to go to court. So you're right, they certainly raise problems in the report. So, you know, wasted money about poor strategy, things like this. But what they sanitized was all the on the record commentary with people who are

involved in the war, what they said in these interviews. I'll give you examples of that. So there was an interview with Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, who was the war czar under Bush and Obama. And he said, we didn't have the foggiest idea of what we were doing. We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. He also said, 2,400 lives lost. Who will say that that was in vain? Now, to have an army general suggests that U.S. troops who had lost their lives in this war, may have died in vain. That's shocking. Army generals just don't do that. They always talk about how the ultimate sacrifice was for a worthy cause. So the fact that you have senior officials like him, and I could go on and on, there were other generals, General Dan McNeil, who was a two-time war commander,

he said in his lessons learned interview, we didn't have a strategy. He didn't say we had a bad strategy or a misguided strategy. He said we didn't have a campaign plan. His successor, or British General David Richards, who was a commander of U.S. and NATO troops during the Bush administration, also said we didn't have a strategy. He said, we had a lot of tactics, but we didn't have a proper strategy. What war have you ever heard a commanding general admit they didn't have a strategy? That's how bad things were. And all those comments, all those statements, none of them were quoted in the Sigard Lessons Learned reports. We had to sue them over three years. The lawsuit's still going in federal court because Sigar didn't want to put this information out because they wanted

to protect these people. They didn't want to have the governments held accountable. They spent $10 million a taxpayer money doing research for these reports. That information is public, should have been made public from the get-go. They've covered it up. So no, I don't think they've done their job. But people deserve to hear those voices unvarnished. Okay. So the Douglas Lute interview happens in 2015, I believe. And it's the quote that you just gave us is, in this most recent lessons learned report, like the full thing, devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn't have the foggiest notion. Yeah, but when was that put out? It was on the 16th. To be fair, yes, August 16th is the first time we see it published by

Cigar. Yeah, we published it in the Post in December of 2019. We made that public. They fought us. They wouldn't release it. They're only saying it now because the Post forced them to make it public. They would have never made that public if the Post hadn't sued them. So no, I don't think they did their job. And this is proof of that. But if your job, I'm doing this thing that I told Jason I wasn't going to do where I'm playing devil's advocate for them. Because I, anyway, let me just, let me ask this question this way. If your job as Cigar is to get the unvarnished truth from these people with the idea that when the war is coming,

to its conclusion that this paper is going to be published. And the new and the Washington Post starts knocking at the door and wants to see these things. If you don't fight and your interviews aren't concluded, are the people that you still need to talk to going to give you the unvarnished truth? Well, I guess the question is what's what's their priority here? Is it bureaucratic self-preservation so they can keep turning out reports that nobody's going to read? Or do they need to do they need to follow the law and release this public information? It took a judge to tell them to cough it up. They were breaking the law by withholding this stuff. And I think the only, yeah, sure, would people talk to them again? I don't know. But that's not my concern.

Should that be their concern? Or this is a war that was worse than anybody knew the mistakes that were being made. And they withheld and suppressed that information. So no, I'm not very sympathetic to it. I can't argue that no one read the reports. as someone who has read many of them and attempted to get many stories placed about many of the things that are in them, yes, that is... Even one high-ranking cigar official told me when they unveiled one of these,

he looked at it, dropped it on the table, and rolled his eyes. I mean, look, these are dry reports. That's what governments do. You know, and that's fine. I'm not trying to criticize them for their pros. But my point is this was public information. these were really important statements by people involved in the war, some of whom thought they were speaking on the record and what they said should be made public.

And still, Cigar fought us for three years in court so they didn't have to release them. I think that's unforgivable. I'm just wondering, just along this vein, did a lot of this stuff come out as leaks anyway? I mean, I'm not saying that actually having the raw stuff in front of us is not tremendously important. I'm just thinking, you know, some of these people did talk, right, off the record, and I'm sure some of them talked to you. Would you say that's right? Well, I think certainly the sentiments that were being expressed had come out and reporting. I mean, look, journalists had been reporting problems in the war in Afghanistan for years and years on all these subjects, whether it's the Afghan army or corruption or the opium strategy, all those things. None of these are new issues. But I think what distinguishes these interviews that we obtained and were the basis for the book and for the original series in the post is, one, we could attach names to a lot of them.

You know, people can't just, it's easy to dismiss anonymous sources and what they're saying in weeks. I mean, people tune that stuff out. I mean, you especially see it with political reporting. But I think the power this had when we first published them in the post is not just we wrote stories about it and quoted from them. We posted all the documents. We linked between the quotes and the actual thing you would see in the paper on the document itself. So people could see, no, this isn't made up. This is real in black and white. an official government document from official sources. So, you know, nobody could deny it. With anonymous sources, you can always deny it or push back and say it's somebody making it up

for political reasons. With this, you know, this is different. This is the real stuff. And that's why we posted them all so people could see for themselves. All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to take a break. We will look back right after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, thank you for sticking around. We are back. We are talking to Craig Whitlock about Afghanistan. I want to zero in on one story that's in the book that really struck me as illustrative of kind of the wider war effort. Who was Major Lewis Frius? If you don't quite... Oh, yeah, he was the SIEOPS officer. So this was an oral history with an officer who was with the psychological operations unit out of Fort Bragg. And in 2003, if I have my date, right, he was

deploying to Afghanistan. Now, the SIOPS teams were supposed to, for lack of a better description, manipulate public opinion in a war zone to benefit U.S. objectives. And so, you know, this has been going on for years, decades, and other places. But, you know, we had Siyop teams stood up and we started to send some into Afghanistan. And Major Frius was in an oral history for the U.S. Army, which we published for the first time in the book, he's talking about even though his unit and he were supposed to be experts in the local language, the local cultures, that, you know, really none of them knew anything about Afghanistan. They were just on a crash course trying to learn as much as they could. And so on the flight over to Afghanistan, he talked about how he had the book Islam for dummies with him. And I'm not making that up, but he was reading Islam for dummies so he could better understand Afghanistan. And this isn't just any soldier. This is the Siyat's officer who's supposed to be an expert in the local culture. If people were talking to, you know, just to the government as opposed to actually letting it come out publicly, why didn't anyone in the government read it?

That's a good question. I think, well, one, these notes and transcripts that we obtained, they weren't disseminated. You know, essentially, Sigar wrote their own report drawing on that information and they watered it down. But in fact, we had one reason we had to fight for someone to obtain them is Sigar said they had lost track of these notes and transcripts and they were in different. places and it took them a while to compile them and release them, even though they were public records. And I also think Cigar was, you know, as Matthew points out, they've been blowing the horn for a while about problems in Afghanistan. You know, I give them credit for that. And the Inspector General himself John Sopko testifies frequently before Congress. But for whatever reason,

he gets tuned out. A lot of other U.S. government agencies saw him as a bit of a glory hound who like ironically like being in the line light, even though his agency fought us for all these records. And so nobody likes the criticism, right? The Defense Department, State Department, USAID, they would often push back on his conclusions. But why didn't Congress listen more? That's an open question. I think Congress was also complicit in a lot of mistakes in the war and fell down when it came to important function for holding people accountable. You know, they paid for all this, but they didn't ask a lot of hard questions. They also let things drift.

And when they did, it tended to be weird, grandstanding things about, say, goat farms that they were kind of doing just to get on C-SPAN and not asking really interesting questions. That's a tangent of mine. One of the things I do I like about this book is how it details the changing relationship between the White House, the Pentagon, and the American people during like these kind of three eras of the war that you detail. Each president oversaw a different phase, but also a different phase of spin, I would say. Can you kind of outline these errors for us? Sure. And, you know, guide me if I'm headed down an unanticipated path. But I think what happened, particularly, you know, at first the Bush administration, as I mentioned,

they thought they had won the war. They were very quickly distracted by Iraq and by their preparations to go to war there. So when things started to go south in Afghanistan, they, you know, of course, started to say, in public and that no, things were going well, and they were very dismissive of media report suggesting that Taliban was making a comeback. I think the book outlines pretty directly, describes in pretty blunt terms, is from Bush to Obama to Trump, you know, it kept getting worse as the years went on. At first it was, well, okay, the Taliban's getting a little stronger, but that's because we're taking the fight to the enemy. And, you know, the fibs started small,

but over time, they doubled down and they got bigger and bigger. And to me, one of the biggest discrepancies, to put it politely, was during Obama's second term, he had promised to end the war before he left the White House. And in December of 2014, they actually had a ceremony in Kabul at military headquarters where they were going to end the combat mission, as they put it, that the Afghan security forces were going to take over full responsibility for fighting the Taliban and that U.S. troops would only remain in an advisory role. And Obama said, you know, the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion. So he's telling the American people, look, this war is all but over.

We're going to be sitting at the back, just sort of giving advice to the Afghans. And he said it was the end of the combat mission. This was December 2014. That clearly wasn't the case. He knew that wasn't the case. We still had almost 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, and they continued to die. They died on the battlefield. They were attacked by insurgents. Certainly, we didn't have the same number of troops that we had during the peak of the surge when we had 100,000 troops. It had gone down by 90 percent, but the war was still going on, particularly in the air. And worse than that, you know, the casualties among Afghan civilians kept going up. And they kept going up under the rest of Obama's years, and they kept going up under Trump. So the civilian casualties in

Afghanistan have peaked every year for the past several years. So this idea that was being sold by the White House, whether under Obama or Trump, that the war dwindling down or we were barely involved just wasn't true, but that was a deliberate messaging on their part. They didn't want the American people to pay attention to what was going on in Afghanistan. So they were trying to minimize the headlines and the amount of time it was on TV. And to me, you could see that that crescendo build from one administration to the next. Well, and I think it worked too, right? As soon as Iraq started, maybe even before, no one really paid attention to Afghanistan, unless they'd been there, right? No, you're right. And in fact, you know, I recount this one episode in the book when Rumsfeld goes to

Kabul shortly after the Iraq war broke out. And he has a press conference with, with Hamid Karzai and their journalists assembling at the presidential palace in Kabul. And Hamid Karzai comes out and he speaks English. And he sort of smiled and laughed at the journalists and said, I'm surprised there are any of you still here. I thought you had all gone to Iraq, right? Because most journalists had. That's where everybody was focusing their attention.

And people took their eye off Afghanistan. But certainly as the years went on, there was a deliberate attempt, particularly under Obama and Trump to minimize or shut off news coverage from Afghanistan, the number of embeds of journalists who could embed with U.S. troops, or even just to have access to interview U.S. commanders in Kabul or at headquarters throughout the country, you know, those opportunities dried up. The Pentagon didn't want the war to get much coverage. And we still had journalists on the ground there, primarily print reporters, but also some TV.

And so they were reporting from outside. But in terms of getting access to the U.S. military brass or troops on the ground, that became non-existent in recent years. Craig, I also want you to talk me out of my cynicism. If I can ask for that, Lord, it'll be the rest of my life, unfortunately. Because another thing that struck me as I was reading this book and something I've gotten angry about in the past week watching the coverage of the evacuation, you know, I'm a post-Watergate kid. I was 18 when the weapons of mass destruction were lied about. I just kind of take it at face value that politicians are just going to lie to me. And in that kind of environment, why is this kind of work still important?

Like, we know that they lie to us. Like, how do we bust, like, my cynicism and the American people's cynicism when it comes to politicians? Does that question make sense? Yeah, I'm not sure I can bust your. synicism, but to just give up and accept that's not much of a response, right? You know, because then it'll just get worse. The only way to change it or to do something about it or prevent it in the future is to hold them account as directly and plainly as we can. And, you know, I hope that's one result of this kind of reporting and this coverage is that maybe the next time we're in a war,

or even when it's smaller, operate or whatever subject, that at least in the back of their mind, the people in charge will know that they may be held to account for this and they need to watch it. I also would like to draw a distinction here. Certainly, I think people have a lot of cynicism about politicians and political leaders. But throughout most of this war, the polls show, public opinion survey, show that the U.S. military is really the most trusted institution in the United States. So when you had uniform generals or admirals coming out, telling people things that weren't true, people tended to believe that, right? They don't see them as partisan. They don't see them as politicians.

They see them as people who were admired in the military more so than any other public figure just about. And I think what I've tried to demonstrate in this book is that, no, the generals weren't straight with you. The generals were feeding a very misleading message about what was going on in Afghanistan. And, you know, we show example after example of that. But I think that's a distinction I would draw, too, between the people in uniform. and the politicians. I think Americans trusted the military a lot more than they trusted the politicians. And yet, as we've shown, the generals and senior officers can be just as guilty of lying as anybody else. And I think that was important to show. I think that's faded in recent years a bit. But certainly, I remember in the Bush administration, the generals could do no

wrong. And during the Obama administration, some of the commanders were really held up as heroes, those supermen almost, people like General Petraeus or General McChrystal, were venerated in public. And I'm not trying to criticize them individually, but these were people really held up. You know, Petraeus was mentioned as a presidential contender. And so I think as a journalist, we have a duty to hold those people to account and put them under scrutiny just as much as we do the politicians. Nobody seems to be any good at this. I mean, this is appalling, just from a competence point of view. it is very wild.

That was the thing. When I read these admissions in the interviews that were generals and ambassadors saying, we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't have the foggiest idea. I was, look, I've been around a long time as a journalist, and so I can be a little cynical too,

but I was shocked by that, by that very forthright admission. Because you're right, you assume somebody somewhere has a reason for what we're doing, right? That maybe it was misguided or turned out to be wrong in hindsight, or they have a different, you know, ideological or political perspective, you know. But these guys were just flat out saying, look, we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't understand the country.

Our strategy was a mess if it existed at all. And to me, it's like, wow, this was worse than we thought. You know, all along people knew things were awry in Afghanistan. And things weren't going well, at least in the last 18 years. But when you hear them say those things, you're just like, oh, my God. And if anything, I don't know what the end result. of that is, except you hope and you would think that it would make the country much more skeptical next time it's seen as necessary to go to war and engage in military operations that people won't

be afraid to ask those really basic questions of like, do you know what you're doing? What's the plan here? You need to spell it out in very clear terms. I think, you know, the public in times of war, particularly when we're under attack like we were in 2001, tends to be very deferential to the people in charge and not to breed cynicism, but there's nothing wrong with asking skeptical questions, hard questions. That isn't being cynical. That's just demanding that people are told the truth and that these things are thought out. Yeah, this is my worry is that, you know, in six months it's going to be like the end of burn after reading. And there'll be the men in the CIA room. Somebody will say, well, what did we learn?

here and they'll go, hell if I know, and they'll close the file and put it back up on the shelf and everyone will just move on. And I want that not to happen. It needs to not happen. How do we make sure that doesn't happen? Well, just what we're doing here. We keep talking about it. We insist on a public debate. We try and get people to pay attention and we shine a light on it. I mean, that's what journalists do is you shine a light on this stuff and you hope people are paying attention and you hope you can frame it in terms that they can understand and that they recognize it's important. So, I mean, that's why I wrote the book. That's why the Washington Post published that original series is we're trying to shine a light on it. Sometimes it's hard for that

light to break through or for people to pay attention, but you know, you got to keep trying. When are we getting a Fat Leonard book, Craig? Next year, that's next on the list. I've been working hard on Fat Leonard. And that's going to be my favorite book of all. all time because that story's wilder than anybody knows. It's the little bits that I know, I can't imagine what I don't. And I am excited to learn. Let me ask you this. Okay.

I was just on the phone doing an interview for the Fat Leonard book before you guys called in. Oh, beautiful. All right. So for those that don't know, there's a nightmarish and bizarre and complicated corruption scandal involving the 7th Fleet and the Pacific. It affects a lot of people in the Navy. At the center of it is this character named Fat Leonard. Let me ask you this specific question.

I had read reports that one of the things that Fat Leonard had done is set people up in one of MacArthur, like a room that MacArthur had formally used. An orgy was conducted there involving MacArthur memorabilia. I was never able to figure out what specific MacArthur memorabilia was used. Have you been able to figure that out, sir? Indeed, I have. An investigative reporter such as myself can't rest until you verify such details. So Matthew, what you're referring to is there was an incident at the Manila Hotel in the Philippines. This was back around 2009, so it's been some years, senior officers who were aboard the USS Blue Ridge, which was the command flagship for the 7th Fleet. So this ship oversees all military

and Navy operations in Asia. So it's really important. And a lot of the senior officers went to the Manila Hotel, where Fat Leonard through this big wild party. And it was an orgy. Even Leonard himself described it as an orgy in the presidential suite or something in the Menloel Hotel. It was the MacArthur suite because General MacArthur had used it as his headquarters

or sometimes or over two. And in court papers, there were references to using memorabilia from MacArthur's, suite as sex toys or something during the orgy. What they were referring to was MacArthur's corncob pipe and that, well, I don't know what the rating is on your podcast, but Leonard used, and some of his friends from the Navy were using the cornucop pipe with some of the prostitutes, and I'll let your imagination figure out the rest. Yeah, it's a, sorry. I feel as soiled as when I was hearing the Monica Lewinsky stuff and the cigars. But, It's just the tip of the iceberg on the Fat Leonard thing, man.

It is a wild story. And I cannot wait to read that book. But for right now, the book is the Afghanistan Papers. A Secret History of the War is by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post. Sir, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking with us. Thanks so much. You really enjoyed the conversation, the great questions. Good talking with you guys as always.

Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, we have a substack for just $9 a month at Angryplanet.substack.com or AngryPlanetpod.com. You get two bonus episodes every month. We've got a couple

kicking around in there about Afghanistan. I'm about to, as soon as I could have done recording this, put one up that is just about the use of drones in the Vietnam War. Yes, you heard that right. It's an in-depth discussion with David Axe. So look for that if you are interested.

If you like the show, please rate us on iTunes, like, subscribe, all that stuff. We will be back next week with more conversations about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.