About: Afghanistan Papers

The Afghanistan Papers are a set of interviews relating to the US war in Afghanistan prepared by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and published by The Washington Post in 2019 following a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents reveal that high-ranking officials generally held the opinion that the war was unwinnable while keeping this view hidden from the public. Due to the difficulty of creating objective metrics to demonstrate success, information was manipulated for the duration of the conflict. NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro, comparing the documents with the Pentagon Papers, noted the revelation of, "explicit and sustained efforts by the US government to deliberately mislead the public.”