Because little changes, there is little to report that will excite audiences. The Afghanistan War has been a catastrophic failure for nearly two decades. The media also has a long-standing bias toward “new” news. The Afghanistan Papers don’t provide that kind of easy contrast they demand a kind of holistic condemnation, in which Trump and those bureaucrats are part of the same problem. It doesn’t really know what to do with bipartisan failure.ĭuring the impeachment hearings, news outlets gleefully covered the conflict between Trump and members of the foreign policy establishment, holding up the latter as selfless bureaucrats working tirelessly and anonymously on behalf of the American interest, in contrast with the feckless and narcissistic head of the executive branch. It also thrives on partisan conflict, because conflict drives narrative. The political press loves the idea of bipartisan cooperation, which plays into a notion of American greatness and its loss. The pattern across administrations is that any movement toward resolution is usually met with a slow slide back into the status quo, a.k.a. out of Afghanistan, there has been little progress with peace talks. Now, although both Democrats and Donald Trump seem to be on the same page about getting the U.S. But Barack Obama, despite his obvious skepticism of the war effort, exacerbated Bush’s mistakes by bowing to the Washington foreign policy blob and authorizing a pointless troop surge. Bush started the Afghanistan War and botched it in plenty of ways, not least by starting another war in Iraq. There are no hearings, few press gaggles. But one major reason that the Afghanistan Papers have received so comparatively little coverage is that everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive. The relentless news cycle that characterizes Donald Trump’s America surely deserves some blame: This isn’t the first time that a consequential news story has been buried under an avalanche of other news stories. For the Obama administration, Afghanistan was the “good war” that stood in contrast to the nightmare in Iraq. For the Bush administration, Afghanistan was a key component in the war on terror. Both parties had reason to engage in the cover-up. They reveal a bipartisan consensus to lie about what was actually happening in Afghanistan: chronic waste and chronic corruption, one ill-conceived development scheme after another, resulting in a near-unmitigated failure to bring peace and prosperity to the country. The documents are an indictment not only of one aspect of American foreign policy, but also of the U.S.’s entire policymaking apparatus. As Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1974, told CNN earlier this week, the Pentagon and Afghanistan Papers revealed the same dynamic: “The presidents and the generals had a pretty realistic view of what they were up against, which they did not want to admit to the American people.” officials, across three presidential administrations, intentionally and systematically misled the American public for 18 years and counting. Like the Pentagon Papers, which showcased the lies underpinning the Vietnam War, the Post’s investigation shows that U.S. This week, The Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers, an extensive review of thousands of pages of internal government documents relating to the war in Afghanistan.
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