i am army cam fptain and i served in afghanistan. we need to get to the people first before the taliban and we need to win their hearts and minds d that s how we are going to win this war. i thought okay, that was a unique strategy. i was in the problem is you show up with your team of 18 to 19 year olds, gung-ho patriots and we are going to drink some chai tea and we ll build
considerably, afghan forces are better than we thought they were. they are better than they thought they were. the afghan commanders who make up that core never lost a battle against the taliban and they never will. general, there are a lot of americans who look at the collapse of the afghan military and think, did those generals lie to us ? no, they did not. you don t stand up as a young 21-year-old lieutenant and say troops, i think we got about 30% chance of taking that hill, follow me. no, glass half full. do thank you think one of the problems may also be that the incentive structure within the u.s. military is to be able to say that something has been achieved as opposed to
identified early on, this older mendacity. there was this exaggeration after exaggeration of what we accomplished. after a court battle to obtain the hundreds of secret interviews conducted by his team, the washington post won and whitlock published the findings in a series of reports known as the afghanistan papers later expanded into a book. what these interviews and the project revealed he says was a far different history of the war in afghanistan than the one the american people had been told. the non-watered down version is it is much worse than you thought in afghanistan. freedom is taking hold in afgha afghanistan. we re winning but the war has not yet been won. do you think that all the public officials saying positive things about the war were lying,
57,000 fewer troops in afghanistan than were in iraq. 57,000. the following year, that gap doubled to about 115,000. you had a v 8 engine in iraq tuned up and had something much less in afghanistan so everything was harder. here is an example. summer 2009, we have a horrible problem with i mmp vised explose devices, iuds and mines. we have a total of three what are called route clearance companies to open up routes. in iraq at the same time with far less incidents at that point with iieds and mines there are some 90 route clearance companies and that didn t change until there was a large surge approved by the obama
in 2006, troops trying to counter insurgency on their own. the u.s. updated counter insurgency guidance. a strategy that focused on less conventional warfare and more on securing the support of the population, ensuring aids and infrastructure and trying to win the trust of the people. you literally working on the books, the idea of naasian building. did it work in afghanistan? it did work, during the period we did have the resources to do that. the problem is in a situation like afghanistan, we do have to be prevailing if you will in the security realm because that s the foundation that allows you to do all of these other tasks.