The Afghanistan Papers Reveal Two Decades Of White House Lies

A blockbuster investigative series from the Washington Post reveals the extent to which top officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations misled the public about widespread failures in America’s eighteen-year war in Afghanistan. The story described the ways in which the original mission of dismantling the Taliban was expanded with time, and how American money was funneled into the war despite a shared understanding among many U.S. officials that it was helping spawn corruption in the fledgling democracy. What impact — if any — will the stark findings have on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, or American voters? To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by Stephen Kinzer, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, now a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University; and Neta Crawford, director of the Watson Institute’s Cost Of War Project, and chair of the political science department at Boston University.