Afghanistan war, who cares about the Afghanistan war?

The White House and Pentagon have adopted a sort of "what who cares" attitude to the series of articles published by the Washington Post about how the war in Afghanistan was mishandled from the beginning. The articles were based on hundreds of interviews with participants carried out by the US Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) in a lessons-learned inquiry in 2014 which had remained confidential until the Washington Post put in a bunch of Freedom of Information requests. The excellent journalist Craig Whitlock, one of my nicest former colleagues in the Pentagon press corps when I was in Washington 2010-2013, produced a stunning series of articles underlining the hopelessly ill-informed strategy that lay behind the campaign against the Taliban in the longest war since Vietnam. The Pentagon's response to the articles has been basically shoulder-shrugging. Yeah yeah things went wrong but the Taliban was prevented from taking over the government again, so the US and Nato campaign had achieved positive results. Even General Jim Mattis, former defence secretary and former commander of Central Command overseeing the war in Afghanistan from 2010-2013, has been pretty casual in his reaction, saying there was nothing revelatory in the articles. Mark Esper, current US defence secretary, merely said it was important to look forward not back. To an extent Mattis and the Pentagon officials commenting are right. There is nothing truly explosive about the SIGAR reports and the Washington Post articles because actually journalists involved in writing about Afghanistan since 2001, including me, have known about and reported on the weaknesses and failures of the huge Afghanistan campaign. Nevertheless, Craig Whitlock's intrepid determination to reveal everything in the lessons-learned inquiry has been a classic piece of reporting which the public needs to know. He has done a great service and for the current US administration - admittedly only involved in Afghanistan since 2017 - to dismiss the whole thing as old news is both unfair and dishonest. The 18-year campaign was and is a disastrous example of misjudgments, failures in leadership and a total misunderstanding at the hghest political and military level of what could be realistically achieved in a country as backward as Afghanistan. The Brits went into Helmand without having the first idea of how the Taliban would react to the arrival of 3,300 British troops in 2006 in the province that was their spiritual heartland. It turned out to be a hopelessly inadequate number to face the resurgent Taliban and British paratroopers were slaughtered. They were sent to help with reconstruction but ended up fighting for their lives. It was a disaster. The Washington Post articles are littered with similar examples of fatal misjudgments. The anti-heroin campaign was also a farce. Some bright spark came up with the idea of paying thousands of dollars to individual poppy farmers to stop planting poppy seeds and switch to wheat and cereal. The farmers agreed and took the money but just carried on planting poppy because the Taliban warned them they would be killed if they didn't. And anyway there was no transport system for carrying wheat and cereal to the markets. Britain alone handed over about £11 million in cash piled into suitcases but got nothing in return. But officials back in Whitehall no doubt thought it was a splendid idea. Totally misguided! In my view the Washington Post articles, while not revelatory, were a brilliant summing up of a campaign that went wrong wrong wrong and there is still no end to it.