Author: Craig Whitlock
Craig Whitlock, an outstanding journalist, has done something remarkable in this book by bringing together first person reports from soldiers, administrators, and politicians about US involvement in Afghanistan since 2001.
The Afghanistan Papers “is a shocking account that will supercharge a long overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered,” said a review on goodreads.com.
Whitlock’s source material is a project called Lessons Learned, interviews with hundreds of participants in the war, including the generals and others who made the decisions. Lessons Learned was produced by a federal agency called the Office of the Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
Whitlock is a journalist working for The Washington Post, where he is responsible for covering the Pentagon and national security.
The Post won the release of the documents after a three-year legal battle with the US government and published them in 2019.
Whitlock has worked as a staff writer for the Post since 1998. He served as the paper’s Berlin bureau chief and covered terrorism networks in Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. He has reported from over 50 countries.
Since 2001, more than 775,000 US troops have deployed to Afghanistan. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to US Defense Department figures.
The Afghanistan Papers is a collection of more than 2,000 of pages of documents and interviews collected by SIGAR.
