A Flawed View of Afghan Lessons Learned
A Flawed View of Afghan Lessons Learned by Gary Anderson – Washington Times
After three years of legal wrangling, The Washington Post finally got the original documents from studies of lessons learned from the war in Afghanistan. In a wave of self-congratulatory backslapping, The Post is comparing the feat with the publication of the “Pentagon Papers” during the Vietnam War.
So far, what The Post has found is a glaring flash of the obvious. The U.S. government didn’t know what it was doing, and the ignorance was bipartisan. Two separate administrations got things wrong. But, like the government, The Post is capable of looking at the same raw data and drawing the wrong conclusions.
A case in point is one of the major conclusions drawn by The Post’s analysis, that being we didn’t know who we were fighting. Wrong, we knew — and know — exactly who we were fighting. After two decades, we know a lot about the Taliban…