Jawid said the fighters then made him lie on his face and beat him with a cable so much that his whole body hurt and he could not walk properly for several days. “I said to myself every moment that I wish to die.” He said they then pulled his clothes off and sexually abused him. Jawid said that six months back when he was arrested, he was mocked by the fighters and they verbally harassed him. He said that under the rule of the Taliban, he rarely went out of the house in Herat and knew that facing the Taliban fighters carries the risk of torture or death. Jawid, 22, a member of Afghanistan’s LGBTQ community, who has been living secretly in Kabul for several months, told a painful story from his hometown of Herat. The Star is publishing only his first name for security reasons. “For a moment, the world went dark in my eyes and I thought I was seeing death with my own eyes,” Jawid said via WhatsApp, speaking in Persian. After asking him questions the fighters determined that he was gay. He was in a taxi when confronted at a Taliban checkpoint. 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.After months of living in isolation after August 2021, Jawid decided to leave the house and head into the city. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground.ĭocuments unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander-and didn’t want to make time to meet with him. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains startling revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war, from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives.ĭistracted by the war in Iraq, the US military became mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. The groundbreaking investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America’s longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock.
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