WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 (Xinhua) -- Senior U.S. officials had misled the American public about the war in Afghanistan by consistently painting a rosier picture, reported The Washington Post on Monday, citing exclusively obtained confidential documents.
The documents, which include over 400 interviews with U.S. officials and insiders from the administrations of U.S. President Donald Trump and his two predecessors, revealed how senior officials hid evidence that the 18-year-old war was unwinnable and made rosy pronouncements they knew to be false, according to The Washington Post.
"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan -- we didn't know what we were doing," a senior American official was quoted as saying.
U.S. officials acknowledged that their war-fighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation, according to the report.
The Washington Post published the documents two days after the resumption of the U.S.-Taliban talks in Qatar's capital city of Doha. Trump cancelled secret meetings with Taliban leaders and Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani in early September after a car bomb in Kabul killed a U.S. soldier and 11 others.
Nearly 2,300 U.S. servicemen have been killed and over 20,000 wounded in Afghanistan since 2001.
