It has cost a trillion dollars to attempt the transformation of Afghanistan

Why governments lie about wars, Gordon Adams, The Conversation, December 20:

Lies are an integral part of national security operations ... They mislead adversaries, cover up mistakes and failures ... President Lyndon Johnson insisted that he was not going to be the “first president to lose a war”  ... Even Donald Trump did not want to “lose” Afghanistan.

Scoop! Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post, December 9:

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakeable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

Memories of Vietnam, Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone, December 13:

I am the son of a Vietnam veteran. Though I wasn’t alive in 1971 when the Pentagon Papers emerged, the very mention of them makes my blood boil. It is one thing to know that the most important man in your life ... volunteered to serve his country and ended up in a conflict that had questionable morals and objectives.

George W. Bush at the Virginia Military Institute, April 17, 2002:

The history of conflict in Afghanistan (has) been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We’re not going to repeat that mistake.

General Mark Milley, press briefing, September 4, 2013:

This army and this police force have been very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day. And I think that’s an important story to be told across the board.

Sumantra Maitra, The Federalist, December 13:

The most striking couple of sentences in the breathtaking report from The Washington Post about the West’s failed nation-building in Afghanistan were right in the middle. The report said: “Some US officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women’s rights” ... More than $1 trillion spent, more than 2000 lives lost, more than 20,000 men and women maimed and scarred physically and psychologically for life, all to shape the semi-feudal Afghanistan into modern Switzerland.

Alex Shephard, The New Republic, December 13:

The Afghanistan Papers are a bombshell. Yet the report has received scant attention in the broader media ... It has been buried beneath breathless reporting on the latest developments in the impeachment saga, Joe Biden’s purported pledge to serve only one term, and world leaders’ pathological envy of a 16-year-old Swedish girl.

The New York Times, December 10:

Military and civilian leaders said that the mission to rebuild Afghanistan was not only possible, but succeeding. Yet in private, the men and women who ran the war acknowledged ... what has long been clear to all but the most blinkered observers.

Peter Beaumont, The Guardian Australia, December 14:

The Afghanistan Papers ... tell another story: how successive presidents rejected nation-building but created a violent, corrupt and dysfunctional state only barely propped up by US arms. They detail too how the US and its allies came so badly unstuck in Afghanistan through a combination of hubris and ignorance.