An authoritative exposé of twenty years of U.S. failures in Afghanistan, based on twenty declassified documents

The summer of 2021 saw the lid blown off twenty years of deception, obfuscation, and delusion in America's war in Afghanistan. By analyzing twenty key declassified documents covering twenty years of the U.S. effort, this slim volume offers concise answers to our most basic questions about the debacle and defeat that played out in August 2021 at the Kabul Airport.

Compiled by the director of the National Security Archive, the nation's leading foreign policy watchdog, Afghanistan 20/20 reveals that the U.S. government under four presidents misled the American people for nearly two decades about progress in Afghanistan, while hiding the inconvenient facts about ongoing failures inside confidential channels--facts that are revealed here in sobering detail.

Tom Blanton guides the reader through each document, providing expert insights and historical context. The documents in Afghanistan 20/20 include highest-level "snowflake" memos written by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the George W. Bush administration, critical cables written by U.S. ambassadors back to Washington under both Bush and Barack Obama, the deeply flawed Pentagon strategy document behind Obama's "surge" in 2009, and multiple "lessons learned" findings by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)--lessons that were never learned.

Author: Tom Blanton
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: New Press
Published: 11/05/2024
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9781620977590

About the Author
As director of the independent nongovernmental National Security Archive, Tom Blanton has won a 2004 Emmy Award, a 2000 George Polk Award, and the 2010 Link-Kuehl Prize. The author of several books including White House E-mail and Afghanistan 20/20 (both from The New Press), as well as articles that have appeared in Foreign Policy, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, he lives in Rockville, Maryland.