First published 2021
Craig Whitlock exposes twenty years of systematic deception about America's longest war. Drawing from interviews with over 1,000 participants, from White House officials to frontline soldiers, he reveals how the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations repeatedly misled the public about progress in Afghanistan. The book documents how the mission lost focus after the initial success against al-Qaeda, becoming an unwinnable nation-building effort that officials knew was failing. President Bush didn't know his Afghanistan commander's name. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted he couldn't identify the enemy. His successor Robert Gates confessed they knew nothing about al-Qaeda. Yet all three administrations continued sending troops while publicly claiming success. Whitlock's investigation uncovers the strategies that failed, the corruption that flourished, and the officials who knew the truth but chose to deceive Americans for two decades.
Genres: history, non-fiction, 21st-century, investigative-journalism, current-affairs, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Afghanistan, America, White House
Period: 2000s, 2010s, 2020s
368 pages · Hardcover · Simon & Schuster