Afghanistan Peace Campaign
A scene from “Bodyguard of Lies,” which chronicles years of U.S. failure in the Afghanistan conflict. (CBS/Paramount+)
The film adapts a 2019 investigation in The Washington Post, “The Afghanistan Papers,” which uncovered hundreds of firsthand accounts from generals, diplomats and other government officials about what went wrong in the conflict. In their reporting, The Post’s Craig Whitlock, Leslie Shapiro and Armand Emamdjomeh found that those unvarnished remarks often directly contradicted statements made by those same leaders to the American public — adding up to decades of deliberate deception. (Whitlock was also executive producer on the film and appears in it.)
In the movie, director Dan Krauss draws on the revelations from that cache of documents, interviewing a number of people involved in the conflict, including John F. Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction; Gen. David McKiernan, the four-star general fired during the Obama administration; and Maj. Gen. Edward M. Reeder, who commanded the U.S. Army Special Forces for much of the war.
Krauss and I spoke over Zoom a few days after the documentary’s Sept. 23 streaming premiere. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I mostly ran into a lack of interest, to be honest. I think even before the war was over, the American public had really tuned out. Now — what is it, four years after the war has ended? — Afghanistan feels really distant in the minds of the American public. It feels like a lifetime ago, to many.
Can you tell me about how you identified and recruited some of the on-camera interview subjects? Especially when it came to senior military officials, I was curious about why you chose the people you did — and whether there were people you wanted to get but couldn’t.
I said early on to the team, it’s not about the war, it’s about words. There’s been so much terrific landmark reporting about the war itself, and I didn’t want to repeat the work that had come before us. I wanted to keep a very tight focus on the lies — on the differences between what the American public was being told and what those same officials knew to be true behind closed doors.
So who do you recruit to tell that story? There are some obvious players, the big-hat, brand-name players that we could’ve tried to get. It didn’t seem to me that we would learn anything new by putting them in front of the camera again. So I was really focused on handing the microphone to people who hadn’t already spoken at length on this subject — and also people who could speak most directly, and most honestly, to their own role in propagating this rosy picture of the progress being made in Afghanistan.
The documentary grew out of the revelations of the Afghanistan Papers, which were published in late 2019. Do you think their publication significantly changed the way the war was conducted?
I have no idea. I mean, I have to — I would like to think that kind of reporting would have an impact. I can’t think of Craig’s reporting without thinking about the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg and the Vietnam War. The lies that were told during that war are very like the ones we were being told during this one.
The heart of the film is, as you say, words and deception from the government. Do you think the American public believed the deception?
Certainly, in my neck of the woods and maybe yours, too, I don’t think anyone ever believed that the war was going as well as they were telling us. I don’t know that the sales pitch was really thoroughly effective, at least for people who had a critical eye.
But it’s one thing to sense that, and it’s another thing to read it or to hear it. And that’s what the Afghanistan Papers did, at least for me. … Craig asks in the film, how do you prove that someone’s not telling the truth? Well, in the case of his reporting, you get the receipts.
Right, and then how do you prove that the person isn’t just self-deluded, but is actively telling you something they know to be untrue?
There was a certain degree of self-delusion that went into the lies, and there was also this very American brand of can-do optimism — that if you say something out loud, you will it into being. We are going to win. We are going to create a democracy in Afghanistan. You have to say it out loud in order for it to happen — and if you say it out loud then it puts an enormous amount of pressure and responsibility on the people beneath you.
By that token, do you think the Biden administration deserves more credit for, in some sense, dispensing with these illusions? The U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan within his first year in office, at some political cost.
I don’t know. I think what’s not discussed, and what I felt was important to include in the film. is the fact that the Trump administration negotiated an agreement with the Taliban, essentially in secret, without input from the U.S. Congress or the Afghan government. Biden inherited that agreement. So there’s certainly a legitimate debate to be had about whether the withdrawal was accomplished as effectively as it would’ve been under another government — who’s to say? Certainly there are strong feelings on all sides of that. But what’s not acknowledged as much is the agreement that led to that withdrawal.
I ask because while watching this documentary, I imagined some theoretical young person who might be getting their first real education about the war. They learn about the lies that got us into, and prolonged, this conflict — then all of a sudden it’s over, and that’s also a calamity. But at some point there must have been a pivot. Some leaders, somewhere — during either the Trump or Biden administrations — took a different course of action and dropped the illusion that we should stay in Afghanistan.
The war ended so disastrously that giving credit to anybody seems really daunting. It’s less about giving credit than reminding people how the end of the war came about: that it was not Biden deciding on his own, unilaterally, to end the war, and it was not Trump actually going through the difficult task of logistically pulling our military out of the country, which is a very, very difficult and dangerous thing to do.
At one point, John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan, almost lays down a gauntlet for the viewer: We should learn our lesson, so we don’t screw up if some president someday promises us a splendid little war. Do you think there are also lessons specifically for the American press corps, especially as they navigate a much more hostile environment? To cite just one example, the Pentagon recently demanded that journalists pledge not to obtain any unauthorized information.
I remember when we bombed the nuclear facilities in Iran and reporters were asking questions about the effectiveness of those strikes — very fair questions, given that American service members were put at risk, and taxpayer dollars and political capital were expended. But there was this sense in the briefing room at the Pentagon that it was unpatriotic to ask questions about the effectiveness of that military strike.
That was one example; the pledge is another. When I see the briefing room at the Pentagon now, I don’t think we’ve learned any lessons, and that things have gotten, in fact, much worse.
The American public has a right to know what’s being done in their name. The idea that it’s unpatriotic to demand answers from our political and military leadership — that’s really scary.
Sophia Nguyen is the news and features writer for the Books section at The Washington Post. She previously served as assistant editor on the National Politics desk and as an assistant editor for Outlook.