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This week, Americans watched in disbelief as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in a matter of days \u2014 and we wondered what Craig Whitlock was thinking. Two years ago he and a team at The Post published a prescient and ground-breaking project called \u201cThe Afghanistan Papers,\u201d revealing hundreds of secret interviews with U.S. officials candidly discussing the failures of the war.
The interviews with some 400 people were part of a project called \u201cLessons Learned,\u201d undertaken by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, and The Post obtained them after a three-year legal battle. These Afghanistan papers are a secret history of the war, Whitlock tells Martine Powers, and \u201cthey contain these frank admissions of how the war was screwed up and that what the American people were being told about the war wasn\u2019t true.\u201d 
\u201cThey really do bring to mind the Pentagon Papers, which were the Defense Department\u2019s top-secret history of the Vietnam War,\u201d Whitlock says. 
These recordings have new resonance this week. 
Read excerpts from Craig Whitlock\u2019s new book, \u201fThe Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War\u201d.Deceptions and lies: What really happened in Afghanistan
The grand illusion: Hiding the truth about the Afghanistan war\u2019s \u2018conclusion\u2019