Mediaboss Marketing

Society of Active Retirees (SOAR), a Farmington Hills-based lifelong learning community billed as a health club for the brain, is hosting a special event featuring Craig Whitlock, staff writer for The Washington Post and author of The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War on Thursday, October 7 at 2 p.m., live via Zoom.

Whitlock will provide an in-depth look at the 20-year history of the United States involvement in Afghanistan. Whitlock will base his talk on the groundbreaking investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public about Americas longest war.

The event will provide revelations by security, governmental and military personnel who played a direct role in the war and will provide a discussion over what went wrong and how we are to understand Americas longest war. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending September 4, 2021. Whitlock has recently appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, PBS NewsHour and several other national media events.

Back in the summer of 2016, Whitlock got a tip from a source that former U.S. Army General Michael Flynn had given an extensive interview to a federal agency called the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Whitlock was interested to see what Flynn said about the war in Afghanistan.

After putting in a public records request to get transcript notes from the interview, the request was refused. Flynn then became President Donald Trumps National Security Advisor, which led Whitlock to believe the interview would be even more potentially newsworthy.

The Post ended up having to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Inspector General to get the interview, and while they were doing that, it was uncovered that the Inspector General had actually interviewed more than 400 people for a project they called Lessons Learned to try and identify mistakes made during the war in Afghanistan.

Once we found that out and we got a look at Flynns interview after we won in court, I knew there was a much bigger story there because Flynn was very blunt and unvarnished in his criticism of the war in Afghanistan in the interview, Whitlock said. I thought if the others are anything like this, its going to be an important story.

The interviews ended up being a way to get arms around a bigger project to report out what went wrong in Afghanistan and how people in government werent forthright about all the problems that were going on. The Afghanistan Papers were published in December 2019 by the Post, and after it became one of their most-read stories of that year, readers urged them to turn it into a book.

I did that and we expanded on the original series by obtaining several hundred other interviews that were conducted with veterans in the war and other senior officials, Whitlock said. It really enabled us to write a narrative of what went wrong in Afghanistan from beginning to end.

In reading the documents and interviews, what was most shocking to Whitlock is just how blunt the admissions of failure were by the people in charge.

There were literally several people who said, we didnt know what we were doing in Afghanistan, Whitlock stated. There were multiple generals who said they didnt have a strategy. To hear that from the people in charge, people who worked at The White House or the top levels at the Pentagon or military headquarters in Kabul was completely shocking to me, and even when I re-read their remarks today, I still cant believe they said some of this stuff.

Whitlock will be giving a talk during the event, but its really going to be a Q&A where viewers can ask anything theyre curious about. More than anything, Whitlock hopes the event allows people to get a better understanding of what happened in Afghanistan.

We had been told for years by people in charge that we were making progress in Afghanistan, so how did this happen? This is really an event to try and explain some of that and answer anybodys questions.

Registration for this event is open to the public. The event fee is $10.00. For more information about SOAR, or to register for the event, go to http://www.soarexplore.com or call (248) 626-0296.

See the original post:
SOAR Hosting Virtual Event with Craig Whitlock, Author of 'The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War' Detroit Jewish News - The Jewish News