{"id":12141,"date":"2019-12-14T20:00:21","date_gmt":"2019-12-14T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2019\/dec\/14\/afghanistan-papers-political-self-delusion-public-indifference"},"modified":"2019-12-14T20:00:21","modified_gmt":"2019-12-14T11:00:21","slug":"afghanistan-agony-is-a-product-of-political-self-delusion-and-public-indifference-simon-tisdall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=12141","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan agony is a product of political self-delusion \u2013 and public indifference | Simon Tisdall"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Afghanistan papers revealed the same kind of US official groupthink that prolonged the Vietnam war \u2013 but where, over 18 years of bloodshed, is the outrage?<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s coincidental \u2013 but fitting \u2013 that the so-called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/graphics\/2019\/investigations\/afghanistan-papers\/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents\/\">Afghanistan papers<\/a> were published in the week Donald Trump was officially charged with abuse of power. The documents show how, for years, the American public and the world were <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2019\/dec\/09\/afghan-papers-reveal-us-public-were-misled-about-unwinnable-war\">persistently and deliberately misled by the Bush and Obama administrations<\/a> over the chaotic conduct and unwinnable nature of the Afghan war.<\/p>\n<p>If such behaviour does not amount to abuse of presidential power, if this does not qualify as \u201chigh crimes and misdemeanors\u201d, then pray, what does?<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2019\/dec\/14\/afghanistan-papers-political-self-delusion-public-indifference\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Afghanistan papers revealed the same kind of US official groupthink that prolonged the Vietnam war \u2013 but where, over 18 years of bloodshed, is the outrage?It\u2019s coincidental \u2013 but fitting \u2013 that the so-called Afghanistan papers were published in the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[46,997,61,758,47,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-defence-policy","category-south-and-central-asia","category-us-national-security","category-us-news","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12141"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12142,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12141\/revisions\/12142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}