US Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley on Friday pushed back against recent reports that government officials deceived the public about the state of the war in Afghanistan.
“I don’t think anyone has died in vain,” Milley said at a press conference at the Pentagon.
“I could not look myself in the mirror. I couldn’t answer myself at two to three in the morning when my eyes pop open and see the dead roll in front of my eyes,” the general said.
The comment came in response to recent report by The Washington Post, which revealed that American officials often pushed publicly rosy assessments and misleading statistics over the Afghan war.
Milley said that the original objective of going into Afghanistan in 2001 was to prevent the county from being as a platform to launch terrorist attacks against the US.
“That has what we set out to do and, to date, that has been successful,” he said.
Milley said that claims that there has been some kind of “coordinated lie” over the last 18 years about the state of the war in Afghanistan is a “mischaracterization.”
With hundreds of diplomats, military and intelligence officials “you can’t get that level of coordination” to carry out that kind of “deception,” Milley said.
US Acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper backed Milley’s comments.
“It’s not like this war was hiding somewhere,” Esper said.
The “insinuation that there’s been this large scale conspiracy is to me just ridiculous,” he said.
Milley said that the war in Afghanistan has been in a state of strategic stalemate, where neither the Taliban nor the Afghan government could defeat the other.
He said that the war will only end through an intra-Afghan peace settlement.
