The Washington Post this week released a blockbuster expose called "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War."

After a lengthy legal battle, the Post got hold of documents compiled by SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. John Sopko, the Inspector General, interviewed over 600 people connected to the Afghan war effort to prepare a series of reports called "Lessons Learned," which purported to explain what had gone wrong since America's invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The "Lessons Learned" reports were critical, but "left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews," the Post wrote.

The Post sued to get hold of the underlying material, finally obtained it, and is now releasing its contents.

The United States spent a trillion dollars prosecuting an occupation that has to date claimed 157,000 lives, yet our presence in Afghanistan has been an abject failure.

The major revelation of the Afghan papers is a rehash of a story Americans became familiar with in the Sixties and Seventies, when leaders covered up our policy failures in Vietnam by creating bogus metrics for success.