Revelations echo, yet they shock us less

On June 13, 1971, The New York Times published the first of several articles drawn from a secret history of the Vietnam war that had been compiled by the Pentagon, a 47-volume study that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. After three days of stories detailing the lies and tragic missteps of four administrations of both parties, Attorney General John Mitchell convinced a federal judge to sign an order blocking the newspaper from publishing the stories.

The public reaction was quick and loud. Soon The Washington Post picked up the story after getting its own copy of the secret study, and then 20 other papers published articles based on parts of the study they had obtained. Anti-war demonstrators took to the streets and members of Congress demanded an investigation. The Pentagon Papers added fuel to the fiery demands for the war’s end, which finally came four years later, after 58,220 American troops had died.

This month, The Washington Post published a series of articles it labeled The Afghanistan Papers, detailing what lay behind the 18-year military slog in Afghanistan that has become the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. The stories were based on more than 2,000 pages of documents compiled for a secret federal study of what caused the war effort’s failures.

The Post got the records only after a three-year fight under the Freedom of Information Act. It’s no surprise that the government tried to stop their release; they reveal that three administrations had uncertain objectives, implemented flawed strategies and repeatedly lied, apparently to conceal from U.S. citizens and the rest of the world how badly the war effort was going.

America has spent a trillion dollars in the Afghan fight; 2,300 U.S. troops have died and more than 20,000 were wounded in action. At least 150,000 Afghans have died, of whom perhaps one-quarter are civilians.

It is troubling yet unsurprising that the reaction to The Afghanistan Papers has been muted, at least in comparison to the outrage generated by those similar stories almost four decades ago. America is a very different country now.

Maybe people are just distracted by the impeachment debate in Washington. Or perhaps the official reaction yields the public yawn: The Trump White House has shrugged at these revelations, while the Nixon team’s effort to squelch the Pentagon Papers led to a landmark Supreme Court decision affirming that the government cannot exercise prior restraint of First Amendment rights.

More likely, though, the lack of outrage over The Washington Post’s extraordinary findings shows that we’ve come to expect no better from our government.

How can we be shocked at being misled about the Afghan war’s military progress when our president has offered up more than 13,000 documented lies during his tenure? (To be clear, The Afghanistan Papers reveal failures through the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.)

Why would we be surprised that the goals of the Afghan incursion weren’t clear inside the government, as the Post found, when they’ve never made much sense to the general public?

Public trust in all institutions has fallen since the 1960s, and trust in government is near historic lows, according to the Pew Research Center. Only 17% of Americans today say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (3%) or “most of the time” (14%). More than half expressed that much trust in 1971.

Americans were both more naive during the Vietnam war era and more engaged in what our nation was doing abroad, in part because of the military draft. Vital young men from all walks of life were being shipped to distant Southeast Asian jungles, and many from even wealthy families never returned. Rare was the American neighborhood untouched by the war.

Now 80% of our all-volunteer military comes from households with income below $80,000 a year; 43% of the men and 56% of the women in the military are from a racial minority. For many Americans, any war our country is now fighting is not their war.

Or maybe Americans are just tired of having to notice what’s going on, after being shocked senseless by school shootings, political outrages, climate disasters and more, all of it pummeling us on every news cycle. So we turn away. No wonder history is repeating itself: It’s just another war foisted upon us under false pretenses. Nothing to see here.

Still, one echo of the past merits celebration: There remain watchdogs at work, exposing high-level duplicity that we would never know of but for a free press — which, thankfully, and against some odds, remains a potent force in America.

Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union of Albany, N.Y.