After 18 years of war in Afghanistan, a secret Pentagon assessment shows that the publicly marketed image of can-do military success has masked a bright, shining lie on the ground. U.S. policymakers and military commanders apparently had no clear understanding of the goal when they launched the war after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and even after 18 years, they still apparently haven't figured it out.

"We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking," was the assessment of Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the Afghanistan war during the Bush and Obama administrations. Of course, Lute never said anything like that in public. His and other such candid views were included in a more than 2,000-page secret federal examination of the root failures of America's longest war. The Washington Post obtained the document after a three-year legal battle.

"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn't know what we were doing," Lute stated in 2015, questioning "the magnitude of this dysfunction" and lamenting the 2,400 lives lost.

The papers are an appalling statement on the trustworthiness of military and government officials when they reported publicly on the war's progress. If a war isn't going well, the time for a reassessment is in the first months or years, not more than a decade into the fighting. There still are worthy goals worth fighting for in Afghanistan — including suppressing Islamist terrorism and ensuring that women aren't returned to a slave-like existence. But don't tell us, year after year, that the Taliban's defeat is near when news on the ground says the opposite.

The Afghanistan war once was overwhelmingly popular and deemed essential in defeating the kinds of Islamist radicalism promoted by al-Qaida and the Taliban. Early in the war, it became clear that these foes wouldn't give up easily. Even so, President George W. Bush diverted America's resources to the 2003 unnecessary war in Iraq. The Afghanistan campaign has deteriorated ever since.

But American policymakers and commanders described their progress in glowing terms. When statistics demonstrated otherwise, they simply concocted rosier statistics. Washington appears to have learned nothing from the campaign of deceit in Vietnam exposed by the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

In Afghanistan, top U.S. officials succumbed to a mindset of trying to make themselves look good while boosting fears that Afghanistan would disintegrate in chaos if Washington withdrew. The fears were not unfounded. But sanctioning the waste of billions of dollars, while thousands of casualties mounted — all for the sake of massaging decision-makers' fragile egos — is unconscionable. No wonder President Donald Trump has concluded that the only way to extricate America from such "endless wars" is simply to cut and run. The professionals running the war appear to have given him no better options.

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