Sophia Nguyen
“Bodyguard of Lies,” a documentary examining the deceit that drove the longest war in American history, takes its title from a Winston Churchill line: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
It’s difficult to say whether truth was considered precious, during the decades that the United States was mired in military conflict in Afghanistan. As the film demonstrates, it was certainly in short supply.
The film adapts a 2019 investigation in The Washington Post, “The Afghanistan Papers,” which uncovered hundreds of firsthand accounts from generals, diplomats and other government officials about what went wrong in the conflict. In their reporting, The Post’s Craig Whitlock, Leslie Shapiro and Armand Emamdjomeh found that those unvarnished remarks often directly contradicted statements made by those same leaders to the American public — adding up to decades of deliberate deception. (Whitlock was also executive producer on the film and appears in it.)
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In the movie, director Dan Krauss draws on the revelations from that cache of documents, interviewing a number of people involved in the conflict, including John F. Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction; Gen. David McKiernan, the four-star general fired during the Obama administration; and Maj. Gen. Edward M. Reeder, who commanded the U.S. Army Special Forces for much of the war.
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