American civilians, who are confused that their soldiers are still in Kabul while the officials always said they are making progress in Afghanistan, finally get to know a true Afghanistan war after the Afghanistan Papers published by The Washington Post on Monday.

Since the start of the U.S.' war in Afghanistan in 2001, senior U.S. civilian and military officials did not tell the truth about the status of the war, according to the newspaper after reviewing more than 2,000 pages of government documents.

It's reported that the officials made rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid evidence that the war had become unwinnable.

Including previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, the documents are reported to examine the root failures of the 18-year-long armed conflict and provide some lessons so that the world's largest economy will not repeat the mistakes any more.

Besides lying to the public, the interviews in the documents showed that many of the interviewees, who were involved in the longest armed conflict in the country, had no idea of what they were doing in the Middle East country.

"What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking," Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, was quoted by the Post as saying.

Besides for individual officials, even the U.S. government never settled on what they wanted to achieve in Afghanistan. A reshape of the regional power balance or rebuild a democratic Afghanistan? There is still no answer.

The documents show that the interviewees in the Middle Eastern country could not tell friend from foe, and some of them were used to altering data to present the best picture possible.

According to the Post, behind the progress the officials told the public, there is flourishing drug trafficking instead of flourishing market economy, incompetent Afghan security forces instead of a robust Afghan army to defend their homeland, and a corrupt Afghanistan instead of a democratic one.

The Post said that it won release of the documents after a three-year legal battle with the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as SIGAR, which was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.

The report — "The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of America's longest war" — was published just as peace talks between the United States and the Taliban have restarted in Doha, Qatar.

According to the United Nations, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed last year. That is the most in one year since the United Nations began tracking casualties in the war a decade ago.