Reprinted with permission from Matt’s Thoughts on War and Peace. Cross-posted by Eisenhower Media Network.
Bodyguard of Lies, featuring senior fellow Matthew Hoh, is an unflinching, unvarnished deep dive into the brutality of the Afghanistan War and the double-talk of U.S. politicians and military leaders.
The documentary, produced in conjunction with The Washington Post, peels back the layers of deceit that the American public was fed over four different presidential administrations: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.
This official deceit involved having no clear strategy while simultaneously concealing uncomfortable truths about how the war was playing out on the ground. It was grounded in a deep ignorance of Afghanistan’s culture and history, and a refusal to acknowledge that spending large sums of money in Afghanistan did not, in fact, improve the country or lead to any type of victory.
Stills from Bodyguard Of Lies, streaming on Paramount+, 2025. Photo Credit: CBS / Paramount+
Hoh worked for the U.S. State Department in Afghanistan. In 2009, he resigned in protest over the continued escalation of the war. He became a whistleblower, only to be met with threats and pushback from the Pentagon.
“They didn’t care what the reality of this war was. They cared about whether or not their narrative was going to be upset by someone speaking to the press.”
The bipartisan deceit came at great cost: $300 million per day; hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Afghans; thousands of dead and wounded U.S. troops and contractors; and an Afghanistan ultimately worse off than before the U.S. military occupation began in 2001.
Most money for the U.S. reconstruction of Afghanistan went right back into U.S. corporations. Georgetown Professor C. Christine Fair explained in 2021 that “between 80 and 90 percent of outlays actually returned to the U.S. economy. Of the 10 to 20 percent of the contracts that remained in the country, the United States rarely cared about the efficacy of the initiative.”
The top five U.S.-based war corporations received $2 trillion in federal contracts during the Afghanistan war.
Bodyguard of Lies premieres on the Paramount+ streaming service on September 23.
Matthew Hoh is the Associate Director of the Eisenhower Media Network. Matt is a former Marine Corps captain, Afghanistan State Department officer, a disabled Iraq War veteran and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus with the Center for International Policy. He writes at Substack.
