Mediaboss Marketing

Its easy to criticize the American effort in Afghanistan. Among its many shortcomings, Washington has vacillated across numerous ineffective strategies, failed to fully account for the geopolitical constraints of the conflict, and consistently prioritized expediency over effectiveness. But did U.S. officials pervasively lie to the American people about the war? The Washington Post seems to think so, as evidenced by the first sentence of its Afghanistan Papers articles published last week: A confidential trove of government documents reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. Its no surprise that the series has gotten a fair amount of attention.

But is that claim accurate? Unfortunately, its not. The story the Post is telling is neither wholly true, nor supported by the documents it published. Instead, the Posts reporting puts sensationalist spin on information that was not classified, has already been described in publicly-available reports, only covers a fraction of the 18 years of the war, and falls far short of convincingly demonstrating a campaign of deliberate lies and deceit.

The Government Has Published Numerous Reports Critical of the Afghanistan War

The documents the Post was able to obtain are transcripts and notes from interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known more commonly as SIGAR. These interviews were conducted as part of SIGARs lessons learned program, whose goal is to identify and preserve lessons from the U.S. reconstruction experience in Afghanistan, and to make recommendations to Congress and executive agencies on ways to improve [U.S.] efforts in current and future operations. Importantly, the interviews the Post obtained were conducted between 2014 and 2018, in many cases years after the people being interviewed left their positions of authority. In addition, they were conducted off the record, not for attribution, and at the unclassified (as opposed to confidential, secret, or top secret) level. And, they were used as data for the production of the eight lessons learned reports that SIGAR has already published and are available via its website.

Since 2007, I have in some form or fashion been involved in assessing progress in the war in Afghanistan whether as an analyst embedded within the International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Central Command, or as the leader of various independent assessments of Afghan security forces and the United States overall strategy for the war. Throughout this time, I have had the unique experience of having been interviewed by SIGAR several times for its lessons learned projects, and I have conducted exactly these types of interviews for them in support of one of their lessons learned efforts. I can therefore say with confidence that these interviews contain a mix of three types of information: interviewees recollections of historical actions and events (which may or may not exactly correspond to what actually happened); their opinions on what they saw, heard, sensed, and did (or didnt) do while in their position of authority; and reflections on their own experience (which are often delivered in an air of catharsis). Because these interviews are conducted well after the fact and are off the record, interviewees are often especially candid and willing to explore their own failures and those of others, with the understanding that doing so is for the greater and future good of American policy and security, and will not directly be made public.

Thus, it is no surprise that what the Post got was a lot of post-factual reminiscing and salacious quotes, which it has been using for effect. But are its headlines accurately representing the information it has? The answer is no. Take, for example, its claim that U.S. officials have consistently lied to the American people about progress in the Afghanistan war. By my count, in the Posts article specifically laying out this claim, it includes quotes from 17 interviewees. In a newspaper article that may seem like a lot, but in fact it is a mere 3 percent of the total number of documents it has. While some of the quotes the Post uses are salacious in nature, are they truly representative of a consistent theme of lying throughout the documents the Post received, or are they the views of a fringe group? To accurately back up their claim of a campaign of deliberate deceit, some form of thematic and textual analysis would need to be done to demonstrate the pervasiveness of this theme. The Posts article makes no attempt to do so.

Further, to convincingly demonstrate a pattern of willful lies and deceit, one would need to show that U.S. authorities were making such decisions in real time. Policy memos, transcripts of official U.S. policy discussions, and sensitive communications among senior authorities (the vast majority of which would be classified) would be needed as evidence of such decisions. Yet, the Post has only one data source for this a number of memos it obtained from Donald Rumsfelds archives. True, these memos are from the Secretary of Defense and they do call into question the wisdom of some decisions made during his tenure. But they also cover less than a third of the Afghanistan war (2001-2006) and they do not present a comprehensive picture of what was happening in other parts of the U.S. government (especially the White House). To convincingly paint a picture of the U.S. government as consistently and pervasively at war with the truth in Afghanistan, a much more representative trove of information would be needed.

The Afghanistan Papers are Not the Pentagon Papers

The Post seems to implicitly recognize this when it attempts to draw a comparison of the interviews it received to the infamous Pentagon Papers. This comparison is disingenuous, however, for three reasons. First, the Pentagon Papers consisted of far more information than what the Post has (they were 47 volumes of over 7,000 pages). Second, those papers consisted of analysis stemming from a comprehensive and representative set of internal memos and official policy documents from senior U.S. authorities that were captured in real time. And third, they were highly classified (at the level of top secret). What the Post has are interviews that were conducted after the fact, at an unclassified (though off the record) level, and were used as data for reports that are already available to the public.

Here again I will turn to my own experience. My personal observations during the roughly 12 years I have been working on assessments of the Afghanistan war are that U.S. officials have not generally engaged in a deliberate campaign of lies and deceit of the American public when it came to progress in the war. Rather, what Ive observed is shifting (and often unclear or arguably unachievable) strategic and policy objectives combined with aggressive optimism and an overwhelming can do attitude on the part of U.S. government officials especially within the military given its rigid hierarchy, and culture of following orders and vertical appeasement (as described here). In addition, the U.S. government and particularly the Department of Defense has consistently struggled with its own doctrine, processes, approaches, and bureaucracy doing its thing type challenges to assessing these non-conventional wars, as I have endeavored to show along with a host of other authors such as Ben Connable and Stephen Downes-Martin.

The combination of these factors has more often than not resulted in a situation in which U.S. officials were asked to provide their assessments of progress toward murky outcomes using primarily their own judgment. In real time, it is therefore not at all surprising that their assessments would typically follow the pattern of progress having been made, with many challenges remaining. It is also not surprising that in hindsight, many of these officials would recognize that their efforts accomplished less overall than they had hoped they would in real time. Does that make them liars? No. Does it mean they were delusional or professionally negligent? Some might argue so, while citing things like intelligence assessments as controverting evidence to these officials own assessments. In my view, however, the vast majority of these officials were not lying or delusional they were aggressively pursuing objectives that were mostly incoherent or unachievable and doing their best to make sense of information that was, as a result, often conflicting or incoherent itself. As I often tell people who ask for my help with assessing progress, if you dont know where youre going, its very hard to tell if youve gotten there, but movement in any direction will feel like youre getting closer.

Sometime in the future when the policy memos, intelligence products, and independent assessments are declassified and the full extent of the U.S. governments internal deliberations are known publicly, the conclusion drawn by historians will be different than that drawn by the Post. While it is scintillating to read of allegedly-scandalous behavior on the part of U.S. officials in charge of various aspects of the war, the general and pervasive reality is far less conspiratorial our inability to accurately assess and convey progress (or lack thereof) in the war was mostly a symptom of not having a clear and consistent vision of what we were doing and why, combined with an aggressively optimistic, can do culture within our implementing departments and agencies (the military especially) and an over-reliance on self-assessment. A key point here is that these aspects themselves are systemically problematic and deserving of deep analysis and introspection exactly the kind that is evident in SIGARs lessons learned interviews and its already-published reports. Yet, rather than helping us address those issues, the Posts reporting will make it harder to do this going forward. Now that everyone knows their interviews are likely to be made public and potentially used to make conspiratorial claims against them, the SIGAR lessons learned team will inevitably have curtailed access and candor from current and prior U.S. government officials going forward.

Americans Have Been Let Down, Not Lied To

I applaud efforts by the Post, SIGAR, and others to bring more of the policy discussions, decisions, and mistakes pertaining to the war in Afghanistan into the light. But as in any analysis, the conclusions drawn need to be rigorously justified by the data available. By this standard, the Posts reporting has failed to deliver an accurate portrayal of the available information. It is further disappointing that the head of SIGAR, John Sopko, claimed on record to the Post that the American people have constantly been lied to. Through this statement, Sopko (who has been accused previously of distorting the role of the inspector general and of spinning facts to generate news stories), has significantly undermined his own lessons learned program one that had been adhering to very rigorous analytic sourcing standards. The mission of that effort to understand what the U.S. has done right and wrong in Afghanistan, in hopes of doing better in the future remains valuable but is undercut by both the Posts reporting and Sopkos comments. I hope that both of these actors will engage in their own lessons learned reflections and come to the conclusion that there was no secret war on the truth and, as with everyone else associated with the war in Afghanistan, they have made mistakes that are worth recognizing and learning from.

Dr. Jonathan Schroden is a research program director whose work has focused on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency activities across much of the Middle East and South Asia. He has served as a strategic advisor to numerous military commands and civilian offices in, or focused on, Iraq and Afghanistan. The views expressed here are his alone. You can find him on Twitter @jjschroden.

Image: U.S. Army (Photo by Master Sgt. Alex Licea)

Follow this link:
There Was No Secret War on the Truth in Afghanistan - War on the Rocks

A reader wrote in about the revelations about U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and how shes changing her mind about what America can actually accomplish when it takes military action overseas.

I hate the idea of standing by while they fill soccer stadiums to stone women, and all of that. I truly hate it. But I think we have proven we cannot really do this. Ive always been more interventionist than isolationist, but I have to admit, the lives weve given, some of them personal friends, the money spent and yet things are just not getting done there.

How do you tell yourself, I did good, I did my best, I wasnt wasting my time in that service, with reports like this? How do you tell yourself your entire career isnt wasted, or even wrong? No wonder military personnel are fighting so many psychological issues now.

I thought we should even have gathered allies for stepping into Darfur, and Afghanistan was just a no-brainer for me, even as I lived with deployments right from the start. Listening to Colin Powell at the time, I thought [the 2003 invasion of] Iraq made sense, even knowing my [loved ones] would go too. I have thought we needed to stand up against tyranny and the use of chemical weapons for Syria against YEARS ago. I believed in the surges. Now I dont know. And I bet Im one of many.

What our post-9/11 history has demonstrated is that the United States has a first-rate military that can tear apart an opposing force thoroughly, quickly, and effectively. But our government, along with the governments of our allies, have not yet figured out how to establish peaceful, unified, stable governments to replace the regimes we topple not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Libya and arguably Syria as well. The problem was not that we were too stingy or didnt try hard enough; its that were trying to plant seeds in soil that isnt fertile enough to grow much of anything. (In Afghanistan, this is not merely metaphorical; the U.S. spent $34 million trying to grow soybeans in Afghanistan, despite previous researching the land was ill-suited to that purpose.)

The American public does not have the patience for the decades-long military presence, like in Germany and Japan and South Korea. We can argue that they ought to, and some would argue that the 13 to 16 U.S. personnel killed in Afghanistan each year since 2016 is a relatively small price to pay to ensure Afghanistan doesnt once again become an incubator for terrorists who want to kill as many of us as possible. But the public remains unconvinced . . . that is, when the public stops to think about foreign policy at all. Americans are tired of being in Afghanistan, but the protests against the wars largely stopped once Obama took office.

The grim SIGAR assessment of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan disappeared from the news cycle quickly. As Alex Shephard observes over in The New Republic, one major reason that the Afghanistan Papers have received so comparatively little coverage is that everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive. There are no hearings, few press gaggles.

Follow this link:
We Never Figured Out Afghanistan, and No Longer Want to Try - National Review

Ali Zifan [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

December 9, 2019; Washington Post

A confidential trove of government documentsreveals that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable, writes Craig Whitlock in the Washington Post.

Whitlocks statement is based on documents released to the Post by the federal government after a three-year legal battle. The documents come from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction or SIGAR, which interviewed over 600 people starting in 2014 for its Lessons Learned project. Since 2016, SIGAR has published seven papers based on research for that project, but the reports, contends Whitlock, often omitted the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.

What the Post has received, explains Whitlock, is more than 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from 428 of the interviews, as well as several audio recordings. Of these 428 interviews, the names were blacked out for 366 of them, although Whitlock indicates that the Post was able to independent able to identify 33 additional names independently. Whitlock adds that the Post is still seeking a court order to remove the remaining name restrictions.

Although the Afghanistan war has received scant US media coverage in recent years, the US commitment in dollars and lives lost has been significant. Today, the US military contingent today in Afghanistan has fallen to 13,000 soldiers, but bombing is occurring at three times the pace that it occurred under President Barack Obama. Civilian deaths in 2018 totaled 3,804, the highest single-year total since the United Nations started counting a decade ago.

Since 2001, Whitlock adds, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures. More broadly, an estimated 157,000 have died in Afghanistan since the war began, including an estimated 64,124 members of the Afghanistan security forces, 42,100 Taliban-affiliated fighters, and 43,074 Afghan civilians. Additional fatalities include 3,814 US contractors, 1,145 coalition troops, 424 humanitarian workers, and 67 journalists.

Direct federal costs (defense, state and US Agency for International Development) are estimated to be between $934 billion and $978 billion. Per capita, that works out to about $3,000 per US resident. These figures, adds Whitlock, do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

Among the findings:

The Post organizes interview transcripts by topicspin, strategy, nation-building, corruption, security forces, and opium. It has also highlighted 25 of the interviews that Post reporters consider to be particularly essential reading.

What happens next? Two members of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have called for hearings to be held, which may reveal some additional details.

Meanwhile, the Afghanistan Papers remind us of the high cost in livesand in treasureof the 18-year-war. For example, if just half of the direct spending on Afghanistan had been redirected to fund universal pre-K education, the federal government could have covered the estimated $26 billion a year cost these past 18 years without raising taxes a penny.Steve Dubb

Follow this link:
Afghanistan Papers Reveal Widespread Lying and Corruption - Non Profit News - Nonprofit Quarterly

A U.S Army soldier walks behind an Afghan policeman during a joint patrol with Afghan police and Canadian soldiers west of Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2007. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)Its not nearly as high as it should be, because the American people have for the most part declined to hold the liars accountable.

Late last year, Donald Trump announced that he wanted to completely withdraw troops from Syria. Then, the usual policy experts the few left serving his administration talked him down or ignored him and suddenly the White House announced it had reversed that decision. Then, this year, Trump moved between 40 and 100 troops out of one spot in Syria, and political and foreign-policy experts lost their minds. Kurdish allies were betrayed by the move, they said. ISIS prisoners were released. American influence was squandered and surrendered. What would potential allies think of us for having turned tail?

At Foreign Policy, Peter Feaver and Will Inboden wrote to criticize the handful of realist and restrainer voices praising Trumps Syria pullout:

Trump and the realists both tend to present the debate as a false choice between endless wars and total withdrawal. And both offer the false comfort that immediate withdrawal will not impose high costs to U.S. interests.

Even those with qualified praise for Trumps decision complained about the haphazardness of his policy-making and its implementation, and of his departure from the norms of American foreign policy.

What, you might ask, were those norms producing for us? Forever war or isolation is a false choice, they say. But cast your eyes over to Afghanistan, where it really does seem like the alternative to leaving is staying endlessly. At least thats how policymakers in three administrations have thought about the Afghan conflict, to judge from the Washington Posts latest scoop, a huge tranche of documents recording the candid, occasionally emotional assessments of the U.S. War in Afghanistan made by White House officials, generals, and policymakers.

My personal favorite is the early and perspicacious note from then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld: We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave. He was right. The United States had almost immediate success in routing the Taliban from Kabul and denying safe havens to al-Qaeda, but met with almost immediate failure in its efforts to create a stable state that would prevent the return of the Taliban and the safe havens for terrorists that it provided absent a continual American presence. Weve remained in this state of half-success, half-failure ever since.

The more troubling revelation in the Posts story was that multiple presidents and generals had lied elaborately to the public about the war, pretending it was going well even though theyd privately concluded that our objectives were contradictory and our strategy was a mess. Worse yet was the lying they did to themselves, creating endless color-coded metrics and then manipulating the data that was measured by them.

Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible, said one Army colonel and senior advisor during the Obama years, Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.

Americans are still dying in Afghanistan. So are the Afghans who risked their lives to ally with U.S. troops against the Taliban. Over 60,000 Afghans have died in the 18-year war, against an enemy American presidents long ago concluded we could not or would not defeat. Has anyone asked what future allies might think of us for sticking around and bleeding our Afghan allies dry in a war we were simply unwilling to end or win?

Classical statements of just-war theory put the prospects of success at the heart of the moral calculation. Wars are occasions for so much evil that there must be reasons to believe their aims are achievable if they are to be pursued in a just way.

But the U.S. has pursued practically utopian aims in Afghanistan, including the establishment of a strong central government. Under the Obama administration, we tried to use our military to prop up the institutions of a stable country for the Afghans, believing that if they built enough schools and canals, a civil society would just appear around it all. And in a sickening replay of late Vietnam-era follies, officials continued to lie to the public about the level of corruption in the allied Afghan government, and about the effectiveness of its own armed forces against the Taliban.

Of course, what the Post reveals as the attempts of multiple presidents, generals, and other officials to mislead the public has also been half success and half failure. Did you, dear reader, ever believe that a modernizing civil society was starting to flourish in Afghanistan under American tutelage? No. Of course not. The lies were not credible. But I suspect that, like me, you havent decided to hold one president or another particularly responsible for pursuing an unattainable and thus by definition unjust objective in Afghanistan. And in that sense, the strategy of lying to the public has succeeded.

The U.S. governments propaganda failed to convince American citizens that Afghanistan was really getting better, but American citizens have failed to punish their government for lying to us and wasting American blood and treasure.

In normal countries that is, smaller and more vulnerable ones failures in war are punished severely and even spectacularly. Generals, policy advisors, and heads of state are sometimes hung or shot in the streets at the conclusion of a failed war. But we are a large and powerful enough country that the public doesnt bear such immense costs for its nations foreign-policy blunders and lies, so we dont give out such ugly punishments. In fact, we tend to give the architects of such failures new positions at universities or think tanks, or even advising the next president.

Perhaps there is justice in all this anyway, though: Having spent two decades lying about Afghanistan, the normal experts are now left to rattle to cable-news cameras, and for the most part they arent believed even when they tell truths about Washington. It may not be a just punishment, but it could be a fitting one. And in any event, its the only one forthcoming.

See the original post here:
The Price Our Government Has Paid for Lying about Afghanistan - National Review

A Canadian construction engineer conducts a survey for a new bridge near the Dahla Dam in Kandahar province of Afghanistan on April 16, 2008. PST

Recently, the Washington Post published a lessons-learned report on Afghanistan authored by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, SIGAR. The report, based on 600 interviews with American civilian and military leaders directly involved in the operations in Afghanistan, reveals bleak pictures of an unwinnable war, with the U.S. administration deliberately hiding the truth. The report caused a sensation in the international community involved in Afghanistan.

Canada spent $20 billion for the Afghanistan mission: military operations and development assistance (of $2.2 billion). Certainly, Canadas largest development assistance program in history must address public accountability principles. While David Mulroney, a former deputy minister who oversaw the Canadian operations in Afghanistan, welcomes a comprehensive review of Canadas involvement, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan dismisses the findings of the SIGAR report. He defends Canadas military and development record, based on what he witnessed during his time in Afghanistan. He claims that to comprehend the degree of the impact of Canadian presence in Afghanistan, one must be on the ground and see the ups and downs over the years.

I certainly meet this criterion, and my personal experience contradicts the ministers over-optimistic assessment of progress.

In 2003, I saw optimism pervading the country. I saw it on the faces of men, women and children. While my very first impression was that Kabul was the poorest of all Asian capitals I had seen, it was nonetheless vibrant: the Kabuliwallahs in their majestic turbans going about their business; lovely children, with smiling faces, running to the roadside greeting passengers in cars; women bargaining in the street with vendors.

What I see today in my drives in Kabul are certainly not signs of development or improved well-being. Children still line the roadside but childhood has been robbed from their faces. I see fearful eyes of women; and old men in tattered clothes; burkha-clad women carrying babies; young and able-bodied unemployed men and school-aged children, begging in the streets. I traverse a war zone marked with checkpoints, sniffing dogs, concrete barriers, steel walls, sandbags, armed guards and armoured vehicles all signs of declining security in the capital of a country we spent $18 billon to secure.

Contradicting Sajjans claims of progress in development, meanwhile, the most burning examples of our failed development projects are: the Dahla Dam, where we spent $10 million for security out of the total cost of $50 million, with little water flowing to Afghan farm lands; the polio vaccination drive, which has not been successful in erasing the title of Kandahar as the worlds polio capital; and the building of 52 schools with $90 million, a large number of them not operational.

We supported pomegranate production as an alternative livelihood to prevent farmers from cultivating poppy. We should have known that no other crop could compete with poppy prices. Afghanistan today is the largest narcotics-producing country in the world. Similarly, programming for womens development, largely detached from the ground realities from the start, produced all but dismal results. Aid workers question figures on enrolment of children in schools, as meaningful data collection is not possible under the deteriorating security situation; and the absentee rate and dropout numbers, especially of girls, are abysmal. In the health sector, the reduction in infant mortality rate is also questioned. Malnutrition in children under five is reaching dangerous levels.

Undoing the past is not possible but learning from it will help us avoid the mistakes made and save us from losses in similar ventures. Let us move our government to launch an independent comprehensive review of our Afghanistan mission with this purpose.

Dr. Nipa Banerjee, currently with the University of Ottawa, served 34 years in CIDA, Canadas Official Development Assistance agency. She was the resident head in Kabul, of Canadas aid program (2003-2006). Since 2007, she has visited Afghanistan twice a year, on average.

ALSO IN CITIZEN OPINIONS

Gower: Ottawas official plan is innovative but will require a shift in thinking

Poliquin: Talking to anglophones about francophone immigration

White: I quite my well-paid desk job and went back to teaching. Heres what happened

Read more here:
Banerjee: Why we still need a review of Canada's role in Afghanistan - Ottawa Citizen