I want a better deal on the hatred we are buying. The subway service in my town (Boston) is about to increase fares, again, and cut back service in a semi-yearly ritual of crapping on the poorest in Gov. Duval Patrick's state, in a week when the US will toss another $2 billion at military operations in Afghanistan which seems only to keep generating more hatred for Americans.
At $2 billion every week, I say that's too much. I'm sure there are better deals on hatred. And thanks to a fearlessly outspoken line officer, Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, we now know what we don't know about Afghanistan.
In his bombshell report which is to Afghanistan what the Pentagon Papers were to Vietnam, "Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders' Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort," Davis all but calls his top commanders skilled, habitual, wouldn't-know-truth-if-it-hit-them-in-the-head bald-faced liars about the situation in Afghanistan. His opening thesis, which has received much of the attention surrounding the report, is actually among the mildest to be found in the report, saying merely that:
"Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America's credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan. It has likely cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars Congress might not otherwise have appropriated had it known the truth, and our senior leaders' behavior has almost certainly extended the duration of this war. The single greatest penalty our Nation has suffered, however, has been that we have lost the blood, limbs and lives of tens of thousands of American Service Members with little to no gain to our country as a consequence of this deception."
Lest one miss what Lt. Col. Davis is driving at, he sums it simply by saying:
"We seem significantly challenged to tell the truth in almost any situation."
Of the spin-master Petraeus during his tenure as commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Davis points out:
"...in numerous speeches during his 12 months in command of ISAF troops, General Petraeus often stated...that since the arrival of US surge forces, ISAF has taken away Taliban strong holds, killed or captured hundreds of his senior and mid-level leaders; thousands of foot-soldiers have been removed from the battle field (killed or captured); ISAF has interdicted enemy lines of communication; discovered untold numbers of weapons and ammo caches, and beaten the enemy on battlefields throughout the countryBy any logic, then, since the number of ISAF troops never dropped throughout 2010 and ISAF leaders often reported the Afghan people were coming more and more to our side, then the number of enemy attacks, by any rational calculation, ought to have dropped throughout the second half of 2010, and to have done so precipitously by the summer of 2011, some 18 month after the surge began. But that is not what happened. In fact, as we'll see in the following sections despite the fact we had 94,000 to 100,000 American military personnel on the ground in Afghanistan from May 2010 through December 2011, the violence continued to rise at almost the same rate it had risen since 2005 all the way through the summer of 2011..."(emphasis mine)
Davis brings to bear as evidence the words of officers in
charge of safeguarding and refining what can only be called a culture of
deception among the top military command, in which the American public
is seen as just another opponent against whom to conduct psychological
operations. Davis quotes an article by Colonel Richard B. Leap
("Strategic Communication: An Imperative for the Global War on Terrorism
Environment"), in which Leap says:
"the US Government must clarify the roles, responsibilities, authorities and relationships between Public Affairs, Public Diplomacy and Information Operations to not only influence foreign target audiences, but to safeguard US national will."
Davis writes:
"It seems not to have occurred to the Colonel that the drop in American public support...might have had something to do with the actual deteriorating battlefield conditions and not a "failure" on the part of PA to accurately "frame" the matter....what's to say the implication isn't that we can "frame" only the positive information while suppressing the negative - or to manufacture positive information if none exists."
Colonel Leap concludes his article by recommending several actions designed to strengthen "Military Information Operations," such as specifically addressing "all prior legislation beginning with the Smith-Mundt Act that is limiting the effectiveness of Information organizations in the GWOT environment."
Davis says:
"In case you aren't familiar with the Smith-Mundt Act, it established the US law that was amended in 1985 to specifically prohibit US organizations from using information "to influence public opinion in the United States."...Colonel Leap is implying we ought to change the law to enable Public Affairs officers to influence American public opinion when they deem it necessary to "protect a key friendly center of gravity, to wit US national will."
Davis gives invaluable insight into the convenient flexibility of the very terminology used to describe progress:
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