When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Tell Lies

Westmoreland did it in Vietnam in the 19602, and the Pentagon is doing it in Afghanistan today:

It is challenging enough that the war in Afghanistan has gone on for almost 17 years. But now the Trump administration is raising hackles in Congress by cloaking in official secrecy an unusual amount of data about the longest armed conflict in American history, including, until very recently, the dwindling size of the beleaguered Afghan military.

Information contained in a recently issued government report provides a window into what the Pentagon has been keeping secret since last year: The Afghan army has shrunk by 11 percent and insurgents have gained territory, raising questions about whether the Pentagon has been concealing a strategy gone awry.

………

But just as the Pentagon began sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan, it also began classifying key war metrics it had previously made public. That included ways of measuring the success or failure of America’s mission: training and funding the Afghan military so it can beat back the Taliban and other insurgents.

The latest report by John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction — who objected strongly to the new program of secrecy and pried some of the data out of US military leaders in Afghanistan — contained some worrisome figures.

There has been a long history of the US military lying to Congress, and in come cases lying to the President to continue with their wars, whether it be Vietnam, or Iraq, Lebanon, or (to a slightly smaller degree) Korea, we know that the military will attempt to restrict information given to the civilian leadership so that they can continue fighting.

To quote Georges Clemenceau, "War is too important to be left to the generals."