PUBLIC STATEMENTS MADE FROM PODIUMS in Washington have little correlation with the on-the-ground reality in Afghanistan. Veteran officer Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis learned that last year when he traveled over 9,000 miles across Afghanistan, spending most of his time in the insurgency-enflamed provinces in the east and south. He was shaken to discover the US military leadership’s glowing descriptions of progress against the Taliban insurgency did not jibe with the stories told to him by American soldiers on the front lines of the failing war. Nor did the optimistic assessments correlate with the negative reports he found in open-source and classified documents. In his phrase, there was a “truth deficit.”
Col. Davis then did a remarkable thing for an officer who has served in the US Army for seventeen years: he went public. In January 2012, he began a singular campaign to bring his findings to the attention of the American people. Davis wrote two reports, classified and unclassified. “I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II,” he wrote. Davis briefed members of Congress and journalists, including Scott Shane of the New York Times, which broke Davis’s unique whistle-blowing campaign after the venerable Armed Forces Journal published his article, “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down.” In his article, Davis candidly summarized his charge that military leaders are misleading Congress and public about the war, and needlessly endangering American soldiers in the process. The Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings subsequently released Davis’s report, “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort.” In his campaign, Davis persistently asks the compelling question: “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?”
So does Col. Davis know what he is talking about? Is the war in Afghanistan going much worse than top military leaders are willing to admit? Are US soldiers in Afghanistan increasingly skeptical about their mission? From my reporting in Afghanistan, where I spoke with hundreds of US soldiers and civilians in forward operating bases, combat outposts, MRAPs, dining halls, hooches, tents, helipad terminals, and the US embassy, I have to say yes. Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis knows what he is talking about.
In his report, Col. Davis stated that the senior ranking US military leaders have so thoroughly misinformed the American public about the Afghanistan War “that the truth has become unrecognizable.” Disputing the “Victory Narrative” being promulgated by top Pentagon officials, Davis wrote that during his recent twelve-month deployment he saw “deception reach an intolerable low.” In his view, the divergence between the Happy Stories from top military leadership and the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan has undermined US credibility with both allies and enemies, cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, and inflicted death, disfigurement and suffering on tens of thousands of soldiers with “little or no gain to our country as a consequence of this deception.”
I concur. Based on my research and experience in Afghanistan, it was obvious top US officials weren’t leveling with the American people. The military called their Kabul press briefings “feeding the chickens,” gatherings where press officers handed out releases and briefers gave upbeat reports to hungry journalists. Unfortunately, the reports were often at variance with what was happening out in the provinces. As I made my way around eastern Afghanistan, soldiers and officials told me a much different story: rising levels of popularly supported rebellion, rapidly deteriorating security, a corrupt and incompetent Afghan government, scandalously wasteful US programs that funded the insurgents, a failed “whole-of-government” campaign to coordinate US military and civilian efforts—“civ-mil,” as they called it.
However, there was one area where civ–mil cooperation was apparent: neither the US military nor civilian officials in Afghanistan gave Washington the straight story. Before a cable went out, truth was often parsed and curried, scrubbed for career-tarnishing bad news. Metrics were crafted to tell a nice story.
Phyllis Cox was an attorney and law professor for twenty years before she served as the Kabul embassy’s chief of party focused on governance and rule-of-law issues, and as Afghanistan’s country director for the NGO, Global Rights. Based on her long experience, Cox lambasted the Kabul embassy’s dysfunction and duplicity. She told me, “I feel so strongly about this embassy,” saying much of the bad news about Afghanistan was not passed on to Washington—“the conclusions are spun for domestic consumption.” Staffers were required to adhere to the party line.[i] “They are punished for getting out of line—made persona non grata, whatever. It’s easier for them to just put in their time.”
Former Bush administration deputy secretary of agriculture Jim Moseley did extensive work in Afghanistan. He confirmed Cox’s assessment: “The point is they knew what headquarters wanted to hear. Things got sanitized,” he told me. “They knew what Washington wanted to hear.”
But Col. Daniel Davis focused his indictment on the Department of Defense senior leaders, relentlessly quoting their repeated claims of success that were, he wrote, “refuted by the physical evidence.” Col. Davis cited Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony to the Senate Armed Forces Committee on March 15, 2011, just before he retired to become CIA director. In his upbeat briefing, Gen. Petraeus indicated the US-led coalition had arrested the Taliban “momentum,” a vague descriptor that Davis noted, “you can neither prove nor disprove its existence.” Gen. Petraeus artfully told the senators, “However, while the security progress achieved over the last year is significant, it is also fragile and reversible,” providing a handy escape clause for a future collapses in security. Col. Davis rightly refuted Gen. Petraeus’s assertion of increased security with data that indicates the insurgency dramatically grew in strength and influence over the last eight years.
I experienced the same disconnect between the official line that things were getting better when things obviously weren’t. Press officers would brightly deliver briefings about improved security when attacks and IEDs were climbing sharply. Any grunt on the ground could tell you the insurgency was growing in strength. A US officer told me the Special Forces dictum: if an insurgency isn’t shrinking, it’s winning.
Scarcely a half-mile from the giant US base at Bagram Air Field, I stood in the dry, brown landscape with a rangy Force Protection leader, Major Eddie Simpson. His security soldiers were guarding development specialists as they conferred with Usbashi village leaders beside a small river. One of the Afghans said Usbashi was pro-government, a peaceful place. “You can take off body armor here,” he said. Major Simpson snorted, “Those rockets came from this village a few nights ago,” talking about an attack on Bagram. A white Toyota Corolla and two motorcycles suddenly charged down the dirt track toward us, then abruptly plunged into the shallow stream and roared up to an overlooking bluff. The security soldiers watched as the cyclists dismounted and a pack of men erupted from the car. The Afghans stood on the bluff like imperious Sioux warriors scouting the cavalry. “Taliban, checking us out,” Major Simpson snarled. Simpson had earlier talked about the Soviet Union’s ill-fated experience in Afghanistan: “It didn’t work out so good for the Russians here,” he told me. “It ain’t working out so good for us. These people don’t like anyone.”
Touted as an essential counterinsurgency element, the ballyhooed Afghanistan aid and development projects had no measurable impact on the insurgency. For example, the wildly expensive US-financed roads through Afghanistan that US development lobbyists promoted in Washington with the perky slogan of “the insurgency begins where the road ends,” actually became kinetic corridors of Taliban IEDs. One major paved route in Khost Province became so heavily mined with IEDs that the US commanders closed it to military traffic.
I found US troops were increasingly cynical about the mission to prop up the profoundly corrupt Afghan government, which includes the Taliban in their pernicious nexus of power. Working day in and day out with Afghan government officials whom they knew were corrupt and commonly funneling American taxpayer dollars to the Taliban, US soldiers and civilian officials were engaged in a bizarre wartime “coop-etition” that guaranteed cognitive dissonance on an organizational level. Soldiers in eastern Afghanistan sardonically told me, “We are funding our own enemy.”
Multiple government reports buttressed the stories that soldiers told me: the insurgents were benefitting from payoffs from the US development and logistics contracts. Riding through Taliban-controlled Ghazni City in an armored MRAP vehicle with a detachment of Texas troops, an angry soldier told me, “It’s like we’re financing the Taliban. The road contractors are paying the Taliban for road contracts; the PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team, a civ-mil development unit) talks about it all the time. We had a veterinarian truck hijacked. Had to pay $6,000 to ransom the workers. We think the contractor was working with the Taliban. They just took the truck.” Captain Arie Kinra, an Indian American with a big dip of snuff contorting his lower lip, chimed in that the Afghan power elite, with its entangled networks of government officials and insurgents, “just want to keep things the way they are.” He took a dip and said, “They’re just like Mafioso, getting their cut.”
Military leaders have long emphasized the importance of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) to the US exit strategy. Since 2002, the United States has spent $20 billion training, equipping and sustaining the Afghan army. Col. Davis quoted Gen. Petraeus’s facile testimony that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) “continued to increase in quantity, quality, and capability.” Given the ANSF’s abysmal baseline, Gen. Petaeus’s statement was not exactly untrue, but it did distinctly understate the ANSF’s woeful inability to ensure Afghan security. Beyond unsustainable numbers of AWOLs and desertions, the overwhelmingly illiterate Afghan army doesn’t fight very well. In violent Khost Province, it was common knowledge that the Afghan National Army (ANA) seldom ventured from its base at Camp Clark. In Laghman Province, I watched disheveled ANA recruits reluctantly shamble toward the base gate as their frustrated US Army trainer barked orders, illustrating the findings that virtually no Afghan army units can operate independently of the Coalition. Later that day at a pre-mission meeting with American security soldiers, the team leader played a popular YouTube video of laughably uncoordinated ANA soldiers unable to do jumping jacks, cracking up the tough US soldiers. “These guys are going to beat the Taliban?” one soldier hooted.
Col. Davis points to the military’s synthesis of Public Affairs functions and Information Operations, with its imperative for propaganda and deception. The commingling has created an entrenched misinformation system that helped produce “the truth deficit.” While covering the Afghanistan War, I learned to distinguish between outright lies and officers spinning a bad situation by cherry-picking positive data. Counterinsurgency stalwart Col. Mike Howard, the RC-East brigade commander, was a scrupulously honest guy and a great leader, but he sure didn’t say everything he knew. Reflecting the military’s ”can-do culture,” Col. Howard accordingly presented the “victory narrative.” In his case, he focused on the incremental improvements in Afghanistan over his four deployments, and emphasized the military’s need for more time to prevail.
Many officers out in the field repeated the party line: security was improving, the Afghans were embracing their government, the Afghan National Army was getting better, whatever. But the on-the-ground reality prevented them from staying with the story very long. In Laghman Province, officer after officer would tell me, “Oh, it is secure here,” before diverting into vivid descriptions of ubiquitous IEDs, blown-up MRAPs, ambushes, attacks. I finally started kidding them about suffering from group delusions.
Col. Davis’s report is creating a stir in Congress. In a February 10, 2012 letter to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Representative Frank Wolf (R- VA) referenced Col. Davis’s report, and called for the establishment of a panel of outside experts to review U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, akin to the Iraq Study Group that he championed.[ii] Staunch conservative Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-NC) is one of the six congressmen who have signed a February 10, 2012 letter to representatives John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi. The six congressmen called for them read Col. Davis’s dire report and the National Intelligence Estimate that contradicts the optimistic war assessments, and then encourage the chairs of relevant committees to immediately convene hearings on the “truth deficit.” A member of the Armed Services Committee for eighteen years, Jones says, “Col. Davis is telling the truth. He’s doing the American public a great service reporting the truth as he saw it. That’s important: ‘as he saw it.’”[iii] Referencing the high cost in American blood and money, Rep. Jones agreed with a letter sent to him by a marine general, who wrote, “We need to bring our people home.”
Many American soldiers felt the same way. As happy news about successful counterinsurgency efforts continued to pour out of the Washington and Kabul press offices, the troops on the line were far less upbeat. Soldier after soldier shared his or her misgivings with me, sometimes on background to avoid repercussions. A marine officer in southern Afghanistan told me in mid-2011, “Among the marines in Afghanistan, there’s low morale. They say, ‘This is such a waste of time. This is a drug and tribal war, with the ISI and Iranian intelligence involved. These people will never pull their heads out of their asses.’” The marine officer said, “On an operational level, the soldiers are saying, ‘I’m going to go over there and try to not get my legs blown off. My nation will shut this bullshit down.’ That’s the feeling of my fellow soldiers.” The officer said soldiers had long since lost faith counterinsurgency’s requirement that they mix combat with hearts-and-minds development work—“marines say, ‘fuck this,’” the officer remarked. “The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”
Published Foreign Policy February 23, 2012