PRESIDENT OBAMA BOLDLY HAILED AFGHANISTAN as “the necessary war” in 2009.[i] Based on his recent comments, or lack of them, it now appears Afghanistan is the shunned war—an elision followed by Republican challenger Mitt Romney and other U.S. political leaders.

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, President Obama’s acceptance speech was notable for his fleeting reference to the still-raging war in Afghanistan: “We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over.”[ii] One can only imagine the late-night speechwriting sessions that eventually yielded that tortured, far from candid sentence. With 77,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of American contractors still in harm’s way in Afghanistan, President Obama chose to cite the example of a young amputee sailor bravely recovering from an Iraqi grenade attack as his military “hope.”

AN OLD AFGHANISTAN HAND TOLD me about a buzzword now popular among US policy wonks in Kabul and Washington: “reify.” Ruefully laughing, he said “reify” refers to a concept being confused with reality. In the eleventh year of a failing war in Afghanistan, it’s about as good a word as any to use to describe the US situation.

Even as anti-American violence continues to wrack Afghanistan following the latest Koran-burning incident, and Taliban attacks are spiking to their highest levels in the war, Pentagon Press Secretary George Little was insisting the insurgency is “on its heels.” Mr. Little stated the ISAF leaders had “strong sense” that “we must continue to do everything we can to carry out the strategy [which] we believe has been working for some time.”

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.”