Didn’t we see this movie before? You know, the one where the generals lie about the success of their Asian land war by cooking the books (i.e., inflating numbers of enemies killed and/or captured).
In December, Petraeus’s command said a total of 4,100 Taliban rank and file had been captured in the previous six months and 2,000 had been killed.
Those figures were critical to creating a new media narrative hailing the success of SOF operations as reversing what had been a losing U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
But it turns out that more than 80 percent of those called captured Taliban fighters were released within days of having been picked up, because they were found to have been innocent civilians, according to official U.S. military data.
Even more were later released from the main U.S. detention facility at Bagram airbase called the Detention Facility in Parwan after having their files reviewed by a panel of military officers.
How do we know his command lied to the media? Because in September the press officer for the International Security Assistance Force admitted that of the number of captured Taliban claimed at that time only included “initial detainees. In November 2010, the commander of Task Force 435 admitted that over 80% of captured Taliban fighters were released within two weeks from June-November, 2010.
We also know this:
But during those six months, only 690 individuals were sent to Parwan, according to the Task Force 435 data – 17 percent of the 4,100 Taliban rank and file claimed captured as “Taliban”.
The total of 690 detainees also includes an unknown number of commanders counted separately by Petraeus and a large number of detainees who were later released from Parwan. Considering those two factors, the actual proportion of those claimed as captured Taliban who were found not to be part of the Taliban organisation rises to 90 percent or even higher.
Petraeus also claimed in December 2010 that 2000 Taliban fighters had been killed by our forces during the same six month period of June 1-November 30, 2010. Did he lie about those numbers also, or did he just uncritically accept the reports from the field?
So much for all the “momentum” and “success” we are having eradicating the Taliban. Just as in the Vietnam War, body counts appear more and more to be to be highly inaccurate and a poor metric for accessing the Military’s success in defeating our enemies. Yet, once again the media and perhaps even the President has been misled based on beatifically inflated numbers. The same thing happened in Iraq. You would think we would have learned by now.
Here’s the problem for those who want to end the war. A narrative of failure will ensure that the US will double down; the politics of the US does not like failure–see the recriminations over the “loss of Red China” and “leaving Vietnam before victory”.
Second of all, military success is not what is going to stabilize Afghanistan. The Afghan people are stabilizing Afghanistan because they don’t like continuing war, and there are signs that public opinion is reaching or has reached a tipping point that wants to see the nationalist movement cool it to allow the US to leave. The religious Taliban is only part of the forces that have been fighting US occupation.
Third, when is it that generals in wartime haven’t lied to ensure their personal success. William Westmoreland inflated body counts to show they were winning. Eisenhower pumped up minor successes in North Africa (with the help of war correspondents) to establish a narrative of inevitable victory.
I, for one, am glad that the US military is releasing the obviously innocent instead of the previous policy of torturing false confessions out of them and sending them to Guantanamo.
And I maintain that we should declare victory and come home. It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The religious Taliban through their previous rule lost all legitimacy; they can only regain power through a coalition of anti-occupation forces. Or anti-Karzai forces, which is slightly less likely if the US leaves and almost a certainty is the US stays much longer. Karzai knows this. That’s why he calls out the US for any civilian casualties at all.
“You would think we would have learned by now.”
The new paradigm is that no one ever learns anything from anything, whether it’s in the spheres of law (Remember Nuremberg? Didn’t think so), the economy (Great Depression? Second Crash of 1937? Nope…), or military action (Vietnam? Clearly there’s no comparison to Iraq or Afghanistan because neither place has jungles! It’s self-evident!). Instead, our government now operates on a toxic mixture of ideology, wishful thinking, and “faith” that is threatening to destroy the nation as the clueless national media cheers on the slo-mo train wreck from the sidelines.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."