Lt-Col Challenges The Official Rosy Version Of Events In Afghanistan – 'Absence Of Success On….Every Level'

An Army officer is fed up with “rosy official statements” that paint Afghanistan as a picture of progress, and he is demanding military leaders come clean about the “absence of success on virtually every level.”

“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan?” Lt. Col. Daniel Davis asked in a four-page essay titled “Truth, Lies & Afghanistan: How military leaders have let us down.”

“No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on,” Davis wrote.

Here is an excerpt from Colonel Davis’ piece:

Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.

And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the kind that I observed all over the country.

 

ISAF in Afghanistan

In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.

Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.

“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”

As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.

“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”

You can find Colonel Davis’ essay here.  The full version of this Army Times piece is here.