Don’t buy the Pentagon’s statements on Afghanistan
After 17 years of stalemate in Afghanistan our military leaders are pushing an optimistic picture of our current efforts. The author of this article says not to believe this rosy story. The facts are that the Taliban represent a near majority of the country; the Afghan government is corrupt to the core; and US aid in the form of nation-building is largely ineffective. Afghanistan is no nation. It is a collection of tribes who do not get along for the long term.
Our efforts should be focused solely on al Q and ISIL-K. The Taliban is not our concern.
Read the rest at the link.The Lead Inspector General (IG) for Operation Freedom’s Sentinel released its quarterly report to Congress last week, assessing the state of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. To put it mildly, the situation is not good.
As Glenn Fine, the Principal Deputy IG for the Defense Department writes in the report’s foreword and executive summary, “the percentage of the population living in areas under the control or influence of the Afghan government showed little positive change this quarter,” while civilian casualties were “near record high levels.”
There were some small signs of promise, such as a modest decrease in “security-related incidents” — violence. From April to February, violence was below historical averages, and remains there, despite the Taliban’s Spring Offensive beginning in April. At the same time though, high profile attacks by the Taliban and ISIS spiked, and the Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats, has written that the security situation in Afghanistan will likely continue to decline this year.
To the interested outside observer, this is nothing new. Report after report from the Pentagon, as well as the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), over the last several years, has been telling this story. The Taliban has been slowly reasserting itself, corruption is rampant, and reconstruction projects deliver limited or no results.
However, officials at the Pentagon paint a different picture. General John Nicholson, Jr., Commander of Resolute Support and Commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, said Wednesday, echoing earlier statements from the Pentagon in response to the IG’s report, that “‘violence and progress can coexist,’ and that's what we're seeing.” We should be immensely skeptical of this rosy outlook. The Pentagon is not going to be honest and realistic about Afghanistan, at least not publicly.
To understand why requires understanding Pentagon officials respond to incentives the same way everyday, private citizens do. In 1962, economists James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock published The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, a seminal work of the public choice school of economics, which employs economic analysis to study political problems. Buchanan would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his contributions in this field.
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Originally Posted by DGUtley
