Truth, lies and Afghanistan

I hope readers of SWJ will weigh in on this, if not in a stand-alone essay, than at least in comments. I am no longer in uniform, nor do I have nearly as much contact with service members as I used to, so I am curious to hear what people think about this.

Some questions that come to my mind:
– What civil-military issues are raised and how do current members of the profession view those issues?
– Did the LTC’s travels really give him a chance to make a fair assessment of the situation?
– At what point does one become confident enough that he has a sufficiently complete picture to very publicly accuse senior leaders of not just error or omission, but deception, negligence, or even recklessness?

The latter two questions come to mind because I would be very hesitant to visit any location for a few days and think that I understand the situation there. Likewise, if I were to visit a hundred locations for a few days each, I would be hesitant to believe that I understand the larger picture. On my deployments (to Iraq), I never felt that I had a solid grasp of the situation in one locale until I had been there for at least a few weeks. Additionally, situations change over periods of weeks. So, even if I had understood an area well, that understanding would be quite dated within weeks of moving to another location.

On the other hand, much of what ISAF, the Pentagon, and our administration have said about operations in Afghanistan have simply not passed a basic smell test. We are unwilling or unable to define momentum, but we are told that we have reversed the Taliban momentum. One is left to wonder what on Earth momentum is, given that:
– the Taliban is becoming more entrenched
– the GIRoA is mired deeper in corruption and demonstrates no significant progress in developing governance capacity
– the Afghan people are increasingly dissatisfied by the GIRoA, and thus driven into the arms of the Taliban or other warlords
– Pakistan seems less cooperative than ever
– Taliban safe havens along the Af-Pak border seem to be too numerous to count
– Our most potent warfighting skill seems to be conducting targeted killings of the Taliban leaders whom we need to be co-opting or engaging through non-lethal means, thus ensuring that the mid-level leaders remain largely composed of younger and more extreme individuals who are more difficult for ISAF or the GIRoA to deal with.