Afghanistan War Metrics Manipulated to Highlight Battlefield Success According to Bombshell WaPo Report
Afghanistan War Metrics Manipulated to Highlight Battlefield Success According to Bombshell WaPo Report by Shawn Snow – Military Times
America’s longest war continues to drag on as U.S. forces are amid one of its heaviest bombing campaigns since the start of the conflict 18 years ago as Washington seeks to force the Taliban into a settled peace.
But in the backdrop, war metrics that have been used to push positive public sentiment and stay the course in a war U.S. officials have acknowledged as unwinnable were manipulated to tout successes and emphasize particular strategies were moving in the right direction, according to a an explosive story from the Washington Post.
In documents obtained through a government records request by the Washington Post, a senior National Security Council official said the Obama administration and Pentagon pushed metrics that portrayed the 2009 decision to surge 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in an inaccurately positive light.
“It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture,” the NSC official said in a 2016 government interview, according to the Washington Post’s government documents.
“The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war,” the NSC official said, the Washington Post reported…
