print“The war has been a disaster and the military’s top brass” is lying to the American public to keep the adventure going, never mind the grunts that give up the ghost for the brass’s career designs. Wow. That can’t be, can it?
Sure it can. It’s probably quite unremarkable.
Anyone who has been reading this space and articles with any regularity will yawn, and then, disinterestedly, peruse the report written by active-duty officer Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, who is “a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan.”
The title of the article in Rolling Stone is “The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read.” Don’t you think that’s over-dramatic? Is deception to keep the killing fields open for the business of the military-industrial-complex that unusual? Hardly.
“If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,” Davis writes. I don’t think so. The American public is a zombie.
Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We’ve decided to publish it in full; it’s well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.
UPDATE (Feb. 15):
Refreshers for the record from “‘JUST WAR’ FOR DUMMIES” March 12, 2003: “I’m no pacifist. While I don’t condone the lingering American presence in Afghanistan, and while I doubt the abilities of the U.S. military to contain al-Qaida there, I supported going after bin Laden’s group in that country. That was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense, accommodated within St. Augustine’s teachings, whereby a just war is one ‘that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects.'”
And from “A War He Can Call His Own” July 18, 2008: “The initial mission in Afghanistan was, after all, a just one. Going after al-Qaida in Afghanistan at the time was the right thing to do and was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense accommodated within Just War teachings. Al-Qaida was responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. The Taliban succored al-Qaida and its leader bin Laden. The President had told the hosting Taliban to surrender bin Laden and his gang. The Taliban refused. America invaded. So far so good. But that initial mission mutated miraculously, and now we are doing in Afghanistan what we’re doing in Iraq: nation building. Nations building is Democrat for spreading democracy. Spreading democracy is Republican for nation building. These interchangeable concepts stand for an open-ended military presence with all the pitfalls that attach to Iraq. …”
This report aside, it’s fairly well known that Afghanistan has long been (one of) the places where Empires go to die. 19th-century Britian had no success there and, after the annihilation of its invading force, simply used the place as an anti-Russian buffer in the Great Game; then Russia’s 20th-century failure precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. I expect the Taliban to enter Kabaul w/in a week or two of the American withdrawal…maybe sooner…if the whole S. Asian situation explodes as a consequence of the upcoming Isramerican attack on Iran. What an Epic Fail.
Start, as George Carlin stated, from the position of not believing anything the govt. says. And that has to include the talking heads of the MSM.