Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: "How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?"

Truth, lies and Afghanistan
How military leaders have let us down
 
BY LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS
 
I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops 
and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping 
Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the 
enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and 
talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, 
Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.
 
What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. 
military leaders about conditions on the ground.
 
Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the 
claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that 
the local government and military were progressing toward 
self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be 
reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see 
companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.
 
Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.
 
My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat 
deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the 
Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 
2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent 
eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs 
— among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs 
for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.
 
As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set out to talk to 
our troops about their needs and their circumstances. Along the way, I 
conducted mounted and dismounted combat patrols, spending time with 
conventional and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had 
conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the 
lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff 
members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security 
officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.
 
I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to 
pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many 
stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land 
beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force 
(ISAF) base.
 
I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide 
for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked 
with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or 
incapable local government.
 
 From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the 
insurgency.
 
FROM BAD TO ABYSMAL
 
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.
 
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!”
 
According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the 
cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban 
literally run free.
 
In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to 
a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban 
attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.
 
As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were 
watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking 
the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming 
from behind a haystack. We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a 
motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.
 
The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to 
make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into 
the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.
 
On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP 
vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered 
the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.
 
To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but 
contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the 
above incident occurred.
 
In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai 
district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently 
been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced 
soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How 
do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on 
these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the 
eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something 
meaningful? How do I do that?”
 
One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I 
live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I 
hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might 
be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of 
confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what 
they’re living here, what the situation really is.”
 
On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., I 
visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar. 
I talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to 
the U.S. commander. Here’s how the conversation went:
 
Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces 
[ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. 
troops leave this area?”
 
Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this 
region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the 
Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t 
shoot them.
 
“Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no 
action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the 
Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone 
like me who has worked with the coalition.
 
“Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend 
of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better 
quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in 
pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do 
the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my 
children out of school just to keep them safe.
 
“And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge 
overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the 
ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in 
front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a 
member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his 
parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.”
 
That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally 
responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square 
kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. 
And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many 
regions of Afghanistan.
 
In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to 
abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could 
mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or 
fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard 
fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in 
the 10th year of war.
 
As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the 
absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical 
situation all over Afghanistan.
 
CREDIBILITY GAP
 
I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official 
statements and the truth on the ground.
 
A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that 
public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were 
“sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak 
for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We 
encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no 
matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the 
nature are solely intended to influence American and European public 
opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an 
accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”
 
The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for 
Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. 
leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation 
in Afghanistan.
 
“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has 
steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory 
by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges 
ahead,” Cordesman wrote. “They also, however, were driven by political 
decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 
to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan 
governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, 
and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the 
steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”
 
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? 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.
 
I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 
division-level “experiment” that turned out to be far more setpiece than 
experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, Training and Doctrine 
Command leaders told me that the Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) 
had shown that a “digital division” with fewer troops and more gear 
could be far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our 
congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration firsthand, and 
it didn’t take long to realize there was little substance to the claims. 
Virtually no legitimate experimentation was actually conducted. All 
parameters were carefully scripted. All events had a preordained 
sequence and outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in 
the language of scientific experimentation and presented in glowing 
press releases and public statements, intended to persuade Congress to 
fund the Army’s preference. Citing the AWE’s “results,” Army leaders 
proceeded to eliminate one maneuver company per combat battalion. But 
the loss of fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in 
killing capability.
 
A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to the Future 
Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, Texas. It didn’t take 
long to discover that the same thing the Army had done with a single 
division at Fort Hood in 1997 was now being done on a significantly 
larger scale with FCS. Year after year, the congressionally mandated 
reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant 
problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, 
the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO 
didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the 
program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success. Ultimately, 
of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show 
for $18 billion spent.
 
If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our 
leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be 
immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge 
classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it 
with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller 
accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both 
Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.
 
A nonclassified version is available at 
www.afghanreport.com
. [Editor’s 
note: At press time, Army public affairs had not yet ruled on whether 
Davis could post this longer version.]
 
TELL THE TRUTH
 
When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation 
into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and 
to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in 
telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is 
likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide 
if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.
 
Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims 
or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, 
our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American 
people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of 
action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the 
military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten 
from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. 
Simply telling the truth would be a good start.
-- 
Namib
 
Nous n'arrivons pas à changer les choses suivant notre désir, mais peu à 
peu notre désir change (M. Proust)

 BY LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS
 
Dimenticavo la fonte: 
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2012/02/8904030
 



 
Mi sa che l'avevo già postato. Ci sono anche report dal tono diverso
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/two-officers-counter-bleak-assessment-of-afghan-war/?partner=rss&emc=rss
 
 
 
PP

 Mi sa che l'avevo già postato.
 
Verifica. Eventualmente, Namib dovrebbe chiederti scusa.
 
 
-- 
*Sunspot*
The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock.

 Verifica. Eventualmente, Namib dovrebbe chiederti scusa.
 
è un piddino, dovrebbe chiedere scusa all'umanità di esistere

 Verifica. Eventualmente, Namib dovrebbe chiederti scusa.
 
:)


 Verifica. Eventualmente, Namib dovrebbe chiederti scusa.
 
Mai. Se Namib, il nostro Presidente, ha deciso di pubblicare ora il 
link, evidentemente io l'ho fatto troppo presto.
 
P
 


Giusto.


Il 22/02/12 14:50, Sunspot ha scritto:

E se ordina di epurare il Cirque con l'aiuto di consiglieri iraniani non 
avremo dubbi ed eseguiremo.
 
Passando ad altro, lo sapevi che Namib è oftalmologo e prima esercitava 
a Londra?
 
PP
 


Pasdaran(s) :)


 a Londra?
 
Ok, non l'ho capita. Eppure, ho bevuto solo 1/2 l di 8.6.


 Ok, non l'ho capita. Eppure, ho bevuto solo 1/2 l di 8.6.
 
E' il cv di Assad Jr, mi chiedo infatti chi gliel'abbia fatto fare di 
rientrare e mettersi in quella nassa che è la Siria.
 
PP

 rientrare e mettersi in quella nassa che è la Siria.
 
Magari se non l'avesse fatto l'avrebberro ammazzato.
 
 
-- 
"Quando ti incontro per la strada ti darei calci nei denti. Ma forse non 
li senti. E' meglio se ti rullo di kartoni (kartoni)"

 rientrare e mettersi in quella nassa che è la Siria.
 
Forse cercava la "bella morte".


 Magari se non l'avesse fatto l'avrebberro ammazzato.
 
Ma perchè? Se se ne stava in ospedale a chi dava noia?
 
PP
 

 Forse cercava la "bella morte".
 
Mah, gli autocrati difficilmente la fanno.
 
PP


alla moglie o alla madre.
 
mai sottovalutare una Lady Macbeth levantina.


e qui il dhimmi ci spiega perchè ha così paura delle donne da andare
in dhimmistan e cercare quelle che possono essere cacciate nel giro di
5 minuti

 e qui il dhimmi ci spiega perchè ha così paura delle donne
 
bombacci, ma parli mai di qualcosa di cui ti intendi?

Il 22/02/12 15:08, Palmiro Pangloss ha scritto:

La Siria ha equilibri delicati.
Se hanno deciso che Assad figlio era quello che ci voleva per tenere il 
coperchio sulla pentola non è detto che il piccolo si potesse rifiutare.
 
E' un'ipotesi come un'altra.
 
 
-- 
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of  freedom, must, like men, 
undergo the  fatigues of supporting it.”
 
North Idaho 21st Batallion of Light Foot