Sure, it is fine to say that information about Afghanistan that wasn't published by the military should be published. The military says it was an error.
But this?
“Of course it’s a cover-up. What else can it be, when you hide figures? The thing is, it is not going well,” says Thomas Ruttig, a co-director of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) with decades of experience in Afghanistan.
Isn't that going too far?
And isn't this is rather a dead giveaway on bias:
The increased opacity comes after Mr. Trump last summer ordered several thousand more US troops to Afghanistan, raising the total level to some 14,000, on a mission to secure “victory.” Airstrikes have been ramped up to the highest level since 2010.
Why is victory in quotation marks? I'm so old that I remember when Afghanistan was the "real" war against al Qaeda. The "good" war. The "necessary" war. All in contrast to the Iraq War (and Iraq War 2.0) where we inconveniently killed lots of jihadis who flocked there rather than to Afghanistan.
Now victory is just fiction.
And this is interpreted completely wrong to justify that skeptical view of defeating the Taliban:
All the five trends he monitors – from security incidents and territorial control to Afghan force casualties – have grown worse since 2015, and many are at record levels.
“It means the conflict has become more violent, more brutal, and more widespread,” adds Ruttig.
Not that I haven't raised warning bells about Afghan loss of territory. I have. I worried about the Afghans holding on in static positions as the enemy had the initiative and picked off the outposts. I worried about the demoralizing aspect of that going on too long.
And we have taken steps to create reserves in order to seize the initiative. This began in the Obama administration and it will take time on the Afghanistan end; and time for the added US and NATO troops to provide Afghans with the support they need to reverse real losses in government control.
I certainly won't say that our side is winning yet.
But the other factors Ruttig cites to claim we can't achieve victory--security incidents and Afghan force casualties--are metrics of combat intensity and not of victory or defeat. And part of the renewed American interest in victory involves more fighting. So of course security incidents and casualties will go up.
In World War II, American security incidents and casualties in Europe skyrocketed on and after June 6, 1944. And violence certainly spread in scope to the continent.
That statistical change did not mean we were then losing the war.
And in Iraq, American activity and casualties spiked up starting in mid-2007, but that surge offensive broke the back of Sunni Arab jihadi resistance in Iraq and was not a metric of defeat.
I never heard of the AAN, which is a mostly Scandinavian organization, apparently. Which may be my ignorance rather than a slam on AAN and Ruttig. Maybe it and Ruttig are respectable analysts (although Ruttig worked in the diplomatic services of Soviet satellite East Germany and served in Afghanistan before the Soviets withdrew and while a pro-Soviet government was in power there, which makes me suspicious that he hasn't evolved that much).
But the argument about metrics of combat intensity being metrics of losing were commonly made about the Iraq War which was also considered unwinnable before we won (and then partially lost and then reclaimed the victory with Iraq War 2.0), which gives me pause to consider the group and Ruttig as reliable.
Of course we can win in Afghanistan. Victory doesn't mean Afghanistan looks like mountainous Switzerland. It does mean that the Afghans can prevent jihadis from having a sanctuary to train murderers who will come after us as they did on September 11, 2001.
But of course we can lose in Afghanistan. And if we lose, our enemies will have the sanctuary to be that threat again.
