The publication of Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis’s piece in the Armed Forces Journal, followed up by an interview in the New York Times and the posting of a longer piece [.pdf] by Rolling Stone, is a remarkable event in the sense that rarely has a more comprehensive debunking of official lies been written by an insider. Col. Davis has served in both the Iraq and Afghan campaigns, and recently was on a tour that took him to a number of Afghan outposts. His reports relate, in numbing detail, the complete disparity between the official pronouncements of our military spokespersons and the grim truth of what he saw on the ground in Afghanistan.
As our generals testify before Congress [.pdf] that our efforts in Afghanistan are bearing fruit, that the “surge” worked both in Iraq and Afghanistan, that our training the Afghan security forces is succeeding, and that we are on the road to “victory,” Col. Davis turns this Panglossian scenario on its head. The reality, he says, is that the “surge,” in both cases, failed – in Iraq, because the additional troops had nothing to do with the internal split in the insurgency that caused it to temporarily abate, and in Afghanistan because casualties went up in direct proportion to the increase in troops – without any corresponding gain on the battlefield. As for the vaunted Afghan security forces, which are being hailed as reliable guarantors and legatees of a hard-won US “victory,” Col. Davis draws a portrait of them as invariably having their backs to the enemy – that is, when they aren’t collaborating with them, calling “mini-truces” via radio while US soldiers take the brunt of the fighting.
Davis’s charge: that the military high command, in conjunction with our political leaders, engaged in a campaign of systematic deception designed to depict our failed attempts to conquer and colonize Iraq and Afghanistan as glorious victories, when, in reality, the exact opposite is the case. He gives a series of stunning examples, debunking lie after lie, finally asking:
“One of the key questions most readers must be asking about this point in the report, is how could such an extensive, pervasive, and long-running series of deceptive statements have gone unnoticed by virtually the entire country?”
Glad you asked. The reason is simple: the media has become an adjunct to the military’s “information operations,” i.e. psychological and propaganda operations, which are not just directed at the foreign “enemy,” but also at the enemy on the home front, i.e. the American people, who, if they knew the truth, would pull the plug on the whole operation. Col. Davis puts it more politely:
