New Pentagon Report on ‘Progress’ in Afghanistan Released

October 30, 2014

The Pentagon released its latest edition of its “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan” online today. The 114-page report can beaccessed here.

This report, like all its predecessors, claims to fairly present all the pertinent facts concerning that have been transpiring in Afghanistan over the past six months. In fact, these reports suffer from the “emphasize the positive” syndrome while giving only passing mention to all the problem areas in Afghanistan.

According to a friend of mine who helped co-aiuthor these reports in the past, you can write whole books about what is deliberately left out of these reports at the request of the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon brass, all of whom have a vested interest in trying to present the situation in Afghanistan in its best possible light.

And over the past five years, each successive report gives less and less empirical data on the state of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police forces and their capacity to take over the responsibility for defending Afghanistan from the few remaining U.S. and NATO forces.

With all that said, please exercise caution in accepting at face value the ‘conclusions’ of the report. I wish someone was producing an ‘alternative version’ of this report with all the stuff that the Pentagon doesn’t want you to know. Unfortunately, such a publication does not now exist.