Wednesday, February 15, 2012
"Sacrificial Spokesman"
The politics of war is never exposed for what it is...
At PJmedia.com, Richard Fernandez writes about the war in Afganistan:
"Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, an officer who 'served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09″ and “legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas', recently concluded, after spending a year in Afghanistan gathering data for a report on equipment, that the whole operation had become a fraud.
He echoed the assessment of Anthony Cordesman’s conclusion that the war was being reported to fit a political template, while in the meantime doing little or nothing to achieve any tangible goal. Cordesman wrote, '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. 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.'"
