Generals Lying?

In the waning days of the Soviet Union, an American was travelling from the Black Sea to Moscow, by car; he was lost. He kept seeing huge billboards proclaiming: "You Are On The RIGHT ROAD, Comrade!" When he asked directions, from a farmer on a tractor, he was told to turn around: he was going the wrong way.

Our war in Afghanistan is like that, and in fact, the Soviet war in Afghanistan was like that, too (the point of the article), and was nearly the last straw, because everybody knew the government lied.

Would American generals lie about the Afghan war? Most Americans would have a hard time believing it: that's why Generals like Petraeus and McChrystal get away with it. They prevaricate to the American people, but also to Congress and the President.

First of all, Petraeus and others, with support from the Secretaries of State and Defense, persuaded President Obama to surge troops to Afghanistan, because they fundamentally mis-represented the reason why violence diminished in Iraq after Iraq's surge. Additional troops were only a small part of it; the bigger part was the Sunni Awakening, a response to the incredible brutality of al Qaeda in Iraq, their sometime ally, against Shias and Sunnis alike. They allied with the US to defeat the worse enemy.

In Afghanistan, as Petraeus et al, must have known, there was no significant al Qaeda group brutalizing the population--it was hiding in Pakistan--and there was nothing comparable.

More important, ultimately, the generals, not just Petraeus, have created an information warfare capability that is not only used against our adversaries, but against American public opinion, and even against members of Congress and the administration. With that system, they have systematically lied about the Afghan war, about how well we're doing (not), and even about weapons complexes they are supposed to be developing (are spending billions to develop).

In the Soviet Union, when the generals said they were winning the Afghan war, Soviet citizens knew the opposite must be true, and it was. When generals in the US say that a weapon system has passed all its tests and is ready to be deployed, the claim needs to be examined, since, in a number of cases we know the tests were rigged. When generals say, year after year, that we're winning the war in Afghanistan, that there will be fewer casualties as the surge troops secure the nation, and then we see that casualties rise with the number of troops, should we believe them about winning the war, or believe the opposite?

The beginning of the end of a political system (democracy or dictatorship) is when the people no longer trust the information that comes from their government, especially their armed forces. Unless something changes, that day is coming soon to the American Empire.