Next Top General in Afghanistan Supports Continuing the War Beyond 2014

The next commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Joe Dunford, told the Senate on Thursday that he supports continuing the war in Afghanistan beyond 2014.

“Dunford is ready to tell Congress,” reports The Cable, “that he supports U.S. troops staying in Afghanistan for a host of missions in 2015 and beyond, which matches the Obama administration’s plans, despite some high-level administration statements to the contrary.”

“In my view our overall objective in Afghanistan after 2014 will be to sustain our hard-won security gains after 2014 so that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for terrorists,” Dunford told the senators.

“To accomplish this objective, the primary missions of the U.S. military in Afghanistan should be to (1) train, advise, and assist the ANSF; (2) provide support to civilian agencies, and (3) conduct counter-terrorism operations.  This mission set will include force protection for our brave young men and women and, as available, the provision of in extremis support for our Afghan forces.”

The Obama administration has been falsely telling the American public that the war in Afghanistan is coming to a close and the last US troops with be withdrawn in 2014. But all along, the US has been working behind the scenes with the Kabul government on an agreement that would govern the presence of up to 25,000 US troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014, perhaps until 2024.

Dunford is Obama’s top choice to lead US forces in Afghanistan, replacing Gen. John Allen, now under investigation after getting caught up in the Petraeus sex scandal. But Dunford is as much of a propagandist and outright liar as his predecessors.

Dunford also claimed that the surge in Afghanistan has worked, an old line also peddled about Iraq, that has no relation to reality.

“The purpose of the surge was to reverse the Taliban’s momentum and increase the size and capability of the ANSF. The surge accomplished these objectives and created the conditions to initiate the process of Transition,” he wrote.

Indeed, the US-led NATO command in Afghanistan found in a report last month that not only has the surge failed to dent the Taliban insurgency, but insurgent attacks have actually increased since the start of the surge.

The cornerstone of the Obama administration’s strategy in Afghanistan was to build up a government and security forces that would serve as a bulwark against Taliban rule post-2014. The Kabul government is overwhelmingly corrupt and on the brink of collapse, while the US-backed security forces can’t operate on their own and have largely been infiltrated by the Taliban.

The war is a failure by every observable metric, but Dunford is continuing the tradition of lying to Congress and the American people so as to continue a needless failure of a war.

As Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis revealed last year: “Our current military leadership is so distorting the information it releases that the deterioration of the situation and the failing nature of our efforts is shielded from the American public (and Congress), and replaced instead with explicit statements that all is going according to plan.” He said his deployments to Afghanistan revealed to him a reality that “bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.”