The best intelligence available goes into America’s National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), and their findings are sent to policy makers, meant to be the information upon which they base decisions.
Unless you’re the Pentagon. Fresh off the latest Afghanistan NIE projecting that the Taliban’s power will continue to grow in Afghanistan through 2017, the Pentagon has insisted that they won’t allow the NIE to affect any of their war planning. Because 12+ years of stumbling blindly through the Afghan hills has been working fine by their reckoning.
The report is a particular bummer for the Pentagon, which is constantly issuing its own public estimates insisting Afghanistan is going just fine, and claiming only ending the occupation would give the Taliban a boost. The NIE, by contrast, assumes the continued occupation and points out that years 13-15 of the war won’t be where everything magically turns around.
The Afghan government is rejecting the NIE as well, seeing it as a test balloon before the US starts making deals to hand over territory to the Taliban as part of an eventual settlement.
But the Afghan rejection assumes the NIE is untrue. The Pentagon, by contrast, isn’t even attempting to refute the NIE, and is rather determined to just pretend it doesn’t exist.
"Stumbling blindly through the Afghan hills"? Hardly.
You obviously haven't seen 'Sole Survivor', the story of a small band of heroes inserted to eliminate a threat based on actionable 'intel' but informed-on by goatherders whose lives they'd spared. What followed though it was not the success that normally transpires in such things did leave the landscape festooned with dead thugs. Through the sacrifice of the few, the rowboats of the Taliban invaders were beached indefinitely and the rest of us left safe to hit the Mall.
These he-men knew exactly what they were doing.
Our government in the US seems equally intent on hiding the truth, and hiding from the truth, preferring to deal in perceptions and deceptions. Nothing could be a more surefire predictor of continuing calamities than a government that operates in such fashion. Is this really the best we can do? I weep for my country when I see the intellectual poverty and moral bankruptcy of our so called leaders and self professed elites.
Right on point , Rid. May God or someone , please help us.