Pentagon Won’t Provide Any Metrics on How Afghan War Is Going

18+ years of claiming non-specific progress in occupied Afghanistan came back to bite the Pentagon, at least a bit, when the Afghanistan Papers started being leaked, which revealed that not only were these claims false, but the officials making the claim knew well they were false the whole time.

With another year coming to an end, the Pentagon is now faced with the obvious question in Afghanistan – reporters want to know how the war is going. Pentagon officials are making it clear they don’t want to get into that.

“I’m not going to get into specifics,” insisted Rear Admiral William D. Byrne, during a recent Pentagon briefing, saying only that the commander is “satisfied” with where things are at.

Indeed, Pentagon officials have refused to provide any metrics at all that might be used to gauge how the war is going. That’s likely because any metrics show the war is generally not going well, and any claim that the war is going fine risks being uncovered as another in decades of lies.

While the recent media reports about past lies may have made the Pentagon particularly gunshy, this is in keeping with the administration’s increasingly secretive war strategy, not wanting to let the public know how the war is going in general, because that’s just going to lead to more questions they aren’t prepared to answer.