By Ken Dilanian and David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times
January 11, 2012, 6:39 p.m.
Reporting from Washington—
The U.S. intelligence community says in a secret new assessment that the war in Afghanistan is mired in stalemate, and warns that security gains from an increase in American troops have been undercut by pervasive corruption, incompetent governance and Taliban fighters operating from neighboring Pakistan, according to U.S. officials.
The sobering judgments, laid out in a classified National Intelligence Estimate completed last month and delivered to the White House, appeared at odds with recent optimistic statements by Pentagon officials and have deepened divisions between U.S. intelligence agencies and American military commanders about progress in the decade-old war…
…In a section looking at future scenarios, the NIE also asserts that the Afghan government in Kabul may not be able to survive as the U.S. steadily pulls out its troops and reduces military and civilian assistance…
…
The findings prompted a sharp response from Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, the U.S. commander of Western forces in the war, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, who filed their objections in a one-page written dissent. The comment was also signed by Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, commander of Central Command, and Adm. James Stavridis, supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Military and Pentagon officials argued that assumptions used by intelligence agencies were flawed…
Are the assumptions the intelligence agencies are making wrong? Is the military brass simply optimistic because that’s the script? Hummm.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Army, Military, NIE
January 14, 2012 at 6:00 pm
It’s cause somebody elected Obama, that’s why. No other reason, really.
January 14, 2012 at 6:03 pm
The military brass is not optimistic. They are pessimistic. That is why they want this report shot down, because they know how the numb nut shicken wings in DC would use it to downgrade their mission. They are already “redistributing money” from the military to “make it more efficient” while increasing money to other branches of the US social government since cutting down costs would “cut down benefits”.
Still, even if it’s the truth, certain people don’t want it to be recognized for various political and military reasons. Start talking about defeat, and well, often a battle will be a route simply because panic is contagious. That is one military perspective. A political perspective would simply be, “If Democrats find another reason to pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq, they’ll just rape the military for even more funding by saying we don’t need it for a failed war”.