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Afghanistan
SIGAR: US officials have ‘routinely’ lied over Afghan war
2020-01-17
[KhaamaPress] John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) told US Congress on Wednesday that US officials have ’routinely lied’ to the public with exaggerating reports on the Afghan war. Sopko was summoned by the US Congress to talk about the ’Afghanpapers’ recently published by America’s Washington Post.

"There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue. . . mendacity and hubris," Sopko said in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "The problem is there is a disincentive, really, to tell the truth. We have created an incentive to almost require people to lie."
Have y’all lied to President Trump?
As an example, he said that US officials have lied in the past about the number of Afghan children enrolled in schools ‐ a key marker of progress touted by the B.O. regime ‐ even though they "knew the data was bad."
Ah yes, the previous president.
Sopko cited a 2014 agency newsletter, where the then-USAID administrator stated: "Today, 3 million girls and 5 million boys are enrolled in school‐compared to just 900,000 when the Taliban
...mindless ferocity in a turban...
 ruled Afghanistan," he said.

The US sent personnel into Afghanistan who did not know the difference between al-Qaeda and Taliban and who lacked any substantive knowledge of Afghan society, Sopko said.
The key is that they learned what they needed to know once they arrived, and passed their learnings on to those who followed — that’s the American way of war.
He also said that the abuses committed by coalition-aligned warlords drove many Afghans into the arms of the resurgent Taliban.
And the abuses of the other-aligned warlords — where did they drive the remaining Afghans?
"For all the lives and treasure the US and coalition partners have expended in Afghanistan, and for Afghans themselves who have suffered the most from decades of violence, the very least we can do is to learn from our successes and failures," he said.
A safe statement...
"Oversight is mission-critical to any successful reconstruction and development program in Afghanistan," he added.

He said that in the future, "we need to recognize vital importance of addressing corruption from outset. This means taking into account the amount of assistance the host country can absorb and ensuring that agencies can more effectively monitor assistance."
Yes, along with recognizing that Third World cultures are corrupt — that’s why they aren’t First World.
"While honesty and transparency are always important, when government agencies overstate the positive and overlook flaws in their methodologies or accountability mechanisms, it has real public policy implications," he said.

On peace, Spoko said: "We know that a stronger Afghan economy is necessary to last peace and stability, and, without it, US reconstruction efforts are largely unsustainable."
That seems backwards, somehow...
Related:
John Sopko: 2019-12-28 ANA Not Meeting Target Enlistment Numbers: MoD
John Sopko: 2019-12-11 The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History Of The War. U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, states a confidential trove of government documents.
John Sopko: 2019-03-29 Afghan peace would bring its own risks to reconstruction: US watchdog
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