Classify All The [Stabilization] Things
The latest NYT:
But as of this month, ask a question as seemingly straightforward as the number of Afghan soldiers and police officers in uniform, and the military coalition offers a singularly unrevealing answer: The information is now considered classified.
The American outlay for weapons and gear for Afghan forces? Classified. The cost of teaching Afghan soldiers to read and write? Even that is now a secret.
The military command’s explanation for making the change is that such information could endanger American and Afghan lives, even though the data had been released every quarter over the past six years, and Afghan officials do not consider the information secret.
To say that what amounts to the muzzling of SIGAR is disturbing would be a gross understatement. We have heard time and time again about how training, advisorship, aid, and reform are "non-kinetic" lines of effort in both limited and large-scale stabilization efforts abroad. As SIGAR has detailed, the actual results have been exceedingly unimpressive.
In particular, the current iteration of American military involvement in Iraq was forced by the failure of American efforts to build an Iraqi force that could stand up and fight against a determined and aggressive opponent:
The United States spent about $25 billion to train and equip Iraq’s security forces and provide installations for these forces from the start of the war until September 2012, according to a report by the special inspector general on Iraq. And Iraq has spent billions of dollars of its own money since then to acquire or order F-16 fighter jets, M-1 battle tanks, Apache helicopter gunships, Hellfire missiles and other weapons. ....
The stunning collapse of Iraq’s army in a string of cities across the north reflects poor leadership, declining troop morale, broken equipment and a sharp decline in training since the last American advisers left the country in 2011, American military and intelligence officials said Thursday.
Four of Iraq’s 14 army divisions virtually abandoned their posts, stripped off their uniforms and fled when confronted in cities such as Mosul and Tikrit by militant groups, principally fighters aligned with the radical Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the officials said.
In light of the stunning failure that the collapse of the Iraqi forces represents, the last thing that the government ought to be doing is classifying the inputs and outputs regarding Afghan military training and assistance. Such a step makes it dramatically harder for outside analysts not invested in favorable public perception of these large-scale stabilization and assistance efforts to evaluate key components of American national security policy. It also is reminiscent of the Vietnam-era "five o'clock follies" in which Pentagon officials repeatedly and blatantly attempted to mislead an increasingly belligerent and skeptical press corps.
It is difficult to overstate how deeply and thoroughly damaging classifying data and kneecapping SIGAR is to the credibility of security forces assistance, advising, counterinsurgency, and stabilization advocates. If the public is not to be trusted regarding key aggregate statistics regarding these matters, the public should reciprocate with automatic and extreme skepticism regarding claims about the efficacy of stabilization efforts and calls for future missions of this nature.
