Sons Of Afghanistan Program Starts Off With A Bang Of Disingenuousness

When a policy rollout begins with a series of misrepresentations, you just know that policy is totally superawesome and its architects have total confidence in its wisdom and success. To boot, the Sons of Afghanistan tribal-militia pilot program in Wardak Province got brought up at Geoff Morrell’s Christmas-eve-day Pentagon press conference. Here’s how the Pentagon’s in-house news service (shudder) described it:

Afghanistan’s government is preparing a pilot program in community policing that’s expected to debut in the near future, a senior Defense Department official said here today.

“Community policing”? If this were a police action, do you know who would be taking care of it? That’s right! The police. But I suppose “a pilot program in recruiting and arming tribal militias” might raise some objections, so out come the euphemisms.

But it gets worse. Morrell apparently denied that the war is going badly.

Whitman also addressed a reporter’s question about the tone of some recent media reports that the reporter said seem to imply that the Pentagon is telling incoming officials of President-elect Barack Obama’s administration that the campaign against terrorists in Afghanistan is not going well.

“That’s not the case at all,” Whitman emphasized. “And, that’s unfortunate. I think that any number of our commanders have said we’re not going to fail, and we’re not failing in Afghanistan.”…

[A]nyone who’d describe the situation in Afghanistan as being “in some kind of dire straits,” Whitman said, would be engaged in “a mischaracterization.”

Is Christmas Eve actually Iraq-In-2006 Nostalgia Day at the Pentagon? I’ll reserve judgment until I see the actual transcript, but this is dangerously close to denying the basic, on-display reality that Afghanistan has gotten way worse over the past two years. I thought we were done with this sort of crap in the Gates era.