peacefare.net

Has anyone really read the Afghanistan report?

I’ve been hoping all day to offer analysis of the Afghanistan strategy review, but I can’t find the full text.  That hasn’t stopped anyone else.

So far as I can tell, everyone is commenting on the five-page “overview” as if they’ve read the whole thing.  The Washington Post tells you it hasn’t seen the whole report.  PBS Newshour doesn’t make any claims, but doesn’t post the whole report, so I’ve reached my own conclusion. Democracy Arsenal claims to have read the thing, but then says nothing that hints at content beyond the five pages.  So I thought I should say a few words on why it is not a good idea to comment based on an overview.

The overview is 80 per cent spin.  The higher ups in the U.S. Government don’t do a lot of rummaging around in paragraph 178 of a report, but they do look at what is more commonly called the “executive summary.”  And they make sure it says what they want it to say, whatever is in the report.  Then they get that five pager out to the press and commentators (some of them get it earlier than others of course) in the often justified hope that they can keep the news coverage on side.

The most important part of any government report is what it does not say.  You can’t really tell that from the summary, overview or whatever you want to call it.  But I’ll guess:  judging from this “overview,” it says nothing about corruption and lack of legitimacy of the Karzai government; it says relatively little about local governance and economic development; it says little about lack of cooperation from Pakistan or negotiations with the Taliban.

I don’t really see how a strategy review can be useful (except for PR purposes) without dealing with those issues, so I’m inclined to give this one a failing grade, without having seen it.  But that wouldn’t be fair, would it?  Maybe we should all withhold judgment and give ourselves some time to read the whole thing, calmly and thoughtfully.