The second-ranking American commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti of the Army, took the occasion of a Pentagon briefing on Wednesday to counter – gently and respectfully – the opinions of an Army officer who has written in Armed Forces Journal that the war in Afghanistan is going badly and that military leaders have not told the truth about it. The Times wrote about the officer, Lt. Col Daniel L. Davis, in Monday’s paper and on the At War blog on Sunday.
Here is today’s exchange:
Q: General, Bob Burns with A.P. General, I’d like to ask you to respond to the article that was published in Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Dan Davis in which he says that I.S.A.F. leaders — presumably, including yourself — have been misleading the public about the degree of progress that’s been made there. He says that, whereas compared to the rosy scenario that he hears that — he says there’s been a lack of — a lack of success — I think he said a lack of success at virtually every level in Afghanistan.
GENERAL SCAPARROTTI: Right. I read the article. I — what I would say is this: It’s one person’s view of this. From my personal point of view, I do a lot of battlefield circulation; I talk to commanders and soldiers; I have assessments from others, like my sergeant major that I put on the battlefield virtually every week to walk with both Afghan and coalition parts. So I take in a lot of — a lot of data from many different places to determine my assessment, to include a very objective, detailed assessment we do every quarter.
So I’m confident that — in my personal view that our outlook is accurate.
I did read the article, and I think that as you read that article, I don’t doubt what he describes in a sense, for instance, his occasion of watching a policeman watch an insurgent depart an area. You know, I think those things happen.
We have an — we have an ANSF that has doubled in size in 18 months, and we’re presently building. So you know, there’s — what I would say to you is that we have to be — try to be very accurate about what we see and what we understand the battlefield to be and not treat it as we want it to be. So I work very hard personally at that, and I also take — I pay attention to what — the folks who perhaps disagree, and I look for people to be around my conference room table that’ll argue with me.
Q: Just one specific follow-up on — one particular thing that he said was that I.S.A.F. and U.S. troops don’t actually respect the Afghan forces, their ability —
GEN. SCAPARROTTI: Well, I disagree with that. I think I’ve seen enough of them to know there is — when I talk to soldiers — let’s take an American soldier or a private. At times this private will tell me they’re not that good. But a private is looking at it from the perspective of how he’s trained or the Marines trained, and the standards are very different.
But I can tell you personally from experience and from feedback from others, these soldiers will fight, particularly at the company level. There’s no question about that. And they’re going to be good enough as we build them to secure their country and to counter the insurgency that they’re dealing with now.
Will they be at the standard that we have for our soldiers? No, not, at least, the conventional forces. They do have — their response forces we’re training, their S.O.F. forces, the commandos, are being trained to a very high level; and I think that’s one thing that’s a bright picture here for them, is that their response forces are really coming along very well. And that will be — you know, that will be quite an asset for the country here in the future.
The general then gave his take on the morale of the Taliban and other enemy forces, responding to news reports based on a leaked NATO report, based on the interrogations of prisoners, that discussed their resiliency.
“I think they’ve been hurt, and I’ll try and describe how I view it,” he said. “We know, as I stated before, that they could not generate the tempo that they had in the past. They didn’t reach the tempo they had the year before. It was down about 9 percent over all in a year.
“Their complex attacks are down about 36 percent compared to last year,” he said.
“They have a regenerative capacity,” he warned, “particularly with the Pakistan sanctuary.”
But he said there appeared to be “dissension within the ranks” of the enemy, “because their senior commanders stay in Pakistan and security and continue to expect their midlevel leaders to increase the fight — and I think without full knowledge of just how tough that fight is for the Taliban on the other side.”
Three members of Congress members who had met with Colonel Davis to talk about the war took to the House floor today to praise him for speaking out and to call for an end to the war. Representative John Garamendi, Democrat of California, Representative Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina, and Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, have all been skeptical about the war in the past, but they have seized upon Colonel Davis’ views as those of a credible officer with experience on the ground.
Representative Garamendi read passages from Colonel Davis’ article and declared that his “candid testimony reinforced my conviction that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan, only the prospect of continued shedding of American blood in a war that is not ours to fight. Only through a negotiated political settlement amongst the Afghan factions, not through an open ended US military presence, could Afghanistan become a stable, developing country.”