[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 21 (Wednesday, February 8, 2012)]
[House]
[Pages H582-H584]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              AFGHANISTAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Lee) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. LEE of California. First, let me thank my colleagues Congressmen 
McGovern and Jones, Congresswomen Woolsey and Waters, and Congressman 
Honda for their efforts to bring the war in Afghanistan to a swift and 
safe end.
  Mr. Speaker, I am here this morning to remind my colleagues that 
there is no military solution in Afghanistan. It is time to bring our 
troops home and to make sure that we leave no permanent military bases. 
While many, and a growing number, of my colleagues have come to this 
conclusion, there are still those who claim that Afghanistan is going 
well and that we should stay there indefinitely.
  We are gathered here this morning to give some real and important 
insight into the reality that nothing could be further from the truth. 
We are here to discuss very important revelations brought to light by a 
brave Army officer, Colonel Daniel Davis.
  Colonel Davis has honorably served this country for over a quarter 
century, and has received praise from his commanders for his maturity, 
determination, and judgment. He recently made the brave decision to 
release an unclassified account of the war in Afghanistan after 
witnessing the huge gap between what the American public was being told 
about the progress in Afghanistan and the dismal situation on the 
ground. Declassifying the National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan 
is a necessary step so that our policy is based on accurate 
information.
  In an article published this past Sunday in the Armed Forces Journal, 
Colonel Davis asks:
  ``How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not 
succeeding and behind an array of more than 7 years of optimistic 
statements by United States senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one 
expects our leaders to always have a successful plan, but we do 
expect--and the men,'' and women, I must add, ``who do the living, 
fighting and dying deserve--to have our leaders tell us the truth about 
what's going on.''
  Mr. Speaker, the American people deserve to know the truth after 
spending the past decade on failed military strategies which have cost 
us over $450 billion in direct funding. The costs, of course, have been 
even greater in injuries, lives lost, and in the trillions of dollars 
we will need to spend on long-term care for our veterans, including 
hospitals, clinics, job training, post-traumatic stress disorder 
treatment, housing assistance, and homeless services. But we must spend 
these resources for our veterans.
  The American people, though, are sick and tired of these endless 
wars. Fully two-thirds of Americans support ending combat operations in 
Afghanistan in 2013, and three out of four Americans favor a speedy 
withdrawal of all United States troops out of Afghanistan. We are set 
to spend an additional $88 billion, mind you, $88 billion in 
Afghanistan over the next year while domestic cuts in education, health 
care, roads, bridges, and other essential priorities are sacrificed.
  We cannot afford an indefinite stay in Afghanistan. We need to ask 
what we have to show for the past decade of war. Instead of a stable 
democracy, we have a broken state which is completely dependent on 
foreign countries for its budget, with rampant corruption and 
widespread violence. For the fifth straight year, civilian casualties 
rose in Afghanistan. In fact, 2011 was a record year for the number of 
Afghan civilians killed. There were 3,021 Afghan children, women, and 
men who were caught in the crossfire between an insurgency and the 
heavy presence of NATO troops.

[[Page H583]]

                              {time}  1050

  The reality on the ground in Afghanistan stands in stark contrast to 
the steady reports of progress we have been hearing from those who seek 
to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan in 2014 and beyond. It's 
time to bring our troops home from Afghanistan--not in 2014, not next 
year, but right now.
  Congress authorized the use of force in 2001, which I voted against 
because it gave the President--any President--a blank check to use 
force anytime, anyplace, anywhere in the world for any period of time. 
We should have had a debate 10 years ago when Congress failed to 
consider the implications of giving the Pentagon a blank check in the 
rush to war.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Colonel Davis for his courage and 
risking his career to speak out to try to let the American people and 
their elected representatives understand the true risks we are taking 
in Afghanistan. To understand what is at stake in Afghanistan, I again 
call on the Pentagon to declassify the National Intelligence Estimate 
on Afghanistan so that we can have an informed discussion moving 
forward.
  It is time to bring our young men and women home. They have performed 
valiantly, with incredible courage, and have done everything we have 
asked them to do.

                    [From the Armed Forces Journal]

                      Truth, lies and Afghanistan

                     (By Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis)

       I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with 
     U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the 
     Army's Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant 
     area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 
     12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, 
     traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, 
     Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other 
     provinces.
       What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements 
     by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.
       Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn 
     that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan 
     were improving, that the local government and military were 
     progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to 
     witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely 
     hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or 
     battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.
       Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually 
     every level.
       My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my 
     fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A 
     Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch. I served in 
     Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq 
     in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years 
     in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs--
     among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign 
     affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.
       As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set 
     out to talk to our troops about their needs and their 
     circumstances. Along the way, I conducted mounted and 
     dismounted combat patrols, spending time with conventional 
     and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had conversations 
     with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest 
     ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff 
     members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan 
     security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village 
     elders.
       I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would 
     have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; 
     I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually 
     every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International 
     Security Assistance Force (ISAP) base.
       I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able 
     to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the 
     Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn't went to 
     be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.
       From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces 
     collude with the insurgency.
     from bad to abysmal
       Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or 
     wrote in official reports. I can't talk about; the 
     information remains classified. But I can say that such 
     reports--mine and others'--serve to illuminate the gulf 
     between conditions on the ground and official statements of 
     progress.
       And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the 
     kind that I observed all over the country.
       In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of 
     Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops 
     of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the 
     northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived 
     at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported 
     being attacked by the Taliban 2\1/2\ hours earlier.
       Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where 
     the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a 
     nearby mountain.
       ``What are your normal procedures in situations like 
     these?'' I asked. ``Do you form up a squad and go after them? 
     Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you 
     do?''
       As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain's 
     head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and 
     turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he 
     laughed.
       ``No! We don't go after them,'' he said. ``That would be 
     dangerous!''
       According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen 
     rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of 
     the province, the Taliban literally run free.
       In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, 
     returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were 
     audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one 
     mile away.
       As I entered the unit's command post, the commander and his 
     staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP 
     vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of 
     the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack. We 
     watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and 
     began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.
       The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio 
     operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio 
     operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no 
     answer.
       On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored 
     past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop 
     the two men nor answered the radio--until the motorcycle was 
     out of sight.
       To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had 
     nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area--and 
     that was before the above incident occurred.
       In August I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the 
     Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from 
     the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was 
     a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit's 
     senior officers rhetorically asked me, ``How do I look these 
     men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these 
     missions? What's harder: How do I look [my soldier's] wife in 
     the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died 
     for something meaningful? How do I do that?'
       One of the senior enlisted leaders added, ``Guys are 
     saying, `I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R 
     leave before I get it,' or `I hope I only lose a foot.' 
     Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: `Maybe it'll 
     only be my left foot.' They don't have a lot of confidence 
     that the leadership two levels up really understands what 
     they're living here, what the situation really is.''
       On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on 
     the U.S., I visited another unit in Kunar province, this one 
     near the town of Asmar. I talked with the local official who 
     served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander. Here's 
     how the conversation went:
       Davis: ``Here you have many units of the Afghan National 
     Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against 
     the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?''
       Adviser: ``No. They are definitely not capable. Already all 
     across this region [many elements of] the security forces 
     have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won't shoot at 
     the Taliban, and the Taliban won't shoot them.
       ``Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon 
     released with no action taken against him. So when the 
     Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too 
     go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked 
     with the coalition.
       ``Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had 
     captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to 
     beat him, telling me I'd better quit working for the 
     Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The 
     Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do 
     the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I've had to 
     take my children out of school just to keep them safe.
       ``And last night right on that mountain there [he pointed 
     to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters 
     distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came 
     and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, 
     and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the 
     ANP from another province and had come back to visit his 
     parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe 
     anywhere.''
       That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post 
     nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds 
     of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is 
     beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was 
     representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.
       In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was 
     bad to abysmal. If the events I have described--and many, 
     many more I could mention--had been in the first year of war, 
     or even the third or fourth, one might be wiling to believe 
     that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick 
     it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of 
     war.
       As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence 
     indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations 
     of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.

[[Page H584]]

                            CREDIBILITY GAP

       I'm hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy 
     between official statements and the truth on the ground.
       A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office 
     noted that pubic statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at 
     the end of 2010 were ``sharply divergent from IMF, 
     [international military forces, MGO-speak for ISAF] 
     `strategic communication' messages suggesting improvements. 
     We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to 
     recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any 
     such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to 
     influence American and European public opinion ahead of the 
     withdrawal and are not intended to offer an accurate 
     portrayal of the situation for those who live and work 
     here.''
       The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the 
     Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that 
     ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on 
     the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.
       ``Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does 
     provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively 
     `spinning' the road to victory by eliminating content that 
     illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,'' 
     Cordesmen wrote. ``They also, however, were driven by 
     political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and 
     insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems 
     caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate 
     the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to `spin' the 
     value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady 
     growth of Taliban influence and control.''
       How many more men must die in support of a mission that is 
     not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years 
     of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in 
     Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a 
     successful plan. But we do expect--and the men who do the 
     living, fighting and dying deserve--to have our leaders tell 
     us the truth about what's going on.
       I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 
     division-level ``experiment'' that turned out to be far more 
     setpiece than experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, 
     Training and Doctrine Command leaders told me that the 
     Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) had shown that a 
     ``digital division'' with fewer troops and more gear could be 
     far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our 
     congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration 
     firsthand, and it didn't take long to realize there was 
     little substance to the claims. Virtually no legitimate 
     experimentation was actually conducted. All parameters were 
     carefully scripted. All events had a preordained sequence and 
     outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in the 
     language of scientific experimentation and presented in 
     glowing press releases and pubic statements, intended to 
     persuade Congress to fund the Army's preference. Citing the 
     AWE's ``results,'' Army leaders proceeded to eliminate one 
     maneuver company per combat battalion. But the loss of 
     fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in 
     killing capability.
       A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to 
     the Future Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, 
     Texas. It didn't take long to discover that the same thing 
     the Army had done with a single division at Fort Hood in 1997 
     was now being done on a significantly larger scale with FCS. 
     Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from 
     the Government Accountability Office revealed significant 
     problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. 
     Each year, the Army's senior leaders told members of Congress 
     at hearings that GAO didn't really understand the full 
     picture and that to the contrary, the program was on 
     schedule, on budget and headed for success. Ultimately, of 
     course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to 
     show for $18 billion spent.
       If Americans were able to compare the public statements 
     many of our leaders have made with classified data, this 
     credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, 
     I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the 
     pubic. But I am legally able to share it with members of 
     Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller 
     accounting in a classified report to several members of 
     Congress, both Democrats and Republicans. Senators and House 
     members.
       A nonclassified version is available at 
     www.afghanreport.com [Editor's note: At press time, Army 
     public affairs had not yet ruled on whether Davis could post 
     this longer version.]


                             tell the truth

       When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging 
     our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe 
     it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid--
     graphically, if necessary--in telling them what's at stake 
     and how expensive potential success is likely to be U.S. 
     citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the 
     risk to blood and treasure is worth it.
       Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, 
     alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won 
     at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation 
     to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth 
     and let the people decide what course of action to choose. 
     That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. 
     The American people deserve better than what they've gotten 
     from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of 
     years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start.

                          ____________________