The US Congress' Afghanistan reconstruction watchdog told lawmakers on Tuesday that increasing classification of data on the 18-year-long war has made him completely unable to say whether or not the US is winning that war.
“Every time we find something that looks like it's going negative, it gets classified,” Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko told Congress on Tuesday. “Most of the [methods] of measuring success are now classified.”
The clampdown has come in the wake of complaints by US President Donald Trump that information about the 18-year-long war was too transparent.
“They do a report on every single thing that's happening, and they release it to the public,” US President Donald Trump lamented at a Cabinet meeting in January 2019. “We're fighting wars, and they're doing reports and releasing it to the public? Now, the public means the enemy. The enemy reads those reports; they study every line of it. Those reports should be private reports.”
“I don't want it to happen anymore,” the president reportedly told then-acting US Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan at the meeting.
According to Sopko, it hasn't.
“One question we would like to ask the Afghans is how many people [they] control and how much territory, and that's now not relevant, apparently … It's all secret, classified,” the watchdog chief told a Senate panel on Tuesday, according to Stars and Stripes. “$64 billion has gone to training and…
