The Trump administration may be classifying information on Afghanistan to mask a failing military strategy there, two top Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee claim.
Reps. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., sent a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Thursday requesting a trove of Pentagon documents on the decision to begin classifying statistics on Afghan forces and U.S. airstrikes.
“We believe it is completely inappropriate to abuse our nation’s classification system to conceal the policy failures of the Trump administration,” wrote Cummings, the committee ranking member, and Lynch, who is the ranking member of a national security subcommittee.
After months of deliberation, Trump announced a new strategy in August for the Afghanistan war, a 16-year conflict that is now the longest in U.S. history. It included an increase of about 4,000 troops and putting those troops closer to the front lines of the war against the Taliban and Islamic State.
The possibility of peace talks with the Taliban has appeared to grow in recent weeks, but the group has also waged devastating, high-profile attacks on the Afghan capital of Kabul, which had been relatively safe in the past.
Cummings and Lynch wrote to Mattis that the increased secrecy about the performance and strength of Afghan soldiers and police “comes as President Trump’s new strategy appears to be foundering badly.”
They noted that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani warned in January that the country is under siege and it could not support its army for six months without help from the U.S.
“Now, more than six months after President Trump announced his new strategy in Afghanistan, we are gravely concerned that the administration is retroactively classifying information that used to be available to the American people,” the lawmakers wrote.
Cummings and Lynch requested that by the end of the month the Pentagon turn over all documents related to the decisions to classify the casualty rates of Afghan forces, Trump’s security goals in the country, and the number of U.S. and coalition airstrikes.
The Pentagon’s independent watchdog, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, has been critical of recent decisions to classify data on Afghanistan that has been public in the past, including the number of districts the Taliban controls and the Afghan military casualty rates.
“This development is troubling for a number of reasons, not least of which is that this is the first time SIGAR has been specifically instructed not to release information marked ‘unclassified’ to the American taxpayer,” John Sopko, the special inspector general, wrote in January. “Aside from that, the number of districts controlled or influenced by the Afghan government had been one of the last remaining publicly available indicators for members of Congress — many of whose staff do not have access to the classified annexes to SIGAR reports — and for the American public of how the 16-yearlong U.S. effort to secure Afghanistan is faring.”
