Americans are hardworking. Most of them follow the law and pay their taxes. They expect and are indeed entitled to certain information from their own government, including where their money is going, how certain programs are functioning, and whether the various agencies and departments are doing what they are saying.
Most important of all, the public has the right to know when and where their armed forces are deployed around the world, what missions those forces are conducting, and whether those missions are succeeding or failing. The semiannual consolidated war powers report submitted to Congress by the president is supposed to provide some of this information to the public. Yet year after year, the report has become a relatively meaningless exercise in symbolism stuffed with overt generalities and so few specifics as to make the entire publication a meaningless check-boxing exercise.
The Trump administration released the latest war powers report on Tuesday. Sure enough, the contents might as well have been a blank piece of paper.
U.S. military forces were in Afghanistan, the report reads, to stop, “the reemergence of safe havens that enable terrorists to threaten the United States, and supporting the Afghan government and the Afghan military as they confront the Taliban in the field.” If this isn’t the most basic sentence the government can provide to its people about the status of U.S. operations in this 19-year war, I don’t know what is.
“As part of a comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS, United States Armed Forces are conducting a systematic campaign of airstrikes and other necessary operations against ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria and against al-Qa’ida in Syria,” the report says. As if we didn’t already know that U.S. forces have been launching airstrikes and ground operations against ISIS for the last five years.
“A small number of United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS.” No mention whatsoever about the number of U.S. troops deployed in this war-cloaked country, what these forces are doing beyond the extremely vague explanations given in the document, and what legal authority the administration believes it possesses for such a deployment.
Unfortunately, the war powers report is but one example in a larger trend of the executive branch obstructing any statistics that could be remotely useful to people who follow these various conflicts.
In November, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction said the Pentagon attempted to block information on alleged sexual crimes against children committed by members of the Afghan national security forces —Afghan forces, it should be noted, that Washington has spent tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money building, equipping, and training. In January 2018, that same inspector general reported to Congress that the U.S. military command in Afghanistan decided to classify the number of districts held by the Taliban — one of the most important metrics for measuring the facts on the ground. Just last April, the Pentagon refused to divulge statistics regarding Taliban attacks against the Afghan army and U.S. forces, arguing such disclosure would complicate intra-Afghan peace talks.
Constitutional law experts and government watchdogs have taken note. The national security law website Just Security filed a freedom of information act lawsuit in order to force the Pentagon to release the U.S. troop figure in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. It’s an entirely reasonable request and in perfect alignment with how the U.S. system of government is supposed to function. Yet because the executive branch refuses to abide by that system, the public, the very constituents that fund everything from the purchase of F-35 fighter aircraft to Medicare, is left in the dark.
As Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists told the Guardian newspaper last February, “The idea that the scale of the U.S. military presence in a war zone should be kept secret from the public is a mistake.”
A mistake, indeed. Regardless of which political party you belong to, we should be appalled by the systemic over-classification and outright secrecy of our own government.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
