Bush Administration will keep secret 'grim' Afghanistan report quiet until after election
John Byrne
Published: Tuesday September 23, 2008

A secret US intelligence report which says the political and military situation in Afghanistan is "grim" will be withheld from the public until after the election, a new report says.

Intelligence officials are finishing up the National Intelligence Estimate on Aghanistan, according to ABC's Brian Ross, "but there are 'no plans to declassify' any of it before the election," an official said.

Keeping the intelligence report under wraps would likely help Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). McCain has focused on what he sees as the success of the Iraq "surge," in which the US added troops to lessen violence. Attention to problems in Afghanistan would put the spotlight on President Bush's failures, which might rub off on the Republican presidential nominee.

"According to people who have been briefed, the NIE will paint a 'grim' picture of the situation in Afghanistan, seven years after the US invaded in an effort to dismantle the al Qaeda network and its Taliban protectors," Ross writes.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen told Congress last week the US is struggling to retain control.

"I'm not convinced we're winning it in Afghanistan," he said, adding, "we're running out of time."

"Absent a broader international and interagency approach to the problems there, it is my professional opinion that no amount of troops in no amount of time can ever achieve all the objectives we seek in Afghanistan," he said.

This aligns with the opinions of commanders on the ground. According to a report in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, the US military expects the Taliban to launch a "winter offensive," which would mean a spike in violence in an area that has, at least for the recent past, been more quiet.

"I do think there will be an increase in violence by the enemy in order to maintain a general sense of insecurity," Brig. Gen. Mark Milley, deputy commander of the U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, told the paper. "The winter fighting season this year will be more violent than in previous years."

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Vanee Vines, told Ross "it is not the [National Intelligence Director]'s policy to publicly comment on national intelligence products that may or may not be in production."

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has said that he doesn't believe intelligence estimates should be made public, though several have recently been released, including one that detailed the US intelligence community's position on Iran's nuclear program.

The National Intelligence Estimate reflects the consensus view of 17 government agencies.

Some people just believe anything that comes their way!

They ( the administration) has been doing this all along. Look up the "pentagon filters news reports" or something along that line. They filtered the news so that it would not look bad on Bush for a long time.

And the Easter Bunny rides a purple unicorn.

hey war!

i remember you had posted something about the shia exodus from Iraqi cities just prior to the "surge: as seen by drones and camera shots from above at night.

something like that.

if that is as I remember reading, then maybe they all went to Afganistan to regroup and change the theater of engagement.

Maybe we will get to see a "saurge"engineered for Afghanistan and witness further decimation of terrorist cells and anarchistic mercenaries an a wholesale level.


But they might just sneak back into Syria or Lebanon and give the Ira-elis fits.

What say you?

Government is shipping more troops into Afganistan, someone I know is getting redeployed 2 months early. So someone somewhere is expecting more violence.

Or pumping up the troops early to STOP more problems. Different view of same subject.

Well, there definitely was some ethnic cleansing going on there.
I hate to be the piss on the parade, but the surge didn't work soley because we stuck boots on the ground, we paid Sunni's something like 800,000 a day...a week, not sure, but we were paying them not to fight.

A Afghanistan surge? I think it's more likely that soldiers are being sent there, to use Afghani territories to stage more violence in Pakistan. We'll see, but none of the top commanders are thrilled with what's going on in Afghanistan...maybe we shouldn't have abandoned the Talibans polciy of not producing poppy. Could have kept some of that money out of bad guy hands...oh and how is it that the correlation between more poppy in Afghanistan = more herion/opium here?

How's that work exactly?

guns for drugs.

Ollie North was doing that in Nicaragua in the 70s.

and the whole Iran?Contra mess.


is that what you mean , war?>

just say it.

I've made no excuses for my stance that the CIA/Ollie North/George Bush/Bill Clinton were funneling cocaine into this country, to fund the so called Contra freedom fighters.
This is a entire different ballgame, who is shipping afghanistans poison into this country?

Are you saying that you think it might be the same people?

the world works with deal making, war.

the sunni "awakening" is proof of that.

The shia exodus from the streets of Iraq is proof of that.

We can never leave Iraq, now.

We have to keep an eye on the babysitters. They were sadaam's eyes while he was in power.

Any questions?


as far as the drug trade is concerned, the US tends to look the other way. All those dollars can be burned when found or put back in circulation when retrieved. But the government uses those dollars to fund law enforcement.

You know that, right?

It's a game.

a dangerous game.

America plays that game better than any other nation.

Sad to say, but the evil in this world cannot be rooted out by being unaware of it and far from it's center.

Let's keep it real.

How did Rudy Guliani clean up the streets of New York?

By wishing upon a star?

Nope. He got in the trenches and infiltrated the steets and cleaned them out from the inside.


enough said. enough is enough.

hey!!! I sound like Nobama.

When you use evil to combat evil, guess what that makes you?