Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby speaks to reporters at a briefing last month. As the military has increased its efforts to combat the Islamic State group, the Pentagon has shifted its emphasis in news releases away from Afghanistan. (Glenn Fawcett/Department of Defense)
This article has been corrected.
JALALABAD, Afghanistan — What a difference a war makes.
As the Obama administration seeks to win support for a coalition campaign against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, the White House and the Defense Department public relations shops have gone into overdrive.
In recent weeks, the military has released near daily tallies of airstrikes in Iraq, often detailing how many targets were hit and what type of vehicle was destroyed. Those reports have frequently been pushed out again by the Defense Department and the National Security Council.
It’s a level of detail that has conspicuously vanished from public reporting on America’s other war: Afghanistan.
According to the latest numbers provided by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, the United States still has nearly 30,000 troops in Afghanistan. And while the vast majority of those forces focus on training or other behind-the-scenes assistance, the coalition still carries out regular airstrikes and other operations in support of the Afghans.
But to subscribe to the American government’s message machine, you would have no idea about that level of involvement. The steady stream of detailed reports about the airstrikes and troop numbers in Iraq highlights the striking difference between the drive to build support for military involvement in the Middle East, and the effort to make another war — Afghanistan — disappear.
The difference in messaging is a clear reflection of changing policies and priorities, said retired Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, who once served as the top spokesman for ISAF, the Multi-National Forces-Iraq and U.S. Central Command.
“It’s not unprecedented or unexpected,” he told Stars and Stripes in a phone interview. “It’s a political reality of where we’re at in Afghanistan, and where we need to be to address the threats in Iraq and Syria.”
Even the forces within Afghanistan rarely provide any information on the rapidly diminishing, but still daily, operations.
For much of America’s longest war, ISAF released daily operational updates. That stopped in July 2013, when ISAF announced it would no longer put out such information and would instead forward a daily report from Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry detailing Afghan forces’ work. By now, even that Defense Ministry report is no longer routinely sent to reporters, following a pattern in the Iraq war, when the U.S. tried to shift operational announcements onto the Iraqi military.
A CENTCOM spokesman insisted that although the goal is to support the host nations in both countries, the difference in disclosure can’t be compared because the situations are too different.
That position was also reiterated by U.S. Air Force Tech Sgt. Trevor Tiernan, a spokesman for ISAF’s Joint Command.
“The situation in Iraq is very different to the situation here in Afghanistan,” he said in an email to Stars and Stripes. “As ISAF’s mission in Afghanistan draws to an end, the Afghan National Security Forces are in the lead of operations. We are very deliberately transitioning to a train, advise and assist function. Since the ANSF are in the lead of ops they receive the ops reporting, and are therefore in the best people to go to for answers about operations.”
The operational releases from the Afghan ministries of Defense and Interior do not specifically disclose any details of American or international involvement.
Reporting on the remaining combat operations in Afghanistan, in some ways, more closely resembles the covert campaigns in Yemen and Somalia. Reports of coalition airstrikes by drones or conventional aircraft in Afghanistan usually come solely from local residents or Afghan security officials.
Questions about coalition support to Afghan forces caught in desperate fighting in Helmand province over the summer, for example, were at first belatedly acknowledged in a brief few sentences in emails before being referred to Afghan officials.
And coalition airstrikes conducted in support of an Afghan operation in Kunar province recently came to light only after Afghan officials claimed that at least one of them killed a number of civilians. ISAF officials say they are investigating.
In contrast, press offices at the White House and Defense Department have been detailing not only the number of airstrikes in Iraq but their targets and results as well.
“In total, one airstrike near an ISIL training camp southeast of Mosul destroyed an ISIL armed vehicle, two ISIL-occupied buildings and a large ISIL ground unit,” read one such statement released by the U.S. Central Command and forwarded by DOD to reporters on Thursday. ISIL is an acronym used to refer to the Islamic State group, which has overrun large swathes of Iraq. “Another airstrike southeast of Baghdad damaged an ISIL ammunition stockpile. All aircraft exited the strike areas safely. U.S. Central Command has conducted a total of 176 airstrikes across Iraq.”
smith.josh@stripes.comTwitter: @joshjonsmith
CorrectionDue to an editing error, the original version of this story misidentified retired Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, who once served as the top spokesman for ISAF, the multinational forces in Iraq and U.S. Central Command.
