Progressing backwards

Many of the following quotes were taken by the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers.

“We’re making some steady progress,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters in September 2008.

“We are making steady progress, Marine Capt. Abraham Sipe told Reuters in response to an email in Feb. 2010. “In many parts of Marjah, we have seen very little opposition. There are areas where Marines have met with stiff resistance, but they are making steady progress throughout the area”.

“First, we are steadily making deliberate progress,” said Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez at a news conference in Kabul after NATO and US casualties began reaching new highs in 2010.

“The past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress,” said Gen. David Petraeus before Congress in March 2011.

“The campaign, as I’ve pointed out before, I think has made significant progress,” Sect. of Defense Leon Panetta told reporters that same year, even though he had just dodged a suicide bomb attack.

Then, as the war began moving towards building up the Afghan National Security Forces, the same tune emerged but in a different context. In the 2013 Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan, submitted to Congress in November, the DoD authors said that the transition between the US/NATO forces and the ANSF was “on track for completion by the end of 2014, and most districts are making steady progress”.

The NATO Sect. General Fogh Rasmussen said in 2014 that the transition from NATO forces to ANSF was making steady progress, though he wasn’t quoted using those exact words in the article.

Similarly, writing for the Defense Department website in 2016, staffer Liza Ferdinando quoted Army Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland as saying that the ANSF were making slow and steady progress and gains, in the fighting season with the Taliban.

That same year, after a surge in Taliban attacks on major cities, Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of US forces in Afghanistan at the time, told reporters “we are seeing some progress”.

As the Post reported about US/NATO counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, it was all lies, and that nearly all of the war was conducted without any coherent strategy that could have defined what “progress” meant. Then the month of August 2021 picked up the narrative where Rasmussen left off, showing just how much progress the ANSF had made in securing the country in NATO’s absence when they lost the whole nation in 3 weeks of combat.

While Ukraine most certainly has a more motivated army than the government in Kabul did, and while the Ukrainian general staff will certainly have an idea of what progress would mean, the Discord Leaks already demonstrated that the DoD had been understating Ukrainian losses, and overstating their chances at a successful counterattack.

Therefore it should surprise no one if “steady progress” becomes a byword for failure.