The Pentagon wants you to ignore some inconvenient facts about the failure of the escalation strategy in Afghanistan.

The latest Petraeus/Gates media tour is under way in preparation for the general’s testimony to Congress next week, and they’re trotting out the same, tired spin they’ve been using since McChrystal was replaced in disgrace last year.

If you support Wikileaks, if you support transparency, accountability, or even just basic free speech, you should not be playing into the government’s semantic game that presents itself as a victim, and Wikileaks as an attacker. As someone who engages in journalism, as someone who engages in activism and dissent, I don’t want these things re-defined as an attack on the state.

I am not an insurgent, and neither are you. Until we realize that, until we understand the difference between journalism and war, then the government will continue to claim it’s acting in self defense.

Stop giving the government an excuse for repression. Stop calling Wikileaks “warfare”.

The Pentagon’s public relations machine is working overtime these days trying to sell a theme of “progress” in Afghanistan to push back against calls to end the war. The message machine behind this push is gargantuan, costing $547 million and employing more than 27,000 people. But, as our latest Rethink Afghanistan video shows, all that wasted P.R. money can’t paper over the fact that the Afghanistan War isn’t making us safer, and it’s not worth the cost.

According to intelligence reports, Pakistan Army and ISI, their spy service, are directly involved with supporting, plotting, and carrying out attacks on American soldiers.

If you can’t protect the population generally, from the perspective of COIN doctrine, you lose. If you lack a legitimate host nation government as a partner, you lose. And guess what? According to that doctrine — the doctrine used as the rationale for the troop-heavy American strategy in Afghanistan — the United States is losing. Badly.

Before the supporters of the president’s brutal, costly counterinsurgency strategy (referred to without affection as “COINdinistas”) get started this week, I want to reiterate a point I made a couple of months ago when the last round of silly, disingenuous pro-counterinsurgency celebrations took place.

Senate Republicans criticized President Obama’s decision to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011, claiming it sends the wrong message to our allies. But is this really accurate?