Pentagon discovers thousands of surprised troops in Afghanistan

Ben J. Dickarnault
Senior Mountebank
Official Prevarication Desk
Pataphysical News Agency
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NORFOLK, VA (PNA) — During a routine examination of payroll records, forensic accountants at the Pentagon discovered 26,000 more troops were stationed in Afghanistan than previously thought. Apparently there was an accidental deployment on January 21, 2017 that was not properly encoded in the personnel procurement system, and lax oversight by former Obama employees fired on January 20, 2017 allowed the mistake go unnoticed until two middle school special education students discovered the discrepancies after a freedom of information request.

John “Wesley” Oliver and Carey “Nancy” Drew made the online request for information regarding historic deployment levels for America’s longest undeclared war to support their hypothesis that no one could believe the official government numbers because “everybody know the government is made up of professional prevaricators."

Oliver and Drew did not respond to our repeated texts asking for evidence to back up their fantastic claims.

At a hastily assembled press conference at the Pentagon’s 9/11 memorial shrubbery garden, US Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Kenneth “Spuds" McKenzie Jr. admitted to reporters that the total number of US forces in Afghanistan is rumored to be "in the neighborhood of 34,443," considerably more than the previously announced number of 8,400 when Barack Obama left office.

McKenzie said the slightly higher count is attributable to an accounting change with the Department of Defense now counting all troops deployed in-country and not just those who volunteered. According to unnamed military officials whose names you’d recognize immediately, the change is a routine part of the routine changes that are a part of rapidly evolving changes ordered by Secretary of Defense Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis.

"The Secretary commissioned a quick study after he decided to obfuscate our accounting methodology to improve the public's misunderstanding of America's firm and unwavering military commitment in Afghanistan,” said Under-Assistant Adjutant Pentagon Spokesperson Purity “Snow” White, reading from a soggy napkin.

White said the military is also obscuring how it miscounts troops in Syria and Iraq but declined to say whether that process is complete or ongoing. Unlike Afghanistan, the government in Baghdad already objects to the size of the US military presence, which makes under-reporting troop levels particularly troublesome.

The unexpected rise in troops levels in Afghanistan was welcomed by a leading Repugnicunt on the House Armed Services Committee. Chairman Rep. Marvin Thornberry applauded the president and Mattis “for putting their cards face up on the table.”

In  a statement postmarked Charlottesville, VA, Thornberry continued, "The Obama administration refused to shoot straight from the hip on how many people they sent to Afghanistan despite what we wanted, which added cost to the mission and made it harder to succeed. It is important to be up-front about the importance of the mission and what it takes to succeed, without breaking the bank and needing to raise taxes on job-creators," Thornberry said.

For thousands of years, the US military has always considered that 8,400 constituted what is called a "force management level” (FML) that reporters in the liberal could easily scribble in their notepads during news conferences and include in their state sanctioned reporting. Use of the FML continued during the previous administration, along with the existing obfuscation system. Military commanders were able to work around the cap by bringing in cheap contractors “off the books" for short periods, but it made the military less effective because it operated with incomplete units that lacked unit cohesion.

"Forces have been required to deploy that were not completely whole," McKenzie said. “Sometimes we had way more arms than legs. Other times it was reversed. Sometimes we got heads without bodies or bodies without heads. That’s no way to fight a never-ending war on terror."

According to an unnamed source, “Anyone with a functioning pre-frontal cortex has always understood that 8,400 was a ‘guesstimate' level, because troops are constantly getting wounded, captured, killed, replaced, retired, rehired, imprisoned, and the list goes on and on with troops and units overlapping as new ones arrive and old ones are bagged and sent home."

The discrepancy between publicly disclosed troop levels and the actual “stumps on the ground" was a much smaller percentage in Afghanistan when the procedures were first implemented because the number of US troops was more than 100,000.

MacKenzie insisted that the new accounting procedures were not tied to the increase in troops to follow completion of the South Asia Strategy Review President Donald Trump made up in a speech last week.

Although it is widely believed hundreds of thousands more troops will be disguised as military advisers and sent to Afghanistan as part of the Trump’s worsening hallucinations, McKenzie told reporters that General Mattis has not ordered any build up.

"No troops have started to flow, no decision has been made by the secretary, and the president may change his mind this afternoon on whether he wants to fight terrorism in Afghanistan or on the streets of Chicago," McKenzie said.

US forces in Afghanistan have two competing missions. The majority are assigned to the NATO mission to train and advise Afghan security forces alongside approximately 6,000 troops from other NATO countries. The remainder of US forces in Afghanistan carry out covert missions in the country in support of prolonging the war and sell munitions.

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