The chaos of the Sept. 11 attacks and the remoteness of the battlefield in Afghanistan have complicated officials' job of providing accurate information.

In the sad and confusing days immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks, officials in New York estimated that 6,000 people had been killed in and around the World Trade Center. Accurate numbers were impossible to calculate, for a variety of reasons. In the chaos, officials could not immediately determine whether hundreds of missing people were dead or simply displaced. Human remains were difficult, if not impossible, to identify. The thousands of foreign nationals working or visiting in the area were especially difficult to account for. Multiple relief efforts produced some duplication of casualty lists.

Now, three months after the attacks, New York officials say the tally of dead and missing is below 3,300, much lower than originally feared. The lowered casualty count provides little solace. It does nothing to change the fact that thousands of innocent people died in the most devastating attack on civilians ever carried out on American soil. However, the revised numbers reinforce the evidence of the extraordinary job rescue workers performed in evacuating the twin towers and surrounding buildings in the terrible minutes before the towers collapsed. Their efforts saved even more lives than originally thought.

No one has suggested that anyone purposely inflated the casualty estimates for political reasons. Officials simply did their best to provide accurate information, and then revised the numbers as details became clearer.

However, truth is inevitably a casualty of war, even when those in charge of dispensing information make every effort to be factual. War simply is too messy, too unpredictable for perfect accounting. Americans understand that errors will be made in such conditions, but we do have a right to expect that our political and military leaders will never purposely lie to us. Those who lived through the consistently false official optimism of the Vietnam War and the extraconstitutional subterfuge of the Iran-Contra scandal have developed a healthy skepticism toward official pronouncements during wartime.

The evidence so far suggests that officials deserve generally high marks for candor in their public statements regarding the war in Afghanistan. Journalists who have gained access to Afghan cities in recent days say civilian casualties from misguided U.S. bombs appear to be far lower than the Taliban claimed, and even lower than some objective accounts had estimated. The sudden collapse of the Taliban also silenced those critics who had argued that the United States and its allies were prosecuting the war too timidly and downplaying their setbacks.

Officials have had good reason for withholding some information, such as the movement of U.S. Special Forces on the ground in Afghanistan. For the most part, though, they have fully explained U.S. military objectives and resisted the impulse to overstate our successes. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been especially forthcoming in expounding on the course of the war.

Except for details that would endanger our troops, truth should be our greatest ally, even when the truth is unpleasant. Fortunately, our military retaliation against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attack against America appears to be going well, so our political and military leaders haven't faced the prospect of relaying much bad news. Still, they should remember the hard lessons of past conflicts: Those who would suppress the truth in times of war lack faith in the war effort, in the American people or in both.

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