The U.S. military proudly touted a 7 percent drop in Taliban violence in 2012 as a measure of progress in America’s longest war. Only one problem: The drop never happened.
Its explanation: a data-entry error.
The Associated Press’ Robert Burns discovered the mistake, which undercut a January claim by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO military command in Afghanistan. In reality, Burns reports, there was no substantive change in the level of “enemy-initiated attacks” in Afghanistan during 2012.
“During a quality control check, ISAF recently became aware that some data was incorrectly entered into the database that is used for tracking security-related incidents across Afghanistan,” ISAF spokesman Jamie Graybeal told Burns.
Only the Pentagon is denying that the statistical flatlining in enemy violence has any impact on its claims of progress in the war.
“In spite of the stated adjustment, our assessment of the fundamentals of progress in Afghanistan remains positive,” chief Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters on Tuesday. “The fact that 80 percent of the violence has been taking place in areas where less than 20 percent of the population lives remains unchanged.”
That might be the best that can be said for the U.S. military’s 2010-2012 troop surge in Afghanistan: it changed the contested geography of the country. In 2012, for the first time in five years, Afghan civilian deaths and injuries declined. But the surge did not reduce violence, according to military statistics issued before the clerical error: enemy-initiated attacks have plateaued at a higher level than before the surge began. In 2012, over 2,700 Afghan civilians died and another 4,800 were wounded in war-related violence.
The primary U.S. goal in the war is to transfer control of it to its proteges in the Afghan police and army, and it remains to be seen if the Afghan security forces can keep that territory out of the hands of the resilient Taliban. On Sunday, the Afghan government ordered U.S. special operations forces out of the violent eastern province of Wardak after allegations of their complicity in kidnappings and killings of civilians, a charge that the U.S. is denying. A joint ISAF-Afghan inquiry has been set up to investigate the charges.
“In recent months, a thorough review has confirmed that no Coalition forces have been involved in the alleged misconduct in Wardak province,” ISAF spokesman Lt. Col. Les Carroll e-mailed Danger Room Tuesday. “But we take all allegations of misconduct seriously and will work with our Afghan partners to fully investigate.”
“There’s a tendency sometimes to fixate on only one metric, whether it’s this particular database number, or insider attacks, or casualties,” Little said at the Pentagon. “The complete picture of progress in Afghanistan is much more nuanced.” LINK
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