The
U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan incorrectly reported a
decline in Taliban attacks last year, and officials said Tuesday that
there was actually no change in the number of attacks on international
troops from 2011 to 2012.
The corrected numbers — from the
original reports of a 7 percent decline to one of no change — could
undercut the narrative promoted by the international coalition and the
Obama administration of an insurgency in steep decline.
A
coalition spokesman, Jamie Graybeal, attributed the miscounting to
clerical errors and said the problem does not change officials' basic
assessment of the war.
The 7 percent figure had been included in a
report posted on the coalition's website in late January as part of its
monthly update on trends in security and violence. It was removed from
the website recently without explanation. After The Associated Press
asked last week about the missing report, coalition officials said they
were correcting the data and would re-publish the report in coming days.
U.S.
and allied officials have often cited declining violence as a sign that
the Taliban has been degraded and that Afghan forces are in position to
take the lead security role when the last U.S. combat troops leave Dec.
31, 2014.
In mid-December, Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta
said "violence is down," in 2012, and that Afghan forces "have gotten
much better at providing security" in areas where they have taken the
lead role. He said the Taliban can be expected to continue to attack,
"but overall they are losing."
On Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman
George Little said Panetta was "concerned to learn of the errors" and
was only very recently briefed on the matter.
"This particular set
of metrics doesn't tell the full story of progress against the Taliban,
of course, but it's unhelpful to have inaccurate information in our
systems," Little said.
The Taliban have lost a good deal of
territory since a 2010 surge of U.S. forces in the southern provinces of
Helmand and Kandahar, and they failed to recover it during the last two
fighting seasons. Even so, they are resilient, and they are expected to
severely test Afghan forces as the U.S. and its coalition partners step
further into the background this year and complete their combat mission
next year.
Graybeal did not fully explain ISAF's erroneous
reporting of 2012 Taliban attacks. It was not clear, for example, at
what point the data errors began or who discovered them.
"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," Graybeal said from
Kabul, speaking for the International Security Assistance Force, or
ISAF.
Graybeal said an audit determined that portions of the data
from unilateral Afghan military operations were "not properly reflected"
in the trends ISAF had reported in its monthly updates.
"After
including this unilateral ANSF (Afghan National Security Force) data
into our database, we have determined that there was no change in the
total number of EIAs (enemy initiated attacks) from 2011 to 2012,"
Graybeal said.
"This was a record-keeping error that we recognized and have now corrected," he added.
The
coalition defines enemy initiated attacks as attacks by small arms,
mortars, rockets and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. But it does
not include IEDs that are found and cleared before they explode.
Trends
in Taliban attacks are one yardstick used by ISAF to measure war
progress. Others include the state of security in populated areas, the
number of coalition and Afghan casualties, the degree to which civilians
can move about freely, and the performance of Afghan security forces.
Graybeal
said that even though the number of 2012 Taliban attacks was unchanged
from 2011, "our assessment of the fundamentals of campaign progress has
not changed. The enemy is increasingly separated from the population and
the ANSF are currently in the lead for the vast majority of partnered
operations."
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