Afghanistan: Taking Apart the Latest "We're Routing the Taliban" Story

On Wednesday, Carlotta Gall of The New York Times posted a glowing account of progress in the war against insurgents in southern Afghanistan, "Coalition Forces Routing Taliban in Key Afghan Region". 

The unadulterated story of victory --- "The Taliban will have a hard time returning to areas they had controlled in the province that was their base" --- was accompanied by other cheers of We're Winning, almost nine years after the US had supposedly won in Afghanistan. Fred Kaplan of Salon trumpeted, "Accurate rockets are only a part of the story. More important are the huge advances in intelligence gathering—again, just in the last few months—that have let the U.S. artillery troops know precisely where the bad guys are and, therefore, where to aim their big guns."

Specialist observers, however, thought that the real victory might be that of a propaganda offensive by the US military, and they were not ready to join in the celebration. Joshua Foust wrote:

This disconnect between military spin and ground reality is not only dangerous, it is insulting: Americans can handle the truth about the war their government is fighting. Whitewashing the real challenges and problems we face can only make us worse off: it will make our eventual withdrawal more humiliating and surprising, and it will create a need in the public to know what went wrong. What went wrong, however, is years of consistent political and policy failures, on the part of four military commands, two administrations, and the entire civilian foreign policy community. A surprise “defeat,” which can result from such odious spin, will lead not to a sober reconsideration of how to avoid such a catastrophe in the future, but a witch hunt instead. The military should be more responsible in how it handles its public images. And much more importantly, the media—print and TV alike—should quit meekly reprinting whatever briefing they’re given on their embeds.

We asked EA's new Afghanistan correspondent David Fitzgerald to look over the evidence and give us an analysis:

Josh Foust has been taking lumps out of Carlotta Gall's piece that claims the International Security Assistance Force is routing the Taliban in Kandahar. As Foust points out, once you filter out the quotes from optimistic ISAF commanders, you’re left with a decidedly darker picture where the Taliban are simply waiting the initial offensive out, just as they did in Marjah in central Afghanistan in early 2010.

Gall also introduces some hyperbole about a new, super-accurate rocket that’s both terrifying Taliban commanders and killing them in their compounds.  However, this system –-- the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System or HIMARS --– is neither particularly new (it’s been in service since 2005) nor as accurate as advertised. After all, it was a stray HIMARS rocket that killed twelve civilians in Marjah earlier this year.

What is most interesting about Gall’s piece however, is the way in which it echoes coverage of the war in Iraq in the summer of 2007.  We see the same statements about "cautious optimism" among commanders, references to the fact the coalition forces have only just reached full strength, and of course the implication that this is the turning point that we’ve been waiting for.

These arguments are repeated by General David Petraeus' biographer and PhD candidate Paula Broadwell.  Broadwell attempts to push back against the recent consensus that Petraeus is positioning the US for a compromise in Afghanistan by claiming that what we’re seeing is an increase in intensity across the entire spectrum of counterinsurgency operations, not just in terms of killing and capturing Taliban. [Editor's Note: Max Boot at Commentary, another fervent supporter of the war, is also pursuing this line.] In this telling, this is Iraq 2007 all over again.  Broadwell even shows us that Petraeus has updated his Iraq "Anaconda" strategy (and powerpoint slide), and simply replaced ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’ and ‘Ansar al Sunna’ with ‘Haqqani Network’ and ‘Taliban’!

However, look at the statistics she cites as examples of the success of the Anaconda strategy.  Broadwell lists:

*2,795 "kinetic" operations that captured or killed 285 insurgent "leaders," captured 2084 insurgents, and killed 889 over 90 days.

*Training programs that have produced a 139,000-strong Afghan National Army and 122,000-strong Afghan National Police.

*2,000 extra intelligence officials for ISAF.

*$150,000 on economic development spent by the  3/187th Rakkasans in Ghazni Province

*1,823 population-centric non-kinetic operations conducted by ISAF SOF forces. 

What do all these figures have in common?  They are all outputs, not results. Where are the statistics on how many Taliban defected in the last six months? How many roads are open (apart from for occasional trips by VIPs, which apparently merit ISAF press releases these days)?  Analogies are a dangerous thing to employ, but in reading the Broadwell piece I could not help but be reminded of a talk given by Brian Jenkins of RAND in the midst of another war in 1970:

Frequently, increases in the amount of our own military efforts are measured and this is called progress. On this basis, if twice as many bombs per month are dropped in 1969 as were dropped per month in 1967, we are doing better. The same with leaflets, battalion days of operations, and so on. If we ignore the scores and statistics, as the enemy seems to have done, then we would be left with a different question: what is different about Vietnam 1969/Afghanistan 2010 from two or three years ago and what is still the same?

If ISAF want to project a positive answer to questions about "what is different about Afghanistan today" , then they need to do better than optimistic stories in the Times and lists of "outputs".