Afghanistan: Petraeus "Success" Undone by Rising Casualties? (Porter)

Gareth Porter writes for Inter Press Service:

General David Petraeus claimed limited success this week in the war within a war over the Taliban's planting of roadside bombs, but official Pentagon data shows the Taliban clearly winning that war by planting more bombs and killing many more U.S. and NATO troops since the troop surge began in early 2010.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Tuesday, Petraeus asserted that the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) by the Taliban had "flattened" over the past year and attributed that alleged success to pressures by the U.S. military, and especially the increased tempo of Special Operations Forces raids against Taliban units.

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Data provided by the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), however, shows that IEDs planted by Afghan insurgents killed nearly 40 percent more U.S. and NATO troops in the first eight months of 2010 than in the comparable period of 2009.

The data also show that Taliban IEDs wounded 2,025 U.S. and NATO troops in the first eight months of this year –-- almost twice the 1,035 wounded in the same months last year.

In the Journal interview, Petraeus said that the data on violent incidents in Afghanistan indicate a slowly improving security situation.

Without putting his statement in quotation marks, Journal reporters Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg reported Petraeus as claiming that the use of IEDs "has generally flattened in the past year". While crediting U.S. military operations with this alleged improvement, Petraeus said it is too soon to say that they are the sole reason for this alleged flattening of IED incidents.

But the data for 2009 and 2010 provide no support for Petraeus's "flattened" description.

The 12-month moving average of IED incidents, provided in a report in July by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the basis of JIEDDO data, shows a continuing and sharp increase from 250 in June 2009 to more than 900 in May 2010, for an average increase per month of 54 incidents.

The total number of IED incidents in Afghanistan began to rise steeply in March 2010 to a new high of 1,087 and then continued to climb to 1,128 in May and again to 1,258 in August.

In a related effort to spin the IED issue more favourably to the war effort, Maj. Michael G. Johnson, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commanded by Petraeus, was quoted in a USA Today story published Tuesday as saying that there had been a "dip" in deaths and injuries from IEDs over the previous 12 weeks compared to the same period in 2009.

But the JIEDDO figures on deaths and injuries to U.S. and NATO forces from IEDs from June through August 2010 total 271 casualties --- a 30 percent increase over the total for those months a year ago....

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