The Atlantic – Foust: Of Bomb Counts and Chickens
Source: The Atlantic, 8/3/2011
ASP Fellow Joshua Foust is a featured author.
The U.S. military is belatedly realizing that the real battle being fought in Afghanistan is not just for hearts and minds
“In one of many fawning interviews at the end of his year-long tenure as ISAF commander, General David Petraeus (now the director of the CIA) made an extraordinary claim:
Yet the general said signs of progress were beginning to appear. Insurgent attacks were down in May and June compared with the same months in 2010, and July is showing the same trend, he said.”This just means that they have less capacity; they have been degraded somewhat,” he said of the insurgents. “This is the first real indicator — for the first time since 2006 — compared to the previous year, insurgent attack numbers are lower.”
It was a claim difficult to square with reality, as a new report at the National Journal suggests. “The number of IED attacks in Afghanistan has spiked to all-time high,” Yochi Dreazen quotes U.S. military officials saying, “because of the free flow of critical bomb-making materials from neighboring Pakistan.”
This, too, is difficult to square with reality. Further investigation of Petraeus’ remarks indicated he did not include IEDs in his estimate of violence—that is, he chose not to count the most common form of violence so that he could claim violence has been reduced. It was a pretty shocking piece of dishonesty. However, blaming the rise of IEDs on bomb components (fertilizer, wires, radios, and so on) also makes very little sense…”
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