Deutsche Presse-Agentur – Joshua Foust Quoted in Article “West overplaying success in Afghanistan, experts say”
Source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur/Monsters and Critics, 12/4/2011
Excerpt:
The officials have been touting achievements, saying enemy attacks are down and the years of downward spiral have been reversed. But this assessment only bears up ‘if you count attacks in a very specific way,’ political analyst Joshua Foust said.
‘In the latest ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] report, they report only ‘complete’ attacks – that is, incidents where things go boom – as ‘enemy attacks,’ he said, ‘The pointedly do not record unsuccessful attacks,’ such as defused bombs.
That definition allows the NATO-led force to say attacks are down but can cause misleading statistics, the fellow at the American Security Project, a US-based think tank focused on transparency in defence politics, wrote in an e-mail interview.
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