Global Post – Joshua Foust and the “Are We Winning” Report is Highlighted
Source: Global Post, 10/30/2011
A report by ASP Fellow Joshua Foust is highlighted.
Excerpt:
“…Joshua Foust, a fellow at the American Security project and an expert on security issues in Afghanistan and Central Asia, has recently released a paper called “Measuring Success: Are We Winning?” about the decade-long war in Afghanistan.
In the paper, Foust recaps the dramatic attacks in Kabul over the past year that have turned the Afghan capital into what he calls “the epicenter of violence.”
“This marked shift would seem to indicate the war is being lost,” he writes. “But because the U.S. fails to monitor crucial aspects of the war, there is no reliable way to be certain.”
The U.S. military persists in monitoring discrete, quantitative metrics such as insurgent body counts, numbers of operations conducted, and deadly attacks by insurgents, which fail to give a complete picture of the state of play, he insists.
In fact, adds Foust, officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere may be purposely blurring the lines to produce an overly rosy assessment of progress.
“I think what we are seeing is a deliberate attempt to filter information in a way that will make (the military) look good,” he said.
One example is a recent Pentagon report that claims that violence in Afghanistan is down for the first time in five years. The Wall Street Journal cited the report as evidence that the troop surge and the transition to Afghan security control are finally bearing fruit.
“The findings provide a boost to advocates of the current strategy, which entails clearing areas of insurgent activity and turning them over to Afghan control. Military officials have been anxiously waiting for the troop-intensive counterinsurgency strategy to begin to show results and drive down the number of attacks initiated by militants.”
But the Pentagon report is the result of a shuffling of data that gives a false sense of what is happening, Foust said.
“The Pentagon is counting ‘violence’ differently in October than it did in its April report,” he said. “In April, any IED [Improvised Explosive Device] event was counted — explosions as well as those found and cleared. In October, ‘violence’ included only the explosions … This is a lot of wordplay. They are trying to spin something good out of a bad picture.”
In fact, Foust said, violence is up sharply. The number of “security incidents” has more than doubled in the past two years.
This certainly seems to be the case, judging by Saturday’s news.
The spectacular attack in Kabul all but overshadowed other grim news. In southern Afghanistan, near Kandahar, a man wearing an Afghan National Army uniform turned his gun on ISAF soldiers, killing three and wounding six. This is the latest in a string of such incidents, when men in the uniform of Afghan security forces have killed their ostensible colleagues and partners…”
