http://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/casualties-soared/
Despite Surge, Taliban Attacks, U.S. Casualties Soared
July 4, 2011
Data on attacks by armed opposition forces and
The Taliban and allied insurgent organisations launched 54 percent more attacks and killed or wounded 56 percent more
The nearly 1,571 attacks in May recorded by ANSO, which exceeded the previous monthly peak total of 1,541 attacks in September 2010, was achieved four months earlier in the fighting season than the previous peak.
The number of attacks in June was two percent less than in May, according to the latest ANSO report published on the organization’s website Sunday.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said last June that U.S.-NATO forces would have to demonstrate “progress” by the end of calendar year 2010 or face a collapse in public support.
But the Taliban responded to the surge with a carefully planned strategy to maintain much higher levels of offensive operations through the period from October through December, which normally drop off from the
Even as the monthly level of Taliban attacks was going down in the last quarter of 2010, the number of Taliban IEDs planted and direct or indirect fire attacks during the quarter was 130 percent higher than in the same period of 2009, as shown in a graph in the April 2011 DOD report on Afghanistan.
That increase in attacks recorded by the Pentagon relative to the previous year matches almost exactly the increase of 132 percent in
The JIEDDO data show the number of
But the little-noticed number of
Virtually of the 33,000 additional
Both DOD and ANSO data show that major increases in Taliban attacks and
ANSO data show 2,740 attacks in the first quarter of 2011, 53 percent higher than the 1,791 attacks in the first quarter of 2010. DOD’s April report shows roughly 5,060 attacks for the most recent first quarter, compared with 3,618 for the comparable period last year – a 40 percent increase.
ANSO data show just under 1,200 attacks in April and nearly 1,571 attacks in May – 43 percent more than the 1948 attacks in April and May of 2010.
The ANSO attack data include only those which are regarded as having a significant impact on security, thus excluding hundreds of unexploded IEDs and other incidents counted by DOD.
Last January, The New York Times blog “At War” called the ANSO reporting on insurgent attacks an “independent and widely-respected barometer of the war”. ANSO’s reporting is supported by the European Commission, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The total of 3,416
No other NATO country releases monthly totals for wounded in action in
The Pentagon asserted in its April 2011 report that in the previous six months, operations by
But indirect fire has never been more than a tiny fraction of insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, and a province-by-province breakdown of attack numbers in the ANSO report on the first quarter of 2011 shows that the Taliban had increased the total number of attacks in Khost, the pivotal province in the Eastern region during the quarter to 326, compared with just 147 during the comparable period of 2010.
Another key province in the Eastern region, Paktya, saw insurgent attacks of up to 124 in the quarter compared with only 14 the year before, and total attacks in both Paktika and Kunar were up 12 percent and eight percent respectively over the previous year.
General David Petraeus, who had remained silent on the data on the increase in Taliban attacks and U.S.-NATO casualties since last September, suggested to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius last week that the surge was now beginning to pay off, because the level of violence in “recent weeks” was down five percent from a year ago.
That comment revealed that Petraeus has been desperately looking for even the slightest evidence that the pattern of annual increases in Taliban attacks was being broken.
But the short-term dip in the level of attacks he cited is scant reason for believing that the pattern has been broken. In previous years, two months in the late spring or earlier summer with little change in the level of attacks have been followed by one or more months with large increases over the previous month.
In fact, the post-surge Taliban operations have continued a pattern that has been consistent over the past five years: a gradual increase in the number of attacks from the low point at the end of the previous year’s campaign in January or February to a high point in August or September, followed by a gradual decline in attacks from October to February.
The new low point is always significantly higher, however, than the year before.
This year, the level of attacks at the low point in February was 45 percent higher than the low point of 2010, which was in turn 38 percent higher than the one in 2009.
The Taliban leadership appears to have been making a point to Petraeus and the Pentagon: “The level of our offensive operations cannot be slowed by your military operations against us.” And as the
Gareth Porter
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