Decline for insurgent Afghan attacks was misreported

At the Pentagon Tuesday, spokesman George Little called the under-reporting of insurgent attacks a “regrettable error in our database systems.”

“In spite of the stated adjustment, our assessment of the fundamentals of progress in Afghanistan remains positive,” Mr. Little said. “The fact that 80 percent of the violence has been taking place in areas where less than 20 percent of the Afghan population lives remains unchanged.

“As we have said repeatedly, we have pushed the Taliban out of the population centers, and they have failed to retake any of the areas they lost during the surge, and this remains true,” he said.

The spokesman added: “There’s a tendency sometimes to fixate on one metric, whether it’s this particular database number or insider attacks or casualties. The complete picture of progress in Afghanistan is much more nuanced, and I would encourage you to look at that overall picture.”

The counting error was disclosed after The Associated Press inquired why the command had removed the monthly compilation of attacks from its website.

“During a quality control check, ISAF recently became aware that some data was incorrectly entered into the database that is used for tracking security-related incidents across Afghanistan,” Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, told the AP.

© Copyright 2013 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.