The Defense Department is defending its decision to withhold information on the frequency and success of Taliban attacks, saying it is necessary if the United States is going to be able to help usher in an era of peace in Afghanistan.Officials Friday pushed back against a U.S. government watchdog’s report that said restricting access to the data was making it difficult to assess the security situation as Afghan and Taliban officials have struggled to build on a U.S.-Taliban peace-building deal signed in February.”The decision was that we’re working toward a better solution and a better place for Afghanistan, and that the sharing of that information would not move that ball forward,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman told reporters.
But Hoffman also made clear that Washington has not been happy with the recent scope and pace of Taliban attacks.“We are not pleased with the level of violence in Afghanistan. The level of violence by the Taliban is unacceptably high,” Hoffman said, adding it “is not conducive to a diplomatic solution.”Impediment to assessmentIn the report, released Friday, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) warned that the sudden refusal to share the data on enemy-initiated attacks (EIA) and effective enemy-initiated attacks (EEIA) was making it increasingly difficult to assess safety and stability.“This EIA data was one of the last remaining metrics SIGAR was able to use to report publicly on the security situation in Afghanistan,”Inspector General John Sopko wrote, noting it was not the first time such information had been withheld.SIGAR chastised U.S. defense officials in May 2019 after Resolute Support — the NATO-led training and advisory mission in Afghanistan — stopped providing district-level stability assessments, which showed Afghan forces losing ground to the Taliban.US Military, Key Watchdog in War of Words Over Unfavorable Data
A decision by U.S. military officials in Afghanistan to stop tracking the amount of territory controlled by the Taliban is sparking an increasingly tense showdown with the watchdog overseeing reconstruction efforts.The so-called district-level stability assessments, which measure the number of the country's districts under government or insurgent control or influence, have been one of the most widely cited indicators of U.S.
At the time, SIGAR said Resolute Support officials claimed the assessments, showing which districts were under government or insurgent control, were “of limited decision-making value.”Sopko and others have said the willingness to restrict or classify data that might not show favorable results threatened to skew the public’s perception of progress in a country at the center of America’s longest war.”We have incentivized lying to Congress,” SIGAR’s Sopko told lawmakers in January. “The whole incentive is to show success and to ignore the failure. And when there’s too much failure, classify it or don’t report it.”Pentagon Defends Track Record in AfghanistanSpokesman says accusation there was an intent to lie or mislead ‘doesn’t hold water’Officials with Resolute Support and the Pentagon said Friday that the data on Taliban-initiated attacks, while withheld, had not been classified, and that it could be released in the future, once peace talks between the Afghan government in Kabul and the Taliban had more time to take hold.“We’ve been pushing the military option for some time on this. And we’re helping right now to weigh in and push that diplomatic side a little bit more,” Hoffman said.Despite a weeklong reduction in violence in the run-up to the February 29 agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, there’s been little letup in fighting between the Taliban and Afghan forces, especially in areas farther away from the country’s provincial capitals.“Between March 1 and 31, the Taliban refrained from attacks against coalition forces,” according to a letter from Resolute Support to the special inspector general. “However, they increased attacks against ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] to levels above seasonal norms.”Hundreds of casualtiesAfghan officials accuse the Taliban of killing more than 100 members of the Afghan security forces and killing or wounding up to 800 civilians since signing the February peace-building deal with the U.S.And even before the deal was signed, the last available data on enemy attacks, covering the last three months of 2019, showed enemy attacks trending significantly higher.“Both overall enemy-initiated attacks and effective enemy-initiated attacks [resulting in casualties] during the fourth quarter of 2019 exceeded same-period levels in every year since recording began in 2010,” SIGAR’s January report said.Still, the U.S. insists that while it continues to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, with the goal of getting down to 8,600 by mid-July, it has not abandoned the country’s still-struggling security forces.“We have continued to do retaliatory attacks, defensive attacks, to help defend our partners in the area,” the Pentagon’s Hoffman said. “And we’ll continue to do that.”
…