U.S. retreats on enemy war dead count

WASHINGTON — Taking a page from Vietnam War propaganda, the U.S. military in Afghanistan has been widely publicizing body counts of Taliban and Islamic State fighters killed in battle. Officials described the practice, which began in January, as part of an apparent strategy to rally White House support for remaining in the conflict.

In roughly three dozen statements, the military announced the deaths or wounding of more than 2,500 enemy fighters. The media releases were posted online, where they could have been seen by at least hundreds of thousands of internet followers, including on Facebook and Twitter.

On Thursday morning, in response to questions from the New York Times, the practice abruptly stopped.

The body counts served as a grisly contrast to other metrics that paint a grimmer reality of the war effort — including high attrition rates in the Afghan military and the loss of territory to Taliban militants.

In one example, the military headquarters in Kabul announced that at least 1,700 enemy fighters had been killed or hurt in 90 operations over a three-week period in late June and early July.

“The results seen on the battlefield are obvious,” Maj. Gen. Andrew Poppas, the chief of operations for the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan, said in the July 21 news release.

He said Afghan security forces “take the fight to the enemy and continue to remove all who oppose them at every turn.”

Top Pentagon officials have flatly said they oppose using body counts as a way to drum up public — and political — backing for the 17-year war that President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to leave.

As recently as last year, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis openly disagreed with using body counts as propaganda.

“You all know of the corrosive effect of that sort of metric back in the Vietnam War,” Mattis told journalists after declining to release the number of Islamic State fighters killed in an enormous U.S. bombing in April 2017 eastern Afghanistan.

There are roughly 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan — including 4,000 that were added under Trump’s strategy.

Most of the forces are restricted to advising roles behind the front lines. As a result, estimates of dead militants are difficult to verify, according to three military officers familiar with the process.