Report says Taliban’s attacks show U.S. strategy not working
WASHINGTON — The Taliban and other groups carried out a record number of attacks in Afghanistan during the last several months of 2019, according to an inspector general report released Friday.
The increase in violence occurred during a period in which President Donald Trump tweeted that the United States was “hitting our Enemy harder than at any time in the last ten years!”
The number of attacks, detailed in the quarterly report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a government watchdog formed in 2008, highlights once more the disparity between talking points on suppressing the Taliban and the reality on the ground: Despite a concerted bombing campaign and U.S. and Afghan offensive-ground operations, Taliban fighters are still able to attack at levels similar to those a decade ago.
“Both overall enemy-initiated attacks and effective enemy-initiated attacks during the fourth quarter of 2019 exceeded same-period levels in every year since recording began in 2010,” the report said.
The Taliban and other armed groups carried out 8,204 attacks in the final quarter of the year, 37 percent of which inflicted casualties, according to the report.
The tally is one of the few remaining public barometers for the United States’ war effort in Afghanistan after the U.S. military command there stopped releasing or classified others, such as the number of Afghan casualties and the percentage of districts controlled by the Afghan government versus Taliban forces.
“There’s so little you can publicly talk about that garners importance,” John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said Thursday.
This type of information has been used in the past to extrapolate a trend toward victory or defeat over the course of the war, but ultimately it has foretold little in the United States’ longest conflict.
The expansion of the U.S. air campaign seemed to mirror the increase in Taliban attacks.
In 2019, U.S. military aircraft dropped 7,423 bombs and missiles — a record number since the Air Force began recording the data in 2006, according to recently released Air Force documents. At the beginning of the year, U.S. Special Operations missions had increased by 124 percent from 2018, according to military documents, a rate that most likely continued throughout 2019.
In September alone — the same month as the Afghan presidential election and Trump’s decision to abandon a peace deal with the Taliban — the U.S. military dropped 948 munitions, the most in any month since October 2010.
In 2019, the U.S. military command in the country, led by Gen. Austin S. Miller, focused on inflicting heavy casualties on the Taliban in an effort to keep its leadership involved in peace negotiations taking place in Doha, Qatar. The offensives also aimed to push back the insurgent group to both lower Afghan casualties and hold what territory remained under government control.
After a car bomb in Kabul, the country’s capital, killed a U.S. soldier and 11 others in September, Trump called off the peace negotiations that were on the verge of a deal that could lead to the start of talks between the Taliban and the government in Kabul. The insurgent group has so far refused to talk to the Afghan government.