Watchdog raises doubts about Afghan war progress

WASHINGTON — A Pentagon watchdog agency raised fresh doubts Friday about progress in the 16-year-old U.S. war in Afghanistan and suggested that restrictions on the public release of information make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of U.S. strategy.

The Pentagon’s office of the inspector general, in a report done jointly with the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, said the Afghan government by the end of 2017 had not expanded its areas of control, even as the U.S. added about 3,500 troops and intensified airstrikes against the Taliban.

“On the sole quantifiable metric discussed publicly to date — expanding security to 80 percent of the Afghan population by the end of 2019 — Afghanistan made no significant progress in 2017,” the report said.

That assessment underpins doubts expressed by others, including members of Congress who are impatient for progress.

Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said this week that recent Taliban attacks killing scores of people in Kabul make it appear the Taliban insurgency is “nowhere near folding,” and that the government is incapable of protecting its own citizens.

Earlier this month, Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan said after visiting Kabul and meeting with President Ashraf Ghani and other Afghan government officials that he realized it wasn’t a “rosy situation.” He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Taliban attacks in January were “a real shock to many people in the government.”

Just this week, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, told Congress that militant groups based in Pakistan are using that country as a haven to conduct attacks in India and Afghanistan. He said the Pakistani government is likely to maintain ties to those groups while restricting its counterterrorism cooperation with the United States.

More than 2,400 Americans have died in Afghanistan since the U.S. launched its war in October 2001 in response to the al-Qaida 9/11 attacks.