8,024 attacks hit Afghanistan toward end of ’19, report says
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. 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 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 sameperiod levels in every year since recording began in 2010,” said the report, which was released Friday.
The Taliban and other armed groups carried out 8,204 attacks in the final quarter of the year, 37% 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% from 2018, according to military documents, a rate that most likely continued throughout 2019.
In 2019, the U.S. military command in the country, led by Gen. Austin 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.
But the increase in military operations from the United States, the Afghan government and the Taliban are not without cost. There were more than 8,000 civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2019, according to U.N. data.
Twenty U.S. troops died during combat operations in 2019, the most in any year since 2014.