By Kambiz Foroohar
The Pentagon has barred an official watchdog from providing unclassified guideposts in his reports on the war, amid increasing violence in Kabul and signs that Afghan forces aren’t gaining ground against the Taliban despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to send more U.S. troops.For the first time since 2009, the Defense Department didn’t let the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction release his assessments of Afghan force strength or his breakdown of territory that’s held by the government, lost to the Taliban or contested, John Sopko said in his latest quarterly report.
“Historically, the number of districts controlled or influenced by the government has been falling,” Sopko wrote. “The number controlled or influenced by the insurgents has been rising — a fact that should cause even more concern about its disappearance from public disclosure and discussion.”
Trump condemned a Taliban suicide attack in downtown Kabul on Saturday that killed 95 people and wounded 158 others as “despicable” and called on the world to act against the Islamic fundamentalist group. While U.S. policy has long been to use military pressure to force the Taliban to the negotiating table with the Afghan government, Trump said on Monday that “innocent people are being killed left and right” so “we don’t want to talk with the Taliban. There may be a time, but it’s going to be a long time.”
More Troops
In August, Trump agreed to a Pentagon request to send 4,000 additional U.S. troops, including special forces, to be deployed in Afghanistan. He also gave commanders in the field more authority to strike the Taliban as well as Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists.
The U.S. Air Force dropped 653 bombs and missiles in October, a threefold increase from a year earlier and a record high since 2012, according to the inspector general’s report. But he said those actions have yet to increase the Afghan government’s control over its population.
He noted the “irony” that as recently as December the Pentagon had made public figures comparable to those he’s now been barred from reporting, including in a November briefing for reporters by General John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Sopko said the Pentagon has said about 64 percent of Afghanistan’s population lives in areas under government control, with 12 percent under insurgent control and the remaining 24 percent in contested areas. Government control has declined since the inspector general’s staff began reporting the data in January 2016.
U.S. casualties doubled in the first 11 months of 2017 compared with the same periods in 2015 and 2016, according to military figures cited by Sopko. In 2017 data through Nov. 26, 11 U.S. military personnel were killed in Afghanistan, and 99 were wounded.
The military said civilian casualties rose 13 percent to 4,474 from June 1 through Nov. 26, according to the report, with about a third of those deaths. According to the United Nations, more than 26,500 civilians have been killed and an additional 49,000 have been injured since the conflict began in 2001.
Drug Labs
Despite $8.7 billion spent on counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan, opium production was up 87 percent in the first 11 months of 2017 from the same period a year earlier, an all-time record, the inspector general reported.
Although the Pentagon says airstrikes demolished drug labs, destroying $80 million of drug money and cutting off $16 million of direct revenue to the Taliban, the inspector general’s report “questions the accuracy of these figures.”
“The labs being destroyed are cheap and easy to replace,” the report said. “According to some estimates they only take three or four days to replace.”
On the economy, the inspector general offered a note of caution about Afghanistan’s mining industry. Although the U.S. government estimated that previously unknown Afghan mineral deposits were valued at almost $1 trillion, the report says the U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars since 2009 trying to stimulate and support mineral-resource
development in Afghanistan without much success.
Mining revenue in 2016 supplied only 0.3 percent of the country’s $6.5 billion national budget. Plans to develop the country’s mineral resources have been stymied by insecurity, corruption, weak governance, and a lack of infrastructure, the report said. – Bloomburg politics
