US-led coalition’s report of drop in Taliban attacks wrong; figures show no drop

washington post ^ | 2/26/2013 | ap

[tobyhill]

The U.S.-led military command in Afghanistan incorrectly reported a decline last year in Taliban attacks and is preparing to publish corrected numbers that could undercut its narrative of a Taliban in steep decline.

After finding what they called clerical errors, military officials in Kabul said Tuesday that a 7 percent drop in “enemy initiated attacks” for the period from January through December 2012 reported last month will be corrected to show no change in the number of attacks during that span.

The 7 percent figure had been included in a report posted on the coalition’s website until it was removed recently without explanation. After The Associated Press inquired about the missing report, coalition officials said they were correcting the data and would re-publish the report.

“During a quality control check, ISAF recently became aware that some data was incorrectly entered into the database that is used for tracking security-related incidents across Afghanistan,” said Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition known officially as the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF.

[ScottinVA]

Sounds more like they’ve reclassified what actually constitutes an “attack.”

[qwerty1234]

Just like police departments - when they get everything they want, they purposefully understate crime by not filing reports, or changing the way they are worded to make things seem less severe...but if the raises aren’t as big as they would like, or god-forbid the rate of increase in the budget is slowed down, all of a sudden you see a ‘spike in crime’ - which is really just the cops purposefully filing more paper work to make it look like the ‘spike in crime’ is a result of the ‘severe budget cuts’.

[Timber Rattler]

How convenient. Waiting until after the election to correct its figures, which were likely low-balled in the first place to help Obama.

[huldah1776]

We hadn’t lost anyone for a month until Friday...

“A U.S. Marine from the Navajo Nation died in combat on Friday in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Marine staff Sgt. Jonathan D. Davis, 34, was from the Kayenta community on the Navajo Reservation. He died in the Helmand province of Afghanistan.”

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/20130225arizona-marine-dies-afghanistan-abrk.html

[elpadre]

We have been conditioned to accept Obama favoring statistics published by he Dept. of Labor and he other bureaucracies later revised to the correct stats and printed on page #10 of the local newspapers. They are all totally controlled by the WH. But when the military starts revising numbers I begin thinking somehow the WH has something to do with it.