Narrative vs. reality in Afghanistan

By Gregg Carlstrom

I started writing a post this morning about the incoherent military operations in Afghanistan that have followed Obama's surge announcement. I left it unfinished because I had to run to Capitol Hill for an interview about Lebanon; I came back to this tweet from Matt Yglesias, which sums up my thoughts quite well:

Too many words being written generals testifying on the Hill, not enough about actual events in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The actual events on the ground are, frankly, not very encouraging. There are reports this morning that NATO forces killed civilians in a raid in Laghman province earlier this week. ISAF insists no civilians were killed; the Afghan government says 13 were killed. Civilian casualties will, needless to say, spark a lot of anger in Afghanistan. (NATO is now investigating those claims.)

Pajhwok reports that ISAF troops detained a tribal elder in Paktia province; the man's family insists that he has no connection to militants.

Finally, there's Operation Cobra's Anger, the new Marine-led offensive in Helmand province. The DC foreign policy set has spent a lot of time debating whether "Cobra's Anger" is a cool name for a military operation -- and almost none discussing whether it makes sense to send thousands of fresh troops to fight in sparsely-populated backwaters like Now Zad.

The operation is proceeding pretty much according to script: The military insists Now Zad is a "Taliban stronghold," but reports only "sporadic" resistance, which means the Taliban fighters have already left town (just like they did in previous Helmand offensives). And the military is stressing the size of Helmand's opium crop, which furthers the fantasy that eliminating the drug trade would somehow bankrupt the Taliban.

None of this stuff -- killing civilians, detaining elders, focusing on the drug trade and "Taliban strongholds" -- comports with Gen. Stanley McChrystal's stated mission of population-centric counterinsurgency. You'd think at least a few of the journalists covering McChrystal's testimony on Capitol Hill would take notice. Nope! Instead, we're treated to a relentless focus on the "optics" of his testimony, paeans to his integrity, and hundreds of other narrowly-focused stories that read like little more than ISAF press releases.

Update (by Steve Hynd).

The Security Crank segues off Gregg's original post at The Majlis and points to the depressing predictability of the "claim success - deny civilan deaths - investigate - admit and apologise" process.

almost inevitably, weeks and sometimes months after the initial event that resulted in so much bloodshed, NATO/OEF is forced to admit that they not only didn�t kill as many Taliban as they said initially, but that they also killed a surprisingly high number of civilians in the process.

There is even a ratio for this dance: usually the U.S. admits to killing about 2/3 of the number of militants it initially claimed, and usually admits to about 2/3 of the number of dead civilians in the aftermath. These two ratios are so reliable, it is almost frightening how often they appear.

So when we read about a new raid in Laghman province, that NATO says killed a bunch of Taliban but the provincial governor says actually resulted in six dead civilians� well, we�re already to the investigation part, where NATO admits it had no idea what it was talking about when it claimed zero civilian casualties and now has to double-check its accounting. It�s all so predictable�in all likelihood, we�ll hear that 4 or 5 civilians died, and a smaller number of Taliban did.

And we�ll rinse, and we�ll repeat. No one faces any kind of censure for this kind of stuff�not necessarily the botched raid, because those are a tragic consequence of war (one of many that should make us fearful of ever having to fight one), but the lying and covering up afterward.

You should also make sure you read the Crank's post on how incredibly often the magic number 30 crops up in official claims of militants killed or captured.