Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Friday, July 29, 2011

Kill rates don't show success

By Dave Anderson:



An insurgency that is trading no worse than 2:1 against the counter-insurgent force is winning. And that is what the Taliban appears to be able to do.




The AP reports on Afghan counter-insurgent force fatalities:



There were 2,770 Afghan policemen killed during the two-year period that ended March 19, the last day of the most recent Afghan calendar year. That's more than twice the 1,052 Afghan soldiers or 1,256 U.S. and other foreign troops who died during the same period. Moreover, 4,785 Afghan policemen were wounded in the two-year period compared with 2,413 Afghan soldiers.


That is a total of 5,078 counter-insurgent combatant fatalities in the span March 2009 to March 2011.



Danger Room from March 2011 has some incomplete stats that allows us to make reasonable estimates of counter-insurgent claimed Taliban kills:


Those metrics � dead insurgents � are growing in importance to Petraeus. The Washington Post reports that he and the Afghans gave reporters stats showing 2,448 insurgents have been killed over the past eight months, a 55 percent increase from the previous year�s period. USA Today adds that NATO killed or captured 900 Taliban �leaders� in the past ten months.



In the two comparable 8 month periods, the US is claiming that the counterinsurgent forces have killed roughly 4,000 Taliban. Applying a 50% fudge factor to account for the gap of March, April, May and June, or the start of the fighting season, increases the probable claimed kills to roughly 6,000 over two years. Yes, there are several thousand Taliban or suspected Taliban or military age males who were also detained until they could break out of prison, but the body counts don't show success.



Posted by at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)