Press TV
January 31, 2020

A US government watchdog has announced a surge in violent attacks in its war in Afghanistan, saying they climbed to record levels in the last quarter of 2019.

“Enemy-initiated attacks” rose sharply last year, with the fourth quarter seeing a total of 8,204 attacks — up from 6,974 in the same period in 2018, said the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) in a Friday statement.

“A turbulent last six months resulted in increases in overall enemy attacks (6 percent) and effective attacks (4 percent) in 2019 compared to the already high levels reported in 2018,” SIGAR stated in its quarterly report to the US Congress.

Attacks dropped earlier in the year but picked up again after US President Donald Trump called off talks with the Taliban near Washington after an American officer was killed in Afghanistan.

Despite a relative lull in battles between US and Taliban forces, which has come as the two sides continue negotiations towards a potential agreement for invading American troops to pull out of Afghanistan, clashes in the country’s rural provinces have continued unabated, with reports of daily fighting.

The SIGAR report further claimed that Afghanistan’s security forces were struggling to take the fight to the Taliban and that they continued to rely on American military backing for more than half their ground operations.

It also highlighted an increase in the number of casualties among Afghan troops, who it said have sustained massive losses over the past five years.

The US military has been boasting that its primary mission there in the past several years has been to train Afghan security forces to fight Taliban insurgents on their own.

The report comes two days after the US Air Force said American warplanes had dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in the past year than at any other time in at least a decade.

According to the figures released by the US Central Command (CENTCOM), American warplanes dropped a total of 7,423 bombs and other munitions across Afghanistan, marking a whopping eight-fold increase from 2015. 

Despite Washington’s claim that its air raids target militant positions, the data released by the UN indicated the US was responsible for at least half the 1,149 civilian deaths in Afghanistan over the first three-quarters of 2019.

However, locals insist the real civilian death toll is much higher. Experts also believe the intensified US air campaign has failed to destroy the operational capacity of militants, who persistently continue to step up their attacks. 

This is while the security situation across Afghanistan continues to deteriorate despite 19 years of US military presence, purportedly aimed at rooting out terrorism and bringing “peace and stability” to the war-torn nation.

Pointing to massive failures of the US military mission in Afghanistan, classified documents published by The Washington Post in December showed that top American officials had repeatedly lied to the US public about the Afghan war, which many believed was unwinnable.

Quoting Ryan Crocker, former US ambassador to Afghanistan in 2002 and then again from 2011 to 2012, The Post wrote: “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption. Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it’s somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.”

Despite these fundamental failures, according to the daily, top American officials have said in public that the US military was making progress in Afghanistan, in part by distorting statistics to “present the best picture possible,” as one counterinsurgency adviser said.

Earlier in January, a US veterans group started a TV advertising campaign aimed at urging American voters to demand their congressional representatives put an end to “endless wars,” focusing on the need to pull out of Afghanistan.

As part of the effort, the first priority of the ad campaign by Concerned Veterans of America (CVA) was to press US lawmakers to “get America out of Afghanistan.”