US Admits Claims of Taliban Decline Were False
The claim that Taliban attacks are dropping in Afghanistan, the single piece of data backing up NATO claims of “progress” in the protracted occupation and indeed the centerpiece of President Obama’s re-election campaign speeches related to foreign policy, has turned out to be completely false, Pentagon officials admitted today. The data, which seems to have formed the basis for much of NATO’s occupation strategy, was [allegedly] the ultimate result of a “clerical error” that officials attributed to the Afghan military turning in certain forms late. Officials [now claim] that the revised data shows attacks approximately flat, but they have simply removed all the old reports based on the false data and haven’t replaced them with anything since then.