Nato success against Taliban in Afghanistan ‘may be exaggerated’

Report says kill-or-capture raids are not a surgical tactic as claimed and use of the word ‘leader’ is suspect The success of one of Nato’s principal tactics against the Taliban – targeted night raids aimed at killing or capturing leaders of the insurgency – may have been exaggerated to make the military campaign in Afghanistan look more effective, according to a report published on Wednesday. The study shows that for every “leader” killed in the raids, eight other people also died, although the raids were designed to be a precise weapon aimed at decapitating the Taliban on the battlefield by removing their commanders. The report notes that in briefings to the US media, aggregate claims made for the number of Taliban leaders killed or detained over a given period were sometimes much greater than the numbers recorded in the daily press releases. The report, by Kandahar-based researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, for the Afghanistan Analysts Network, looked at the daily press releases published by the Nato-led International Stability Assistance Force (Isaf) to create a profile of the “kill-or-capture raids” from December 2009 to the end of September this year. Strick van Linschoten also said Isaf’s definition of the word leader was “so broad as to be meaningless”. He said the words leader and “facilitator” were sometimes used interchangeably in the Isaf press releases, although facilitator could just be someone whose house an insurgent group was thought to have used. A previous study of night raids had found that many people classified as leaders captured in night raids had subsequently been released by Isaf. “The use of the word ‘leader’ is intended to convey the impression that the masterminds of the Taliban are being taking off the battlefield. That’s a misrepresentation,” Strick van Linschoten said. “It is meant to be taken as meaning that we are taking out the brains behind the Taliban off the battlefield, but that claim doesn’t really measure up.” The report, entitled A Knock on the Door, echoes a study published last month by the Open Society Foundations. That study said that although Isaf had made strides in reducing the number of civilian casualties, the 12 to 20 raids a night over a sustained period, with thousands of arrests, many of them of non-combatants, were alienating the population and undermining the international coalition’s aims in Afghanistan. “The raids are a far blunter weapon than we have been led to believe, and they have an indiscriminate impact,” said Erica Gaston, a human rights lawyer for the Open Society Foundations and co-author of the

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