A briefing was held October 15th with a senior NATO official, who provided extensive context on the violence trend statistics tracked by the international Security Assistance Force.  These trends incude measurements of enemy-initiated violence as, in the words of the official, “an indicator of the insurency’s cohesion, command and control, morale, adaptiveness, and resiliency.” 

CLICK HERE for Oct. 15 statistics PDF

The official said that the Coalition uses the statistics as one data point, blended with different types of intelligence collection, open source information, and information provided by Afghan partners.  The official discussed the consistent drop in enemy initiated attacks at length, describing the military analysis; an abridged excerpt follows below:

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“…We hit the big moment in May.  I’ll tell you, and I talked to some of you around that time, I said don’t get real excited about this.  That dip is because of two principal factors.  One was the delayed poppy harvest, which shifted violence in the southwest and south by about three weeks to the right. 

The second one was the protracted infiltration stage we had to go through this year.  What that means is in spring, summer and fall of 2010 as we operated in Kandahar and Helmand in particular, we drove them out of areas of safe haven that in some cases they had enjoyed for three to five year periods.  They had gone into those areas when the troop density was very low, basically surrounded them with IED belts, and it did a couple of things.  One is it gave them freedom of movement within those zones.  They were able to establish infrastructure, so safe houses, IED factories, caches, weapons caches that they put into the ground or into abandoned buildings.  Then they were able to, frankly, establish shadow governance in some of those areas.  They carried arms openly, they ran courts, they administered justice, and they did a lot with the narcotics trade in a lot of those areas.

Frankly ISAF during that kind of ’07 until late ’09 period didn’t have enough force to be able to get into many of those areas.  It’s so costly when you don’t have the right clearing packages, the right counter-IED capability and you don’t have the forces to actually hold the ground after you move in it.

So there would be raids that would go on, sometimes on the ground, sometimes by air over the ID belts, but you’d stay for a very short period of time, you’d pull out, and then the guys that went to ground could pop back up.

What happened in spring and summer of 2010, we did a couple of things.  One is we could effectively breach through these IED belts.  So we took far fewer casualties and we could do it very very fast.  In many cases, literally catching them still in those areas.  Now Marjah, they had a lot of heads-up, right?  We laid that thing out and there were probably some issues with what we did and how we did it there as far as the strategic communications; but the bottom line is they had some warning.

We learned from that lesson.  As we moved into the other areas we did not do that.  What it allowed us to do was not only penetrate those areas but then we stayed.  That was something they had never had to deal with.

So before, instead of just taking a knee for a short period of time or drifting over to another district for a short period of time, we actually stayed.  Not only did we stay, but the Afghans stayed with us.

Over a period of time, particularly the fall and winter, fall of 2010 and winter of 2011, what we did is we basically owned that terrain at that point.  Through good outreach to the local population, they started turning in these caches.  So our cache find rate was the highest we’ve ever had.  It was almost double the year before; it was 119 percent higher than the year before.

What happened was when they returned this spring, spring of 2011, they had to do a couple of things.  One is we had forces that could pick them up literally at the border, which they’d never had to deal with before.  So it’s almost like a full court press in basketball.  As soon as their toes cross the line we start to detect them and then that makes it not impossible to get in but it makes it a lot more costly and it takes a lot of time, so they lose a lot more as they’re going in, it takes them a lot more time, it’s a lot more expensive, and frankly, it’s a lot more uncomfortable if you’re having to deal with that.

When they finally made their way back into these areas that were former safe havens, what they found is that you had coalition and Afghan forces there, you had locals that frankly in some cases did not want them there.  As they would root around they’d find that their caches had been discovered so now they’ve got to reconstitute, re-bring in that equipment.  So when we looked at this, we said the reason we have low levels of violence in May, actually below May the year before, was because of that.  Protracted infiltration and the poppy harvest being delayed because of weather.

The one exception was in the east.  In the east they came back on time and violence picked up immediately.  Frankly at that point it was actually higher than the range we had originally predicted.  We’ll get down to regional stats later, but I want to make that point right now.  So south and southwest were traditionally the heartland of the insurgency.  The heartland for three reasons, and it’s vitally important to them for three reasons.  There’s economic, there’s social, there’s psychological.

Economically, that’s the breadbasket.  It’s not only poppy, but it literally is other crops that are very valuable that they require for their internal funding.

The second piece is social.  When you look at the composition of the senior leadership, the majority of them are from that area.  Their families are from that area.  And their tribes are from that area.  So that’s very important to them for the economic and social aspects.

Then psychologically, that was where “the Taliban started”.  That’s their narrative.  I think anyone who’s been here more than a day knows where it actually started, but the bottom line is that’s their narrative, that’s where it started.  I think it’s kind of ironic right now that we have CERP projects that are refurbishing Mullah Omar’s mosque right now which I think also indicates the level of control we have in many of these areas that were, again, former safe havens.

So we predicted we’d see it spike, but it’s a funny thing...  In June it was about double -- that decrease.  The blue is good, so when we compared it to the previous June we’re about five percent below.  I said okay, no worries, that won’t sustain.  Again, it will be slower because they keep telling us.  What we saw at this point was a lot of friction internally.  Remember, on 30 April they announced their 1 May Al-Badr offensive.  Some of you know this, we picked this up about a week before and they started they were going to kick off the Al-Badr offensive with a big attack across the country.  They were very specific.  We kept hearing them say on 1 May in the English calendar.  That was the day they kept using.  We worked with the Afghans and we started deploying forces basically to preempt that attack.  Frankly, it was a fizzle on that day.

We started at that point taking a hard look at this and going okay, here’s what they said they were going to do, they’re just not able to get it off.  But the Al-Badr offensive was not a one-day or a one-week, it was their campaign for the fighting season.  So again, we didn’t get too excited.  We started looking really closely.

June, July is about 19 percent.  We go into almost 25 percent in August.  Then we’re almost at 30 percent in September.  So the trend line is much better, as a matter of fact it’s the exact opposite of what I predicted and what our assessment was.  The first time we modified our assessment was at our quarterly review on 7 July.  By that point we had at least the start of a trend.  That was the only key judgment that we changed is it looked like violence would not be as high as we predicted.

Media:  How did Ramadan play into that?

Senior NATO Official:  I’ve got a slide in another packet I’ll show you, we’ll pass it around.  But we factored in Ramadan.

Here’s what we did.  We went back three years and we looked at the violence trends in Ramadan.  Here’s the difference between this year and the previous years.  This year they came out very hard, and we think it was because for the first few months they weren’t able to get the violence up.  What they said was we’re going to make this the most violent Ramadan ever.  And we looked at that very hard.  Obviously there was some concern.

When we looked at the patterns of violence during Ramadan, here’s what we found.  Ramadan, regardless of when it fell in the year, that the curve of violence followed whatever the seasonal curve was at that time.

Here’s the example of Ramadan.  What you can see is you can see that the curve follows the seasonal curve of the violence.  And the timing really has nothing to do with it.  At least that’s been our assessment, our take-away.

We looked at it very hard.  We made our assessment the week before Ramadan started and we said it’s not going to happen.  Everything they’ve said so far this year they have not been able to accomplish. So we have no reason to think that they’re going to be able to spike during Ramadan.

They were not able to.  And when you look at it, you can actually see the dip every year, or actual Eid, that was another thing they talked about, a slight dip there, big dip here, big dip here, big dip here.  What you see is they pick it up for about two or three weeks after, and then it starts to decline.

The other thing they talked about was Eid, this was going to be the most violent Eid ever.  It didn’t happen.  Then it was going to be, we’re going to pick it up after Eid, and what we saw was that traditional two to three week increase, and then we started to see it break.

So our current assessment is that enemy-initiated violence peaked in August and it’s going to decline.  And this decline is likely to continue through the rest of the year.

Media:  I’m just looking at the numbers for ’08 and ’09, and essentially the political, military, intelligence assessments in ’08 and ’09 were that the United States with its international partners were losing the war here.  The violence may be down from ’10, but you’re still not even at the ’08 levels.  So my question is, do you need to start assessing the war based on 2008’s violence levels or just from the previous year?

Senior NATO Official:  Using that though, why don’t we use 2005 or 2001.  It’s going to take some time to turn this back to pre 2009 levels.  So this is dramatic for two reasons.  First of all we didn’t have an exponential increase that we’ve seen every year since 2001.  So even if we flat-lined, and that’s why I go back.  If we were 17-30 percent this year, that was success according to any model that you could use.

So we’re not there.  We’re significantly below that.  What you’re seeing is the effect of two hard years of fighting.  So this is the cumulative effect.

When we started the surge in 2009 which was very small at that time.  Think back with the deployment of the 30,000 U.S. forces.  The last troops just hit the ground this April.  So they just, we hit our peak this April, and what we’re seeing is not the effect from the April deployment or even the November deployments from last year.  What we’re seeing is the start of the deployments back in ’09.  We started to set the conditions that started to put the pressure, and now we’re seeing this decrease.  So I think this is pretty dramatic.

Is violence high?  Absolutely it’s high.  Do we want to go back to a period of time?  I’m not sure I’d use 2008 as a period of time I’d want to go back to. I think we’ve got to get a lot better than that.  So this was something that took a long time to get to where it was, the realization that if we didn’t change this was going to spin out of control.  What you’re seeing now is really the fruits, the initial fruits of two hard fighting seasons.

Media:  Considering you hit the peak but you’re beginning to lose the troops from the surge, is it realistic to continue to think that that downward trend will continue?

Senior NATO Official:  Absolutely.  Here’s the deal.  We were able to have everybody that we started the surge with through the core fighting season.  So we’re going to go down 10,000 by the end of December, but that’s after the core fighting season.  So frankly, we were able to have all the benefits of the surge through this core fighting season.

We’re going to go down 10,000 troops and a large number of those are non-combat forces.  They came over, they built base camps, infrastructure that the combat troops could fall in and use to conduct the fight.  So that’s a large portion of that initial 10,000.

The next 23,000 that are going to be out by the end of September, they’re also going to be here through the winter, through the spring, and through the core of the next fighting season.  That’s when we’ll lose them.

This is all about momentum.  When you looked at what was happening, we had arrested the momentum of the insurgency.  So from about 2005 until last fall, they had the momentum.  And it took that long to get sufficient force, sufficient capability in here to start to arrest it.

The assessment that we just briefed on 10 October, which covers up to 30 September, that’s the cutoff date for the data, is that we’ve reversed the momentum of the insurgency.  Before, we had arrested it which meant at that point they weren’t making that forward progress.  What we’re seeing now is the reversal which is they’re regressing at this point...”

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ISAF will endeavor to continue to release the violence trends data on a monthly basis.