THE OTHER, NON-SURGE WAR. So, there's an airstrike in Afghanistan. NATO claims that 150 insurgents were killed. The Afghan Army claims that fifty were killed. The Afghan Ministry of Defense claims that eighty were killed. The actual number killed can't be counted because the battlefield is too remote, but we do know that one insurgent was captured. In a similar operation in early December, NATO estimated that seventy or eighty insurgents had been killed, a number that was later modified to "seven or eight". Read all about it. This isn't just a problem of media management. When no one has the faintest about what's going on we have no reliable measures of effectivness, meaning that tactics, weapons, and practices can't be evaluated. No one knows what's working and what's failing.
--Robert Farley
