Petraeus' Oily Spin About Progress in Afghanistan

[unhappycamper]

Derrick Crowe
Political Director, Brave New Foundation
Posted: August 19, 2010 08:50 PM

With General Petraeus' stop on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric now halfway over, it's worth taking a moment to unpack the unchallenged, false assertions and implications he's piled up thus far on his media tour. We decided to look into the claims he made about "oil spots" of "progress" during his interview with NBC's David Gregory. Both claims were absolute fantasies, and the remaining journalists on Petraeus' tour owe their viewers more rigorous skepticism than what we saw on Meet the Press.

Despite Petraeus' use of the term more than a dozen times in his MTP interview, there is virtually no data that shows strategically significant security "progress" in Afghanistan since the start of the latest escalation. According to the Afghan NGO Safety Office (ANSO), emphasis mine:

...The number of provinces having more than three attacks per day has grown from 1 to 4 while the number of provinces seeing the lowest rate (<1 per 2 days) has dropped from 22 to 19. Overall ANSO assess that, in terms of daily attack rates, 23 provinces have remained stable, 1 has improved and nine provinces have deteriorated being Nangahar, Paktya, Kandahar, Paktika, Uruzgan, Helmand, Ghazni, Farah, Kunduz.

AOG are presenting a formidable geographic presence and are escalating attacks, in areas well outside of IMF main focus, at their own direction and tempo.

~snip~

GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, the oil, the oil spot, if you will, is a, is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area. So what you're trying to do is to always extend that, to push that out. ...(D)own in Helmand Province what we sought to do was to build an oil spot that would encompass the six central districts of Helmand Province, including Marjah and then others, and then to just keep pushing that out, ultimately to connect it over with the oil spot that is being developed around Kandahar City...



unhappycamper comment: Nice analogy, Dude. A fucking oil spot?