NATO's night raids' success against Taliban in Afghanistan 'may be exaggerated'

London, Oct 13(ANI): The success of NATO's targeted night raids, aimed at killing or capturing insurgent leaders, may have been exaggerated to make the military campaign in Afghanistan look more effective, according to a new report.

The report, entitled 'A Knock on the Door', 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, The Guardian reports.

The study, by Kandahar-based researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, for the Afghanistan Analysts Network, 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 paper said.

It 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, it added.

Strick van Linschoten said that ISAF's definition of the word 'leader' was "so broad as to be meaningless", adding that 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.

"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."

Strick van Linschoten found that some of the claimed statistics of leaders killed or captured provided in briefings to the US press were far in excess of the totals of the press releases over the same period, the paper said.

An ISAF spokesman, Colonel Gary Kolbe, said that the gap could be easily explained, it added.

"The figures reported in Isaf press releases are not intended to provide a complete historical documentation of every battlefield event that occurs in theatre," he said, adding that more comprehensive figures were used in formal reports to the US Congress, Nato or the UN. (ANI)