Poor Database Management

In a shocking bit of news, ISAF has announced that the drop in attacks that was reported is not actually correct, it was a mis-count of the stats.

Here's another article on the situation by the Christian Science Monitor.

This bit of "whoops we kind of screwed up the data" doesn't shock me at all from this organization. I'm not suggesting that ISAF Joint Command is a bunch of bumbling idiots, but battle tracking doesn't really seem to be their strong suit. They can certainly track incidents that occur on a big map that is displayed, but getting those incidents into the database seems to be a challenge. A few times I've been on current operations floor and seen an incident or two displayed that I've tried to look up when I got back to my desk only to discover that the incident isn't in the database.

Same for the next day, and the day after.

Hell, even the target set that I'm currently assisting in, Green on Blue attackers who have fled, is not immune to this problem. In the past couple of weeks there have been multiple GoB attacks that we have "discovered" that somehow never made it into the database and had to be added.

How does this happen? Is it incompetence or an attempt to hide the truth?

From my perspective it is neither. It's just what happens when you have a large headquarters with multiple different nations attempting to do several things at once. Plates are going to get dropped.

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating...the number of attacks isn't even that critical of a metric to track when it comes to an insurgency. A low number of attacks in an area may indicate that the insurgency is defeated in that area, or that there are no security forces in that area and the insurgents actually control it. The flip side, a high number of attacks may indicate that insurgents are not in control and are trying to gain dominance.

So I suppose what I'm trying to say is, this failure by ISAF to properly account for attacks isn't that big of a deal. However, ISAF needs to get its shit together.