

So this is what "fragile and reversible" progress looks like in Afghanistan: violence is up 51 percent since this time last year, thanks to a hurricane of insurgent suicide attacks, assassinations and bombs, undermining U.S. military claims that it's breaking the momentum of the Taliban.

The closest thing the war has to a report card comes in the form of a new quarterly report from the United Nations. And the American troop surge appears to be dangerously close to flunking. According to the U.N., not only is violence on the rise, but so are civilian casualties. Compared to the spring of 2010, civilian deaths and injuries are up 20 percent, with 1,090 dead and 1,860 wounded. Over 435,000 Afghans are displaced by the war, a 4 percent rise.

The U.N. report directly contradicts an emerging talking point in the U.S. military. Lt. Gen. John Allen, the incoming war commander, told a Senate panel on Tuesday that "violence is five percent lower so far this year in comparison to last year," (.pdf) a statistic that David Ignatius attributes to Gen. David Petraeus in his Wednesday column. Not only is violence not going down, if the U.N. is to believed, it's going way up – far from a war effort that's arresting Taliban momentum.

The silver lining for the U.S.: its proportion of civilian casualties continues to decline. Only 10 percent of casualties, 292 since March, were the responsibility of U.S. and allied military action. In 2010, the U.S. was responsible for 16 percent of 2,777 civilian deaths.

But whatever counterinsurgency strategy remains in Afghanistan wasn't premised on bringing down the proportion of U.S.-caused civilian deaths. It was premised on protecting the population from insurgent violence. Despite a fierce fight to clear out the insurgency from Helmand and Kandahar for the past 18 months, Kandahar accounts for the "majority" of security incidents, the U.N. finds, "with a quarter of the overall attacks and more than half of all assassinations recorded countrywide."

And the uptick in violence isn't just attributable to the U.S. fighting the Taliban out of Kandahar. Homemade bombs are up, though the U.N. doesn't specify by how much. April alone saw 17 suicide attacks. Five of those "complex attacks," which combine suicide bombing with small arms fire or other insurgent tactics, a total higher than any month in 2010. Then come insurgent attacks targeting convoys, government buildings, civilian contractors – and political assassinations.

One interesting fact from the perspective of the way Petraeus has prosecuted the war: he's increased air strikes significantly, which the Afghans associate with indiscriminate civilian deaths. But the U.N. doesn't find any appreciable increase in civilian deaths due to the escalated air war.

But if the report is correct, then the U.S. military's biggest effort to rescue Afghanistan – the troop surge – failed. Now that thesurge is ending, the best the U.S. can do is hope that drones, commando raids, trained Afghan soldiers and some sort of peace deal can end the war.

Photo: Flickr/Expertinfantry

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