How successful has Nato's strategy been in Afghanistan?

Under General David Petraeus, a major plank of Nato's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) strategy has been "kill/capture raids" - lightning strikes on senior Taliban personnel to either take prisoner or kill.

But have they worked? Isaf supplies no consistent data on the policy, other than issuing a string of press releases claiming success after success, releases which often describe several raids in different places simultaneously. Researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn wanted to find out exactly how the missions worked.

You can read their full report here. Frustrated by the lack of hard data, Strick van Linschoten scraped the reports, then used the Tinderbox database package to process each incident and extract the key numbers.

What he found is a very different picture to that described by Isaf press releases. "There are still relatively large numbers of Afghans subject to the capture-or-kill raids," he says.

Although, interestingly, there has been a decline in these raids since Petraeus left Afghanistan in July this year.

Kill/Capture raids

More crucially, he found that:

The terms used by ISAF to denote that 'key leaders' were being killed or captured is confusing at best, misleading at worst

The report is a fund of data crucial to understanding the way Nato has fought the conflict. We've mapped some of the key facts by province, too.

This data, painstakingly collated, is the first time we can get a real picture of what is happening.

Aside from occasional scraps thrown to the media by ISAF, this is the first time that we have been able to get a somewhat more nuanced picture of how ISAF is operating, minimum figures for how many people are being detained and killed as well as a makeshift way to evaluate the usefulness of ISAF's own aggregate numbers that supposedly show the successes of the raids in Afghanistan.

Strick van Linschoten has visualised the timeline of releases below - you can explore it by clicking and dragging - or seeing it on the original site.

What can you do with the data?

Data summary

Afghanistan kill and capture raids by Isaf Click heading to sort table. Download this data Area Kills Kills in Kill, Capture raids Captures in KC Raids Ratio kill to capture KC Raids Total Ops KC raids ratio to total ops TOTAL 3865 0.542 2362 3139 0.75 Helmand 821 294 1046 0.650 377 622 0.61 Kandahar 265 106 1073 0.199 381 496 0.77 Khost 214 66 1139 0.178 374 413 0.91 Paktya 219 142 315 0.652 117 144 0.81 Paktika 176 108 299 0.550 101 121 0.83 Zabul 100 49 350 0.256 149 182 0.82 Kunar 456 39 12 14.250 8 66 0.12 Nangarhar 186 145 237 0.724 106 122 0.87 Kunduz 147 97 241 0.540 92 111 0.83 Lowgar 69 34 314 0.205 146 162 0.90 Ghazni 131 51 215 0.500 95 125 0.76 Wardak 122 82 224 0.488 103 123 0.84 Baghlan 126 75 141 0.834 61 75 0.81 Uruzgan 79 23 105 0.590 34 60 0.57 Badghis 140 33 43 2.979 18 31 0.58 Faryab 115 14 18 3.108 12 26 0.46 Farah 57 49 76 0.655 30 37 0.81 Kabul 55 6 69 0.618 34 43 0.79 Laghman 93 18 34 2.735 15 24 0.63 Balkh 28 23 85 0.311 33 37 0.89 Nimruz 32 18 68 0.395 24 34 0.71 Kapisa 76 10 13 3.304 10 22 0.45 Takhar 40 30 27 1.481 13 15 0.87 Nuristan 52 41 0 52.000 2 5 0.40 Sar-i Pul 22 17 21 1.000 9 12 0.75 Jowzjan 16 12 21 0.667 11 14 0.79 Herat 10 4 3 1.000 2 6 0.33 Parwan 2 0 4 0.222 3 5 0.60 Samangan 6 0 3 2.000 1 2 0.50 Dai Kundi 5 0 0 1.667 0 2 0 Badakhshan 3 3 4 0.750 1 1 1 Ghor 2 0 0 2.000 0 1 0 Bamiyan 0 0 0 0.000 0 0 0 Panjshir 0 0 0 0.000 0 0 0

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