Report - United States Department of Defense

UNCLASSIFIED
Several coalition members pledged additional military support during the reporting period.
Albania and Ukraine pledged forces to fulfill enabling functions such as force protection,
counterintelligence (CI) and medical support. Lithuania, Germany and Slovakia pledged to
provide additional special operations troops, and TCNs pledged a total of 26 new SFATs. Over
the past six months, Georgia increased its overall troop contribution to ISAF from about 800 to
about 1,500 personnel, making it the largest non-NATO troop contributor.
Twelve PRTs have handed over their responsibilities to the Afghan Government. The 21
remaining PRTs will be phased out and closed by the end of 2014.
Caveats
All ISAF coalition partners in Afghanistan operate according to the ISAF Rules of Engagement.
Individual coalition partners invoke national caveats to ensure their forces operate in accordance
with respective national laws and policies. Although some Allies and partners have reduced
these caveats, some maintain national caveats that continue to constrain ISAF operations by
limiting the types of missions a given country’s forces are authorized to undertake. Senior U.S.
leadership consistently emphasizes the need to reduce national caveats.
1.5: SECURITY OVERVIEW
A Note on Metrics
Previous editions of this report and much of ISAF’s public reporting on Afghanistan have relied
on enemy-initiated attacks (EIAs) as the primary metric for progress in the war in Afghanistan.
This report will, however, no longer be using EIA totals and historical comparisons of these
totals as a primary metric of success in Afghanistan due to changing conditions on the ground,
evolving force numbers and the shift from primarily ISAF-reported EIAs to primarily ANSFreported
EIAs. Indeed, it is now clear that ISAF public reporting and media coverage of the war
have relied too heavily on EIA reporting as a “scoreboard” for progress, something which the
current version of this report is attempting to correct.
As seen in figure 2, EIAs are now increasingly being reported by the ANSF while ISAF EIA
reporting has declined in tandem with its force numbers. Although ANSF-reported EIAs are
accurate, they provide far less detail in their reports than ISAF EIA reports, and there is a greater
lag in collating ANSF-reported EIA data. This EIA data is still a useable metric and
comparisons with previous years are still valid under certain circumstances, although the fidelity
and depth of analyses and assessments based upon this data will be reduced.
18