KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban has long exaggerated its military successes, but its figures for 2008 may be the militia’s most startling claims yet.
The Taliban claims its forces last year killed 5,220 foreign troops, downed 31 aircraft, destroyed 2,818 NATO and Afghan vehicles and killed 7,552 Afghan soldiers and police.
Though third-party observers can rarely confirm casualty claims on the Afghan battlefield from the Taliban, the Afghan government, the U.S. or NATO, the Taliban’s 2008 numbers would appear to be far from the truth.
NATO’s member countries announce all troop deaths, providing names, ages and hometowns and how the soldiers were killed. According to an Associated Press tally of those announcements, 286 foreign military personnel died last year in Afghanistan, including 151 Americans and 51 Britons.
The AP’s tally for U.S. deaths is less than the 155 listed for Operation Enduring Freedom by the Defense Department, which includes four personnel who supported the war effort but died in incidents outside Afghanistan — two in Djibouti and two from the Marriot hotel bombing in Pakistan.
The Taliban’s toll is almost 20 times higher.
Despite the inflated toll, the Taliban have had more success recently. Violence in Afghanistan has spiked in the last two years, and Taliban militants now control wide swaths of countryside. In response, the U.S. is planning to pour up to 30,000 more troops into the country this year.
The insurgents’ exaggerations are designed to boost morale inside the Taliban and to attract financing from donors sympathetic to their cause, a U.S. military official and a Taliban expert said.
“They put out this propaganda in order to raise capital to continue their operations,” said Col. Jerry O’Hara, a U.S. military spokesman.
Vahid Mojdeh, the author of a book on the Taliban, said the exaggerated claims help the insurgents recruit new fighters.
“The Taliban needs volunteers to carry out suicide attacks, so they want to show they are killing a lot of people,” Mojdeh said.
In 2008 the AP recorded 3,800 militant deaths based on claims primarily from Afghan officials and the U.S. coalition. Afghan officials sometimes say they base their count on bodies recovered from the battlefield, but other times they base their count on “intelligence reports.”
A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, stood by the militia’s numbers in a telephone interview Monday, saying that its fighters film every operation and verify the tolls.
“The numbers I have given to you, that is counted one by one,” he said. “When we say there are 2,818 vehicles destroyed, that is a correct number. Why aren’t we saying 2,820? Because we have reports of 2,818.”
Mojdeh said that some of the exaggerations likely come from false assumptions. For instance, he said, if a roadside bomb hits a U.S. Humvee, then the Taliban probably report four U.S. deaths, even if everyone inside the armored vehicle survives.
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