Fat Finger: ‘Data-Entry Error’ Led Military to Falsely Claim Taliban Attacks Are Down
March 2nd, 2013Via: Wired:
The U.S. military proudly touted a 7 percent drop in Taliban violence in 2012 as a measure of progress in America’s longest war. Only one problem: The drop never happened.
Its explanation: a data-entry error.
The Associated Press’ Robert Burns discovered the mistake, which undercut a January claim by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO military command in Afghanistan. In reality, Burns reports, there was no substantive change in the level of “enemy-initiated attacks” in Afghanistan during 2012.
“During a quality control check, ISAF recently became aware that some data was incorrectly entered into the database that is used for tracking security-related incidents across Afghanistan,” ISAF spokesman Jamie Graybeal told Burns.
