Blurry Vision

The latest Pentagon report on the security situation in Iraq comes with a noteworthy new caveat in the foreword. Since U.S. forces withdrew from Iraqi cities in June, U.S. officials find it hard to obtain and verify source data for the performance categories discussed in the document.

As a consequence of the movement of U.S. forces out of Iraqi cities on June 30, 2009, the U.S. has experienced reduced visibility and ability to verify Iraqi reports. Without a robust U.S. presence, Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) has begun reporting metrics that include host nation reports that it may not be able to independently verify. The overall trends between Coalition force data and host nation data are very close, but some values may change. Current charts show a combination of Coalition and Host-Nation reported data. The combination of these reports causes baseline numbers to increase, making it difficult to compare these charts with those presented in previous publications of this report.

The congressionally mandated document examines a host of indicators that would tell U.S. lawmakers whether the government of Iraq is making progress in the areas of security, public services and economic development.

The latest version, dated September 2009 but released only this month, describes "generally positive trends" but also warns that Iraq remains fragile because "many underlying sources of instability have yet to be resolved, putting security gains at risk."