The U.S. military has decided there’s no point any longer in publishing the number of Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, and some think-tank experts agree.

For much of the war, defense officials used the reporting of insurgent attacks as a way of showing the U.S. and its allies were winning the war.

In January, in fact, the U.S.-NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed there had been a 7% drop in Taliban attacks last year—only to later admit the numbers were wrong and that there had been no reduction at all. (Two-thirds of the 100,000 ISAF troops are from the United States.)

So now the Pentagon just won’t bother publishing the number of times that Taliban forces engage American forces. ISAF spokesman Jamie Graybeal issued a statement that as Afghan forces take over more of the fighting, “We have determined that our databases will become increasingly inaccurate in reflecting the entirety of enemy initiated attacks.” Instead of correcting the mistaken figures on its web site, ISAF will just stop making them public.

Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that’s not a bad idea. “The truth is they should not have published them in the first place,” Cordesman told the Associated Press. “A great many people realized from the start that it was a meaningless measurement” because it didn’t reveal how much influence the Taliban was gaining with the Afghan people.

“Basically speaking, we’ve ended up—after the surge and three more years of fighting—with absolutely nothing that we can tell ourselves that shows the level of progress we did or did not achieve,” he added.

Spencer Ackerman, writing for Wired, said, “Abandoning the attack data represents a vote of no confidence in the Afghan forces that the U.S. is spending billions annually to finance…. The American public and the Congress will have even less basis for assessing the progress of the longest war in their history.”

-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky

To Learn More:

U.S. No Longer Will Reveal Taliban Attack Trends (by Robert Burns, Associated Press)

Military Decides You Shouldn’t See Key Data on Afghan Insurgency (by Spencer Ackerman, Wired)

Reported 7% Decline in 2012 Afghan Taliban Attacks Was A Data Entry Error (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman, AllGov)