The acknowledgment came after the US government's office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published a report saying the US military had barred it from disclosing how much of Afghanistan is under Taliban control.
Such a restriction would have represented a significant break from past accountability amid mounting security woes in the war-torn nation.
But after the report came out, Navy Captain Tom Gresback, a spokesman for NATO's Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan, said the intent was not to withhold or classify information which was available in prior reports.
"The classification system, because it incorporates both a NATO and US nomenclature, can be challenging, and a mistake was made. The data is not classified and there was no intent to withhold it unnecessarily."
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At issue are the number of Afghan districts, and the populations living in them, considered to be held or influenced by the Kabul government, by insurgents, or contested by both.
The US government has sometimes referred to such numbers in the 16-year-old war to show how the Afghan security forces are faring against a resurgent Taliban.
The special inspector, John Sopko, wrote in SIGAR's latest quarterly report that the request to classify more information was "troubling."
SIGAR said the Pentagon had also asked its office, for the first time since 2009, to classify figures detailing the size and attrition rates of Afghan security forces.
Resolute Support said that as of October 2017, approximately 56 percent of Afghanistan's 407 districts were under Afghan government control or influence, 30 percent were being contested by the Taliban or other groups, and approximately 14 percent were under insurgent control or influence.
But tracking progress toward such a goal would be difficult without any numbers being released.
"Historically, the number of districts controlled or influenced by the government has been falling since SIGAR began reporting on it, while the number controlled or influenced by the insurgents has been rising," Sopko said.
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