Afghanistan ten years on measuring are we winning ?

By Stephen Cheney, CEO of the American Security Project, and Joshua Foust, fellow at the American Security Project. - 10/07/11 12:10 PM ET This week marks ten years of our involvement in Afghanistan; during that time our servicemen and women have demonstrated astounding courage. We routinely stand in awe of their efforts and their sacrifices which are in the best tradition of what America puts forward. But we should also be asking: are we winning? In raising this question, it is important to ask what winning means. President Obama has laid out his Afghanistan strategy in three broad pillars: defeating al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from overthrowing the government, and building the capacity of the Afghan Army and government. While these are all laudable goals, in defining two-thirds of our strategy by absence no al Qaeda and no Taliban President Obama created an end state that cannot ever be reached. And the other third of the strategy as something indefinable: good enough governance by Afghans. Without any commonly agreed-to set of circumstances that define these goals we lack the means to tell whether the war is being won or not.

Confusing matters further is the nature of the war itself. The Taliban and its allies are fighting one kind of war, based on influence, perception, and politics. The US, NATO and their Afghan allies are waging a far different war based on sweeping operations, infrastructure creation, and security force training. With both parties to the conflict fighting different wars with different types of outcomes, there is no simple way to tell whether we are winning. But we should try. From President Obamas three goals and understanding the underlying nature of the conflict, we derived nine metrics that should indicate success or failure. They do not capture the entirety of the war, but they do capture the reality that the war is a complicated mixture of politics and military objectives. They also will not say much as individual points of data: what matters is not what these metrics are at any one point in time, but how they are changing.

Looking at political participation, local government accountability, and violent rhetoric from local leaders can show us how Afghans attitudes toward and confidence in their government is changing over time. Examining childhood literacy, agricultural production, and Afghan security forces retention can tell us whether we are helping to build a socially and economically sustainable future for Afghanistan. And tracking the activity of shadow government institutions run by the insurgency, al Qaeda membership, and overall levels of violence can show us how the insurgency itself, and the threat posed by al Qaeda, is evolving. The International Community is very good at tracking some of these metrics. The U.S. Department of Agriculture gathers significant data about agricultural production, for example, and ISAF keeps meticulous records on Afghan security forces recruitment and retention. Several NGOs keep surprisingly precise records of participation in elections and other forms of formal government. Some metrics are disputed but nevertheless tracked, such as violence (ISAF and the UN have recently presented starkly contrasting studies of violence owing to differences in how they count acts of violence). Al Qaeda membership can mean many things, but the intelligence community tries to measure it (ISAF often uses words like sympathetic to describe militants relationship with al Qaeda, which can mean anything). But many of these important metrics, like violent rhetoric, childhood literacy, and even local government accountability are not tracked at all. With such incomplete public data about the war in Afghanistan, theres no way of saying whether were winning or not. Due to President Obamas strategy lack of specificity and end state, it is easy for pundits to project their own assumptions onto news about the war. After ten years of fighting we should strive for something better: a concrete set of measurements that will tell us whether were winning. But as we have found, without tracking the metrics that matter, we cannot say for certain. This is not good enough for our country or the men and women who have paid the ultimate sacrifice over the last ten years in Afghanistan. Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney USMC (RET) is the CEO of the American Security Project. Joshua Foust is a fellow at the American Security Project and co-author of a new study about measuring the war in Afghanistan.

Source: http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/186259-afghanistan-ten-years-onmeasuring-are-we-winning-