The Obama administration is racing to demonstrate visible headway in the faltering war in Afghanistan, convinced it has only until next summer to slow a hemorrhage in U.S. support and win more
time for the military and diplomatic strategy it hopes can rescue the 8-year-old effort.
….”We need a fundamental new approach,” said one officer, a senior advisor to Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly appointed top commander in Afghanistan….Officers in Afghanistan consider much of the effort of the last eight years wasted, with too few troops deployed, many in the wrong regions and given the wrong orders.
And how are we going to know if this fundamental new approach is working? Metrics!
Both the House and Senate versions of the pending 2010 defense spending bill include metrics and reporting requirements for the administration. Obama’s strategy is “still a work in progress,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who co-sponsored an amendment in the legislation setting conditions on aid to Pakistan.
In the absence of strict guidelines from the administration, Menendez said in an interview, “we are definitely moving to a set of metrics that can give us benchmarks as to how we are proceeding” and whether Obama’s strategy “is pursuing our national security interests.”
The White House hopes to preempt Congress with its own metrics. The document currently being fine-tuned, called the Strategic Implementation Plan, will include separate “indicators” of progress under nine broad “objectives” to be measured quarterly, according to an administration official involved in the process. Some of the about 50 indicators will apply to U.S. performance, but most will measure Afghan and Pakistani efforts.
I’ve got nothing against metrics, but 50 sounds like about 45 too many. Internally, they can have a thousand metrics if they need them — and they probably do — but for public consumption four or five key things are enough to tell us whether things are turning around. I’d much rather have that than a long laundry list that leaves the military with enough scope to conclude just about anything it feels like concluding.
In any case, September 24 is when we get to hear about our new Afghanistan strategy. In Iraq, we took advantage of a few indigenous movements and then dumped a ton of soldiers into Baghdad, working on the assumption that Baghdad was so crucial that if it could be stabilized the rest of the country would follow. In Afghanistan, we don’t really have anything local to take advantage of, and Kabul doesn’t have anywhere near the importance that Baghdad does in Iraq (and besides, it’s practically the only place in Afghanistan that isn’t a problem). So our experience in Iraq really won’t help us much — which means this new strategy is pretty much starting from scratch. I can’t wait to see it.
POSTSCRIPT: Plus, as Matt says, I’d like to know what the plan is if the metrics look bad a year from now. Will we withdraw? Create new metrics? Fire the old commanders and put new ones in again? Or what?
