| Remember as we watch our casualties go up in Afghanistan that this is not a measure of winning or losing. Our press latches on to friendly casualties to paint a picture of Afghanistan spinning out of control--that we are losing. But casualties are a measure of combat intensity and not winning or losing. Measuring winning or losing is an entirely different animal. And it is difficult for outside observers to figure that out. In conventional war you could see advances or retreats as the metric--with key cities and objectives being counted. In a COIN we can't measure success or failure that way. Higher casualties mean nothing other than that combat levels are higher. With more troops committed to more offensive operations, this is to be expected. Watch what you are measuring. |
UPDATE: The problems of metrics:
Under the war strategy adopted by the Obama administration this spring, "protect the people'' means training the Afghan army and police and helping them enforce the rule of law by working alongside them on counter-insurgency operations.
That concept "briefs well – it looks good on PowerPoint and it sounds good if you're standing behind a podium and the cameras are rolling," said Capt. Booker T. Wilson, the company commander who led the mission. "But doing it is like a football game in the mud. There's nothing pretty about it."
(Note to White House staffers drafting "benchmarks" to measure progress in the war: Keep reading to see how you would grade the situation in Tokchi, and hundreds of similar villages. Do you see lots of gray areas?)
Will the adminstration show the guts of the past administration in winning its war when President Obama's natural constituencies of the press and the Left demand victory signs obvious even to them?
