As senior congressional Democrats call for a faster troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rate of successful enemy attacks on NATO troops is lower than previous winters, according to NATO data.
But some say the numbers can't be taken at face value, or used to convincingly show that, as Pentagon Press Secretary George Little said last week, "significant progress" has recently been made in the war-torn country.
There are problems with the numbers and interpreting the numbers.
One, violence isn't really a metric except in extreme changes that indicate one side has just collapsed (and so there is no way for the other side to shoot--so far less violence). As I explained during the surge when incidents go up, that isn't a sign of losing. It is a sign that more troops are in action. And since we used those additional troops more aggressively, that also increased levels of violence by pushing into enemy areas.
So I won't jump on decreased numbers to prove we are winning. Our troop levels are going down, we smashed up the Taliban in the south, and we may very well be using our troops less aggressively for political reasons. All those factors would result in some decreases. I'd worry if they didn't go down, but I won't declare victory because they are going down.
Second, what about the numbers themselves? The IED numbers are suspect in my mind. IEDs are a bigger part of the enemy's attacks and we changed the rules about how we counted them. We used to count IED discoveries or failures as attacks. Only IEDs that explode are counted:
NATO only includes IEDs that actually exploded.
"So all of the bombs they discovered and defused, or which did not go off, were not included in their IED attack statistics," Foust says.
I did say in the past that it was kind of weird to count discovered or faulty IEDs as "attacks" since you can't count indirect fire (rockets or mortars) attacks aborted or gun ambushes called off because the attackers got too scared or delayed by an orbiting UAV. But if the goal of your statistics is to measure enemy activity rather than safety, you shouldn't fail to count what you can just because there are things you can't count.
So I have to ask, why did we change the way we count IED incidents? Indeed, I did ask that recently:
While our casualties are down this year, which shows we've had success (unless we are avoiding casualties by sitting in our bases and not seeking out the enemy), civilian casualties are up. The report at least notes this is almost all due to Taliban attacks and that the Taliban are deliberately targeting civilians.
But if the statistical measure of attacks has been made, is the change retroactive or did we just change mid-fight to affect the graphs? I can understand changing how we measure violence. As I said, counting discovered IEDs always seemed like a case of looking where the light is best since we can't discover a planned mortar attack that is cancelled at the last moment or anything like that. But I understood why we would want to count failed IED attacks even when we couldn't count other types of aborted attacks. If our new statistics were changed going back to not count discovered IEDs, our measure is still good.
Look, my impression of the trend is that we are winning on the battlefield. I know it is common to say we are losing. But I don't see that. We've pounded down the enemy in the south of Kandahar and Helmand provinces, and need to move east. There we need to nail down the areas adjacent to Pakistan and we need to neutralize or seriously degrade the enemy sanctuaries inside Pakistan. What we then achieve with that military victory is another thing altogether. If you think military victory means we have to set up an Afghanistan government that is governed from Kabul where the debates are over bike paths, well then yeah, you are probably right to say we are losing.
But my objectives for Afghanistan have never been high. It is peripheral to the broader struggle against Arab jihadi ideology. It is important only because its remoteness allowed it to be a sanctuary for jihadis to attack us at home on 9/11. All I want to do with our battlefield victory is make sure friendly Afghans at the nominally national level and at the local level that counts prevent jihadis from setting up shop again:
The end result in Afghanistan, if all goes well, will be a nominal national government that controls the capital region and reigns but does not rule local tribes and which actually helps the locals a bit rather than sucking resources from the locals, who in turn do not make trouble for the central government or allow their areas to be used by jihadis to plan attacks on the West. We press for reasonable economic opportunities, with bribes all around (I mean, foreign aid), to keep a fragile peace.
Afghanistan will be a violent place for many generations even without a war going on. So aim low and you won't be disappointed--or so easily panicked.
But the question remains, are we compiling statistics to measure what is happening to guide our actions? Or does the administration know what its actions will be and just needs the statistics to justify what they will do?
UPDATE: Thanks to Stones Cry Out for the link.
