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“Afghanistan by the Numbers – Measuring a War Gone to Hell”, by Tom Engelhardt

Larry Kummer, Editor

Another chapter in that long series of American classics, Know your wars.  By comparison with Englehardt’s, most writings by the war’s advocates are like children’s scrawls on the sidewalk.

“Afghanistan by the Numbers – Measuring a War Gone to Hell”
By Tom Engelhardt, posted at TomDispatch, 8 September 2009 — Posted in full with permission.

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Measuring Success
  3. Costs
  4. War-Fighting
  5. Escalation
  6. Public Opinion
  7. The Presidential Election
  8. Private Contractors
  9. Diplomats and the Civilian Surge
  10. The Metrics of Success
  11. Afghanistan by the Numbers
  12. The next war
  13. What Can’t Be Measured
  14. Notes
  15. About the author
  16. Afterword and For More Information

(1)  Introduction

Here may be the single strangest fact of our American world: that at least three administrations — Ronald Reagan’s, George W. Bush’s, and now Barack Obama’s — drew the U.S. “defense” perimeter at the Hindu Kush; that is, in the rugged, mountainous lands of Afghanistan. Put another way, while Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last three decades), we’ve been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation.

Imagine for a moment, as you read this post, what might have happened if Americans had decided to sink the same sort of money — $228 billion and rising fast — the same “civilian surges,” the same planning, thought, and effort (but not the same staggering ineffectiveness) into reclaiming New Orleans or Detroit, or into planning an American future here at home. Imagine, for a moment, when you read about the multi-millions going into further construction at Bagram Air Base, or to the mercenary company that provides “Lord of the Flies” hire-a-gun guards for American diplomats in massive super-embassies, or about the half-a-billion dollars sunk into a corrupt and fraudulent Afghan election, what a similar investment in our own country might have meant.

Ask yourself: Wouldn’t the U.S. have been safer and more secure if all the money, effort, and planning had gone towards “nation-building” in America? Or do you really think we’re safer now, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7%, an underemployment rate of 16.8%, and a record 25.5% teen unemployment rate, with soaring health-care costs, with vast infrastructural weaknesses and failures, and in debt up to our eyeballs, while tens of thousands of troops and massive infusions of cash are mustered ostensibly to fight a terrorist outfit that may number in the low hundreds or at most thousands, that, by all accounts, isn’t now even based in Afghanistan, and that has shown itself perfectly capable of settling into broken states like Somalia or well functioning cities like Hamburg.

(2)  Measuring Success

Sometime later this month, the Obama administration will present Congress with “metrics” for… well, since this isn’t the Bush era, we can’t say “victory.” In the style of special envoy to the region Richard Holbrooke, let’s call it “success.” Holbrooke recently offered this definition of that word, evidently based on the standards the Supreme Court used to define pornography: “We’ll know it when we see it.”

According to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, the Obama administration is reportedly rushing to “preempt Congress with its own metrics.” It’s producing a document called a Strategic Implementation Plan, which, DeYoung writes, “will include separate ‘indicators’ of progress under nine broad ‘objectives’ to be measured quarterly… Some of the about 50 indicators will apply to U.S. performance, but most will measure Afghan and Pakistani efforts.” These are to include supposedly measurable categories like numbers of newly trained Afghan army recruits and the timeliness of the delivery of promised U.S. resources.

The administration is evidently now “tweaking” its metrics. But let’s admit it: metrics in war almost invariably turn out to occupy treacherous terrain. Think of it as quagmire territory, in part because numbers, however accurate (and they often aren’t), can lie — or rather, can tell the story you would like them to tell.

The Vietnam War was a classic metrics war. Sometimes it seemed that Americans in Vietnam did nothing but invent new ways of measuring success. There were, for instance, the eighteen indices of the Hamlet Evaluation System, each meant to calibrate the “progress” of “pacification” in South Vietnam’s 2,300 villages and almost 13,000 hamlets, focusing largely on “rural security” and “development.” Then there were the many indices of the Measurement of Progress system, its monthly reports, produced in slide form, including “strength trends of the opposing forces, efforts of friendly forces in sorties… enemy base areas neutralized,” and so on. For visiting congressional delegations, the commander of U.S. forces, Gen. William Westmoreland, had his “attrition charts,” multicolored bar graphs illustrating various “trends” in death and destruction. Commanders in the field had their own sophisticated ways to codify “kill ratios,” while on the ground, where the actual counting had to be done in dangerous circumstances, all of this translated far more crudely into the MGR, or, as the grunts sometimes said, the “Mere Gook Rule” — “If it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese, it’s VC [Vietcong].” In other words, when pressure came down for the “body count,” any body would do.

The problem was that none of the official metrics managed to measure what mattered most in Vietnam. History may not simply repeat itself, but there’s good reason to look askance at whatever set of metrics the Obama administration manages to devise. After all, as in the Vietnam years, Obama’s people, too, will be mustering numbers in search of “success”; they, too, will be measuring “progress.” And those numbers — like the Vietnam era body counts — will have to come up from below (with all the attendant pressures). By the time they reach Washington, they are likely to have the best possible patina on them.

With the delivery of those new metrics to Congress seemingly imminent, I thought I might offer my own set of Afghan metrics for the worst year of the present war. Think of this as basic math for Americans. (All figures cited below are linked to their sources. If a figure has no link, just click on the nearest previous link.)

(3)  Costs

(4)  War-Fighting

(5)  Escalation

(6)  Public Opinion

(7)  The Presidential Election

(8)  Private Contractors

(9)  Diplomats and the Civilian Surge

(10)  The Metrics of Success

(11)  Afghanistan by the Numbers

(12)  The Next War

(13)  What Can’t Be Measured

Here’s a conundrum to be considered and filed away under the rubric “impossible to measure” as you leave the world of Afghan War metrics: The U.S. continues to struggle to train Afghan police and soldiers who will actually turn out and fight with discipline (see above). In the meantime, as a recent Washington Post piece by Karen DeYoung indicated, the Taliban regularly turn out fighters who are reportedly using ever more sophisticated and tenacious fire-and-maneuver techniques against the overwhelming firepower of U.S. and NATO forces. (“To many of the Americans, it appeared as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army’s Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.”)

Both groups are, of course, Afghans. It might be worth considering why “their” Afghans are the fierce fighters of history books and legend and ours, despite billions of dollars and massive training efforts, are not. This puzzling situation had its parallel in Vietnam decades ago when American military advisors regularly claimed they would give up a division of U.S.-trained South Vietnamese forces for a single battalion of “VC.”

Here’s something to carry away with you: Life is invariably hard when you set up your massive embassies, your regional command centers, your election advisors, your private security guards, your military trainers and advisors, your diplomats and civilian enablers and then try to come up with a formula for motivating the locals to do your bidding.

(13)  Notes

Thanks for help in researching this piece goes, first and foremost, to Nick Turse — with a small bow to Frida Berrigan as well. Crucial websites, if you want to keep up-to-date on Afghanistan, include Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, which has recently focused an ever more laser-like beam of analysis on events in that country, the invaluable Antiwar.com (especially Jason Ditz’s daily summaries), the War in Context (not to be missed more generally on “the Greater Middle East”); Rethink Afghanistan, and Foreign Policy’s the Af/Pak Channel. If you want to download a “cost of war” counter to your computer, check out the National Priorities Project website.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

(14)  About the author

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

(15-a)  Afterword

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(15-b)  For more information about this topic

To see all posts about our new wars:

About our wars in the Middle East and sub-continent:

  1. A guide to our Middle East Wars – change you cannot see, 31 March 2009
  2. Is America a destabilizing force in the world?, 23 January 2009
  3. “Going for Broke – 6 ways the Af-Pak War is Expanding” – Engelhardt, 26 May 2009
  4. Can we answer SecDef Gates’ question about NATO and the Af-Pak War?, 19 May 2009
  5. Advice about our long war – “It’s the tribes, stupid”, 10 June 2009
  6. “War without end”, a great article by George Wilson, 27 June 2009
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