Huffington Post cites “Measuring Success: Are We Winning? ” report
The ASP report Measuring Success: Are We Winning? 10 years in Afghanistan by fellow Joshua Foust was mentioned in a Huffington Post article.
Source: Huffington Post, February 8, 2012
The lack of clarity affects the military as well. In a conversation at Fort Bragg recently, Col. Brian Mennes, who commands a brigade of 82nd Airborne paratroopers deploying this month for a combat tour, put it this way: “I don’t think we’ve defined … do we even know what winning is?”
The U.S. goals in Afghanistan, as analyst Joshua Foust has observed, are ambiguous at best: to deny al Qaeda and other extremists safe haven inside Afghanistan.
That leaves unclear whether the precise goal is to have no extremists inside Afghanistan for all time, or something less. If an acceptable outcome is something less — to have a few extremist Taliban groups inside Afghanistan, for instance — there is nothing to define what that would mean in terms of U.S. military or economic support for Afghanistan.
Read a copy of the report here.
