The Hill – BGen Stephen Cheney and Joshua Foust Write an Op-Ed on Measuring Success in Afghanistan
Source: The Hill, 10/7/2011
ASP CEO BGen Stephen Cheney, USMC (Ret) and ASP Fellow Joshua Foust are featured authors.
This week marks ten years of our involvement in Afghanistan; during that time our servicemen and women have demonstrated astounding courage. We routinely stand in awe of their efforts and their sacrifices which are in the best tradition of what America puts forward. But we should also be asking: are we winning?
In raising this question, it is important to ask what winning means. President Obama has laid out his Afghanistan strategy in three broad pillars: defeating al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from overthrowing the government, and building the capacity of the Afghan Army and government.
While these are all laudable goals, in defining two-thirds of our strategy by absence – no al Qaeda and no Taliban – President Obama created an end state that cannot ever be reached. And the other third of the strategy as something indefinable: “good enough” governance by Afghans.
Without any commonly agreed-to set of circumstances that define these goals we lack the means to tell whether the war is being won or not.
Confusing matters further is the nature of the war itself. The Taliban and its allies are fighting one kind of war, based on influence, perception, and politics. The US, NATO and their Afghan allies are waging a far different war – based on sweeping operations, infrastructure creation, and security force training. With both parties to the conflict fighting different wars with different types of outcomes, there is no simple way to tell whether we are winning. But we should try.
From President Obama’s three goals and understanding the underlying nature of the conflict, we derived nine metrics that should indicate success or failure. They do not capture the entirety of the war, but they do capture the reality that the war is a complicated mixture of politics and military objectives. They also will not say much as individual points of data: what matters is not what these metrics are at any one point in time, but how they are changing.
Looking at political participation, local government accountability, and violent rhetoric from local leaders can show us how Afghans’ attitudes toward and confidence in their government is changing over time…
