By Steve Hynd
On March 27th, President Obama unveiled his new Bush-lite stratergy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and promised:
we will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable... And we will review whether we are using the right tools and tactics to make progress towards accomplishing our goals.
Four months later, despite five policy reviews, we're still waiting for details of those metrics.
The New York Times reports that we could be waiting some time still.
Senior administration officials said that the president�s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, approved a classified policy document on July 17 setting out nine broad objectives for metrics to guide the administration�s policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Another month or two is still needed to flesh out the details, according to officials engaged in the work.
The NYT continues with the White House spin line that they are taking the time to get the measures right, citing the misleading metrics the Bush administration applied in Iraq as reason for caution.
But we're now being told that we'll be six months in to the new plan - an entire Friedman Unit - before any metrics are ready. And with the plan ever evolving away from a counter-terrorism mission towards the full-on, unworkable, nation-building counter-insurgency program Obama also promised in March we wouldn't get,the relevant benchmarks have to be changing too.
I'm beginning to wonder if the White House just plans to keep stalling in the hope that the American public just forget about those pesky benchmarks.
Depressing. That's exactly the kind of weasely noncommittal language I'd put into a R&D proposal, when there is no real path to product development, but I really want keep working for another six months anyway. (Is the government contracting schedule the true origin of the Friedman unit?)
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Obama has plans to "optimize and downselect."