At Last, Benchmarks! (Updated)

By Steve Hynd

The Cable has the exclusive, the draft Obama administration metrics for Af/Pak [PDF]. I'll be working through the document and I'll post more detail later but Spencer Ackerman has first thoughts.

I'm reading the Pakistan metrics "Progress towards Pakistan's civilian govt...becoming free of military influence," followed by "Demonstrable action by government against corruption." This is Mr Ten Percent's government we're talking about, right? The one in a country where the military control over half the civilian economy and over half the housing? In what dimension do the folks at the White House and Pentagon think either of these is remotely possible?

Update: The Cable now has a cleaned-up version of the metrics document here.

Reading the metrics, I'm struck by how close to a cut-n-paste job from the Iraq "surge" the strategy they set out to measure is. That strategy still has the same problem: none of it really works without legitimate, uncorrupt and especially unfactionalised local institutions: government, army, police, judiciary etc. And that's just not going to happen in either Pakistan or Afghanistan this side of hell freezing over. The best outcome that can happen is papering over the cracks long enough to declare success and leave. Shortly thereafter, the whole thing falls apart and you're back to "safe haven" square one, having spent large amounts of blood and treasure. There's got to be a better way to deal with an outfit that, let's be honest, hasn't really been all that serious a threat. The real damage has been in our reactions to their attacks.

Update 2: Spencer Ackerman is pretty much liveblogging today's Afghanistan hearing by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and quotes John Kerry saying pretty much what I and other skeptics have:

�No amount of money, no rise in troop levels, nor any clever metrics will matter if the mission is ill-defined or ill-conceived.�

...Kerry, who has said the United States is involved in a �global counterinsurgency,� references the commando strike earlier this week against a Somali militant with ties to al-Qaeda. The success, he said, should cause policymakers to ask  �how much counterinsurgency and nation-building is required to meet a sufficient set of goals?�

Spencer also has a great quotable quote from Rory Stewart:

Stewart compares the Obama administration�s twinning of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to a policy of dealing with �an angry cat and a tiger,� after Brookings� Steve Biddle reiterated his argument that the U.S.�s interests in Afghanistan are primarily about Pakistan.

�We�re beating the cat,� Stewart said, �and when you say, �Why are you beating the cat?� you say, �It�s a cat-tiger strategy.� But you�re beating the cat because you don�t know what to do about the tiger.�

Which perfectly encapsulates one of my basic problems with the Obama occupation strategy (and Bush's before it): it's tantamount to admitting we're still occupying Afghanistan only because we can't properly attack AQ in the parts of Pakistan where they are truly based without starting a war with the only Muslim nuclear power.

Update 3:Adam Serwer at Prospect weighs in, noting Paul R. Pillar's compelling argument that safe havens don't really matter:

This is the question that bothers me the most: No one in the administration has credibly explained how a counterinsurgency can work in a nation where the government the U.S. supports is viewed as illegitimate, and if the "safe haven" argument no longer applies the way it did ten years ago, the strongest argument for us remaining in Afghanistan is undermined.

Update 4: Fred Kagan loves the new metrics...well, not exactly. He loves the opportunity to pontificate.

The most important thing about the metrics leaked from the Obama Administration today is that they indicate a continued commitment to a serious and properly-resourced counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan...The "metrics" themselves are less important than the fact that the Administration is still pursuing these objectives.

The Economist is less impressed, echoing Dave Schuler in comments here who thinks the metrics are entirely too damp a squib.

I hoped or imagined these metrics would be interesting, sneaky sorts of measurable quantities that would point towards goals like effective governance and security in unexpected ways. The sorts of things you'd expect to find in Freakonomics. Maybe the quantity of potable water consumed by schoolkids every day in a given district had turned out to be a remarkably good indicator of low government corruption. Or maybe it would be something about measuring broken windows, or aggregate non-burqa'd female faces recorded by security cameras and crunched by facial-recognition software. Andrew Exum wrote back in March that David Kilcullen had told him of a unit that was measuring the variety of vegetables on sale at the local market, to see whether farmers were growing more than just poppies. At the very least, I figured the metrics would involve numbers. They were taking so long to work them out, and so many were scheduled to remain classified, that there had to be something really sophisticated about them, right?

...This is what we waited all this time for? These are the brilliant output-oriented metrics that are going to tell us whether we're winning the war in Afghanistan? Explain to me why I should be impressed.

I'd love to hear that explanation too. Before McChrystal asks for 30,000 to 40,000 more troops, as FOX is reporting he will.