Benchmarks are as solid as the ground they’re built on Posted by The Editors

This post is by NSN intern Luis Vertiz

U.S. Army General John Craddock, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe, recently testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee concerning United States European Command. Not so surprisingly, reporting on his testimony focused much more on Afghanistan:

General: Obama's new Afghan plan needs benchmarks

NATO can't measure Afghan war performance: General

The AP and Reuters elaborated:

But Gen. John Craddock warned Congress that he has been stymied in his effort to find ways to gauge progress."Right now, our assessments of progress are anecdotal, and they vary daily, weekly," Craddock told the Senate Armed Services Committee. [AP, 3/24/09]

 "I could not agree more that we must have objective metrics," he told Senator Ben Nelson, a Democrat who has called for the Obama administration to draw up a series of benchmarks to measure progress in Afghanistan.

 "We have to find a metric that tells us whether or not more or less of the country is secure," Craddock said.

"Right now, it's based upon incidents," he said. "Gunfire in a bazaar counts the same as a suicide bomber killing 13 people. That's not correct." [Reuters, 3/24/09]

There obviously needs to be debate within the Administration and within the American public about how to measure success in Afghanistan. Opinion range from cataloging the number of attacks on NATO forces, number of NATO soldiers killed, number of schools built, number of vaccinations administered, etc.  However, the debate about metrics misses one critical issue: there is very poor demographic data about the Afghan population.

Current counterinsurgency doctrine has switched the loci of military operations from killing the enemy to securing the civilian population. But no organization, either governmental or non-governmental, has much, if any, good data on the Afghan population. Nearly three decades of conflict has prevent the collection of health records, enrollment of children in schools, the exactly number of refugees or internally displaced people. Even the last reliable census for the population was conducted [partially] in 1979. Such data is critical for creating development policies because it gives both governments and non-governmental organizations a “floor” by which they can measure success in providing social services and security to the population. Recording NATO causalities or even schools built are not necessarily helpful indicators of policy success if the US and others are unable to have concretely set a baseline of living conditions for the average Afghanistan and thereby deduce how US and NATO operations are measurably affecting the living standards of the average Afghan. Organizations like the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit have attempted to collect demographic and other data, but security conditions have understandably restricted their research.

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