AFGHAN STATS

I am just about old enough to have distant TV memory of the fall of Saigon to the Communist North Vietnamese, but, am not old enough to remember seeing first hand any American TV reports that talked about 'body counts' and showed cumulative totals of dead insurgents, etc. Many people have, however, noted the parallels, the similarities and the differences between the TV based Vietnam War and the current Afghan conflict.

Measuring success or failure it something that concerns both the Pentagon and the Taliban; with references to the number of Taliban dead or a recorded decline in poppy production or the Allied death toll being used in recent years to gauge the success of Allied operations in Afghanistan. Yet even the use of these basic figures makes it difficult to quantify success or failure.

The Taliban are incredibly quick to reclassify their dead as being civilian casualties and any recorded decrease in poppy production does not clarify whether opium production has ceased or simply that cultivation has simply moved on elsewhere.

Some years ago, when traveling in Tajikistan in the mid 1990's, I can recall our attention being drawn to burned areas of cultivated land, where the local police had recently burned opium fields, as part of the war on drugs, only to be told in the same breath with a degree of irony that the growers, amply warned by local police (who were on the take) had simply moved to areas where their activities were less prominent, so everybody got to tick the box, so to speak.

The new NATO commander Gen Stanley McChrystal wants to change the emphasis in the conflict in Afghanistan from defeating insurgents to helping and protecting civilians, as part of this process, there will be new ways of measuring success, which will help to measure the success (or failure) of the new counter-insurgency strategy.

The Allies will measure:

• The number of District officials actually living in the district - currently many government officials live out of area but still pile up pretty nice salaries by Afghan standards.

• The cost of transporting goods - this varies depending upon the level of violence, and the scale of extortion by government officials, the Afghan police and the Taliban bribes.
  

• The number of shops and businesses that are active and open in the local bazaars

• the recorded number of reported improvised explosive devices (IEDs) - the frequency of reporting by local people to Carlton forces will be used to measure the level of support for the Taliban.
  
  
• the number of Children going to school - at present 95 schools closed out of 235 in total in Helmand, the Taliban actively target schools and teachers
  

So there we are, we now face a new type of war on terror and the Taliban and a whole new way of measuring the success (or not) of the Allied counter insurgency programme. For the record, just how did we end up even having a counter insurgency programme - this is a classic case of what can best be described as 'mission creep' that has not so quietly taken place as Allied soldiers have moved slowly from liberating Afghanistan and hunting the Taliban, to supporting the 'civil power', to full blown counter insurgency, and to dealing with opium production at source and beyond.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

A significant degree of concern should be prompted when General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan (the man in charge of the military mission to bring peace to that much troubled land) stands up and says that the campaign is in serious trouble.

The suggestion that the high price being paid by thousands of Allied personnel (it is after all a NATO supported operation) might end up being in vain, not to mention that the consequences of any resultant failure would have far reaching consequences, not just to NATO but across one of the world's most deeply troubled regions and beyond should provoke deep a degree of concern if not alarm.

Back in 2001, things started so well, with such optimism when the Taliban were overthrown, if you consider that this is a vital mission (possibly the most significant mission ever undertaken by NATO in its 60 year history) how did we get into this mess?

General McChrystal has pulled no punches, he went though a regular litany of mistakes, misjudgements and bad decisions that have taken place over the last eight years, when he spoke to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (in London) recently.

At the heart of the problem stands the basic failure to address the ordinary needs of ordinary Afghans (something which many Aid and Reconstruction Agencies have been concerned about for some years), there were also basic failures within a complex and almost byzantine military (and political) command structure.

You can add also to this the lack of clearly defined objectives and a whole series of gradual (and not so gradual) changes or "mission creep" in the 'mission' over the years and the rising NATO (and Afghan) body count - all of which has helped to understandably undermine and weaken public support for the war effort in every NATO member country.

Especially on the back of a 'flawed' election result... one question that many be increasingly asked is where do we go from here?