Maybe it’s just some form of perverse Olympic fever, but with regards to Operation Moshtarak I find myself wondering–given that is has been labelled as ’the largest military offensive of the eight-year war in Afghanistan’–who won?
Gold, Silver, or Bronze?
The question, of course, is absurd. In the New Wars one cannot know who is winning at any given time. There is no score board, no order of battle to check against, no way of measuring success.
But still…let’s look at the numbers and have a punt. The NATO operation was massive (by contemporary standards). It involved 15,000 ground troops from NATO countries and Afghanistan, as well as number of specialist assets, such as helicopters, UAVs, and other hardware. Beyond ‘mere’ kinetic resources, of course, NATO invested considerable effort in providing economic and developmental assistance to the area, in keeping with current COIN conventional wisdom.
So, how’d they all do? To answer that in Vancouver, we don’t just ask the competitors how much they spent on their skis, or determine how much Lycra they brought to bear on the rink. We don’t measure input, we count output, in terms of fastest time, or most pucks in the net, or best performance, as adjudicated by the judges against set criteria.
What does that look like in Afghanistan? Well, the numbers look like 30 Taliban killed, 4 NATO soldiers killed, and 15 civilians killed, and around 1000 displaced people fleeing the fighting. Plus some schools built, some wells dug, and some speeches made and hands shaken. Doesn’t seem to be a gold medal performance…
But of course that is not fair. We should not measure outputs, but rather outcomes; and those cannot be measured with a stopwatch, but rather a calendar. It can take months, or even years, to change the economic situation in a place as basic as Kandahar or Helmand. If education, and not school-building, is the focus of our assessment, it might take a generation to see the difference. Equally, esoteric changes can bring about brief improvements that are easily and quickly reversed. You cannot really gain ‘points’ for building a school, and then get more later for having to re-take that same school from the Taliban a year later. And what about the things we don’t count? Like ‘how many Afghans will be motivated by this operation to join the Taliban, or at least collaborate with it, given the fact that there family members were amongst those non-combatants killed’?
As hard as it may be, there are metrics involved in figuring this out. There must be, because there is no end to officials–NATO and national officials, military and civilian–who claim that ‘things are getting better’ all the time. Their yardsticks include ‘number of ISAF soldiers killed’, ‘number of IEDs discovered’, ‘percentage of Afghan civilians who support the central government’, etc. etc. Kinda like ‘artistic interpretation’ in Ice Dancing: its all in the eye of the beholder.
As with the Games in Vancouver, NATO operations in Afghanistan cannot last forever. The Closing Cermonies look likely to take place in 2011. Winners and losers there will be, without doubt. How we will tell the difference is another story…
