David Silbey at Edge of the American West presents a graph of coalition fatalities in Afghanistan, 2010-2012, and writes that the downward trend suggests that the coalition is "winning militarily." He adds that whether this constitutes "victory" in a larger sense would require more discussion.
I'm not an expert on counterinsurgency. You want Dan Trombly, Abu Muqawama, Adam Elkus, and that whole crowd. As readers of this blog know (all one or two of them), I'm not really an expert on anything. (If I were, presumably I'd have a job, right? But then I probably wouldn't have time to blog and what a loss that would be to the world of discourse. Criminy, I'm starting to sound like J. Otto Pohl, who spent months online repeatedly bemoaning the unfairness of his having to teach in Ghana, while simultaneously proclaiming how great Ghana is.)
Anyway, to the point. I am skeptical of Silbey's suggestion. Surely what matters in measuring success in a counterinsurgency is the eventual outcome, not the casualty trends. I hope someone who knows something in real detail about, say, France's war in Algeria (to take one prominent historical example) will tell me whether I'm right about this.
P.s. (added later): Note, btw, Laleh Khalili's new book Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford U.P.). I might buy this. On the other hand, inspired by the rhetoric at the Republican convention, I could take the money I would spend on this book and use it to start a small business instead. If only there weren't so many burdensome taxes and regulations. Tsk, tsk.
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5 comments:
The outcome would, of course, be the best way to measure it. But we don't know the outcome in Afghanistan. Absent that, coalition fatalities are, I think, a pretty good measure; not perfect, but also not subject to a lot of the biases that affect other measures.
True, we don't know the outcome in Afghanistan, but it seems reasonably clear, at least as of now, that whatever the exact outcome, it's going to fall well short of what the coalition initially hoped for: i.e., a well-functioning, more or less 'democratic' central govt able to run the country more or less effectively. Maybe this wasn't a realistic goal. But it also doesn't seem to me that the Taliban are v. near defeat, just based on reading the newspaper. They are still able to carry out suicide attacks etc on a pretty routine basis, it seems. Of course there is some time betw. now and 2014 and I could be proven wrong in my pessimism. But in retrospect I tend to think the Afghan 'surge' was a mistake.
Btw I've been meaning to read an article from last year by Thomas Barfield, "Afghanistan's Ethnic Puzzle," Foreign Affairs Sept-Oct 2011. He apparently advocates devolving power to local authorities in a planned way, which may happen anyway when coalition forces leave, except in a non-planned way.
In any case, thanks for stopping by and replying.
P.s.
From WaPo (9/1/12):
"The senior commander for Special Operations forces in Afghanistan has suspended training for all new Afghan recruits until the more than 27,000 Afghan troops working with his command can be re-vetted for ties to the insurgency.
"The move comes as NATO officials struggle to stem the tide of attacks on NATO forces by their Afghan colleagues. The attacks, which have killed 45 troops this year, have forced NATO officials to acknowledge a painful truth: Many of the incidents might have been prevented if existing security measures had been applied correctly.
"But numerous military guidelines were not followed — by Afghans or Americans — because of concerns that they might slow the growth of the Afghan army and police, according to NATO officials."
Link to article quoted from above:
here
it's going to fall well short of what the coalition initially hoped for: i.e., a well-functioning, more or less 'democratic' central govt able to run the country more or less effectively. Maybe this wasn't a realistic goal
Sure, but so did World War II. FDR's "Four Freedoms" didn't come close to being carried out, but we don't think that World War II wasn't a military victory.
They are still able to carry out suicide attacks etc on a pretty routine basis, it seems. Of course there is some time betw. now and 2014 and I could be proven wrong in my pessimism
Suicide attacks and the attacks by ANA soldiers on Americans get a lot of press coverage, but don't actually inflict that many fatalities (ie despite the large number of them this summer, fatalities are down overall substantially). So I don't think they're really a good measure of how well the war's going.
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