In an interview with WPR’s Judah Grunstein, Andrew Exum responds to criticism that civilian casualties are a dead metric in Afghanistan:
I think that the population is not being kinetically targeted in the same way it was in Iraq, but what that misses is a silent war of fear and intimidation. Let me sketch this out for you: The fall of Kandahar is not going to look like the Taliban rolling down the streets in tanks. The fall of Kandahar is going to look like the Taliban steadily making ground with a campaign of fear and intimidation, and creating an environment in which the Afghan government can’t operate in Kandahar, and Kandahar eventually becomes ideologically inhospitable to the government of Afghanistan, never mind Coalition forces. So first off, the population may not be targeted kinetically in the way that it was in Iraq, but it’s certainly being targeted.
Very well. But that’s not what Exum and his co-authors wrote in their much-discussed CNAS paper, Triage. Instead, they explicitly talked about casualties:
To be sure, violence will rise in Afghanistan over the next year—no matter what the United States and its allies do. What matters, though, is who is dying. And here a particular lesson may be directly imported from the U.S. experience in Iraq. In 2007, during the Baghdad security operations commonly referred to as ‘the surge,’ U.S. casualties actually increased sharply. What U.S. planners were looking for, however, was not a drop in U.S. casualties—or even a drop in Iraqi security force casualties—but a drop in Iraqi civilian casualties.
And in a sidebar titled “Key Metrics over the Next 12 Months”:
Civilian Casualties: A decrease in civilian casualties—whether caused by the United States, coalition, Afghan forces, or the Taliban—will indicate a genuine improvement in security. Conversely, a rise in civilian deaths will imply deterioration in the security situation.
Now Exum is saying they didn’t actually mean dead Afghans? Dude, make up your mind.
Like I’ve said, shielding the population from the Taleban should indeed be the top priority, but… Hell, I’ll just quote myself:
You should do it, and you can do it; it’s just that there’s no meaningful way to measure your success when dealing with intangibles like ‘support’ or ‘opposition’ — unless you count opinion polls, but I’m guessing they’re not concrete enough for Exum et al.
In other words, Kandahar may fall the way Exum says, but there is no way for the metric-loving U.S. military to measure it. I mean, it’s not like we’ll go, “Oh crap, look at the charts, the Taleban scared the bejesus out of another 1,379 Kandaharis this month, but let’s try and counter-intimidate at least 20 percent by October”.
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