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There is an ancient axiom that stresses the wisdom of articulating the objective before committing the resources, and more recently Lewis Carroll succinctly captured the notion when he wrote, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there."
President Obama is trying hard to hew to this advice. Maybe too hard.
At least in theory, an objective is unambiguous, and achievement of it can be measured. If it were not so, it could not be called an objective. In World War II, we decided on the uncondictional surrender of the Axis and prevailed at least partially because it was easy for us and our allies to understand what it meant. In Vietnam, we fought but failed, and one of the reasons was that we found it difficult to articulate the measurable end state of the conflict. It was not enough to say, tautologically, that we win and the communists will lose, because that does not inform the route to victory, especially in an unconventional war.
Candidate Obama committed to fighting the Taliban, and President Obama ordered our troop strength in Afghanistan to rise to about 70,000, but the administration still seems to be in a quandary about what it is really trying to accomplish there. Not in general terms, of course: we know that we want to eliminate the Taliban and al Qaeda, empower the government in Kabul, strengthen tribal control of the provinces, bring economic development to the impoverished Afghans and a host of other important goals. But the White House and the Pentagon recognize that most of these things are relative and subjective, and they want to be able to measure success.
Old ways of measurement---such as the number of enemy killed or the ratio of friendly to enemy casualties---have proven to be illusory or irrelevant in recent wars, and hundreds of experts and bureaucrats are working hard to create a universe of objective reality, a list of criteria that bureaucrats have unfortunately coined "metrics." Our civil servants are likely to be frustrated in this endeavor, and they will ultimately establish criteria that seem interesting but reflect a distorted, meaningless or incomprehensible picture of what's happening in Afghanistan.
No matter how difficult, measuring success is deemed laudable principally because data may tell us important things like how we're doing, what to do next, which tasks need more resources and which ones fewer. It is unfortunate, however, that the principal, stated reason for this exercise is that the administration fears the American electorate, smart enough to recognize that we've been in Afghanistan for seven years already, doesn't have a taste for much more---without being shown that we're making objective progress. And so our government will structure a large menu of metrics, many of which may be intellectually interesting but largely irrelevant to achieving the overarching goal of a stable, prosperous and Taliban-free Afghanistan.
In an ideal world, our government would not have to go through the charade of manufacturing a method to deliver a thin representation of progress to the public and to lawmakers, for we would all be sufficiently informed to understand the importance of prevailing in Afghanistan and that it will take decades to be successful. But the world is frustratingly imperfect, and our method of governing is barely capable of satisfying our national security requirements in the best of circumstances, especially when the voters want results quickly and with the sacrifice of others rather than themselves.
Whether we do well or poorly in Afghanistan will have little relationship to the artifices that the government is manufacturing but instead will be the result of good generalship and the glorious service of the few citizens who have risen to defend us all.
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I advocate nothing of the kind. My advice is that one should expect very little in the way of justice in a procedure that is not designed to administer it.
