Metrics

Unfortunately for our beautiful blue-eyed girl discussed in the 20 May post, America is a realist nation.  Sure, the leaders come and go and policies change at the margins, but we follow a realist template – all nation-states do.  Nation-states do what is in their best interests because their citizens demand it.  Do you really think the citizens of western countries would bankrupt and bleed themselves to death for some moral objective?  I think not and I point to Rwanda and Darfur as my examples.  Since these places have no strategic interest, we took no action.

I’ve heard some argue that we are here in Afghanistan to help the Afghans.  The idealism oozes forth as the argument invokes notions of rule of law, women’s rights, child education, and whatever other pursuit the speaker favors.  These are all noble goals and most of us would support them at first glance.  But does our country support this as our goal here?  I say no.  These ideals are merely means to an end in the realm of realism.    

Afghanistan was a basket case of a country long before the America military leviathan arrived on scene.  Ask yourself why we came.  Was it to help the Afghans crawl out of the past and into the twenty-first century?  Was it to provide Afghan women with hope for the future?  Was to provide their citizens with an economic future?  We had the chance to do this in the aftermath of Soviet withdrawal in 1989, but decided our dot-com economy and pursuit of “more” was infinitely more important at the time.  Hindsight is twenty-twenty, right?      

It wasn’t until America was attacked that we decided Afghanistan was in our national security interest (echoes of Eisenhower warning of the military-industrial complex run through my mind).  But this doesn’t mean that anything has changed.  The plight of Afghan women and children is still not our main concern here.  Our concern is American security and to the extent that rule of law, democracy, women’s rights, etc. assists in providing that security, it will get attention.  To put it bluntly, we are not here to help Afghanistan; we are here to help America.  However, to the extent that helping Afghanistan helps America, we will do it (or try to). 

So what does this mean in relation to withdrawal?  The reality here on the ground, at least from my perspective, is that this strain of realism permits an Orwellian view of Afghanistan to permeate all thinking.  For those that may not have read George Orwell’s 1984 (you should), among other things, it introduces the concept of “newspeak.”  This fictional language assists the totalitarian regime of the book in quashing alternative thinking.  This same effect is accomplished here through metrics.   How is this done? 

Some seem to think that metrics are the Holy Grail or a panacea.  They believe that when data is properly gathered, metrics will give them a accurate picture of the ground truth.  “See, we’re winning, the metrics say so!”  Well, the crux of that line of thinking is accurate data.  Nearly everyone can point this out immediately and I really have no idea if the data is being gathered properly or not because I’m not out there doing it (and neither are most of those that rely on this data, incidentally).  However, what most people miss is the really crucial question.  The primary question is not whether our data is accurate, although that is certainly important, but whether we are measuring what is appropriate when considering our goals.

Let’s illustrate:  One of the goals here for rule of law is to measure judicial capacity.  Now this seems pretty self-explanatory: courts need judges, prosecutors, etc. to operate.  If we supply these things, and a courthouse, we’re good to go, right?  So we measure the number of judges trained to determine judicial capacity.  We keep cranking out trained judges and at some point we’ve trained enough to reach the mythical judicial capacity we desire.  It’s that simple.  Or is it?

In one major city here, the judicial center has a tashkil of 18 judges.  This means that the court requires 18 trained judges to be at full capacity.  We train 18, send them to this major city and report having done so to whoever the keeper of the metrics is.  Now, when we look at the metrics measuring number of trained judges at our next meeting, we can all pat ourselves on the back with the satisfaction of knowing that we helped the Afghans achieve full judicial capacity in that city.  But what if we dig deeper?  Instead of asking how many judges we’ve trained, what if we ask how many show up for work?  You should understand that judicial positions here aren’t like that in the US.  Here pay is very low and, in some places, judges (and sometimes their families) are shot dead by the Taliban.  Thus, if we ask the right question, we learn that in this same major city only 6 judges routinely show up for work.  Our metrics show 100% judicial capacity, but the reality is 33% capacity.

You’ve all heard the expression “declare victory and go home.”  This is how it is done.  There is no lying or manipulation of data.  That isn’t necessary (and, quite frankly, it’s a bit amateurish).  All that is needed is selective measurement.  We measure the things that support a declaration of “victory” (whatever that means) and the end result becomes preordained.  Is the mission here to bring effective, efficient, western-style, internationally compliant rule of law to Afghanistan?  It may be advertized that way in some circles, but that was not our original mission and, based on how we’re measuring progress, I don’t think it is our mission now.  But what exactly is the mission?  As Washington seems to vacillate on US policy here, it is impossible for me to accurately answer that question.  Are we here to eliminate Al Qaeda?  To fight the Taliban?  To make Afghanistan a beacon of democracy?  Who knows?  I certainly don’t.  But what I do know is that politics drives war (some will recognize Clausewitz here) and our politicians are looking for a way out.  Metrics will show the way.