by Josh Mull
General McChrystal Has No Idea What’s Going On In Afghanistan
3:00 pm in Uncategorized by Josh Mull
I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan. The views expressed below are my own.
Back in August, General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry produced a report titled "US Government Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan." In it they laid out a complete counter-insurgency strategy, including development aid and international assistance, for their mission in Afghanistan. They also provide various criteria to measure success, as well as a requirement for Interagency Quarterly Assessments which would "identify progression / regression, opportunities / obstacles, and course corrections (adjustments to policy, activities, planning or resourcing)." I certainly haven’t seen any of these progress reports from McChrystal, not to mention anything resembling a "course correction." But we do have a new assessment from the Government Accountability Office, and they say we’re screwing up horribly.
It seems that McChrystal and Eikenberry were correct in their report. If they don’t have these progress assessments, they won’t have any idea what’s going on in Afghanistan. They won’t know if their l337 COIN strategy is successful, which also means that whenever some out-of-touch politician touts these successes, he’s simply engaging in the age old art of "making shit up." McChrystal’s plan for measuring progress is absolutely required if we care at all about the truth in Afghanistan. However, the variable in this plan is not necessarily the ability to produce these assessments, but access to the sort of reliable, accurate information sources which provide the backbone of these assessments. Read the rest of this entry →
