The coalition forces in the Af/Pak theatre may not have the men and materiel they need, but they cannot be said to be short of the vocabulary to fight this war. The latest contribution is, Triage: The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan [pdf], a Center for the New American Security (CNAS)–the neo-liberal equivalent of the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century (PNAC)–report, by Andrew M. Exum, Nathaniel C. Fick, Ahmed A. Humayun, David J. Kilcullen.

The report is hardly a panacea (to be fair, it says just that), but seems only to fulfill a bureaucratic need: to redeem the promise, made to parry persistent demands from the US Congress, to provide “metrics” to measure success in the new “Af-Pak” war.

This brief report is organised in three sections: (i) a situation report; (ii) recommendations; and (iii) metrics.

Situation Assessment

The situation, according to the report, is as perilous as ever and continuing to worsen; with a rapidly deteriorating security situation in Pakistan, to where the report alleges the center of gravity of the insurgency has now shifted. This assessment is outdated, simple-minded, and wrong; it is clear that the authors do not understand the situation at all in Pakistan, and not very well in Afghanistan either.

Operational Recommendations

Not surprisingly therefore the report’s two pairs of recommendations for the two countries, while harmless in of themselves, do not even begin to address the real problems (and do address some imaginary ones):

“In Afghanistan:

• Adopt a truly population-centric counterinsurgency strategy that emphasizes protecting the population rather than controlling physical terrain or killing the Taliban and al Qaeda.
• Use the “civilian surge” to improve governance and decrease corruption in Afghanistan. Place civilian expertise and advisers in the Afghan ministries and—to a lesser degree—the provincial reconstruction teams, rather than in the embassies.”

Taken at face value, the first could be described a circle-the-wagons strategy that can hardly be called a counter-insurgency strategy. The second, presumably, is to improve the quality of life of the protected population. While this may be exactly what the Congress (not to mention the Afghans, and the media) may want to hear–and this explains the implausible script fom which Gen. McChrystal was reading from in his confirmation hearings–this is hard to reconcile with the kind of Special Ops expertise being deployed to Afghanistan. As for the “civilian surge” (only ex-military contractors are expected to be the civilians) addressing governance and corruption, the authors could have consulted the lessons of USAID’s not very successful half a century of experience in this area.

“In Pakistan:

• Strictly curtail the counterproductive drone strikes on non-al Qaeda targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). The expansion of the approved target list for U.S. drone attacks to include non-al Qaeda individuals should be reversed.
• Strengthen the Pakistani police, with an emphasis on areas—such as Punjab and Sindh—where the Taliban has not yet exerted control.”

Again, the first–to curtail strikes–can be a feature of some yet to be specified strategy, but hardly qualifies strategy; and second, appears to be scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with a recommendation: with over 3 million refugees from Swat, more expected from Waziristan, the army deployed in countering local insurrections (the insurgency, properly speaking, is in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan), the logic strengthening the Punjab and Sindh police is not immediately obvious.

Benchmark and Metrics

After 22 pages of nice words and nicer graphics, the last 4 pages provide the promised metrics. The key metrics over the next 12 months are to be:

In Afghanistan:

• 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.
• Afghan Elections: A free and fair election, occurring without significant incidents of violence, will demonstrate both political progress and continuing Afghan commitment to the democratic process.

In Pakistan:

• Assassination Rate of Maliks: The more Maliks (tribal representatives) killed by the Taliban, the fewer obstacles to the consolidation of Taliban influence in northwest Pakistan. If the rate of maliks being assassinated drops, and they are still resident in their home districts, then security has improved.
• More Taliban Chapters in Punjab and Sindh: Greater Taliban activity in Punjab and Sindh will suggest the insurgency is gathering momentum in the Pakistani heartlands, and therefore causing greater insecurity.

These are the 4 metrics by which the administration of President Barack Obama will justify a half a trillion dollar war!! With Congressional fatigue, or complicity, or both, hey will probably get away with it.

For a positive review of the report, though, see Spencer Ackerman.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Triage
1 a: the sorting of and allocation of treatment to patients and especially battle and disaster victims according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors b: the sorting of patients (as in an emergency room) according to the urgency of their need for care
2: the assigning of priority order to projects on the basis of where funds and other resources can be best used, are most needed, or are most likely to achieve success.