The Economist had some issues with my post on yesterday's Afghanistan-Pakistan presentation by Richard Holbrooke. Since the post is typically anonymous, as is their practice, I will assume it was written by Economist Editor John Micklethwait, since I imagine he is a regular TAPPED reader. Anyway...SIR -- Your comments on my post are rather disingenuous. Your suggestion that I came away from yesterday's briefing "moderately encouraged" seems to ignore my observation that "the government still doesn't have a handle on the end-state question" and that comments from officials were "disconcerting" and "not comforting." That said, you provide a useful discussion of the United States' use of metrics during the Vietnam war and why good metrics are not sufficient for success. Unfortunately, this misses the point of my post: Some U.S. agencies may have taken an effective approach to measurement during the Vietnam years, but that data did not penetrate to the highest echelons of American government or was suppressed by the same; more important, the public was not aware of it. (I doubt HES data made many appearances on the evening news; body counts certainly did.) The fact that Holbrooke, now a top official, is publicly acknowledging the need for these kind of metrics, and their strengths and weakness, is a lesson that I hope he took from Vietnam. (Whether or not those lessons have been learned remains to be seen.) But the importantance of these metrics is what we can learn from them about U.S. policy, not merely that they exist. You also say that "it is not as if America just woke up yesterday and realised this, and as a result we can now do anything." The latter half of that sentence is a cute straw man, but in a sense America did just wake up yesterday with an understanding of counterinsurgency. COIN doctrine languished in the U.S. after Vietnam, and had to be relearned in the last decade. Only in 2007 were these strategies adopted in a widespread way in the Iraq conflict -- where it has been quite effective -- and only in the last year have the same ideas begun to be applied in Afghanistan. To be clear: Neither COIN nor the effective use of metrics remotely guarantees success in Afghanistan. In fact, it is my skepticism about the management of the conflict in Afghanistan that leads me to emphasize the need for clear, empirical evidence that the U.S. tactical and operational methods are actually capable of achieving, or even related to, the narrow strategic and political goals set by the president. The argument that a basic counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan has not been hugely effective in the last eight years is a persuasive one, but the administration needs to justify the benefits of its approach quickly. -- Tim Fernholz
