benchmarks

Big scoop from Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy: right in time for that closed door briefing to the Senate on the metrics for judging progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, here the metrics are. I can’t help but notice in light of this post that it begins with a restatement of the anti-al-Qaeda goal that the [...]

The New York Times has a big, excellent piece about the Obama administration’s inability or unwillingness to produce its long-promised metrics for measuring success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I’ve been covering that for months, as you can read here, and it remains almost surreal that there aren’t any metrics announced five months after President Obama [...]

After initially promising to come up with benchmarks for judging the success or shortcomings of its Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy — the term preferred by the administration, I understand, is “metrics,” which I’m cool with — the Obama administration has yet to come up with any, and has resisted Congressional efforts to put them in the recent [...]

I don’t know what benchmarks the Obama administration wants to place on its aid and commitments to Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Well, more on that in a moment.) But I do know what benchmarks they don’t want. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy told the House Armed Services Committee yesterday that the Pakistan aid bill [...]

For the second day in a row, here’s State Department spokesman Robert Wood eliding the issue of how to conditionalize aid to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He’s asked about President Asif Ali Zardari’s blessing of the Swat peace deal with the Taliban:
Well, look, you know, our views on the whole issue of Swat are well known. [...]

That Afghanistan law essentially robbing women of anything resembling autonomy over their own bodies is worse than I thought: it’s charmingly focused on the Shiite minority. If ever there’s a benchmark for U.S. aid crying out to be written, here it is. This is a U.S. client state, where U.S. influence is tremendous. To those [...]

The Congressional recess grinds along — somehow it doesn’t make Mike Lillis any less busy — and yet Hill people are starting to get frustrated at the absence of the Obama administration’s promised conditions on aid to Afghanistan and Pakistan. To take a quote at random from CQ’s roundup:
“Sen. Reid believes sound criteria are necessary [...]

On Thursday, Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani admonished critics that his government had not endorsed any peace deal with the Taliban in the Swat Valley:
Pakistan has not done a peace deal with the Taliban in Swat Valley. Period. Pakistan has negotiated an arrangement, locally, with the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi of Swat. The president of Pakistan has not signed [...]

Hill sources are saying that the Kerry-Lugar bill pushed by the Obama administration to bolster Pakistani civilian governance won’t be introduced until after the congressional recess that begins tomorrow. The bill would authorize about $7.5 billion over five years to the non-military sectors of the Pakistani government and civil society, and conditionalize military aid on [...]

So when the Obama administration announced on Friday that it was going to come up with benchmarks to judge the success or failure of its Af-Pak strategy but was still working out what they would be, Denis McDonough, a top White House foreign-policy adviser, said that the forthcoming Kerry-Lugar bill would have some “good metrics [...]