metrics

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 [...]

Laura Rozen, newly minted Politico hire, posts the integrated civilian-military campaign plan for Afghanistan from Amb. Karl Eikenberry and Gen. Stanley McChrystal. And if you turn to an appendix, you can find an elusive, chimerical beast: metrics for measuring progress. Well, sort of. They may not be the National Security Council’s metrics, but the document [...]

Congress is back, and Karen DeYoung has a good section in her Washington Post story on the administration’s Afghanistan choices about what that means:
The pending 2010 budget legislation for the first time requests more money for Afghanistan-Pakistan operations than for Operation Iraqi Freedom — $68 billion compared with $61 billion. Administration officials said they expected [...]

It might be going on five months since the Obama administration pledged to “develop metrics … that give you an idea of our success rate” in Afghanistan, as outside adviser Bruce Riedel put it on March 27, but Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks it’s “important the Administration [...]

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 [...]