Afghanistan by the Numbers: Measuring a War Gone to Hell

Here may be the single strangest fact of our American world: that at
least three administrations -- Ronald Reagan's, George W. Bush's, and
now Barack Obama's -- drew the U.S. "defense" perimeter at the Hindu Kush;
that is, in the rugged, mountainous lands of Afghanistan. Put another
way, while Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of
money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or
other key places of need, until recently just about no one
in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight
years (not to say much of the last three decades), we've been pouring
billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives
into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation.

Imagine for a moment, as you read this post, what might have happened
if Americans had decided to sink the same sort of money -- $228 billion
and rising fast -- the same "civilian surges," the same planning,
thought, and effort (but not the same staggering ineffectiveness) into
reclaiming New Orleans or Detroit, or into planning an American future
here at home. Imagine, for a moment, when you read about the
multi-millions going into further construction at Bagram Air Base, or to the mercenary company that provides "Lord of the Flies"
hire-a-gun guards for American diplomats in massive super-embassies, or
about the half-a-billion dollars sunk into a corrupt and fraudulent
Afghan election, what a similar investment in our own country might
have meant.

Ask yourself: Wouldn't the U.S. have been safer and more secure if all
the money, effort, and planning had gone towards "nation-building" in
America? Or do you really think we're safer now, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7%, an underemployment rate of 16.8%, and a record 25.5% teen unemployment rate, with soaring health-care costs, with vast infrastructural weaknesses and failures,
and in debt up to our eyeballs, while tens of thousands of troops and
massive infusions of cash are mustered ostensibly to fight a terrorist
outfit that may number in the low hundreds
or at most thousands, that, by all accounts, isn't now even based in
Afghanistan, and that has shown itself perfectly capable of settling
into broken states like Somalia or well functioning cities like
Hamburg.

Measuring Success

Sometime later this month, the Obama administration will present
Congress with "metrics" for... well, since this isn't the Bush era, we
can't say "victory." In the style of special envoy to the region
Richard Holbrooke, let's call it "success." Holbrooke recently offered this definition of that word, evidently based on the standards the Supreme Court used to define pornography: "We'll know it when we see it."

According to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post,
the Obama administration is reportedly rushing to "preempt Congress
with its own metrics." It's producing a document called a Strategic
Implementation Plan, which, DeYoung writes, "will include separate
'indicators' of progress under nine broad 'objectives' to be measured
quarterly... Some of the about 50 indicators will apply to U.S.
performance, but most will measure Afghan and Pakistani efforts." These
are to include supposedly measurable categories like numbers of newly
trained Afghan army recruits and the timeliness of the delivery of
promised U.S. resources.

The administration is evidently now "tweaking" its metrics. But let's
admit it: metrics in war almost invariably turn out to occupy
treacherous terrain. Think of it as quagmire territory, in part because
numbers, however accurate (and they often aren't), can lie -- or
rather, can tell the story you would like them to tell.

The Vietnam War was a classic metrics war. Sometimes it seemed that
Americans in Vietnam did nothing but invent new ways of measuring
success. There were, for instance, the eighteen indices of the Hamlet
Evaluation System, each meant to calibrate the "progress" of
"pacification" in South Vietnam's 2,300 villages and almost 13,000
hamlets, focusing largely on "rural security" and "development." Then
there were the many indices of the Measurement of Progress system, its
monthly reports, produced in slide form, including "strength trends of
the opposing forces, efforts of friendly forces in sorties... enemy
base areas neutralized," and so on. For visiting congressional
delegations, the commander of U.S. forces, Gen. William Westmoreland,
had his "attrition charts," multicolored bar graphs illustrating
various "trends" in death and destruction. Commanders in the field had
their own sophisticated ways to codify "kill ratios," while on the
ground, where the actual counting had to be done in dangerous
circumstances, all of this translated far more crudely into the MGR,
or, as the grunts sometimes said, the "Mere Gook Rule" -- "If it's dead
and it's Vietnamese, it's VC [Vietcong]." In other words, when pressure
came down for the "body count," any body would do.

The
problem was that none of the official metrics managed to measure what
mattered most in Vietnam. History may not simply repeat itself, but
there's good reason to look askance at whatever set of metrics the
Obama administration manages to devise. After all, as in the Vietnam
years, Obama's people, too, will be mustering numbers in search of
"success"; they, too, will be measuring "progress." And those numbers
-- like the Vietnam era body counts -- will have to come up from below
(with all the attendant pressures). By the time they reach Washington,
they are likely to have the best possible patina on them.

With the delivery of those new metrics to Congress seemingly imminent,
I thought I might offer my own set of Afghan metrics for the worst year
of the present war. Think of this as basic math for Americans. (All
figures cited below are linked to their sources. If a figure has no
link, just click on the nearest previous link.)

Costs

Annual funding for U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, 2002: $20.8 billion.

Annual funding for U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, 2009: $60.2 billion.

Total funds for U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, 2002-2009: $228.2 billion.

War-fighting funds requested
by the Obama administration for 2010: $68 billion (a figure which will,
for the first time since 2003, exceed funds requested for Iraq).

Funds recently requested by U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry for non-military spending in Afghanistan, 2010: $2.5 billion.

Funds spent since 2001 on Afghan "reconstruction": $38 billion
("more than half of it on training and equipping Afghan security
forces").

Percentage of U.S. funding in Afghanistan that has gone for military purposes: Nearly 90%.

Estimated U.S. funds
needed to support and upgrade Afghan forces for the next decade: $4
billion a year ("with a like sum for development") according to former
Assistant Secretary of Defense Bing West. (According to the Brookings
Institution's Michael O'Hanlon, "It's a reasonable guess that for 20
years, we essentially will have to fund half the Afghan budget.")

Afghan gross national product: $23 billion ("the size of Boise" Idaho's, writes columnist George Will) -- about $3 billion of it from opium production.

Annual budget of the Afghan government: $600 million.

Maintenance cost for the force of 450,000 Afghan soldiers and police
U.S. generals dream of creating: approximately 500% of the Afghan
budget.

Amount spent on police "mentoring and training" since 2001: $10 billion.

Percentage of the more than 400 Afghan National Police units "still
incapable of running their operations independently": 75% (2008
figures).

Cost of the latest upgrade of Bagram Air Base (an old Soviet base that has become the largest American base in Afghanistan): $220 million.

Cost of a single recent Pentagon contract
to DynCorp International Inc. and Fluor Corporation "to build and
support U.S. military bases throughout Afghanistan": up to $15 billion.

War-Fighting

Number of American troops killed in Afghanistan, 2001: 12.

Number of American troops killed in Afghanistan, 2009 (through September 7th): 186

Total number of coalition (NATO and American) deaths in 2009 thus far: 311, making this the deadliest year for those forces since the war began.

Number of Lithuanian troops killed in Afghanistan: 1

Two worst months of the Afghan War in terms of coalition deaths: July (71) and August (74) 2009.

U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, 2002: 5,200.

Expected U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, December 2009: 68,000.

Percentage rise
in Taliban attacks on coalition forces using Improvised Explosive
Devices (IEDs) in 2009 (compared to the same period in 2008): 114%.

Rise in Coalition deaths from IED attacks in July 2009 (compared to July 2008): six-fold.

Percentage increase in overall Taliban attacks in the first five months of 2009 (compared to the same period in 2008): 59%.

Number of U.S. regional command centers in Afghanistan: 4 (at Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Bagram).

Number of U.S. prisons and holding centers: approximately 36 "overcrowded and often violent sites" with 15,000 detainees.

Number of U.S. bases: at least 74
in northern Afghanistan alone, with more being built. (The total number
of U.S. bases in Afghanistan seems not to be available.)

Estimated cost per troop of maintaining U.S. forces in Afghanistan when compared to Iraq: 30% higher.

Number of gallons of fuel per day used by the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan: 800,000.

Cost of a single gallon of gas delivered to the Afghan war zone on long, cumbersome, and dangerously embattled supply lines: Up to $100.

Number of gallons of fuel used to keep Marine tents cool in the Afghan summer and warm in winter: 448,000 gallons.

Number of troops from Georgia (not the U.S. state, but the country) being prepared by U.S. Marine trainers to be dispatched to Afghanistan to fight in spring 2010: 750.

Number of Colombian commandos
to be sent to Afghanistan: Unknown, but Colombian commandos, trained by
U.S. Special Forces and financed by the U.S. government, are reportedly
to be dispatched there to fight alongside U.S. troops. (Note that both
Georgia and Colombia are dependent on U.S. aid and support. Note also
that neither the Georgians nor the Colombians would assumedly be bound
by the sort of restrictive fighting rules that limit the actions of
some NATO forces in Afghanistan.)

Percentage of American spy planes and unmanned aerial vehicles now devoted to Afghanistan: 66% (33% are in Iraq).

Number of American bombs dropped
in Afghanistan in the first six months of 2009: 2,011 (a fall of 24%
from the previous year, thanks evidently to a directive from U.S.
commanding general in Afghanistan, Stanley A. McChrystal, limiting air
attacks when civilians might be present).

Number of Afghan civilian deaths
recorded by the U.N. January-July 2009: 1,013, a rise of 24% from the
same period in 2008. (Unfortunately, Afghan deaths are generally
covered sparingly, on an incident by incident basis, as in the deaths of an Afghan family traveling to a wedding party in August, assumedly due to a Taliban-planted IED, or the recent controversial U.S. bombing
of two stolen oil tankers in Kunduz Province in which many civilians
seem to have died. Anything like the total number of Afghans killed in
these years remains unknown, but what numbers we have are undoubtedly undercounts.)

Escalation

Number of additional troops General McChrystal is expected to recommend
that President Obama send to Afghanistan in the coming months: 21,000 to 45,000, according to the McClatchy Newspapers; 10,000 to 15,000 ("described as a high-risk option"), 25,000 ("a medium-risk option"), 45,000 ("a low-risk option"), according to the New York Times; fewer than 10,000, according to the Associated Press.

Number of support troops
Defense Department officials are planning to replace with
"trigger-pullers" (combat troops) in the coming months, effectively an
escalation in place: 6,000-14,000. ("The changes will not offset the
potential need for additional troops in the future, but could reduce
the size of any request... officials said.")

Number of additional NATO forces General McChrystal will reportedly ask for: 20,000.

Optimal number of additional Afghan National Army (ANA) troops to be
trained by 2012, according to reports on General McChrystal's draft
plan: 162,000. (According to
Naval Postgraduate School professor Thomas H. Johnson and retired
Foreign Service officer M. Chris Mason,"[T]he U.S. military touts
91,000 ANA soldiers as 'trained and equipped,' knowing full well that
barely 39,000 are still in the ranks and present for duty.")

Public Opinion

Percentage of Americans opposed to the war in Afghanistan: 57%, according to the latest CNN poll, an 11% rise since April. Only 42% now support the war.

Percentage of Republicans who support the war: 70%, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Percentage of Americans who approve
of President's Obama's handling of the war: 48%, according to the
latest CBS poll, a drop of 8 points since April. (Support for
increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan is now at just 25%, down
14% from April.)

Percentage of British who feel their forces should be withdrawn from Afghanistan: 59%.

Percentage of Germans opposed to that country's 4,000 troop commitment to Afghanistan: More than 70%.

The Presidential Election

Estimated cost of staging the 2009 Afghan presidential election: $500 million.

Number of complaints of voting irregularities: More than 2,500 and still climbing, 691 of them described as "serious charges."

Number of members of the "Independent Election Commission" not appointed by Afghan President (and presidential candidate) Hamid Karzai: 0.

Cost of blank voting-registration cards in Ghazni Province in May 2009: $200 for 200 blank registration cards.

Cost of such a card purchased by "an undercover Afghan journalist working for the BBC" this fall: $8.

Number of voter registration cards
(not including fakes) reportedly distributed countrywide: 17 million or
almost twice the estimated number of eligible voters.

Number of ballots cast at the Hajji Janat Gul High School polling place, half an hour from the center of Kabul: 600.

Number of votes recorded for Karzai at that polling station: 996. (Number of votes for other candidates: 5.)

Number of ballots marked
for Karzai and shipped to Kabul from 45 polling sites in Shorabak
District in Southern Afghanistan that were shut down by local officials
connected to Karzai before voting could begin: 23,900.

Number of fake polling sites
set up by backers of Karzai where no one voted but hundreds of
thousands of votes were recorded: as many as 800, according to the New York Times.
(Another 800 actual polling sites were taken over by Karzai supporters
"to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr.
Karzai.")

Number of ballots in Karzai's home province, Kandahar, where an
estimated 25,000 Afghans actually voted, submitted to be counted:
approximately 350,000.

Private Contractors

Number of military contractors hired
by the Pentagon in Afghanistan by the end of June 2009: Almost 74,000,
nearly two-thirds of them local hires, a 9% rise over the previous
three months.

Percentage of the Pentagon's force in Afghanistan made up of contractors in March 2009: 57%.

Ranking for the percentage of contractors used by the Pentagon in Afghanistan: highest in any conflict in U.S. history.

Diplomats and the Civilian Surge

Cost of new "crash" program
to expand the U.S. "diplomatic presence" in Afghanistan and Pakistan:
$1 billion. ($736 million of which is slated for the construction of a
massive new embassy/regional headquarters in Islamabad, Pakistan.)

Number of additional U.S. government personnel reportedly slated to be sent to Pakistan to augment the 750 civilians already there: almost 1,000.

Expected number
of U.S. government civilians to be posted at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul,
Afghanistan by the end of 2009: 976. (There were 562 at the end of 2008
and there are now reportedly more than 1,000 diplomats, staff, and Afghan nationals already working there.)

Estimated total number of civilians
to be assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul as part of a proposed
ongoing "civilian surge" by 2011: 1,350 (800 to be posted in Kabul, 550
outside the capital).

Cost of
the State Department's five-year contract with Xe Services (formerly
Blackwater) to provide security for U.S. diplomats in Afghanistan: $210
million.

Cost of
the State Department's contract with ArmorGroup North America, a
subsidiary of U.S.-based Wackenhutt Services Inc., to guard the U.S.
Embassy in Kabul: $189 million.

Number of private guards
provided by ArmorGroup North America: 450, based at Camp Sullivan,
several miles from the embassy compound where they reportedly engaged
in Lord of the Flies-style behavior.

The Metrics of Success

Defense Secretary Robert Gates on success in Afghanistan: It will take "a few years" to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Admiral "Mike" Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Meet the Press:
"I believe we've got to start to turn this thing around from a security
standpoint in the next 12 to 18 months." (He would not directly answer
the "how long" question.)

Senate Foreign Relations Committee report
on the Afghan War: "None of the civilian officials or military officers
interviewed in Afghanistan and elsewhere expected substantial progress
in the short term. They talked in terms of years two, five and 10...
Military officials believe the Afghanistan mission can only succeed if
troops are there far longer -- anywhere from five years to 12 years."

Military experts cited by Walter Pincus of the Washington Post
warn: "[T]he United States is taking on security and political
commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will
probably eclipse that of the Iraq war."

Anthony H. Cordesman, a member of a "team" put together by U.S.
commanding general in Afghanistan Stanley A. McChrystal to assess war
strategy, and a national security expert for the Center for Strategic
and International Studies: "told reporters recently that even with
military gains in the next 12 to 18 months, it would take years to
reduce sharply the threat from the Taliban and other insurgent forces."

Robert Dreyfuss of the Nation
summarizing the opinions of a panel of experts on the Afghan War,
including Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran and adviser to four
presidents, who chaired President Obama's Afghan task force, two
McChrystal task force members, Kim Kagan and Cordesman, and the
Brooking Institution's Michael O'Hanlon: "(1) A significant escalation
of the war will be necessary to avoid utter defeat. (2) Even if tens of
thousands of troops are added to the US occupation, it won't be
possible to determine if the US/NATO effort is succeeding until
eighteen months later. (3) Even if the United States turns the tide in
Afghanistan, no significant drawdown of US forces will take place until
five years have passed." (Riedel commented: "Anyone who thinks that in
12 to 18 months we're going to be anywhere close to victory is living
in a fantasy.")

New chief of staff of the British Army,
General Sir David Richards: "The Army's role will evolve, but the whole
process might take as long as 30 to 40 years." (After much criticism,
he retracted the statement.)

New NATO Secretary
General Anders Fogh Rasmussen: NATO's mission in Afghanistan will last
"as long as it takes" to ensure that the country is secure.

Afghanistan by the Numbers

Cost of a Kalashnikov rifle in Afghanistan today: $400-600.

Cost of a Kalakov
(the Afghan name for a new model of Kalashnikov): $1,100. (For a $150
surcharge, you can have it delivered to southern Afghanistan.)

Cost of a kilo of heroin in Afghanistan: $2,500. (Cost of that same kilo in Moscow: an estimated $100,000.)

Cost in police bribes of getting contraband into or out of Afghanistan:
"$20 on each weapon, $100 for a kilo of heroin and $1,000 for each
thousand kilos of hashish."

Afghanistan's ranking
among the globe's "weakest states," according to the Brookings
Institution: second weakest. (It is also regularly referred to as the
world's fourth poorest country.)

Unemployment rate in Afghanistan, according to the CIA World Factbook: 40% (2008 figures).

Monthly wage for Afghan National Police: $110 (less than $4 per day).

Daily wage Taliban reputedly pays its fighters: $4-8. (Often the only "job" available.)

How long it may take to get a case through a government court (with bribes): 4-5 years.

How long it may take to get a case through a Taliban court (without bribes): 1 day.

Number of registered Afghan refugees still in Iran and Pakistan: 3 million.

Number of al-Qaeda base camps estimated to be in Afghanistan today: 0. (All reputable experts seem agreed on this.)

The Next War

The price tag
the Obama administration's budget team reportedly put on U.S. future
wars almost every year through 2019: More than $100 billion a year.

The cost
of equipping seven Army brigades with a Boeing advanced coordinated
system of hand-held drones, robots, sensors, and other battlefield
surveillance equipment over the next two years: $2 billion.

Date when all 73 Army active and reserve brigades will be equipped with the system: 2025.

What Can't Be Measured

Here's
a conundrum to be considered and filed away under the rubric
"impossible to measure" as you leave the world of Afghan War metrics:
The U.S. continues to struggle to train Afghan police and soldiers who
will actually turn out and fight with discipline (see above). In the
meantime, as a recent Washington Post piece by Karen DeYoung indicated,
the Taliban regularly turn out fighters who are reportedly using ever
more sophisticated and tenacious fire-and-maneuver techniques against
the overwhelming firepower of U.S. and NATO forces. ("To many of the
Americans, it appeared as if the insurgents had attended something akin
to the U.S. Army's Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight
in small groups in austere environments.")

Both groups are, of course, Afghans. It might be worth considering why
"their" Afghans are the fierce fighters of history books and legend and
ours, despite billions of dollars and massive training efforts, are
not. This puzzling situation had its parallel in Vietnam decades ago
when American military advisors regularly claimed they would give up a
division of U.S.-trained South Vietnamese forces for a single battalion
of "VC."

Here's something to carry away with you: Life is invariably hard
when you set up your massive embassies, your regional command centers,
your election advisors, your private security guards, your military
trainers and advisors, your diplomats and civilian enablers and then
try to come up with a formula for motivating the locals to do your
bidding.