It wasn't long ago that counterinsurgency advocates argued that the real measure of progress in a war wasn't the number of enemies killed. Instead, it was the number of lives saved, civilians kept out of harm's way, and attacks reduced. But that was before counterinsurgency ran up against the difficulties of the Afghanistan war. Now, the body counts are back. In a big way.
Danger Room started paying attention to the shift back in August, when newly arrived commander Gen. David Petraeus proudly pointed us to the number of insurgents killed and detained by special operations forces. The next month, we noticed NATO press releases boasting about the lethality and accuracy of anti-Taliban air strikes -- strikes that Petraeus' predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, curbed and Petraeus has surged.
Those metrics -- dead insurgents -- are growing in importance to Petraeus. The *Washington Post *reports that he and the Afghans gave reporters stats showing 2,448 insurgents have been killed over the past eight months, a 55 percent increase from the previous year's period. USA Today adds that NATO killed or captured 900 Taliban "leaders" in the past ten months.
Contrast that with the famous Petraeus-edited counterinsurgency field manual, which called body count statistics used in South Vietnam "misleading" for only "communicat[ing] a small part of the information commanders needed to assess their operations." It called body counts a "partial, effective indicator," only useful when insurgents' identities could be verified.
It wasn't that killing or capturing insurgents wasn't part of a counterinsurgency -- it obviously was, and is. But it wasn't the lion's share of the fight, or the path to anything resembling success. That's why when he testified to Congress in September 2007 about progress in the Iraq surge, Petraeus pointed instead to the actual decline of attacks, reductions in civilian deaths, reduced numbers of homemade bombs, and so forth. In Afghanistan, those statistics, to put it charitably, aren't in evidence. While insurgents cause the vast majority of civilian deaths -- 76 percent -- total civilian deaths in Afghanistan rose by 20 percent during the first ten months of 2010, according to the latest United Nations figures. In Afghanistan's east, according to the Post, attacks are up 21 percent. And while insurgents' homemade bombs are increasingly ineffective, the numbers of them have risen dramatically over the past two years.
One point of light: according to the Brookings Institution's compilation of Afghanistan stats, by December, insurgent attacks fell to 600 per week after a September spike of 1700. But it's too early to say whether that represents the typical Taliban winter lull.
Now, Petraeus also points to other metrics more typically in line with counterinsurgency, like seizures of bomb-making material and insurgent cash crops like opium. There's also the huge increase in Afghan soldiers and cops put into uniform (their abilities are less easy to document). And Petraeus' people argue that attacks will naturally rise as NATO forces push harder into Taliban strongholds like Helmand and Kandahar provinces.
But Petraeus is under big pressure to show security progress ahead of the planned troop reductions in July -- which Gates, dropping by Kabul Monday, declared are on schedule. And it's hardly just Petraeus. Across the border in Pakistan, the Obama administration brags about the "elimination of [al-Qaeda's] leadership cadre" through its drone strikes. Intelligence guiding the drones appears to have grown more accurate as the strikes have increased. But placing "warheads on foreheads" -- as the saying goes -- is unquestionably in vogue.
After all, it's the easiest statistic to understand: a dead fighter. The trouble is, the militants never seem to run out of 'em. The insurgents have between 25,000 and 35,000 fighters, according to a guess by the Afghan Ministry of Defense. As Joshua Foust of the American Security Project notes, that's been the estimated total for years, suggesting that the insurgency is a) very large and b) opaque to the U.S. and its allies. Clearly the insurgency can replenish its ranks, discrediting the suggestion that NATO can kill its way to victory. And it's that insight that caused many in the military to gravitate toward counterinsurgency theory in the first place.
Photo: Flickr/Canadian Army
