A War Examined: Afghanistan
Abstract: After more than a decade of effort and cost in Afghanistan, the United States is withdrawing from combat without bringing the war to a decisive end. There are important strategic lessons of limited war to be relearned from the recurring problems of policy, strategy, and performance that the United States has experienced in the four largest and most protracted military interventions it has undertaken since World War II. ********** Comprehensive assessments of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan will necessarily have to wait until the undertaking ends. Later, when history passes judgment, things may well come to look different than they seem today. At this point, however, nearly a dozen years after the United States reacted to 9/11 by launching what would become its most protracted direct foreign military intervention, there is scope to outline some strategic lessons that can serve as guideposts in future contingencies. Perhaps it is inevitable that current appraisals tend to emphasize errors of both policy and performance while predicting that the best we can expect in Afghanistan is to muddle through. (1) Still, critical analysis should not be an excuse to ignore important accomplishments. If the costly, long, and trying intervention in Afghanistan has achieved only a rough approximation of success, it cannot be called misfortune or defeat. Afghanistan has remained stable, and despite the sufferings the war has entailed, a majority of Afghans say the country is moving in the right direction. (2) The current drawdown is not withdrawal, and substantial US and international commitment to Afghanistan is almost certain to continue in some form. Even though the American appetite for overseas expeditions has dulled, the United States military has endured prolonged strain to remain proficient, cohesive, and preeminent. These are not inconsequential results. And yet, the sum of these accomplishments has not yielded a decisive outcome. This circumstance suggests a first-order question: Why has more than a decade of enormous effort and cost in Afghanistan led to such inconclusive results? A search for the answer at Carlisle or Newport would naturally involve consulting Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and their fellow strategists for historical perspective. One way of applying the method to Afghanistan is to reframe the original question: Why has the United States failed to achieve decisive outcomes on its terms in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea, the four major and protracted wars it has fought since World War II? True enough, major differences caution against risking facile comparisons and false analogies. In addition to contrasts in geography and geopolitics, Korea was essentially a conventional war; Afghanistan has been an irregular war; Vietnam and Iraq combined elements of both. Korea and Vietnam were conflicts over divided nations within the Cold War; Iraq and Afghanistan were post-9/11 "new wars." After dangerous escalation, Korea successfully restored a tense status quo; Vietnam became a quagmire that ended in disaster; and in Iraq and Afghanistan, regime change provoked virulent insurgencies that persist today. Nevertheless, a fundamental pattern recurred in each of these US wars. Robert Osgood first pointed to the problems in his 1957 book about Korea, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, which he updated in 1979 with Limited War Revisited about Vietnam. Others have reflected comparably on our recent limited wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (3) In all four, US leaders found themselves responding by force of arms to what were perceived as urgent security challenges, and in the process transformed what had been countries of secondary or peripheral interest into centers of national mission. However, the more intractable these interventions became, the more they also became publically controversial. …
Recognizing Systems in Afghanistan: Lessons Learned and New Approaches to Operational Assessments
Until it was overhauled in 2011, the assessments process in Afghanistan's Regional Command South was mired in 240 metrics and indicators - some of which were uncollectable while others were entirely irrelevant. It lacked focus, failed to define the problem, and was divorced from decisionmaking cycles. That is to say, it was representative of how operational assessments are usually conducted. There was a general understanding that measuring the conflict environment was vital to the mission and to operational success. But what that was supposed to look like and how it was supposed to be accomplished were never articulated. What resulted was a frenetic approach that tried to measure the universe - attempting to analyze everything and accomplishing little.The years 2009 and 2010 brought a sense that the soon-to-be decade-long war in South Asia needed a new and better defined focus. The campaign in Afghanistan had evolved to a universal, all-encompassing mission, a set of tasks for which the term mission creep is euphemistic. These tasks included counterinsurgency with all its associated complexities, counterterrorism, stability operations, developing rural and urban economies, improving governance, countering corruption, improving the rule of law, promoting female empowerment, building government institutions as well as Afghan military and police organizations, and countering the growth and movement of narcotics - to name but a few. In Afghanistan, there is nothing we were not doing because everything could be justified as necessary to accomplish what was in reality a vague notion of success. There can be little wonder that operational assessments processes reflected the ambiguity of the mission - it is hard for any metrics system to be more precise than the goals it is designed to measure progress against.Back in Washington, graduate schools, think tanks, and policy circles had been consumed by the debate about how to apply new focus - whether to shift U.S. presence in Afghanistan to a light footprint and focus on counterterrorism operations, or surge forces forward to replicate what was by then starting to be seen as victory in Iraq. In December 2009, the United States decided to surge its troops by 30,000, bringing the total to 100,000 - with many of those troops headed for the south of Afghanistan. For the first time in the nearly decade-long conflict, the President directed that the United States would begin its drawdown in July 201 1.After the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Lisbon Conference agreed on a coalition withdrawal date of 2014, the headquarters element of 10th Mountain Division deployed to Kandahar Province to take command of international forces in Regional Command South. Kandahar and its environs were, and continue to be, some of the most violent territory in the country.The war had now acquired a new focus and urgency. The United States had pegged itself to a timeline, even in an environment as violent as southern Afghanistan. Transitioning security responsibility to Afghans became an overarching imperative.Despite the widespread intellectual understanding of such realities, bureaucracies are ships that do not easily turn course. Organizations (and individuals) at war are fixated on what they know. Like mountain climbers halfway up a difficult rock face, people in war zones respond negatively to new and untried ideas, preferring for safety's sake to stick to what they know. Missions, projects, and endeavors develop staunch political and emotional constituencies. Sunk costs are difficult to rationalize when the ground becomes hallowed by blood already shed.These dynamics play out on the battlefield as much as in the operational and strategic commands that develop campaign plans and then seek to measure progress in an intensely complex environment. Civilian agencies and nongovernmental organizations are subject to the same conditions.Theoretical and Practical Problems of AssessmentsWithin this context, the Assessments Group of 10th Mountain Division, based in Kandahar, engaged throughout its tour in a constant struggle to make sense of the environment, understand changes in it, and communicate judgments about it, clearly and usefully, to the division's command group under Major General James Terry, USA. …
Experience of using rating scales for the assessment of vocational trainees in general practice.
For two years trainers in the northern half of the south western region have been asked to assess their trainees with a condensed version of the new Manchester rating scales for vocational training in general practice and to send copies to the regional adviser. The condensed version retains the 23 scales but does not include the subscales. Trainers' workshops and comments from individuals suggested that no radical improvements to the scales were required and that they were an adequate statement of what was required from trainees. The response rate of 89% for returning at least one assessment and 38% for returning all three suggested that use of this condensed version would be more feasible than using the full version of the scales. Analysis of 86 first assessments and 48 sets of three assessments showed a range of variation both in trainee ratings and use of individual scales that was consistent with expectations. A lack of significant rank correlations between the scales indicated that each of the scales measured a different characteristic of behaviour. We suggest that the most useful way to achieve systematic assessment of vocational trainees is by the use of the 23 main rating scales, with regional variations where appropriate.