It seems the only Afghan war number that everyone agrees on is how long we've been fighting it: 17 years, as of next Sunday, October 7.
But beyond that key date, other data, including Afghan battlefield deaths and civilians killed in the crossfire, are denied to the rest of us by the U.S. and Afghan officials running the war. If the Afghan war were a business, no accountant could audit its books based on the flimsy and conflicting data Americans have available to decide whether or not to continue this investment. And it's a heavy lift: Beyond the deaths of 2,317 U.S. troops in and around Afghanistan, the nation has spent close to $1 trillion on this war, including $126 billion to build Afghan security forces capable of defending their country on their own, and for economic development.
But after nearly two decades, the U.S. and Afghanistan are treading water in this conflict, at best. "U.S. military officials increasingly refer to 'momentum' against the Taliban, however, by some measures insurgents are in control of or contesting more territory today than at any point since 2001," the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reported on September 18.
They talk of "follow the money" in politics. But when it comes to war, "follow the numbers" is just as important. The U.S. military has long used figures—troops deployed, tons of bombs dropped, attacks launched—as yardsticks on the road to victory. Sometimes they can be misleading—none more so than the infamous body counts of enemy killed in Vietnam—but they do represent a crude proxy for progress, or the lack thereof. The current dearth of data from the U.S. and Afghan governments can mean only one thing: the war is not going well.
Most critical data remains elusive.
U.S. forces in Afghanistan now focus on training and advising their Afghan allies, with American airpower on call to help beleaguered Afghans fighting the Taliban or to take out key targets. Some numbers are available: The U.S. launched 1,337 bombs and missiles against targets in Afghanistan in 2016, the final year of the Obama Administration. In 2017, the first year under President Trump, the U.S. military unleashed 4,361. In the first seven months of 2018, U.S. warplanes have fired 3,714, suggesting this year's total will eclipse last year's.
Washington and Kabul have flip-flopped on what numbers they provide. Over the past 16 years, they have published Taliban body counts, then halted them, before resuming them yet again in January 2018. Then they stopped doing so September 20 when the New York Times asked about the resumption of the practice. Some see the Taliban death tally as the Pentagon's way of showing a skeptical President Trump that his revamped war strategy, with 14,000 U.S. troops now in Afghanistan—a 4,000 boost on his watch—is making progress. For the past year, the United States and Afghanistan governments have refused to say how many Afghan troops and police have been killed fighting the Taliban as their casualties have soared (up to 400 in one recent week, according to the Times).
There are also conflicting estimates of how many "ghost" Afghan soldiers and police there are. In this case "ghost" refers to fighters and cops who pocket paychecks without actually belonging to the country's security forces. A new requirement that only police who can prove they are serving via biometric data—fingerprints, iris scans, and the like—removed up to 30,000 members from the force's payroll from March to June. While that eliminates "ghosts," it also is halting paychecks to some in uniform for whom remote locations and Taliban attacks make obtaining biometric certification difficult.
Numbers represent a crude proxy for progress, or the lack thereof. The current dearth of data from the U.S. and Afghan governments can mean only one thing: the war is not going well.
The nation is tired of the war, yet taxpayers continue to pay for it (close to $1 billion weekly) and risk the lives of young Americans for a murky mission. No one reflects this laissez-faire attitude more than the commander in chief: he has yet to visit with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, or any other war zone.
The good news for Americans is that relatively few U.S. troops are dying on Afghan soil (five so far this year). The bad news is that we're on a second treadmill, 2,500 miles from Westmoreland's, and we've been on it far longer with no end yet in sight. Without key numbers, there's no way to add up what's really going on.