There's an interesting guy, LTC Daniel Davis, who has been very critical of the way the war in Afghanistan has been fought. Now he's a smart, experienced, dedicated, and brave guy whose work has appeared in all kinds of interesting places including, Armed Forces Journal, New York Times, PBS, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Wired, Democracy Now, etc. Now when he was there, he observed all kinds of things that didn't make any sense to him, and I shared that same experience. Many people who have spent time in Afghanistan have come away less than satisfied with the war's progress.
What's interesting is how the system -- that is, the general officers and senior politicians defend themselves from these criticisms. For example, Joseph Collins, who is a colonel and holds a PhD from Colombia, criticized Davis for being insufficiently rigorous and coherent in his critiques. I get it -- Davis's prose is not always sparkling, his arguments are not always clear, and his methodology may be circumspect -- but that doesn't mean Davis is wrong. So the easy critique becomes, "His evidence is anecdotal." and "He doesn't have the big picture." Well maybe, but I don't think enough credibility is given by academic to on the ground reporting and observation.
Methodologically though, Davis does make some good points. Specifically, he argues that there have been no measures of performance identified that have been tracked against missions. That is, nobody has answered the question, "What are we doing there?" Now Anthony Cordesman has done excellent work defining measures and gathering empirical evidence about Afghanistan, but nobody yet has done the hard work of integrating these measures into a coherent policy analysis. I'm trying to do this, but it's hard to do in one's "free" time.
