Isn't this change due primarily to the increased use of IEDs by the enemy in Afghanistan (and secondarily to increased American reluctance to use airstrikes against suspected concentrations of insurgents)?

Don't misunderstand; the reported change in the "kill ratio" is bad news, whatever the cause. It is just not quite the same as the Taliban being "ascendant."

Which is precisely why I keep telling my son before each deployment not to despise your enemy's skill, courage and capacity to learn. Two hundred and thirty-three years of American military and naval history have proven that we do not have a monopoly on the military virtues and can ill afford to hold our enemy’s prowess in contempt.

I am perplexed by this thought. You would expect for the Taliban to be extremely weak and ineffective against US Armed Forces. However, this study proves that they are just as effective against us as we are against them. How is that? We invest so much more in our equipment, leadership and training of soldiers.

It's frightening to think that the tactics employed by the Taliban are not only working against the US, but they've worked against the Soviet Union. So far, the only method that we have discovered to fight the Taliban is by making them appear as enemies to the normal population, but that isn't happening. So, what ETHICAL strategies remain for the US? Can we defeat the Taliban?

In response to the first post, Secretary Gates recently created an 'anti IED' project that will have interesting results, hopefully useful.

I must be doing something wrong.

If the world was put on hold for a minute, I drew a line around the 25 million Pashto-speakers, cutting out portions of Afghanistan (leaving Dari-Afghanistan) and Pakistan (leaving a weird Punjabi-Balochi-Sindhi mix and undermining the original acronym) and this new country was run by the Taliban... would we be at war with them?

I'm sure they'd make most people's "Least Favorite Government" list, but that's not usually a good reason to occupy a country with a military.

Saw you on C-SPAN, again. You said you can't listen to the talking heads because they sound so ignorant. You would lose your job if you publicly mocked these people, showed them for the fools they are, before the whole world? Maybe your timidity here is also part of the problem? I blog about the fools they are (on many topics, not just foreign policy) but I don't have FP as a platform from which to launch my attacks on the millionaire punditry.

I'm concerned that we're once again using body count as a measure of effectiveness. It's by and large a tactical measurement that does not have a lot of bearing in a counterinsurgency.

Forgive me, but isn't this a bastardized form of the "body count" that got us in such trouble in Vietnam?

Well if one were to visit Hanoi, and knew what they were looking at, you'd see a gap in the population age of Second Indo China War Vets. Obviously if our yardstick for success was the body count, American Vietnam Vets would be in the winners' circle.

However, it does do a grunt good to see the fruits of his labor, as distasteful as that may sound.

If operational intelligence is good (which it ain't), supporting arms aren't delayed (which they are too often), and we finish-up the firefights (which we're not) - the enemy would tend to look elsewhere for trouble.

Anecdotally: anyone taking into account the blood trails that I have it on good authority are found on occasion?

Tom, I honestly think it's worth noting in that report that he was comparing October 2008 with October 2009, only those two months out of either calendar year and not within the total causalities/kills/kidnappings for that year. He notes in the report that October 2009 "reflects the reduction in direct air support to NATO soldiers in combat" which I consider to be very relevant to an understanding of the ratio you've posted. It also reflects the uptick in the number of conflicts between October 2008 (236) and October 2009 (458), which nearly doubled in that intervening year.

It is not simply a matter of military effectiveness--it's also a change in tactics that reflects the greater number of attacks and the accession of two additional provinces to the twelve McCreary already considered to be the core of the insurgency. That information is essential to understanding what McCreary reports.

I'm wondering - does this stat reflect more our over-dependence on air power and high-tech, or more about the jihadis' ability to adapt tactics and learn over time to counter our strengths? Or, more likely, perhaps a bit of both?

A question for those out there who know much more about the military side of the conflict in Afghanistan: if you put our soldiers on a paintball range armed only with guns and radios and put them up against a group of taliban armed with the same, who would win? Maybe it's not a fair question because our soldiers don't train that way, but for this kind of fight, maybe they should - learn to fight stripped of predators, air support, etc., just to hone small unit fighting skills.

The fact that the Taliban appear to be giving as good as they're getting doesn't bode well for our chances on the military side of things in Afghanistan. . .

What's the Afghan share in the "allied" losses?

To respond to an earlier post of Tom's, why does the term "exit strategy" make Obama a one-termer?

In any case, I hope he displays great commitment in tonight's speech. And I wish my own German government would finally acknowledge we're fighting a war rather than us being on a peacekeeping mission.

Another possible reason for the shift could be a decrease in the number of civilian casualties reported as Taliban. If memory serves some analyst on the BBC commented that if the number of dead insurgents reported and the number of insurgents estimated to be fighting matched then the war should have ended years ago.

Of course it's also possible that the practice of putting soldiers closer to the population and less reliant on armored divisions and air strikes could mean that U.S soldiers are more likely to be killed in a firefight, but insurgents typically don't have that prowess.

Someone please help me with the logic of this blog. The Taliban have made a remarkable comeback, so we need someone who understands COIN. But then Mr. Ricks just anointed the overall man in charge, CENTCOM General P., as the most capable COIN guy in the world. Perhaps this blog needs a logic checker.

Wasn't the war in Afghanistan main goal to get rid of Al-Qaeda? Why are we now fighting the Taliban? How is Afghanistan relevant to our national security? Why is the opium output and Taliban strength higher today than on 9-11-2001? What are we trying to accomplish? If we don't want Al-Qaeda to return, that is a long-term, boots on the ground for years project. This country should have demanded some hard answers before we let the president commit 30,000 troops. Almost nine years of war and we haven't accomplished anything. Didn't GEN Hugh Shelton say we could fight two wars simultaneously? We are having a hard time fighting insurgents; can we really fight two states in war? It seems we are not asking ourselves hard questions in regards to how we got where we are today.
I think an implosion of the Mexican government by drug gangs would have serious implications for U.S. national security and economic health, but I don't see Obama sending troops down there. Why Afghanistan? How can we say our experiences will be any different than other countries in that wasteland?

If only U.S & NATO troops altered their strategy to:
1. Defend only major populated cities by issuing ID to every Afghan living there. No Pashtun, less than 50 years of age, be allowed for a period of 2-3 years in to those cities to migrate. Take full control of Kandahar to Kabul highway with air & drone support.
2. Interdict all the opium / heroin supplies before it reaches Afghan borders.
3. Increase the Drone presence along Pakistan border to check the incursion of Taliban with weapons, fertilizers and taking their wounded out to Pakistan for medical treatment. Leave the Policing of South & East Afghanistan to the U.S paid war lords to keep Taliban away from their tribal areas.
This way Afghan troops can be trained faster & safer to take on Taliban with in next two years.

Have just read this thread for first time. Searched in vain for the meaning of these metrics. Yes, i understand enemy-dead-good, friendly-dead-bad. And i don't mean to trivialize that. But unless someone can show how these two measures tie to war aims and national interests, they only show cost, not benefits of the conflict. These are at best tactical metrics in a strategic endeavor.

That's what's missing, a clear set of strategic aims and a realistic set of measures tied to them.

With the Commander in Chief's speech last night (wasn't it great to finally hear a leader in that role rather than a pipsqueak collegiate cheerleader as last we had), we now have a fairly clear set of objective aims that insiders and outsiders can audit, grade, and parse. I suggest we would do well to define 'victory' precisely against these goals and leave aside broader, more holistic concepts like 'defeat of Al Qaeda,' conquest of Jihadist Islam,' or 'absolute freedom from threat of terrorism.'

Let's get this goddam thing over with and get back to the business of national defense. Good plan. Execute. Leave.

AllenGreen:

I did the math. Afghanistan's population is about 23.5 million based on Afghan and UN Census counts, while Iraq is in the 28 million and growing range. Moreover, troublesome demographics breaks the country along a number of important fault lines which defy the meaningful comparisons to Iraq.

I also did the geography. I US sniper on a berm in Iraq has a huge field of view and fire, and lots of options for direct and indirect intelligence about what is going on in the relatively flat countryside. In Afghanistan's terrain, that same sniper might not see things going on 100 yards away, and the direct and indirect intelligence sources may also be useless. Again, the comparisons to Iraq are, at best, challenging. Afghanistan is one place were "The World IS NOT Flat!"

Nor are the substantive issues in that conflict defined by the borders and measurements of the country itself. Iraqi refugees across neighboring borders were troublesome; Afghan transnational influence is substantial---to the extent that applying metric solely based on Afghanistan may provide little, if not misleading, insights.

Did somebody say that this would be complicated?

Don't know where John McCready gets his stats, but given that units in the field only nominally report enemy "killed" in any case, it is certainly garbage in/garbage out.

If metrics are being collected and tracked (or required) on fighters killed and wounded (of whatever affiliation -- Taliban, organized crime, whatever), it is news to the commanders on the ground.

So whether "kill ratios" are important is a secondary question to the fact that the data are bogus in the first place.

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