The acronym COIN does seem to cause its share of hate and discontent, as evidenced over at SWJ. Be that as it may, I don’t like to categorize what Kilcullen has pointed out as metrics, but rather important intelligence indicators in estimating what level you are at in an insurgency, and also understanding they will differ in varrying forms from area-to-area.

The point being: there is always that flaw many commanders fall into by using conventional military estimates which are generally never valid in estimating progress in fighting an insurgency - the institutional mindset!

Anecdotally: much of South Africa's counter-insurgency thinking was based on American, LtCol. John J. McCuen's book, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War, and they were successful against SWAPO.

We have no evidence that Kilcullen's theories will be successful in Afghanistan - just saying? : )

As usual, Mr Kilcullen has made some great observations. I heard Mr Kilcullen speak at a COIN conference in 2006, and as usual, he always seems to be the smartest guy in a room full of smart people. Contrary to Tyrtaios's comments, I don't think there is a "David Kilcullen Theory of Counter-Insurgency (Copywright protected)" His book was a collection of observations. They were very astute observations, but observations nonetheless. After he was hired as Patreus's Counter-Insurgency advisor in Iraq, I can say we sucked less at Counter Insurgency, so anything he tells me is Gospel. I think Tyrataios makes a good point about trying to export the wrong lessons from Iraq and I've seen that from less brilliant strategists than Mr Killcullen.

As an aside, there is a great story about Muqtada al Sadr's father on the subject of vegetable prices in the early 90s. A suplicant had asked for an audience with the elder Sadr, to ask him questions in order to decide if he was going follow his teachings. This is a very important decision for any Shia Muslim, as they are expected to follow the teachings of a learned cleric.

He asked Sadr the price of tomatos. Sadr's followers were agast that someone would ask so strange a question. Sadr gave the price of tomatos in the various markets throughout southern Iraq. The suplicant was happy and left. The point of this oft retold story is that most Shia clerics were so focused on arcane matters of theology that they never actually left their homes to visit markets and see how their people were suffering.

Perhaps there is a lesson there Americans in Afghanistan, as well.

Kilcullen is one of the very few that recognizes the fact that NATO is supporting a revolution, not just countering an insurrection against a "constituted government." The metrics he mentions can be found in many of the old books on communist revolutionary warfare. He simply and brilliantly adopted them to Afghan culture.

I am really looking forward to this paper's eventual release. Hopefully it mentions that rejection of the Taliban does not equate to acceptance of the Karzai government.

Tyrtaios and Abu Nasr upthread both make good points about the "good metrics" listed here.

Not all of them are really metrics by which a NATO military officer can measure the progress or success of his unit's mission. Quite a few of them are intelligence indicators of how well the Afghan government is doing.

This is the problem Tom Ricks has written several hundred posts about. He's mostly written these posts about Iraq; their theme is that, sure, we started doing better after the surge, but the Iraqi government can't hold things together once we leave. The Maliki government is a lot stronger than the Karzai government, and I don't see any answers to the question of how the very best COIN can stand up an Afghan government able to keep the price of exotic vegetables down and get the rate of business formation up, not at least in the time we are going to have available to us.

I have much respect for Kilcullen, but his tax metric is Western-centric. Tracking tax payments would not have much value in a developing county because of their history of centralized, major-industry taxes. These countries have such centralized systems because these are the only taxes they have the infrastructure to collect. This is true for both countries facing insurgencies and those not facing insurgencies.

Imagine, for example, trying to tax the cash-based vendors at an Afghan market. It's nigh impossible to collect money in the best of circumstances. It's much easier to tax the products rolling out of major industrial plants or entering the country through its border crossings - or, of course, oil moving through a pipeline.

Insurgents are less likely to have influence at these heavily controlled points. Even if they do, that influence will be picked up by other metrics. At the same time, industries are less able to avoid a tax. It all amounts to a metric that has very little fluctuation with insurgent levels.

Second, the lower level taxes that are there are quite often imposed from outside rather than from within. The CPA instituted a flat tax during its tenure in Iraq under what was widely seen in the west as an conservative, ideological push. That tax was adopted into Iraqi law because CPA orders remained in effect after the transfer of authority unless explicitly rejected by the Iraqi legislature. No one paid the tax except Iraqis contracted by foreign companies (including interpreters) because, again, that was the only case where the infrastructure was in place for the government to collect the tax.

The history of low personal taxation also made individuals hostile to any tax — insurgency or not. It's like anti-coalition forces SIGACTS. All it tells you is that they are don't want to pay taxes, not that they oppose the government.

In short: Whether an Iraqi lived in Kurdistan or Sadr City, they weren't paying taxes.

Reading this and Exum's latest, one wonders why we don't add ourselves to the list of things to measure in COIN.

Afer all, we can defeat ourselves, right?

poser: Number of ground forces, officer and enlisted, who believe they are 'enablers', not prime movers.

Or, is there a better organizational metric?

As a guy who was tasked to do just this in Iraq in 2005/2006, and Haiti in 2004, I can tell things have come a long way. When I was first introduced to this task, I was put under the wing of a French officer who was on the Haiti mission with us who knew a lot about it. And believe me he did know a lot. He had been a Foreign Legion officer with numerous deployments in shitty regions and had studied the SASO and COIN environments closely - which of course did not prevent him from being dismissed out of hand because he was French.

He stressed from the beginning that the key was measuring what was happening to the people, NOT to our forces. What exactly is measured depends on the situation and the local culture. What was important to measure in Haiti might not matter much in Fallujah, or in Helmand. But, as long as the principle that what matters is what is important to THE PEOPLE, not to you and your side, then you are on the right track.

It gets more complicated as you try to weight and quantify these measures statistically, of course, but Kilcullen is on the right track. Unfortunately it has taken quite a while for these ideas to sink through the staff culture of the military. The French Colonel in Haiti had devised a report to be filled in by every patrol throughout the city of Port-au-Prince (French, Canadian, and American). He included all kinds of metrics, from attitude of locals to the patrol, to how many hours of electricity each block had, to how many residents reported being victims of violence. When aggregated this information gave a pretty good picture of the situation on the ground. But it was a fight to get the units at the pointy end to fill the reports out every time consistently, and the metrics depended on results over time to paint an accurate picture. And sadly, from battalion commanders on down, the Marine commanders often dismissed this stuff, in my opinion, because it came from some French dude and what the hell could he possibly know?

Fast forward a year to Iraq, and I was trying to put this same picture together in Anbar province. Again, most of the focus was on IEDs, units in contact, IDF (indirect fire attacks), etc. - totally focused on what was happening to our Marines and soldiers. When I asked the question about how many crimes were happening to the Fallujans themselves, I got blank stares. I attempted in vain for a year to get a similar information collection effort to what we'd done in Haiti (however imperfectly) off the ground in Anbar province.

It looks like, maybe, the message has finally gotten through.
-PTR

The back-to-back snow storms in the D.C region afforded me the opportunity to read Greg Mortenson’s book, "Three Cups of Tea." A powerful narrative. I then watched his interview on Bill Moyers Journal (see video and transcript for the show on 15 Jan 2010). Mortenson suggests this “measure” as an important data point: “And some more interesting things are if you go into the district courts [in Afghanistan], you'll see the number of women filing titles and deeds for land ownership is skyrocketing. And I think that's a real important thing to note.”