Military Pressure and Body Counts in Afghanistan
Jonathan Schroden
May 17, 2019
For years, the U.S. military has been reporting how much territory the Afghan government controls as compared to how much the Taliban controls as a measure of how the war in Afghanistan is going. This metric tied directly to its theory of success, as articulated in 2017 by the then-U.S. commander of Operation Resolute Support, Gen. John Nicholson:
So the metric that’s most telling in a counterinsurgency—this is what the Afghans are waging. We’re training, advising and assisting them as they fight a counterinsurgency—is population control. So, currently, they control about two-thirds of the population. So we would like to see that increase to at least 80 percent. Why 80 percent? Because we think that gives them a critical mass where they control 80, the Taliban are driven to less than 10 percent of the population, maybe the rest is contested. And this, we believe, is the critical mass necessary to drive the enemy to irrelevance, meaning they’re living in these remote, outlying areas, or they reconcile, or they die, of course, is the third choice … So this is—this, we think, is going to take about two years to get to this 80 percent. Could go faster than that, but, again, I think it’s — my best military judgment right now is—going to take a couple years to get there.
https://warontherocks.com/2019/05/military-pressure-and-body-counts-in-afghanistan/
