NATO sees body counts as a measure of success

Alliance vision of Afghanistan is being painted by numbers

Paul Koring, Globe & Mail, 3 Nov 06

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KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — NATO has exhumed an old and notoriously unreliable measure of war -- body counts -- in an effort to show it is making progress against the resurgent Taliban in southern Afghanistan.

Almost daily, the alliance's International Security Assistance Force trumpets another lopsided killing toll. But the practice, considered odious by some and pointless by others, irks some top Canadian commanders.

In the past week alone, leaders of the 31,000-soldier force issued statements saying "55 insurgents, one ISAF soldier killed in Zabul province" and "more insurgents dead in Uruzgan province," explaining that a revised body count showed "the number of insurgents killed . . . has increased from 55 to 70," and finally that "ISAF forces were engaged in heavy fighting with large groups of Taliban," killing 48 Taliban with no ISAF casualties.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's high-level decision to resurrect body counts apparently reflects an inability to find any other headline-grabbing measure to demonstrate success. Body counts were last used by the Pentagon in Vietnam, where the wildly optimistic and soaring totals were completely at odds with the grim reality that the United States was losing.

Some senior Canadian officers -- and it has been Canadian troops doing the bulk of the killing in recent weeks -- are upset about the decision by ISAF headquarters in Kabul to resort to body counts, which have been widely discredited.

"I don't talk about body counts," said Canadian Brigadier-General David Fraser, who commanded all NATO's forces in southern Afghanistan, the area of heaviest fighting in the past three months. "The number itself is not the story," he said, adding that he believes ISAF started to issue body counts because "the media are looking for that type of metric."

Gen. Fraser may not like the counts, but more senior NATO generals apparently do, including Lieutenant-General David Richards, the ISAF commander for all Afghanistan.

There is evident tension over body counts between the regional command in the south, where the killing is done, and ISAF headquarters in Kabul, which keeps very tight control over what information is released.

Charting progress in anything as messy and long-term as war defies simple statistics. Counterinsurgencies, such as the effort to crush the Taliban and instill sufficient security to allow development and a flourishing civil society, are even more difficult to measure because progress may be imperceptible for years.

In conventional wars, maps can show territory and generals can claim cities taken or troops advancing. But there are no short-term counterinsurgency measures, and it's impossible to count "hearts and minds" won or lost.

NATO has opted instead for body counts and statements that are impossible to substantiate.

"We are winning," Gen. Richards said flatly this week.

It is also true that the news media largely ignore ISAF news bulletins such as the one issued last week proclaiming "Road reconstruction continues unabated," although that fact may actually may have a long-term effect on security.

Instead, both NATO and the Taliban seem to be engaged in a war of escalating body counts. Taliban accounts of the number of foreign soldiers it kills and maims in attacks, roadside bombings and suicide strikes bears no relation to actual casualties. Nor is there any mention of civilian deaths. What is harder to measure -- and more important to NATO -- is whether Afghans believe the Taliban statements.

Similarly, ISAF's clumsy response when its air strikes killed civilians has played into Taliban hands. It is not just the Taliban who up the ante, seemingly without substantiation. Last month, NATO's supreme allied commander, General James Jones, more than doubled the previous estimate of Taliban losses in the major Canadian-led offensive known as Operation Medusa.

"I would say it's probably somewhere in the neighbourhood of around 1,000. . . . If you said 1,500, it wouldn't surprise me," he said. He even suggested that as many as a third of the Taliban's core of full-time fighters might have been killed.

"I don't know if they are going to run out of fighters," Gen. Fraser said, clearly frustrated with the focus on body counts.

But useful measures of progress are elusive. When asked how, if he returned in six months, he would know whether progress was being made, Gen. Fraser said he "would ask some Afghans."

That sort of soft measure may seem suspect. But as Gen. Fraser explained, it will be the assessment of tribal elders and of ordinary urban Afghans in Kandahar that will determine whether there is greater confidence of security and whether people feel capable of working against the insurgents.