1, 3, 8, 12, 17, 23...Wait, start over...

Unfortunately, this guy can count better than the Afghan government.

This war is a partnership. On one half we have NATO, a partnership of its own. For the other half, we have the Afghans. We are working hand in hand with the country's residents and government to try and turn around the state of fractured government that allowed terrorism to thrive here for so many years. Part of a partnership is allowing your partner to handle some things on their own. It builds trust, and lessens dependency. Lessening dependency is a big one for this effort. We want the Afghans to learn to do things on their own so we can eventually go home.

Unfortunately, even basic things, like counting, are sometimes too much for our Afghan partners to perform on their own right now.

We depend on the Afghan National Police (ANP) to give us an accurate count of their numbers. We can count how many people we recruit and train, because these are processes and facilities that we control. Once those soldiers and policemen leave our facilities though, they belong to the Afghan units and we no longer track them ourselves. We depend on the Police to tell us how many people they have in the unit. Why not just add up all the trained people we've sent to the unit, you ask? Well, people quit. People get killed. People disappear with their weapons, never to be heard from again. Occasionally some of these people come back after weeks or months gone from the force (not the dead ones, obviously), after simply traveling home to be with their family for a while without telling anyone. All of these events have to be tracked by the individual unit.

For a society where computer use is common, like America, tracking people is simple, or at least routine. Name a company in the United States that doesn't track how many people it's employing and how much they're getting paid and you're likely naming a company on its way to bankruptcy, or one that has less than 10 employees.

Afghanistan is different. First, how many people are they trying to count? For just the police: one hundred. And seven. Thousand. By flipping hand. Why by hand? Because they have no computers, and often no electricity to run one even if they had it. Payroll is done by handing it to the individual. Record keeping is done with pencil and paper and filing cabinets.

Again, you may ask, so what? The process may be antiquated, but it could still work with proper controls. Let me remind you: paper and pencil don't work either in a country where only 20% of the population knows how to read and write.

So, the process of counting your men is to have them physically show up to roll call. The process of paying them is to physically hand them their pay. Record keeping is done with hand-written notes. Let us assume that all of that goes swimmingly and we get a 100% accurate head count every time. Incoming monkey wrench: what happens when someone that is supposed to be there doesn't show up for roll call? What then?

Enter the real crux of the issue. There is no standardized process for counting people that are absent from the force. We count these absentees under the broad category of "attrition". People that are killed or wounded badly enough that they can't rejoin the force are easy to count, as there's no room for interpretation. But what about people that just walk off? How long do you give them to return before you write them off? Should they be counted as AWOL or simply as absent for duty? Where does that break point need to be? The answers to these questions vary from unit to unit, and even from commander to commander, resulting in very uneven and inconsistent counting of the force.

On top of methodology being inconsistent, there is also the problem of corruption. A corrupt commander may choose to keep counting policeman that are absent from duty so that that policeman's pay continues to be sent to the unit. Every month the commander simply pockets the money. There isn't a tracking system for the money to know exactly where it went, so there's no way to know how often this happens. Now the problem isn't just ignorance or neglect or subjective interpretation. Its intentional deception.

Despite all the challenges, at the end of every month, each unit is required to report something. This report is often hand delivered to the Ministry of the Interior (MoI) for consolidation with the numbers from the rest of the country. Sometimes it's telephoned in. For seven days, the one and only person - ONE GUY - at the MoI that knows how to use Microsoft Excel handjams the numbers in one at a time to a spreadsheet. While he does know how to use a computer, he doesn't speak english, so those spreadsheets have to be translated.

Eventually, those numbers are delivered to my office, where we use a mathematical model to predict future ANP strength based on the attrition percentage (the amount of people that leave each month), the number trained, the number recruited, and the total people we had at the end of the month. Notice that half of these factors are outside of Coalition control.

We have a saying in the analyst community: all models are wrong, but some are useful. No model can take into account every single factor, as it would then cease to be a model and become reality. But, a model can take into account the important factors and give you rough picture of what is going on. Our model has four main inputs, listed above. Two of them are suspect to some unknown degree. This leads to another saying: crap goes in, crap comes out. Until we get accurate data on how many people are leaving the force, we aren't able to accurately predict if or when the Afghan National Police is going to grow large enough to take care of their own country.

Part of the solution is, as always, education. More literacy means more understanding of the process, which means more accurate reporting. The other part of the solution is to teach them a standardized process and get them to follow it. This will be difficult, but absolutely necessary. Without accurate reporting, there's really no telling how fully staffed these police units are. Without knowing how full the units are, we have no idea how many more we need to recruit and train, and no way of truly evaluating the ANP's progress.

*****

I've been doing some counting of my own lately. The spreadsheet that I use for a time card over here was built by someone with a sick sense of humor, as they developed a section that will let you input your start and end dates and output the amount of days, hours, minutes and seconds you have left to be in theatre. Devilishly evil. I was explicitly warned against starting to count the days until late in my deployment, but when I saw that section on my time card, I couldn't resist filling it in. Now every day I go to clock in, I am reminded that I am only 17.5% complete with my time in Afghanistan, and that I have 14 million more seconds to go before I leave. I try hard to ignore it, but to no avail.

One event that I am counting down to is the day I'll get my own room. I'm still living in a tent, and thus still living out of a bag. My kingdom for a wall locker. I'm currently number two on the civilian list, but I also just passed on a room that would have moved me one closer. The guy on the list right behind me wanted to move into an open space in a five man room, where the other four occupants were all co-workers. I didn't have a problem letting him leapfrog me, especially since it meant I got out of having four other roommates. Two will be plenty for me, thank you.

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That's all for now. Thanks for reading. Out here.