Measurement Space

Learning a new skill is not usually easy. Occasionally you find something you're naturally good at, that just comes to you, and you're good at it right away. Most often, you have to work at it, practicing until you learn the nuances. Lets pick something crafty, like knitting (one of my mom's favorite hobbies), for an example. The first time you try to knit a scarf, you probably start out staring at the ball of yarn and large wooden needles, wondering where to even begin. I know I would. With a little instruction though, you can quickly pick up the basic concept, and complete a simple project. Comparing your work to the scarf of a skilled knitter, you are sure to notice differences in the quality of the two pieces. Uneven rows, inconsistent stitch sizes, etc, but it's your first try, so who cares. It's made, and your neck is warm.

With repetition, you get better. You can tell you're getting better by comparing your newest product to your previous ones. The stitches are tighter and more consistent across the the length of your scarf. The knots at each end don't unravel after a couple of minutes. You can measure your progress. You can move on to bigger and better things, and even if you haven't been taught how to make a blanket, or a pair of socks, you have enough knowledge about knitting in general to be able to figure it out on your own with some trial and error, and likely ripping out several rows of stitches.

Now, let’s take your instructor away. Ball of yarn. Needles. No books, no teacher, but have at it. The quality of your final product would be quite a bit lower, yes? I'd venture to guess most people wouldn't finish, and some probably wouldn't even bother to start. For those that soldiered on and made something, there's a good chance it wouldn't look much like a scarf. On your next go around, you may or may not get better. For certain, progressing is harder, as the only thing you have to compare against is yourself. You can tell that you're getting better, but you really don't have an idea how good your scarves are relative to what a skilled knitter would make. It may be that you're the best natural-born scarf maker in the whole world, but without someone that knows something about knitting there to evaluate your work, you don't have a clue.

Let's add one more wrinkle. Instead of being told to make a scarf, you're told to make a qaraqul. Huh? What's that, you ask? Well, it’s a hat, like the one that Afghan President Karzai wears. No, I can't give you any more details, I gotta go, look up a picture on Google. Oh, by the way, I don't have any needles and yarn to give you either, you'll have to find your own. But, I'll be back soon, and I expect the best darn qaraqul in the whole world on your first try. Got it? My head is feeling drafty, and I don't want to catch a cold.

Hmmmmm. Where to begin? I know what I'm supposed to do: knit a qaraqul. But I have no idea how. If I don't know what this thing looks like, how do I measure how well I'm doing? If there's no standard to follow, and no established metric by which to measure your work, the chances of successfully making a world-class qaraqul is virtually nil. How will I know if I've succeeded before its time for my work to be evaluated?

This last example is the essence of the problem of handing over responsibility for security in Afghanistan to the Afghan security forces. Just like my knitting analogy, we know what we have to do: build a professional security force that can be responsible for taking care of the country. We started with zero materials to do the job. We had to go find the people we needed to be soldiers, policemen and policymakers. We had to build  the government infrastructure in order to have the leadership necessary to manage these forces. We had to equip and train the force. But the entire time we've been over here doing all these things, we haven't had a clue what this thing is actually supposed to look like. We can look at a snapshot of a similar product that was put together in Iraq, but the two forces aren't going to be identical. We are very much knitting a qaraqual without a pattern. While trying to meet a deadline. While dodging hand grenades being thrown at our collective head.

Our solution to this problem has been analogous to knitting the hat while it's on the person's head (and  learning how to duck. As silly as that sounds, having the customer there to provide real time feedback on what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong is invaluable when you don't know what the final product is supposed to be. The guy can tell you, "That spot is too itchy," or "I feel a draft coming from 7 o'clock." In our situation, however, the Afghans provide very little feedback on their own. Instead, we have to ask them the right questions. If we tell them what we want to know, they can collect data for us in order to provide an answer. Watching that data over the course of time can tell us if we're improving or deteriorating in a given area. Without the feedback of the Afghan people and the Afghan government, we would have very little with which to measure our progress on building towards this nebulous concept of Afghan security.

But while we can get information, without knowing what our end product is really going to look like, we have very little idea of what information is important. How do we know what questions to ask if we don't know what we don't know? How do we measure our progress without knowing what to measure? Some of the things we've chosen may surprise you.

There are the fairly obvious things. If we're building a force to secure a country, we want to know how big the country is, and, more importantly, how many people it has. Using the measure of size, we can determine how big we need to make the security forces. It's the same as hat size. Before the guy runs out the door after ordering his qaraqual, you need to know how big his head is. We also have deadlines issued to us by Congress and the Afghanistan government, so we know approximately how fast we need to build the force. Unfortunately, there are further complications. People we hire and train to be soldiers and police officers don't always stay in their jobs. Far too frequently, people quit. In order to meet our growth targets by our deadlines, we have to know how many people we're losing, and combat these losses aggressively. This is called attrition. Think of it as your playful kitten pouncing on your needles and string while you're working and unraveling the last 20 minutes of progress.

All of these things are important, and they're also easy to measure, because we can measure them directly. I talked a little bit about direct versus indirect measures in my last entry.  If you want to know how long something is, you pull out a yard stick and you read off the numbers. We want to know how many people we have, so we count them. The measurement taken is in the same units that you are interested in.

For the above examples, we can send someone out to the Army and police units to count people (or have the units count their own personnel, which is what actually happens). If we count these people each month, and we count the people we're recruiting and training at the same time, then we can add the amount of new people to the amount of people we counted last month, and compare to the amount of people we counted this month. The difference between the two numbers (last month's total to this month's total) is our monthly attrition.  I talked about this quite a bit this post. This type of measurement is a calculated measurement.  You use direct measures of contributing factors and calculate the quantity you're interested in.  As a kid I was taught to find the height of a tall object by measuring myself, measuring my shadow, measuring the object's shadow, and use a proportion to calculate the object's height.  Same thing.  In our case here in Afghanistan, the accuracy of these measurements is unknown, and highly suspect, but we can collect something we think is in the ballpark.

Unfortunately, not all things we need to measure can be measured directly. For example: corruption. It is highly necessary to know how much corruption we are dealing with in the Army, police and Afghan government. Corruption directly affects the average citizen in Afghanistan. Corrupt police extort money from people at security checkpoints. Corrupt Army soldiers detain family members of people that won't pay them a bribe. Corrupt government officials divert money from building roads, schools, or power plants to their own pockets. Corruption was a way of life in the Taliban government present before 2001, and is still firmly entrenched in the country. In order to set up a professional, competent security force, corruption has to be minimized, if not eliminated. In order to eliminate it, we have to know how much of it exists, and where it exists.

If we can't do this, the people will not trust in the institutions we've built, and thus will not use them. Instead they'll turn to the Taliban. Imagine suing your rich neighbor over some dispute, and you had a choice of taking him to court where his golf buddy was the judge, or having your hillbilly cousin threaten/beat him with a baseball bat until he paid you. In America, the choice is obvious, as the latter option will end badly for both you and your cousin. In Afghanistan, the latter choice is a viable option, and in the presence of government corruption, probably the best choice. We have to make the government and the security forces into institutions the people can trust in order for them to be effective.

So, how do we measure corruption? In our knitting example, you can think of corruption as the ball of yarn after that darn cat got a hold of it. Tangled, knotted, easier just to cut it out with scissors than try and fix it. In that context it’s also easy to measure. In Afghanistan, not so much. It’s not like we can take a poll of all the government officials and Army commanders and ask them, "Hey, I was wondering, have you taken any bribes lately? I kinda need to know. How 'bout innocent bystanders, locked any up this week?" In the absence of direct measures, like a yardstick or a count of heads, we must rely on indirect measures.

So, what is an indirect measure? Well, it's a direct measure (no, I said that right, keep reading) on
something that is related to what we really want to measure. Usually you need to take several indirect
measurements in order to get the same picture a single direct measurement would give you, but there are exceptions.  For example, one indirect measure people use all the time is deciding when to fill up their gas tank based on the reading on their car's mileage counter. You know how many miles you can get on a full tank of gas, and when you start to get near that number, you know you need gas in your car. Measuring gas consumption with mileage is not very precise, and it can be wrong if you've been doing a lot of city driving, or you left your car running in the parking lot so your teenager could keep the air conditioning running while you shopped at Wal-Mart. But it does get you close.

For things that can't be measured directly, you must use indirect measures, there isn’t any other choice. In our knitting example, the quality of your hat isn't something you can measure with a stick. But, by directly measuring several other factors, such as the texture of the thread, the tightness and evenness of the stitches, the amount of warmth it provides, you can come up with a picture of the quality of the hat. In Afghanistan, corruption is one of those cases where we must use indirect measures.

So what kind of indirect measures do we use to get a handle on corruption? There are several. The ratio of money spent by the government on projects and such to the amount of money budgeted to the government is one. Money that can’t be accounted for has likely gone to lining someone’s pocket. Surveys of drivers leaving police checkpoints is another. One measure we've been actively trying to reduce is how many police officers get a change of assignment between training and deployment. A few months ago, it was very common for an officer in the police to bribe an official to get an assignment away from the fighting or nearer to his family. The number of re-assignments has decreased dramatically since that time, a direct result from a change in how we issue officer assignments. It used to be the assignments were given out in private, a slip of paper delivered to the person to let them know where they were going. The only people that knew where that officer was supposed to go was the officer and the personnel office. Now when they give out assignments, they hold a press conference in front of the media and read off each person’s name and where they’re being assigned. If their assignment changes after the fact, then all of their family and friends will know they were running away from the fight and shirking their responsibility. The public shame this would cause has been a sufficient deterrent to this practice.

Another area where we use indirect measures often is security. It’s not possible to measure directly how secure the country is. There are no units of security. Instead, we use several indirect measures. Polling data is a very import measure. Who better to tell us how secure the country is than the people we’re trying to provide security for? Measures of traffic is another, since people won't use the roads if they don't consider them safe. The amount of reports of insurgent activity that are made by Afghan citizens is an important one, as it gives an idea of how many people consider the government legitimate, and also shows how many people feel safe reporting against the Taliban.

My favorite indirect measure of security is food prices. Food has to be trucked to the store in order for people to buy it. The price of food reflects how much money it costs to transport the goods. If security in Afghanistan is good, then transporting goods won’t cost as much at the market, since the supplier doesn’t need to replace or repair vehicles damaged by attacks or IEDs, or pay drivers hazard pay, or provide security for the convoy. Better security means lower overhead for the supplier means cheaper prices for the people. Tracking prices on specific items over time can give us a picture of how security is changing in Afghanistan. It’s not an intuitive measure at all, but it works.

Measuring all of these things feeds into the biggest measure of all: success. Tracking these indicators over time is the only way we can determine how well we are performing our job in Afghanistan. The big challenge comes when we try and determine “what will success look like?” This is very much like trying to measure “quality” when knitting. Quality is a relative term, and without being able to make a side-by-side comparison, extremely subjective. We certainly don’t have a side-by-side comparison to make in Afghanistan, though our experience in Iraq points us in the right direction. Success, unfortunately, is very much a “I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it” type of thing. We have goals for each of the measures we track, but we don’t know for certain whether those goals are sufficient. At best, measuring success is an educated guessing game played by people much smarter and more important than I. But I try and do my part by informing these leaders on specific measures of interest as accurately as possible. Hopefully, with enough people and hard work, the picture of success will become much clearer in the coming months.

*****

The Invasion of the Generals in my life is almost over, but as with many things, the night is darkest before the dawn.  Today was my first briefing I was responsible for delivering at a general officer level, and I got double the fun, two two-star generals for the price of one.  That's right, I got to brief the deputy commander for police, plus his replacement that will be taking over full time in the next few weeks.  And they found my briefing so stimulating (read: there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed, and I was the one to tell them about them), that I now have a date to brief the three-star general in command of NTM-A/CSTC-A, LTG Caldwell.  I don't have a date and time yet, but it will be this week.  Oh goodie.  Ah well.  It's good exposure for me, and good experience.  Briefing my Senior Executive Service (SES) officer (the civilian equivalent of a general) back at TRAC won't be so imposing now, at least.  I just hope that he doesn't decide I need to go brief General Petraeus.  That's the only step left after General Caldwell.  Ugh.  I'll keep you posted.





And now I'm off to bed.  Nighty night.  Out here.