For the past few months, Congress has been pressing the Obama administration to provide it with “metrics” to judge the success of U.S. policies for countering the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The administration has been struggling for months to comprise these measures of effectiveness since, among other considerations, the figures could affect its ability to sustain support in Congress for its Afghan-Pak strategy. In the interim, analysts must rely on the publicly available indexes compiled by the Brookings Institution and other organizations. Although not without problems, these figures do provide some interesting insights into the wars.

BACKGROUND: In presenting his administration’s new integrated strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan in late March, President Barack Obama reassured skeptics that “we will not blindly stay the course. Instead, we will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable.” Some members of Congress and other observers hope that quantitative measures might provide an objective set of criteria for helping assess the course of these wars and, ideally, the effectiveness of U.S. policies towards them.

Yet, military metrics can be dangerous. By encouraging progress in one dimension, they lead actors to neglect others. By focusing on that which can be measured, they can neglect what is important. A preoccupation with metrics such as “body counts” and other misleading and abused quantitative measures contributed to the American defeat in Vietnam by encouraging the U.S. military to kill insurgents rather than protect the population. Above all, metrics of war are especially difficult to measure in the case of insurgencies, where subjective factors can easily prove more important than seemingly objective hard data.

The best nongovernmental source of metrics for the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and arguably Iraq are currently compiled by a team at the Brookings Institution. Their approach helps guard against some of the dangers discussed previously by employing a broad range of metrics rather than presuming that a few key quantitative statistics are all-important. The Brookings indexes provide historical and current statistical data for three broad categories encompassing security, economics, and politics (which includes measures of public opinion). Many social scientists believe these variables affect the level of organized violence in a country, particularly the success or failure of an insurgency, a problem confronting all three of the indexed countries. The quantitative indicators range from trends in military casualties and crime to employment rates to opinion surveys.

The three indexes are not uniform. The absence of large U.S. military presence in Pakistan means that, whereas the Afghan and Iraq indexes are based primarily on data provided by the governments of the countries under review as well as official U.S. and coalition sources, the Pakistan index derives mostly from information supplied by official Pakistani statistics as well as those provided by the NGO community and the media. In addition, the Pakistani government, though troubled, has never experienced the trauma of forced regime change and foreign military occupation. Since they are not currently battling an insurgency while simultaneously trying to rebuild a national bureaucracy, Pakistani authorities presumably have greater institutional capacity than their Afghan counterparts. For this reason, while the Iraq Index focuses mostly on the level of violence, and the Afghanistan Index on the capacity and viability of the central government, Brookings’ Pakistan Index provides mostly information about socioeconomic trends in the country as well as the public’s attitude towards war-related issues.

The Brookings team attributes great importance to the results of public opinion polls since they allow researchers to see how the data they compile about broader socioeconomic trends actually affects public perceptions. Guerilla wars are fought primarily for influencing the political allegiance of the local population rather than outright military defeat of the opponent. They are essentially wars of perception. The presumption is that Afghans and Pakistanis will only stop joining or supporting insurgencies if their governments are seen as meeting—or trying to meet—their needs and concerns.

IMPLICATIONS: Notwithstanding these caveats, what do the indexes tell us about the course of the insurgencies? The socioeconomic indicators for Afghanistan and Pakistan remain low. In particular, Afghanistan still falls near the bottom end of most economic measures. Although some progress has occurred in aggregate growth indicators as well as the availability of health care, the overwhelming majority of Afghans live in poverty with minimum access to essential public services.

Levels of violence have also increased in both countries. The security situation in Afghanistan now appears worse than at any time since 2001. Casualties among Afghan civilians, the Afghan government, and coalition forces are at record levels. Opium production may have peaked, but at extraordinarily high levels. In Pakistan, the data shows that the number of suicide attacks has surged in recent years. A worrisome development is that about 40 percent of these attacks have occurred outside the Pakistani Taliban strongholds of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), including in the Pakistani heartland of the Punjab.

The public opinion results for Afghanistan and Pakistan are also not good. Support among the Afghan people for their government and its foreign military allies are plummeting across a range of important indicators. Ratings of the United States and the U.S. military have undergone a marked deterioration. One reason for the decrease is that American and other foreign troops are seen as responsible for excessive civilian casualties. Although NATO and other sources now attribute most civilian casualties to the Taliban, Afghans seem to hold the allies to a higher standard.

The recent increase in U.S. forces — combined with guidance from the new U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, stressing the need to avoid civilian casualties even at the risk of allowing Taliban fighters to escape without harm — should over time further reduce the number of Afghan civilian casualties due to coalition action by reducing the need for air strikes and yielding more precise operational intelligence.

The main solace the coalition can find in these numbers is that the Taliban remain very broadly unpopular in Afghanistan. Surveys of Pakistanis indicate a slight improvement in their perception of safety and economic well-being. The results also show very high levels of hostility toward the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda as well as Pakistani suicide bombers. Yet, the polls still record considerable aversion among Pakistanis towards the U.S. government and its policies. The figures also show little support for the current Pakistani government, which is closely allied with the United States.

The missiles fired by CIA-operated unmanned vehicles into Pakistan remain a source of acute public hostility. Nonetheless, the Obama administration looks set to continue these operations because they are widely considered successful within the U.S. intelligence community. Most recently, these drone strikes have assisted the Pakistani military during the recent Swat Valley campaign by killing Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in early August. As in Afghanistan, aversion to the United States does not necessarily translate into support for the extremists. Having recently seen the excesses committed by the Pakistani Taliban in Swat, Pakistani respondents overwhelmingly tell pollsters that they dislike the Taliban, their suicide attacks, and their extremist tactics, and support the government’s offensive against them.

Another hopeful indicator is that, broken down by province, the results for Pakistan show a strong correlation between measures of instability and socioeconomic indicators relating to literacy, employment, education, health care and other variables. The Pakistani government has undertaken a major development program since 2006 to improve these quality-of-life indicators in those regions of Pakistan experiencing the most instability, namely Baluchistan, the NWFP, and especially the FATA. If the existing correlation continues to hold, then future improvements in socioeconomic metrics resulting from these initiatives should result in less violence in these perennially troubled regions.

CONCLUSIONS: Such diverging indicators naturally lead observers to wonder whether the glass is half empty or half full in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The problems with using these metrics to assess such a complex social phenomenon as war is that one does not know which of these many measurements provide the best indicator of an evolving situation. As they now stand, pundits and policy makers can and will cite them as evidence that the Afghan and Pakistani government is winning the war, losing it, or fighting it to a stalemate.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Richard Weitz is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at Hudson Institute. He is the author, among other works, of Kazakhstan and the New International Politics of Eurasia (Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, 2008).