WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- The U.S. administration, responding to growing skepticism over Afghanistan, is developing a set of detailed war progress benchmarks, a White House source says.
With a Sept. 24 congressional deadline looming to provide evidence of progress against Taliban militants as a condition for further war funding, the Obama administration is developing a list of benchmarks based on such things as the number of newly trained Afghan recruits and Pakistani counterinsurgency missions, Sunday's Washington Post quoted an unnamed White House official as saying.
The official said the aim of the Strategic Implementation Plan to is pre-empt Congress from developing its own set of war metrics and benchmarks, supplying its own "indicators" of progress under nine broad "objectives" to be measured quarterly.
The Post reported that there will be about 50 such indicators, some of which will apply to U.S. actions, but most of which will be focused on Afghan and Pakistani counterinsurgency efforts.
"Ideally, it's a combination of objective and subjective" measurements, the source said. "Obviously, not everything is 100 percent quantifiable, and we don't want to just get sold on the number. If you train 100 troops, that doesn't necessarily tell you how effective they are."
