Recommended websites, part III: CSIS and "winning" the war in Afghanistan

Cordesman has produced a steady and compelling stream of critiques of the situation in Afghanistan - very often from angles that are less frequently covered.   Of particular interest earlier this year was a report: "The Afghanistan-Pakistan War: Measuring Success (or Failure)", a strong attack on the poor way in which progress in Afghanistan is actually measured by governments, the military and NGOs alike, contributing to misleading assessments of what is needed to be done:

almost all official reporting has strikingly little meaningful content and even less credibility. Bad as most US official reporting may be, NATO/ISAF reporting is a substantive vacuum with little more than hollow factoid or spin. No European or other government in NATO/ISAF has issued meaningful status reporting or analysis on the course of the war, and their official web pages have virtually no useful content. UN and other aid reporting does not provide any meaningful analysis of how aid meets validated requirements, has no meaningful measures of effectiveness, and often does not provide any useful overview of how aid funds are actually allocated.

His most recent report is: "Winning the war in Afghanistan: the realities of 2009", which is even more forceful in expressing the idea that the conflict is being thrown away by the West in general and the US in particular.  He is very critical of the idea that "new strategies" will fix things:

We cannot win through false optimism, by exploring creative proposals that take years to implement, or by trying to substitute reorganisation for resources..."Winning" does not require new ideas as much as sorting out the flood of existing ideas to see what can actually be done in the field in 2009 and 2010.

His final words from this report are recommendations to the US government - they are refreshingly but surprisingly strong for an academic institute and make telling reading in terms of the likely direction of the conflict :

Start Telling All the Truth Now

•    Stop “bs-ing” the American people. Tell them what new draft US intelligence assessments say, provide the level of transparent and honest reporting that prepares them for the necessary level of sacrifice. Do not issue another vacuous Department of Defense report like that issued in the June. The December report should at least equal the level of similar reporting on Iraq.  Prepare the nation for a long war; build up credibility and trust.