Counting Insurgents

Today's annoying question of the day (actually the past couple of days) comes from a random analyst out of RC-West (Regional Command West). The question was, "What percentage of the population of Farah Province are insurgents?"

I should back up a bit. Shortly before my arrival to IJC there was a governance analyst who developed a mathematical formula that (in theory) could determine the number of insurgents in Afghanistan. On his own he determined that knowing the exact number of insurgents would be useful for some reason and attempted to push his project off on my section. He argued that each RC should let us know how many insurgents they had. If they couldn't provide the answer, then the section NCO needed to travel around Afghanistan and determine the number. Yes, count insurgents.

Asking the Regional Commands seemed like the best answer instead of a traveling insurgent counting mission. This led to some humorous responses of answering the RFI (request for information) in ways that didn't actually answer the RFI. RC-North asked for a definition of what an insurgent is (gotta love the Germans). RC-East first claimed 6,000 insurgents and then 2 weeks later claimed 27,000 insurgents. When asked about this discrepancy RC-E replied that yes, the second number did seem a bit high, so they just split their two answers and claimed 18,000 insurgents.

The project quickly died after that and by the time I arrived insurgent counting was pretty much a running joke.

RC-N's response is probably the most correct. Who should be counted? The individual emplacing an IED because he has been threatened by the Taliban? The part timer who only conducts insurgent attacks when he needs money? Or the die-hard, ideological fueled individual? There are so many factors at play that the number of insurgents can and will fluctuate, often day to day.

So this analyst at RC-W apparently saw some product that the Governance Section created months ago and called up one of the poor analysts here. She tried to explain that the product was outdated and no longer used but this RC-W individual just wouldn't quit and so the inquiry got passed on to my section. My NCO is sitting on his response so that he can come up with a politically correct way of telling the RC-W analyst to "get his head out of his ass."

It doesn't matter how many insurgents there are. Like I said, it fluctuates. Asking for an insurgent count is exactly like the problem in Vietnam of body count. It's an irrelevant statistic and isn't really a metric of anything. If you kill 10 insurgents, that only means that the insurgents left will just work a bit harder until they replace those 10 guys they lost...in like a day or two.

As our Marine 2-star general here said:

"We're never going to defeat an insurgency through attrition."