ABSTRACT
Hand-picked by the ISAF commander personally, the US colonel was transferred to Afghanistan from the Pentagon, where, with a PhD in industrial engineering, he had worked in the field of planning and control for many years. Clearly, he was an experienced person with a knack to sort out the various planning and control shortcomings. In particular, he would focus his attention on determining the effects of operations in Afghanistan. That is precisely what EBAO is all about: formulating objectives in the form of the envisaged effects to be attained by means of military missions and actions and in cooperation with non-military actors. Those effects – intended changes in the situation in the area of operations – may occur in any conceivable domain, physical, economic, managerial and psychological (e.g. the sense of security among the population). They may result both from purely military and not so purely military activities, such as civil-military cooperation, psychological operations or economic development. Thinking along the lines of effects of military missions has been a long military tradition, dating back to Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. This tradition flourished in the form of ‘target value analysis’ carried out prior to missions. Its principal thought is that bombs must be dropped and shells fired as ‘usefully’ and effectively as possible. Thinking in terms of effects may therefore be as old as the military itself (Egnell 2005). However, the concept seems to have gained importance primarily due to the increased deployment of air forces, which are inclined to look rationally at the effects brought about by bombardments and other applications of the air weapon. For the other armed services a ‘battle damage assessment’, ‘after action review’ or ‘debriefing’ is, often in hindsight, a traditional method of establishing the effects of military actions. In current military operations, as the one in Afghanistan, thinking takes place in terms of effects to be realized. However, as mentioned above, the intended effects are broader than what target value analysis prior to violent actions, or battle damage assessment, after action review or debriefing afterwards, intends to achieve. Present-day military missions stretch significantly further than traditional warfare where intention, aims and scope are concerned. Such a span is difficult to control and understand. Probably also for that reason EBAO has recently been ‘declared dead’ on the basis of experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, or looked upon as ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ (Egnell 2005). In other words, there is controversy about this subject, controversy as well as uncertainty. In this chapter we pay attention to both controversy and uncertainty. We will present an inventory of the state of affairs in this particular field of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan. In doing so we will specifically focus on the level of ISAF HQ in Kabul and the HQ of Regional Command South in Kandahar.
