So this morning, thanks to iPhone shuffle, I found myself confronted with a need to reconsider my longstanding antipathy to Metric’s Grow Up And Blow Away album. Then I come back from lunch and Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy obtains and publishes the Afghanistan/Pakistan metrics from the Obama administration, demonstrating my love for metrics is entirely unrequited. A morning spent cajoling Senate offices for the metrics: lost. Josh Rogin is a gangster. 

I wrote up this metric analysis. 

Most of these look unfamiliar to the benchmarks established for Iraq in 2007, which included such granular measurements as electricity kilowatt-hours and sectarian-caused deaths and so forth. That’s what happens when Congress lets the administration write its own benchmarks instead of writing them for it. One pledge that the metric document makes is that by “March 30, 2010 and on regular intervals thereafter” — whatever that means — the Obama administration will provide assessments to Congress of how it’s doing, as well as a “Red Team” assessment to check the self-applied grade, conducted by a team led from the National Intelligence Council.

There’s a lot more, so click through, won’t you? At least as a consolation prize for me?