“Terrorism in Context in Today’s World” with Ambassador Edward Marks, American Career Diplomat and Consultant.

Audience 2:    Ambassador, thanks for your comments and your time.  My name is A.C Wreath, I’m with the US Air Force going over to do some diplomatic service in Turkey.  Following on to the comments you just made of how do you combat or manage the terrorism.  What are your thoughts on measuring success, towards that end?  I know it’s something that’s been debated quite a bit by the academic world.

Ed Marks:    My short answer is you can’t.  And if you are from the military, you then are living under the – it goes with the professional deformation, it goes with one of the professional deformation, the professional military is a passion for metrics.  You want to measure something all the time.  It’s a desirable objective and skill but some things can’t be measured in many meaningful way and I’m not sure how we measure success or how well were dealing with terrorism because success is measured – success means things don’t happen.  And how do you know how many things don’t happen because our programs had been a success.  We know lots of it has happened, we don’t know how much and there’s no way to measure it.  All you can measure is the thing that happened and that skews your observation.  There have been ten or 100 incidents last year.  Is it better or worse than what?  Because how many would there been if you hadn’t been successful?  And by being successful it’s not just us.  Remember other governments had this big – they have their skill in this game as much as we do.  What we must do is, every government got its concern in dealing with this.  So we don’t know all the things that didn’t happen because of things that we do.  There’s no way to measure that.  So the problem with measuring in metrics is you measure the things you can count and you don’t measure the things that you can’t count by definition.  So you can count how many incidents there were last year but you can’t count how many didn’t happen because of defective programs.  That’s why it’s dangerous to measure it, I think pursuit of that objective means you spend your wheels and waste a lot of time and probably draw wrong conclusions.  For instance if you go from a 100 incidents to 110 incidents, we’ve had a 10% increase were losing.  Not necessarily, is that a significant variation?  For all we know there were 1500 incidents planned and we stop more than a year before.  We don’t know that, so metrics and measuring are I’m not sure useful in this situation with this problem.