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What happens when you have an administration that doesn’t release its benchmarks for tracking military escalation in a foreign country? What happens when congressional leaders won’t exercise oversight to hold the administration accountable, or compel them to explain to the rest of us what the hell is going on? They all become prey to Pentagon demands, widespread criticism, and waning public support. This is exactly what we’re seeing right now with the war in Afghanistan.

President Obama promised to establish benchmarks by which his plan for Afghanistan could be measured, but so far the administration has refused to issue any information regarding these metrics. As The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss reported yesterday, the lack of benchmarks led Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) to ridicule the administration while speaking at the neocon Foreign Policy Initiative summit. It also prompted Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations to slam Senators John Kerry and Carl Levin for failing to demand benchmarks from Obama after they led the metrics charge during President Bush’s surge in Iraq.

The reason the administration hasn’t released benchmarks, it seems, is that it hasn’t created them yet. According to McClatchy, “Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said the administration hasn’t yet developed benchmarks to measure progress, but she predicted high human and financial costs for the U.S. in the campaign against Islamic militants in the two countries.” Meanwhile, Gen. David Petraeus told Congress he wants 10,000 more troops in addition to the 21,000 Obama has already pledged. As Steve Hynd as Newshoggers said, this amounts to “metric-free mission creep.”

If we’ve learned anything from Rethink Afghanistan so far, it’s that more troops only exacerbate the Taliban insurgency, further destabilizing both Afghanistan and Pakistan while not solving the great humanitarian crisis. Afghanistan is, as Katrina vanden Heuvel says, a regional conflict that requires regional diplomacy. But until we compel Congress to demand benchmarks from the administration, the President and his military leaders will be able to escalate this war as they see fit.

In general, we need to see more vocal congressional opposition to the Obama administration’s ill-defined plans for war. We need more critics like Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold, and to his credit, John Kerry (who has expressed his concerns about Afghanistan in the past) in the Senate. And in the House, more people John Conyers, Jim McGovern, and the growing number who have signed the letter urging Obama to rethink the surge. By voicing their dissent on the war, these congressional leaders will sway other members like Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus, who is on the fence about escalation because he doesn’t want to see the Pentagon push Obama into sending more and more troops.

But more than that, we need to see this opposition channeled into substantive oversight hearings, so that the administration and military agencies make good on their benchmark promises.