BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN — One of the things I’ve been trying to document during my down time here in Afghanistan is just how closely you need to understand the local politics and contexts of different areas of the country to be able to effectively and sustainably “win” over areas (for a brief examination of how we’ve been learning that in Kapisa province, please see here, and here). Indeed, one of the challenges Afghanistan poses is that traditional military approaches—the sweep-and-clear, the cordon-and-search, and so on—actually don’t work in the medium and long term. Much like in Kapisa, in Afghanistan as a whole you can reliably get a temporary improvement that might even last a few months, but those methods don’t encompass policy sustainment, even if there is a new class of doctrine in place meant to provide such a thing.
In fact, the challenge the Army faces is remarkably similar to the so-called “Tool Box Approach” to policy analysis. As Carl Patton warned many years ago, “Some disciplines spec¬ify analytical routines in detail for many circumstances. This may encourage some people to begin work on a policy problem because it lends itself to their favorite method. Ideally the problem should dictate the methods, not vice versa.”
This is precisely the trap many policy approaches to Afghanistan are falling into. I was reminded of this while reading Spencer Ackerman’s report on the emergence of an influential progressive policy group called the National Security Network.
As for the strategy to achieve those goals, the National Security Network urges the U.S. to support an effort to help the Afghanistan government “satisfy baseline economic and security requirements of its citizens” in order to win and hold popular allegiance. It supports “vigorous diplomacy” with all of Afghanistan’s allies “from India and Iran to Russia and the other Central Asian states”; tying Pakistan policy to Afghanistan policy; and to supplement military force by cracking down on both government corruption and the “stranglehold of the opium trade” which helps fund the insurgency.
Perhaps most controversially, the document endorses a counterinsurgency strategy against the Taliban-led coalition seeking to overthrow the U.S.-allied government in Kabul. Noting that counterinsurgencies are historically won by those who “outgovern …rather than outgun” their opponents, the National Security Network urges military leaders to make decisions “with an eye to meeting Afghan security concerns,” bolstering Afghan security forces and “phasing out tactics that have increased civilian casualties with questionable payoffs.” A United Nations report released this week found that civilian casualties have risen significantly in Afghanistan in 2008 , and over 60 percent of civilian casualties linked to U.S. military activities have been caused by airstrikes.
This is really interesting. Ackerman seems to be saying that the NSN is advocating out-governing the Taliban by meeting Afghan security concerns. Let’s be generous and say this would also translate into the dread human security (pdf). That would then mean that meeting security concerns would also involve degrading corruption within the Afghan government, fixing the justice system, building up the police force, and addressing the horrible inefficiencies caused by Afghanistan’s over-centralized government.
We have tools to do some of these. The PMT/OMLT teams can and have had tremendous successes (as have the ANA equivalents, the ETTs). No one has yet come up with a reliable way to both wean Afghanistan off opium, address the serious funding and salary and cultural issues that drive corruption, minimize the extremist religious tendencies (and corruption) that distort the legal system, or revamping the entire structure of the government so it can be more responsive to its people and less responsive to Hamid Karzai’s remarkably fragile ego. This presents an enormous danger of falling into Patton’s trap: adjusting the situation to fit the approach, and not necessarily letting the situation determine the approach. It’s not quite platitudinous, but it’s awfully close.
It’s not hard to look at Afghanistan and see it’s macro-level problems: those have been obvious for many years. It is seeing how those tools can or even should be used at the local level that will ultimately determine success in Afghanistan. And that is what’s missing from even otherwise smart people discussing their grand plans for “fixing” the country, the counterinsurgency, and the war. Talking corruption, counternarcotics, and counterinsurgency is fine; getting into the details of what that actually means is something else all together. We do not have a comprehensive grasp of lessons learned from the last seven years of fighting the Taliban, and the many competing months-long policy reviews won’t really address failed initiatives to any real depth (if they did, they would argue against things like “tribal militias”). I suspect it is because, no matter how well-intentioned, we still have the same old tool boxes.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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{ 6 comments }
If you wanted to “outgovern …rather than outgun” would you not have to stay in Afghanistan for decades?
But if the option of staying there for decades is not in the tool box, what do you do? You let the methods (or available resources) dictate the problem. Back to square one?
I’m not certain it would require decades, at least to establish the rather minimal standards by which previous Afghan rulers ruled effectively. But it would require abandoning our pretense to a Western-style democracy, and it would also require being willing to accept more risk in the military.
ARghh…!
Mr. Foust, Sir
You write “we do not have a comprehensive grasp of lessons learned…”. We do, but we ignore them for many reasons, some more innocuous, some because of more vile and repugnant motives.
Not only do we have a grasp of lessons learned ( certain truths of COIN and COIN based theories have been taught to deploying units since at least March 2005 when I pre-mobed at Ft Hood) we have much institutional knowledge on these very subjects.
I no longer afford myself the luxury of optimism that the “next, new, good plan” brings.
I’ve seen us hop scotch from good plan to next good plan to review of lessons learned to next new good plan since my first tour here in 2005.
Mr. Vengeance, sir!
I have already lamented the inaccessibility of Lessons Learned. I work with the Army, and I have a hard time digging this stuff up — I know we know better, I’ve tried to catalogue some of that in this space. But it’s nowhere people can actually get at it, at least outside of the narrow confines of CompanyCommander (which I cannot access, since I am not a company commander).
I think you and I agree on this one.
Heck, Josh.
I know well the good works you do and in hindsight I believe it looks as if I took shot at you, that was not my intention.
My point was that I continually hear policy makers and senior leaders effuse the new plan, almost reveling in their genius and implicit stupidity of their predecessors; but where the rubber meets the road, the same institutional lethargy and the cultural entirety of an officers corps that has been born and bred in the newest conflagrations of the continuance and evolution of ticket punching, these “ideas” are just not done.
I well understand your frustrations of trying to catalog an in depth, usable level of “real” information. I would suggest that this information comes in vast amount from three areas( not exclusively these three), AARs/articles written by and for middle and senior leaders, Bloggs coming from people on the ground and word of mouth from one team to another during the R.I.P.
I also know that you know this, and I am in no way trying to imply I am telling you anything new, this is for GP.
The AArs and command written articles I find most suspect because of the very nature of the beast. The AAR, in theory is supposed to be an honest evaluation enabling growth; continue what we identified as good, identify the cause for what we did poorly or went wrong. What commander is going to issue an AAR that states “we had 3 days warning of the impending attack, we took all the measures we could, but found our requests of higher went unanswered” or “because none of us really wanted to walk up the extra 1,000 feet to our designated OP, we went ahead and attempted to land a bird in an unsecured LZ” or “we know the locals hate night raids. We like them so, ya know, get bent”.
Then there is the issue of the “deployment victories” pieces I see written by so many 2ICs about the great, sustainable success their unit had because of the brilliance of the units 1IC. The amount of these is monumental and well documented. The problem I found with the ones I have read talk to all the great success, the sustained success and all round great condition they left the AO in for the follow on unit. I then read data collected showing the up spike of the time the previous unit was still in country but “after” the content that the piece addressed. Then comes the inevitable upcoming article by the new 2IC , writing about his units struggles in an area that was a complete mess when they arrived, but pointing to all the great sustainable success their unit had because of the genius of the new units 1IC.
You have the blogger, guys like me. Well, what are ya gonna do. We rarely write in depth policy pieces, we bitch, we swear, we call the very institution that holds our lives in its hands bad names in run on sentences. We hold much insight, but it is just as susceptible to self serving verse as the next form. The thing you will get here is a tendency to yell loudly when something is screwed up, we also yell a bit when we think we have just done the greatest thing ever. I believe our writings at least as valid as some who counsel the President, thing is, that is not our job, we just wish those that counseled the president would reciprocate with a certain professional courtesy on that point.
Then you have the R.I.P brief. Uh, yeh. I’m not even going to touch that.
The right seat ride works wonders on my level, but you suffer at the hands of the quality of the troop before you.
I believe we have and had much of the answers to the problems facing us now, such as. Identifying the different approaches that work in areas where the physical make up of the people is vastly different from one are to the next, as you pointed to, and adjusting the approach as opposed to the lovable Army way of forcing square pegs into round holes with a sufficient amount of explosives and fire power. Identifying the differences between security for locals and the continued self destructive reliance on a force protection that relys on encasing every US soldier in a blast hardened steel and Kevlar cocoon. The delicate balancing act of passive acceptance of a certain level of corruption by the local officials and the attempt to foster enough trust, through fair dealings, with the local populace that is the key in any definition of win we might have. Etc.
Again, I think we have the knowledge, we just don’t use it. Documenting that is near impossible where the documenter would also be the accused by his own words.
Hey man, again we are on the same page.