No one could have possibly seen this coming:
In announcing a new strategy last month, President Obama promised “a dramatic increase in our civilian effort” in Afghanistan that would include “agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers” to augment the additional troops he is also sending.
But senior Pentagon and administration officials now acknowledge that many of those new positions would be filled by military personnel — in particular reservists, whose civilian jobs give them required expertise — and by contractors.
The shortfall offers more evidence that the government’s civilian departments have not received sufficient money to hire and train personnel ready to take up assignments in combat zones. Unlike the armed services, non-military agencies do not have clear rules to compel rank-and-file employees to accept hardship posts.
Let’s also add that training and retention sucks at a lot of civilian agencies as well. USAID has been gutted since the cutbacks, the State Department actually had a net loss of Foreign Service Officers over the last decade, and the USDA has never been able to incentivize its people well to go to conflict zones (though the USDA people I met in Afghanistan were quite impressive).
So here’s the rub: Obama wants civilians to appear in Afghanistan who can do what they need to do. They don’t exist. So, in typical fashion, they’ll be back-filled with barely-trained military types and everyone will hope for the best. This is not a knock on the soldiers—they don’t make these decisions. It is military culture itself, which assumes anyone can do any job if they “get smart quick” on it. That’s absolutely not true, and it’s why a lot of smart people in the Army get stuck doing mediocre jobs instead of what they’re good at. (In Kapisa, a Sergeant Major joked with me that if I ever “joined up,” as they say, I’d be working the motor pool.)
This comes right when a senior U.S. Army General declares that we are about to have “irreversible momentum in the east.” His evidence for this? “A pilot project creating a local community protection force has also begun in the east and economic development efforts are well established there.” He goes on to explain that there are enough ground troops to cover ground there.
Allow me to respectfully disagree. Ghazni remains about 80% devoid of regular presence, and Khost is so dangerous (indeed, it gets more dangerous by the year) that the Army can’t actually “hold” territory, it just makes occasional raids and force patrols. Kunar and Nuristan remain a bloody mess, and even my beloved Kapisa is not guaranteed a bright future.
To summarize: the military is expanding its reach (many civilians would say “usurpation,” though I think that mischaracterizes it a bit) into civilian duties while proclaiming premature victory in areas it can barely control. This is a recipe for disaster. I don’t get it—do any of you?
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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Pentagon does not like babysitting civilians. So the tendency is to try do things themselves, e.g. PRTs, no matter how unsuccessfully.
There is also the problem of extra costs when it comes to civilian salaries in war zones. A deployed contract interpreter makes a $235K starting salary these days. Not to mention the cost of logistics involved in sustaining a civilian in a war zone.
The alternative option is international NGOs, that are great in administrative tasks and report writing about how many goats they vaccinated the previous year… ugh!
Then there is also successful Afghan native-run international development organizations such as the Bayat Foundation, with a great record, but the political implications can be awful. Remember FOX News investigative reporting and headlines about ACORN?!
‘Usurpation’ wouldn’t be the exact word I’d use, but near enough.
As for ‘NGOs…goats… ugh!’ well I’m intrigued. Care to explain?
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 04/23/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
“As for ‘NGOs…goats… ugh!’ well I’m intrigued. Care to explain?”
What I mean by that is, international NGOs have these projects that miss the mark for what is really crucial for the time being. While people are suffering from insecurity, hunger and cold, an NGO may decide to vaccinate the goats against foot and mouth in a village.
This is tremendously annoying to me, as someone who has been trying to get a job in Afghanistan and have found none available, through USAID or otherwise, for an entry-level person. But what the hey! Send a 23 year old military guy with no academic of practical background in development instead. At least he won’t be some wimpy civilian, or, worse, yet, some wimpy civilian woman.
This is tremendously annoying to me, as someone who has been trying to get a job in Afghanistan and have found none available, through USAID or otherwise, for an entry-level person. But what the hey! Send a 23 year old military guy with no academic or practical background in development instead. At least he won’t be some wimpy civilian, or, worse, yet, some wimpy civilian woman.
I think the bigger problem is the idea that you can “parachute” people into a foreign country and they’re going to be effective with only a minimal understanding of local communities.
In Kyrgyzstan, the military is spending $470,000 to renovate a village school. This is an eye-popping amount for that country, and I’m pretty certain some very lucky (possibly crooked) contractor is making money hand over fist on this. But, leaving the ridiculous price tag aside, it drives me crazy that people think building every village a school is always a good thing.
I worked at a village school that had once been the main school for 3 villages. At some point in the past, the school bus broke down and couldn’t be replaced, so the children in the other 2 villages had to walk or ride horses to school. (It took me about an hour or hour and a half to walk to the next village). With help from international donors, the other 2 villages built small schools in their villages. The old school, that used to have 1000 students, now only had 450, but was stuck trying to heat a big half-empty building. The school used to have indoor toilets and hot/cold running water, but couldn’t afford the maintenance work so the indoor plumbing fell into disrepair and they built an outhouse. In addition, hiring teachers became more of a problem because of the reduced teaching loads that were a result of the drop in the student population. Unlike in the US, primary school teachers there are usually single-subject teachers. Which means small village schools have a difficult time cobbling together enough teaching hours in certain subjects to make it worthwhile for a teacher to work there. It would have made more sense to fund a school bus and concentrate the limited funds the government allocates for maintenance and winter heating on one school instead of spreading it thin between 3 schools. But, building village schools is such a heart-tugger. Who cares about the unintended consequences?
As a side note, I find it interesting that the military reservist in charge of this project is “deployed to Manas Air Base until the project is completed sometime this fall”. I thought the base was closing this summer. Maybe it’s not actually closing?
You start out by saying that civilian jobs will be backfilled by military personnel, “in particular reservists, whose CIVILIAN jobs give them the required expertise” and then a couple of paragraphs later you say civilian agencies cant fill these new requuirements so the positions will be backfilled by “barely-trained military types” Which is it?
I submit to you that there is a multitude of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines here that not only have the essential military skills for security, but in addition hold advanced degrees and a wealth of experience in their civilian jobs. We have professional and certified engineers, doctors, lawyers, managers, agriculture specialists, cops…..you name it.
Sure there are challenges but there is progress, especially now that the focus is shifting from Iraq. In just three months there’s been incredible change in Kapisa and other areas. Yes, in some things we need to “get smart quick” because there is no-one else and not everyone is functioning in their area of expertise, but the glass is not half-empty; it is half full! Change and progress is happening.
It will be tough and involve blood, sweat and tears however, as a new young nation in the 1700s, the U.S. struggled in similar ways for a much longer period. It is easy to see the problems, but it is better to focus on problem solving…and sometimes you need to go with the 60% solution, lest nothing get accomplished at all
I’m currently a DoD civilian deployed in Afghanistan. I can’t speak for the senior leadership, but it has been my personal experience that yes, the military hates “babysitting” civilians. I overheard a colonel the other day complain loudly about the civilians higher headquarters was planning on sending him.
This attitude is unfortunate, for at least two reasons: first, that we can’t find enough experienced civilian experts who are willing to live in the spartan and yes, somewhat dangerous conditions for six months, a year, or longer; and second, that the US Government dismisses younger, eager, and energetic civilians who *are* willing to deploy — who perhaps might not need so much babysitting — as inexperienced.
The experience issue is a hard one to justify, in my opinion. Each conflict and each region is unique enough that even pulling in people who previously served Iraq or Bosnia is no sure solution. Furthermore, the soldiers they *do* assign to this conflict, even the officers and senior enlisted (that is, not your average 20 year old with a rifle and an attitude), are more inclined to see the entire situation from a very skewed perspective. They have spent their careers focusing on defeating a constantly hostile abstract ‘enemy’ and are largely incapable of differentiating between imagined bogeymen and real, probable threats (which incidentally leads to the garrison mindset already recognized as counterproductive). In short, their 20+ years of training has given them the *wrong* sort of experience for dealing with counterinsurgency.
If the civilian agencies are able to get the highly experienced personnel to come here, that would be ideal. If they are not — which would appear to be the case — then running to the military for help is only going to encourage doing it the wrong way even more. These civilian agencies have been gutted over the last decade or so, and so the solution might be to *start hiring*. This won’t be the last conflict in a far away dusty impoverished place, so perhaps something like a civilian expeditionary corps might be in order, with young, enthusiastic, culturally aware employees, rather than military personnel who are just here because they have to be.
As a post script, and a bit of rationale behind my statements: young people are cheaper as far as payroll is concerned and have less at stake (e.g., families and retirement accounts) when they need to make the decision to deploy.