John Nagl, one of the COIN gurus now working at the Center for a New American Security, was interviewed on how he might win in Afghanistan:
One has to bear in mind that Afghanistan has never in its history had a strong central control of the country. It has never had the infrastructure that is required to reach out from Kabul into the whole country. The challenge in Afghanistan is extraordinary. When the Romans faced an insurgency in a distant province the first thing they did was build a road. And a key part of our counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is building roads so the government is able to reach the people. Then it is important to defeat corruption and create a government that is responsive to the needs of the people. The opium problem finances the insurgency and incites corruption from government agents. The road answer also helps that: We can’t convince farmers to grow wheat rather than opium unless they can ship the wheat to the market. In that terrain if you have to feed a family you can ship a whole lot more opium out on the back of a mule than you can wheat.
Obviously, I think this is a bit simple. But instead of droning on about the uniqueness of Afghanistan, the inappropriateness of replicating the Imperial Roman experience (they were incredibly violent in a way we simply will not be), or the assumption that opium drives the insurgency instead of the other way around, I’ll quote two papers that discuss these concepts to greater accuracy and detail.
The first is José Oberson, who explains the necessity of co-opting social fracture into a governance model:
Whether the imperfect success of religious politics the failure of Pashtun national politics are due to a balanced product of either their conceptual weakness or strength, respectively, is an open question. But the contribution of disjointing forces that result in an impression of deep-seated propensity for political and societal fragmentation may even account more for political events than other factors…
In Afghanistan, [a leader overcoming person-based politics by using religion] has been successfully activated in order to overcome tribal constraints and kin-based political economy with considerable success in the beginning, as waging jihads against non-Muslim invaders or the initial triumph of the Taliban movement have shown. Another historical example is a form of internal colonialism imposed on non-Pashtun communities gives evidence for this strategy.
Oberson, however, makes sure to caution that even the religious example is at best spotty and not-permanent. For lack of a better term, Afghanistan’s politics are more or less permanently personal, and creating systemic or material solutions to personal problems will not be very effective. The second perspective comes from Olivier Roy:
Th[e] Afghan identity is based on a common political culture which could be summarized as follows. ‘Real’ political life is played out at the local level and primary loyalty lies with a ‘solidarity group’, whatever its sociological basis…
What these local and ethnic networks and groups need is a distant but benevolent and legitimate state, regarded as a broker or an ally helping to establish a favourable local balance of power and influence. They also expect the state to deal with general services, education, health, transportation etc. The state is seen as a means of enhancing local status and power, and must therefore be effective, without being disruptive – and a state that bases itself on ideology, whether Communism, Islamic radicalism or ethnicity is a disruptive state.
This Afghan political culture has of course been shaken by over 20 years of war. In 1978 the new communist state was perceived as an enemy of the people, based on an alien ideology and working for an alien country. The revolt therefore took on an anti-state dimension.
By this logic, building roads can be good, but only if in doing so the government remains non-confrontational and justice-driven. At the moment, that is the opposite of current efforts to “reform” the Afghan government. So it seems, if Nagl keeps his theorizing on a deliberatley vague and “fuzzy” level, that he can avoid being called out for not really understanding many of the underlying social dynamics that have led both to political fracture and to the insurgency in Afghanistan.
That’s fine as far as it goes—standard think tanky stuff. But what happens when people on the ground get into the practitioner phase? How does one take general platitudes about “connecting people to their government” and force it on a societ that never was? Those finer points are where a lot of the guys with experience in Iraq will simply fall flat on their faces, and unfortunately given the relative importance of Afghanistan in DoD ciricles until, say, the other month… well, the challenge is great.
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the inappropriateness of replicating the Imperial Roman experience (they were incredibly violent in a way we simply will not be),
Joshua, you are really amusing.
Google lancet study Iraq
What, in your mind did the Romans do, that wasn’t challenged at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as many other places later on?
For starters, I really doubt we’d replicate anything on the scale of Dresden of Hiroshima today. Similarly, rounding up all the elders of a village and summarily executing them, abducting their women, and conscripting their young men into the Army wouldn’t really cut it either. Sure we kill people here and there in mis-timed air strikes, but are you really arguing that tactically we’re little better than the Romans?
I hope not.
It’s also worth noting that the Lancet Study had numerous methodological and analytical problems.
The Roman model, if I understood it correctly, was predicated on doing all your evil deeds on one day so that the conquered natives would be scared shitless for a long time thereafter. So, the death toll for a few days would be very high…but not so over the long term.
I think US policy is the opposite. We do our evil deeds, in a manner of speaking, at least in Iraq and Afghanistan, in small doses, largely due to neglect, indifference, and personal prejudices of the people on the ground rather than systematic policy by the top leadership. Death toll is comparatively small, day by day, but over time it builds up–to the point perhaps well beyond the Romans. Regardless of the problems with the Lancet study (and people just seemed to have trouble understanding the notion of “access deaths” rather than people actually being shot or blow up), there is no question that lots of people have been dying. Just that they weren’t being killed in large “batches,” so to speak.
That, actually, might be a problem from the “Roman” perspective: 1,000 people being massacred in a single day may shock and dismay the home folks. It will also shock and intimidate potential local enemies for 1,000 days. Killing 20 people a day or 1000 days will not shock, dismay, or intimidate anyone, despite 20 times the death toll–although it will gain plenty of hatred for the conquerors. Unfortunately for the conqueror, it doesn’t shock the opponents into quiescence either.
Roy’s characterization is elegant, concise and dead-on accurate. However it and similar descriptions of Afghanistan’s center-periphery relations have absolutely no traction with U.S. and Coalition practitioners and planners.
Tom Johnson and Chris Mason’s latest piece in the October 2008 Atlantic, titled “All Counterinsurgency Is Local,” sets a new standard for ignorance and insipid analysis. That their dreck continues to be taken as serious and informed by the intelligentsia and the Coalition suggests how little has been learned in the last eight years about Afghanistan.
Wow, I’m glad Johnson is here to tell me that each district in Afghanistan has a single clan or tribe. Ugh. Good catch.
And I’m beat why he keeps getting published. Though I’ll also note it is interesting he never gets published in Afghan-centric publications.
My apologies for derailing the topic:
Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not occur out of a vacuum. The atomic attacks were used against a foe that in the course of a total war, itself used biological and chemical warfare, killed 20 million people, and was actually planning a radiological attack against the West Coast of the US. One can dispute the morality of atomic weapons, but they were, in a sense, part of the logic of the times.
Obviously in Afghanistan, the situation is utterly different.
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Fascinating. One of the things that confuse me about the whole “COIN paradigm” as presented by Nagl etc. is that while on the one hand it is presented as thinking outside the box, they still keep on firmly thinking inside the box. The box being in this instance US military as the only tool available. If we accept the fact that what is needed for Afghanistan is a distant and benevolent state, then obviously one of the first parameters that must be looked on is that of the state of War. But, since the US is in a fighting war with the taliban, this perimeter will not change unless the US somehow manages to shift the job of rebuilding behind the frontlines to some other force, *wich is what the UN was made for*.
My two cents: Beefing up the UN on a truly massive, NASAeffort-like scale would be able to distribute serious and “neutral” aid, especially if done by non-western folks. Hire in 600 000 chinese contract workers, and supply them with Pakistani Pashtun interpreters, declare a offensive ceasefire and send out the word to all Afghans that now some serious benefits are coming their way. Follow this up with real money. It is the only way out of this mess I can see.
Beefing up UN on a massive scale would be doable only if money grows on trees.
If anybody puts up the money, they would figure that they own at least a part of the enterprise–and they are probably right, since, without their money, the enterprise is toast anyways. They will try to twist the distribution of aid around, to advance their agenda. Or, in other words, you get stuck further and further into the morass. The fundamental paradox, in other words, seems to be that even if “letting go,” at least of the attempt to control the nitty gritty of the operation, is the only way to wrap up the mess, nobody really wants to give up having some control over the outcome. Or, in other words, I don’t see a good way out.
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