Abu Muqawama: Post
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Triage : Blue Steel :: Leverage : Magnum
A report in the Associated Press today mentioned a new paper that I have been working on for the past few months:
The war effort in Afghanistan suffers from a lack of attention to the volatile politics of the country, according to a former adviser to the top U.S. general there.
"The United States and its allies have not thought rigorously enough about how U.S. and allied interests might not align with those of the Afghan government," said a report from Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security. Exum had been an adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
"Good counterinsurgency tactics and operations cannot, in and of themselves, win a campaign," according to the report being released Thursday.
Last fall, I sat down with LTG (Ret.) David Barno and asked him what he thought was missing from our research on Afghanistan. He said that while we had done a good job talking about counterinsurgency at the tactical and operational levels, we had not tackled counterinsurgency at the strategic and political levels. He also said that we had failed to explain the war in Afghanistan in terms of our long-term regional interests. In response, I decided to tackle the former for this year's spring paper on Afghanistan, and LTG Barno -- who started work at CNAS this week -- will begin a project on the latter for 2011.
As a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and as a specialist in low-intensity conflict, it's only natural that I have interest in Afghanistan. But in this paper, I try to address a larger problem:
[As] Stephen Biddle noted almost immediately following [the publication of FM 3-24], much about the doctrine is politically naïve. When the United States wages counterinsurgency campaigns, it almost always does so as a third party acting on behalf of a host nation. And implicit in the manual’s assumptions is the idea that U.S. interests will be aligned with those of the host nation.
They almost never are, though.
I argue that at the same time in which you devise military strategies to defeat the enemy, you have to also devise consensual or coercive strategies to affect the political behavior of the host nation. I argue the United States is really, really bad at doing this -- whether you're talking about counterinsurgency or security force assistance, and whether you're in Afghanistan or Algeria.
Anyway, I think the readers of this blog will really enjoy this report, and you should all download it here (.pdf).
I, meanwhile, am still in the Gulf (Dubai, to be exact, and leaving for Saudi Arabia tomorrow) but should be back in Washington, DC in time for Karzai's visit.
We wanna see a pic of you on
We wanna see a pic of you on the cover, Ex. We don't want Karzai and Obama. We want to see you in your Ranger t-shirt, wearing Fick's UDT/Dive shorts.
http://thestory.org/archive/t
http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_1030_Javorn_Drummond.mp3/view (will 1Lt. John Rue come home like this? why or why not? what's the story, AM?)
Yeah!!! We want Ex in Fick's
Yeah!!! We want Ex in Fick's Marine Dive shorts!!! It's raining men, hallelujah!!!
You're giving me a young
You're giving me a young Thomas Magnum visual there Finn... Wait, that's got me thinking....
Is there an Exum, Waterfalls, Sandwich - Centerfold in our future?
Ex, looks like this guy has
Ex, looks like this guy has been busy in your neck of the woods: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0504/Surfing-the-Blue-Li...
Very interesting thought.
Very interesting thought. What countries ARE good at influencing host nation strategic and politcal behavior? About the only one that comes to mind is possibly Australia...
You double posted.
You double posted.
They've been really, really
They've been really, really bad at this since at least Vietnam. DC and our FP establishment are really bad at understanding others motives. You can make a really strong argument that most of DC doesn't really understand the motives of a large part of America - specifically outside DC, government and politics, Wall Street, Academia and the media/entertainment complex. It's that unknown country they have on maps as "Here be Dragons. And Tea Partiers."
Maybe it's because they're all up there way too long. Obey held his seat for 40 some years?
On a bipartisan basis, throw the establishment out in November.
BTW can you upgrade either your servers or the bandwidth on the WAN link? Now even you have posted twice :-D
Deadly Paradigms by Schaefer
Deadly Paradigms by Schaefer is a great book on this topic...sadly, no one seems to ever talk about it...
From page 20: ... effective
From page 20:
... effective aid and development projects aimed at stabilization can reduce levels of violence.⁴⁰ In order for those activities to succeed, though, effective local governance is a prerequisite.
1. What historical evidence is there to suggest that aid and development projects can or may reduce levels of violence?
2. My impression is that the passage assumes there is not now effective local governance at the community level. Suppose a remote rural community prefers to be governed by Pashtunwali. Would that be considered inadequate governance? Would it be considered a lack of governance? If the answer is yes to either, why?
Visitor, this paper is a
Visitor, this paper is a good one for identifying which aid projects work and do not work to provide a stability effect in COIN environments: http://econ.ucsd.edu/~elib/ham.pdfI'll withhold detailed
I'll withhold detailed comment on Exum's paper until I've read it. I'll be especially interested to see if he deals with the problem of starting counterinsurgency, trying to ascertain host country government goals and motives, etc. several years into a military commitment, as the United States has done in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
liked the report, ex. much
liked the report, ex. much better than that thing on yemen. by the way--did you model that piece off ginny hill's 2008 "fear of failure" report? they both even had little boxes on the water crisis.
Quick everyone, short P&G 15
Quick everyone, short P&G 15 Quadrillion (15,000,000,000,000) shares...
Oh sorry, * my idiot henchmen* are on the wrong screen again...Curses!!
And tell Javron to get a haircut, Banga....
"you have to also devise
"you have to also devise consensual or coercive strategies to affect the political behavior of the host nation. I argue the United States is really, really bad at doing this -- " Yep, this sounds very true to me. Not only the US, but any player that feels it has physical and economic strength on its side. I would add that states that attempt to court the United States are better at figuring out the foreign policy head honchos in Washington want than those same honchos are at figuring out what the rulers of said countries want. But I'd also go a bit further, as well as figuring out what the rulers of a host nation are after, it's also vital to explore the needs, desires, hopes and frustrations of the country's population. After all, if there was no discrepancy between the outlook of the rulers and the population, there probably wouldn't be an insurgency in the first place.There is no evidence that
There is no evidence that improved services reduces insurgency. It's a hope that "build" will buy the loyalty of the population without any evidence that the main driver of the resistance- hate of a foreign army propping up a puppet regime will be reduce the insurgency enough before the patience and resources of the occupier run out.
In Afghanistan development is still being provided by a foreign occupier and no amount of irrigation ditches or asphalt will change that. NATO is spending much more on development now than in 2005 in Afghanistan and violence is about double this year than last which was up 40% over 2008 and so on. Not only is there no positive link between development and reducing violence but as cash flows in for projects the opportunity for corruption increases and the insurgents get increased resources from wages, extortion and theft.
Oh, AM? The use of the word
Oh, AM? The use of the word "host" in your paper; the connotations conjured cause me consternation.
A parasite is what partners with a host in the science world I live in.
So, to me, "host" is an unfortunate choice of words to describe the governments we set out to "rescue", "help", "prop up" (hard to find the right word for what we are trying to do with the COIN thing) when that government is faced with an insurgency. If we were not invited to Afghanistan can that government be accurately described as a "host"? Were we invited?
Just askin' because I am confused as to why we are in Afghanistan. I am lookin' forward to reading Gen Barno's take on that. Tell him to get pen to paper (fingers to keys?) soon!
Antoinette
@ Antoinette, "Just askin'
@ Antoinette,
"Just askin' because I am confused as to why we are in Afghanistan."
Because in the world we live in - science or not - they invited us there when they "hosted" Al Qaeda and AQ bought down the World Trade Center. The date was September 11, 2001 C.E. Since you have a computer you can probably Google it.
Oh, we went there to kill AQ, topple the friendly Islamist State that sheltered and succored them, and stayed to keep them out and keep killing them until it's over. It isn't, and they aren't all dead. Yet.
Mind you it has gotten mighty confused since then, since we started to think we had nobler purposes, such as turning Afghanistan into Canada. Or maybe kinda sorta stopping dope. Let's get them to grow posies.
Some peoples mind are keen to do basic research in labs. Others are inclined to treat society and humanity itself as a test lab for social experiments, rather like building elaborate LEGO schemes. The bastardized part war, part social experiment, part testing a "new" way of war all gets mixed in together. So in a way I can understand your confusion, and losing sight of why we are there. Don't feel bad. So has most of DC. Certainly parts of CNAS.
Abu M, I was Visitor @ May
Abu M,
I was Visitor @ May 6, 2010 - 9:25pm. Thanks for the link to the paper. I remember you posting it a while back and I revisited it to refresh my memory. The problem with studies like that is that the underlying dynamics of the country make quantitative data difficult to apply. The paper seems to rest upon the assumption that COIN operations share sufficient similarities in their intended outcomes that we can lump them together for comparative studies. Although COIN ops may share the ultimate outcome of "defeat the insurgency," the intermediary step(s) toward that outcome are often vastly different from one COIN op to another, making the utility of development projects through studies like this difficult to compare.
For example, I would assert that the insurgency in Iraq was largely borne of competing interests over who would have power in the new government. In Afghanistan, the conflict is due more to competing interests tied to basic issues of legitimacy concerning whether the new government should have certain powers. While the Afghan views are also significantly impacted by "who" (or, perhaps, "which tribe/ethnic group"), the presence of a Pashtun head of state seems less problematic (when one looks at their history since 1747) and much of the resistance to state authority is due to the populace chafing at the imposition of authority in a manner that conflicts with their values. If there is any merit at all to my assertion (which I readily admit there may not be), then drawing lessons from one COIN op does little to assist us in charting the way forward in the other.
More specifically, development projects in Iraq were done for the purpose of obtaining short-term cooperation from locals in order to drive AQI or similar organizations out of the vicinity, on the assumption that establishing a buffer between populace and insurgent would enable us to quickly consolidate our security gain. This made sense in Iraq because there was a spirit of nationalism, a recent history of communities being connected to the state, and a high likelihood that if we could reconnect those communities to the state and establish patronage networks, then the communities would take the bait. This is not the case in Afghanistan. Many, if not most, rural communities have never been connected to any state government in any meaningful way, nor is there an apparent desire for them to make such a connection now. So separating the populace form the insurgent - either through development projects or other endeavors - is not so clearly a logical means toward our desired ends. Given different means, the apparent utility of comparative studies about effectiveness of aid is not readily obvious.
Bah. Sorry for the long reply.
@ elf, "So in a way I can
@ elf,
"So in a way I can understand your confusion, and losing sight of why we are there. Don't feel bad."
Thanks for your reply.
AM says above:
"Last fall, I sat down with LTG (Ret.) David Barno and asked him what he thought was missing from our research on Afghanistan. He said that while we had done a good job talking about counterinsurgency at the tactical and operational levels, we had not tackled counterinsurgency at the strategic and political levels. He also said that we had failed to explain the war in Afghanistan in terms of our long-term regional interests. In response, I decided to tackle the former for this year's spring paper on Afghanistan, and LTG Barno -- who started work at CNAS this week -- will begin a project on the latter for 2011."
2011? I would like an explanation of "the war in Afghanistan in terms of our long-term regional interests" by President Obama's administration sooner than 2011.
But that's just li'l ole ignorant me...
Antoinette
Blue Steel? Magnum? Did
Blue Steel? Magnum? Did you tame the beast and let it out of its cage?
as
as
Ex, can you contact me?
Ex, can you contact me?
There is no operational
There is no operational level of COIN because all COIN is political. There is no "operational" theater command that can be divorced from politics in theatre and in the home land.
COIN consists of tactics and strategy.
The Strategic level of COIN is mainly political.
The Tactical level of COIN is heavily political.
There is no military level of COIN that is separate from the politics.
The lack of understanding of this is why Petreaus et al can happily request 80,000 more troops and a trillion dollars for Afghanistan- he is only concerned with his command and hasn't thought out the strategic implications of a massive escalation of a war with no worthwhile goals for NATO. In effect the Cointras care only about tactics and the institutional welfare of the US military and not the long term strategic implications of their crusade to prove big army has a role in future wars.
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