I love Noah Shachtman, but wish that when he asks if the U.S. military can accomplish the train and equip mission in Afghanistan and shows a video highlighting not only ANA on drugs but also some Marines responding with a drill instructor mentality, he'd also point out his colleague David Axe captured on video another soldier using best practices.
Here's what to do.
Here's what not to do.
Granted the strategy looks like a camel. But I like it anyway.
The stakes in Afghanistan and Pakistan are too high to walk away lightly, but the obstacles to anything that looks like success are too high to confidently invest billions of dollars and thousands of lives in the endeavor. Rather than continue to drift into a Vietnam-like quagmire as we have been, or simply withdrawal with potentially disastrous consequences, this strategy offers a moment of clarity.
This strategy clarifies that this is the moment for Karzai to decide whether or not he wants to commit to reform while he has U.S. support, or risk not only his regime but his personal survival on the loyalty and efficacy of the deals he can cut with local warlords after the U.S. withdraws. For Pakistan it clarifies that if they want the U.S. to remain in Afghanistan for the long-term they must assist us against the Afghan Taliban, or risk their ability to retain strategic depth in Afghanistan on the Taliban’s ability to keep India out. In the meanwhile our core regional concern with Pakistan’s stability is assisted by the time this strategy buys for the Pakistan military to develop counterinsurgency capabilities to fight the Pakistan Taliban and so ensure the security of their own nuclear stockpile.
We can’t fight or buy our way to success in Afghanistan on our own. The best we can do is offer our partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan a window for success, and the additional 30k troops (w/ 10k option) does that. Either our allies oblige us or they don’t. Pretending for another year or two that we’ll stay in Afghanistan indefinitely regardless of cost won’t convince anyone we’ve a long-term strategic commitment to the region if the last 8 years hasn’t.
Tactical issues:
- Leveraging local tribal and village militias is positive, attempts to reproduce the Awakening. Risk is of setting off further intertribal wars.
- 10k option for next year is meaningless, we wouldn’t be able to get them out there any faster if we wanted to.
- U.S. aid will be going to individual ministries and local leaders based on ability to fight corruption and provide services. This is similar to the NSP model.
- 2011 withdrawal timeline will offer the Democrat base some reassurance for mid-terms, and more so for 2012 election. As we know from Iraq, there's plenty of flexibility even in a theoretically hard time line like this one.
There's a time limit to how long development advocates can frame their crusade in terms of national security. The reason the national security lens gets any purchase at all is because of fragile states, and fragile states only because of Afghanistan.
If support for war in Afghanistan is deteriorating, how long before the tide shifts back against looking at development as a national security priority? And that narrative in turn becomes subsumed in a neo-realist perspective that frames attempts to stabilize fragile states as filled w/ hubris?
Afghanistan's chief challenge is governance, a sector the military seems more disposed to address than the development community. If State and USAID are unable to seriously address the core problems of fragile states, when this narrow window of opportunity closes Congress will see the additional resources they've invested in State and USAID as wasted. Is that unfair? Perhaps, but that's how it is.
The data tells a story of Pakistanis that fear their country is going in the wrong direction, but largely for economic reasons. Their perception of religious extremism, the Taliban and Al Qaeda as problems have grown. Support for military operations against the Taliban have grown, but those operations have to be Pakistani operations. They continue to oppose cooperation with the U.S. (Obama provided a slight bump which has since disappeared), and any U.S. operations in Pakistan. A substantial minority still like Osama Bin Ladin (9%).
Those who feel we're in Afghanistan in order to prevent Pakistan from degenerating into chaos should be paying attention to these numbers. They're an important component of an evaluation of how necessary our presence in Afghanistan is to prevent insurgents based there from undermining stability in Pakistan, along with military and economic factors.
Of course the fact remains, there isn't much we can do to effect Pakistan directly. But just because your neighbor's garden hose isn't long enough to reach your burning house, doesn't mean you should start spraying his house down for lack of anything else to do.
Pincus points out the DOD is hiring contractors to translate the U.S. Army intelligence field manual into an Afghan-friendly version. Isn't this exactly how we're supposed to have learned not to do things? If you're trying to build capacity you have to follow the FUBU principle - "For Us, By Us."
While Sen. Levin is calling for the rapid expansion of Afghanistan's security forces - to facilitate a more rapid US withdrawal - the Senate Approps committee is cutting the Administration's request (sorry, CQ subscription).
Why should we care about governance capacity building, and why do our current aid institutions fail so miserably?
Lockhart before the SFRC, 17 Sept 2009.
Back in 2002, during the preparation of Afghanistan’s first post-Bonn budget, Afghanistan required a budget of $500m for the year to be able to pay its 240,000 civil servants (including doctors, teachers, and engineers) their basic salaries of $50 per month and to cover essential running costs. As the Treasury was empty, assistance was required. Unfortunately, donors initially committed only $20 million to the 2002 Afghan budget, meaning that Afghanistan’s leaders could never in the 2002-4 period meet the basic costs of sustaining services. At the same time, $1.7 billion was committed to an aid system to build parallel organizations, which ended up employing most of the same doctors and teachers as drivers, assistants and translators to operate small projects at significant multiples of their former salaries. While some additional funds were later committed to the
World Bank-run Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund, this was never enough to sustain basic governance, and the civil service atrophied. Rather than support the essential nation-wide services and programs within a framework of rule of law and policy, donors launched thousands of small, badly-coordinated projects. Billions of dollars were spent through the aid complex, resulting in little tangible change for most Afghan citizens. Their perception of aid projects was most vividly captured for me in a story told to me by villagers in a remote district of Bamiyan, who described their multi-million dollar project going up in smoke.
The prescriptions of the “aid complex” not only by-passed, but actively undermined Afghan capability: for example, it was aid donors forbade any investment in the Afghan budget for education or training over the age of 11, citing the overriding imperative of investing in primary education. Similarly, a $60 million provincial and district governance program designed to restore policing and justice services was turned down in 2002 for funding on the basis that governance was not “poverty-reducing”.
This is a great example of divorce between the conversation about the crisis in military readiness and the use of Supplementals/Overseas Contingency Operations funding.
ArmyTimes.com
August 16, 2009
Weapons Cuts To Pay For Army Troop IncreaseIn an Aug. 13 letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., President Barack Obama asked that Congress consider amending the 2010 Pentagon budget request by reallocating money from “lower-priority DoD contingency operations’ requirements.” The letter said these items are no longer needed “due to changed circumstances.”...
But the words would appear to be a clear reference to the administration giving higher priority to the war in Afghanistan than the war in Iraq, and the positive official assessments of the development of Iraqi security forces. That development is key to maintaining the security of U.S. troops as they withdraw — an effort expected to accelerate following the January 2010 elections in Iraq.
Many point to the U.S. ambassador's Chief of Mission authority as a natural place to rest interagency coordination. A recent Lockheed Martin analysis of AFRICOM's roles and missions lays out more baldly than usual the reach and limits of CoM authority.
Acknowledge Chief of Mission authority (Ambassador as President’s representative) to grant entry to government personnel based on diplomatic considerations. Also, follow National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 38, which gives the Chief of Mission control of the size, composition, and mandate of overseas full-time mission staffing for all U.S. Government agencies.
According to Larua Rozen at FP's The Cable, Gen. Jones appears to be completing the NSC's assertion of bureaucratic power, expanding NSC's mandate to chair not only the NSC's Principals Committee and Deputies Committee, but the Interagency Policy Committees as well. It'll be interesting to see if this is as decisive as expected without the President's explicit mandate in a PPD. It's not an accident that it was left out in the first place.
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