Afghanistan (now with 10% Star Trek analogies by volume!)
Dec 11, 2009 by
libjpn
Star Trek has any number of time travel plots, but one of my favorites is the TNG episode Tapestry. In this episode, Picard receives a energy blast to his chest, and because of a brawl in his youth resulted in him receiving an artificial heart, 'dies', and is confronted in the afterlife by Q. Picard expresses his regret at the hotheadedness and Q gives him a chance to go back and change that. He does and finds that his future has become circumscribed. Q says
That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realized how fragile life is or how important each moment must be, so his life never came into focus. He drifted through much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves. He never led the away team on Milika III to save the ambassador, or took charge of the Stargazer's bridge when its captain was killed. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe. And he never, ever got noticed by anyone.
It doesn't take a literary genius to figure out why that would be something I would hang onto. But to flesh it out, if America turns its back on Afghanistan (and make no mistake, a withdrawal is just that), it turns its back on a part of itself that is the catalyst for change. As I have said, if one thinks the participation of the US military is an a priori evil, demanding an immediate and total withdrawal is logically consistent, but if one feels that the US can be a force for good in the world, all the mewlings about how Afghanistan has never been at peace and how foreign powers have never successfully intervened in the country (both historical inaccuracies) are simply ploys to cover up the logical inconsistency. Accepting the arguments of anti COIN pundits who then claim that our military has to be more lethal just misses the point. Col. Jack McCuen addresses Col. Gentile's Parameters article with this
In addition, Gentile fails to recognize the key point in any counterinsurgency strategy. The purpose of such a strategy is not "to win hearts and minds." The purpose is not "nation building." The purpose is to win the war against the strategy imposed upon us by our enemies who wage this type of war against us because experience has shown them that it is the only one by which they can defeat us -- what Mao described as a "protracted revolutionary war." They wage this war within the population by using the population as a shield and weapon. Thus, the population becomes the "terrain." "Population terrain" becomes just as critical to insurgent warfare as physical terrain is to conventional warfare. We must learn to clear, secure, stabilize and organize population terrain in insurgent or hybrid war as we must clear. secure, stabilize and organize physical terrain in conventional war.
How does Gian Gentile recommend that we do this and win these insurgent or hybrid wars, such as we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan - - and are likely to be fighting in the future?
Thinking about what kinds of wars we fight in the future is one aspect of my thinking, but for the second part, I want to juxtapose that with some comments by Steve Coll, who went into more detail in his testimony to Congress (pdf link). I posted these to ObWi, but either the comment went astray or it is stuck in the spam filter and I've grown tired of being accused of dishonesty and wilful blindness, so I give up and post it below.
The second American interest in the war, however, is by some margin the more important and enduring one. Yet it is also a more complex subject and so it is more difficult to articulate in political English as a distilled objective.
The United States has a deep interest in the emergence of a stable, modernizing, economically integrated, peaceful South Asia—by which I mean the region that is centered on India, but which also encompasses Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan.
In the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, Europe, then Asia, and then Latin America sequentially and almost miraculously overcame chronic political violence and instability rooted in ideological and identity conflicts. They did so by processes of economic integration, wealth creation, middle-class formation, constitutional politics (usually but not uniformly democratic), and technological modernization. By this process more than a billion people have leaped from poverty, degradation and chronic conflict to something much better, if incomplete and imperfect, in a remarkably short time—an unprecedented transformation in human history, so far as I can think.
Now, look around the world and ask: After Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, where will this modernizing transformation occur next?
The answer seems unarguable: South Asia. (The Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa await their turns.) Why? India.
India is well advanced on a march to prosperity and greatness in the mid-twenty-first century; already, her stable pluralism seems a solid pillar of the coming Asian Century. Internal demand from the Indian economy is driving rapid economic growth this year in that country at a time when most of the rest of the world’s economy is shrinking. Like Brazil and China, the country faces huge challenges. But to imagine within decades a subcontinent—including Pakistan—that has become as successful as Southeast Asia or Latin America are today is not by any means a fantasy; barring the collapse of Pakistan, it is more than probable. This process is of interest to the United States not only because it would create a better world and a more stable Asia but because it would subdue the region’s terrifying nuclear risks.
American officials and outsiders like myself often wring their hands about Pakistan. The Army and intelligence services in that country are a powerful and regressive force, as evidenced by their self-defeating support for the Taliban and other Islamist networks. Civil-military relations in Pakistan are very poor and constitute, since independence, a dismal history of chronic interventions and failures. Constitutional democracy in Pakistan, while technically present, is badly undernourished; it often seems on the verge of imminent collapse.
In recent memory, however, something like that was true, to varying ways, in Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, the Philippines. It is much, much less true today in those countries because they have modernized and economically integrated in successful regional compacts.
Because of India’s economic dynamism, and because of the common, enterprising culture of Punjab that straddles the Indo-Pak border, if that border were opened, and if the two governments normalized relations (they do not require a romanticized or complete peace, only a pragmatic and functional one) a broad, positive, and durable political-economic change would likely occur in South Asia within a generation.
It is along this modernizing pathway that American policy should concentrate its most ambitious investments. American Presidents had confidence in a vision of this kind after the Second World War; that is why Truman intervened in Greece and Turkey and why the Marshall Plan arose.
Why does the Afghan war figure in this assessment today?
The Taliban are a backward-looking threat to the near-term stability of South Asia—in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and, as the Mumbai attacks demonstrated, occasionally in India. The United States has an interest in preventing the Taliban from destabilizing South Asia by acquiring influence in nuclear-armed Pakistan or by provoking a war between India and Pakistan, two still-insecure nuclear powers.
What are the best means to accomplish this? What is the role of Afghan stability in the larger projects of defeating Al Qaeda and the pursuit of a stable, modernizing, “normal” South Asia beyond Afghanistan?
In strategic terms, the Afghan war is in some ways a sidebar to the main event in the region. Elsewhere in South Asia, in Pakistan and in India, American influence is at best indirect. Even so, these regional American interests at issue in the Afghan war are very powerful; to confirm this, consider the alternative of Pakistan’s failure at the Taliban’s hands.
link
Steve Coll's blog has any number of interesting posts about this, including this on the transformative role of Indian Prime Minister Singh. Eric seems to think that confronted with the house of cards that South Asia presents us, we can simply pull out the Afghanistan cards and go back to minding our own business. I tend to disagree.
Comments
Dec 12, 2009, 00:06:27 Turbulence wrote:
[i]But to flesh it out, if America turns its back on Afghanistan (and make no mistake, a withdrawal is just that)[/i]
Here's where you're wrong: America has not withdrawn but has already turned its back on Afghanistan. The average American neither knows nor cares about Afghanistan, let alone the Afghan people. The fate of Afghans is completely irrelevant to the vast majority of Americans -- indeed, the latest happenings on American Idol and the Office are far better known.
This is the fact that you can't seem to accept: Americans do not care about Afghanistan. Keeping soldiers there or withdrawing them will not alter this basic reality.
[i]it turns its back on a part of itself that is the catalyst for change.[/i]
This presupposes that the only way the United States can effect meaningful change in the world is by employing military occupation. Even the most hard hearted cynics of American intentions do not subscribe to such a view.
[i]As I have said, if one thinks the participation of the US military is an a priori evil[/i]
What if one just thinks that the US military is remarkably ineffective at massive social engineering projects involving alien cultures?
[i]As I have said, if one thinks the participation of the US military is an a priori evil, ...but if one feels that the US can be a force for good in the world[/i]
I like how you skillfully you elide the distinction between "the US military" and "the US." Of course the US can be a force for good in the world. But that doesn't mean that everything, or even most things that the US does in the world are good. Ditto for the US military.
Dec 12, 2009, 00:39:41 libjpn wrote:
[i]America has not withdrawn but has already turned its back on Afghanistan[/i]
So it is up to nation's leaders to refocus attention. Or should they simply imitate that short attention span of the US public?
[i]This presupposes that the only way the United States can effect meaningful change in the world is by employing military occupation.[/i]
No, this argues that in Afghanistan, it is important. Trying to suggest that supporting the current proposed plan implies a support for any and all military adventures is mistaken.
[i]What if one just thinks that the US military is remarkably ineffective at massive social engineering projects involving alien cultures?[/i]
How does the 5 billion pledged by Japan actually get to the people of Afghanistan if there is no attempt to provide some measure of security?
[i]I like how you skillfully you elide the distinction between "the US military" and "the US."[/i]
Glad you appreciate it. I'm not going to make some claim that we can clearly separate to two and transfer all the good to the common people of the US and the bad to the military. I don't see the military disappearing anytime soon, so if we don't figure out a way for the military to do good, we are in for another rough century.
But rather than argue about what the military is or is not good at, I'd be more interested in how you feel about Coll's thesis about South Asia.
Dec 12, 2009, 02:10:34 Turbulence wrote:
[i]So it is up to nation's leaders to refocus attention. Or should they simply imitate that short attention span of the US public?[/i]
How exactly would they do that? How do you make people care about things they don't care about? Moreover, if you think that the nation's leaders can refocus attention in this way, can you point to any cases in recent history where they have done so? Or is this just another exercise in wish fulfillment?
[i]No, this argues that in Afghanistan, it is important. Trying to suggest that supporting the current proposed plan implies a support for any and all military adventures is mistaken.[/i]
I don't believe this assertion is compatible with your earlier statement that withdrawal is tantamount to "turning its back on a part of itself that is the catalyst for change."
[i]How does the 5 billion pledged by Japan actually get to the people of Afghanistan if there is no attempt to provide some measure of security?[/i]
If Japan wishes to provide some measure of security in Afghanistan, that might be an interesting question, but since Japan has no interest in doing so, I don't think it matters much. Last time I checked, Japan had a great deal of money and there were a great number of private soldiers in the world happy to provide security in exchange for money. But of course, Japan has no interest in spending the money required to provide such security.
[i]I don't see the military disappearing anytime soon, so if we don't figure out a way for the military to do good, we are in for another rough century.[/i]
WTF? Do you understand the fact that regardless of what the military does, people in the US do good things?
The truth is that we are in for a rough century no matter what happens because we face natural resource shortages. More to the point, just because you want the military to be able to solve all sorts of problems in the world, that does not magically endow the military with the capabilities to do so. Nor does it make the military a cost effective force for solving those problems.
[i]But rather than argue about what the military is or is not good at, I'd be more interested in how you feel about Coll's thesis about South Asia.[/i]
I don't think much of it at all. Afghanistan constitutes less than 1.8% of the population in the region he describes; I don't see any plausible cost-benefit analysis demonstrating that we should spend 0.5-1.5 trillion dollars in order to create a marginal improvement in the governance of a tiny fraction of the population in question. That just doesn't make sense. And yes, I really do see Karzai's crooked, election-stealing, robbing-Afghanistan-blind government of war lords as being only marginally better than the Taliban.
Beyond that, Coll's evidence-free assertions about why and how other countries successfully managed development seem pretty ignorant. From what I've read, he doesn't seem to understand the economics of development well enough to be credible in this area. That's not really surprising: he's a journalist. I'd find his arguments about how and why other countries developed when they did more credible if you could find a respected development economist to back them up.
Dec 12, 2009, 02:53:58 nous wrote:
Star Trek, much as I love it, was always crap at nuance. DS9 did it better than most of the rest, but even they were too utopian on all fronts.
The reason that the US is going to have to walk away from this and let it go is that it was never committed to it in the first place. I had hoped that Obama might be able to alter the rhetorical situation in the US, but I don't think that he can do this with the media and the internet culture and the status-quo supporting inertia in congress. The US government has far too short a feedback loop (two years) to sustain the sort of push this would require, and it would require more than four to sustain this. Obama's administration would not survive a hard push on this topic and the next guy would be forced to withdraw.
The US cannot stay because we can't support either the level of spending required to maintain the occupation or the materiel demands on our military without increasing federal revenue. That won't happen because the people most likely to support military action are the ones least likely to support a tax increase. We also need more troops to replace the ones that are desperately in need of relief, but we don't have enough in pipeline to do that.
This sort of military operation requires something like a draft and a visible public sacrifice to sustain the momentum and get a large public buy-in from the start. Someone didn't want that at the outset and never planned to sustain it in the first place. We can't make up for that now, almost a decade later, having lost many of the initial gains, spent our strength and our reserves, and allowed the enemy an interval to adjust and settle in for another guerilla war.
You are right about many of the point you make, LJ. I just think that you are clinging to these good intentions several years too late to achieve any of them. The US isn't alternate-history Picard, it's Mike Tyson in the post Kevin Rooney phase of his career listening to the hype, buying tigers, and thinking that every fight can be won with that one big knockout punch.
Dec 12, 2009, 07:38:34 libjpn wrote:
[i]How exactly would they do that? How do you make people care about things they don't care about?[/i]
Just the way they have, by making a committment to take steps and taking those steps.
[i]I don't believe this assertion is compatible with your earlier statement that withdrawal is tantamount to "turning its back on a part of itself that is the catalyst for change."[/i]
Well, if you have seen me advocating military intervention anywhere else in the world, do let me know.
[i]Last time I checked, Japan had a great deal of money and there were a great number of private soldiers in the world happy to provide security in exchange for money.[/i]
So you would like Hatoyama to invest in Blackwater?
[i]The truth is that we are in for a rough century no matter what happens because we face natural resource shortages.[/i]
And when these natural resource shortages play out in various places, how will they be dealt with? By sending the USS Dick Cheney with a full complement of armed drones?
[i]I don't think much of it at all. Afghanistan constitutes less than 1.8% of the population in the region he describes; I don't see any plausible cost-benefit analysis demonstrating that we should spend 0.5-1.5 trillion dollars in order to create a marginal improvement in the governance of a tiny fraction of the population in question.[/i]
Geography and natural resources. In an earlier era, we would give the natives smallpox blankets or let settlers deal with the Indian problem. I don't think that is an option now.
[i]And yes, I really do see Karzai's crooked, election-stealing, robbing-Afghanistan-blind government of war lords as being only marginally better than the Taliban.[/i]
Well, I disagree. The Karzai government is the run of the mill bad government that doesn't really care about its people, whereas the Taliban is much more interested in actually intervening in the lives of people on an individual basis. You may argue that the Taliban have learned their lesson and won't do anything as stupid as host AQ again, but, Coll [url=]reviews[/url] Giustozzi's edited book called Decoding the Taliban and says this
[i]Also, in a piece called “The Haqqani Network as an Autonomous Entity” the German researcher Thomas Ruttig provides an extraordinarily detailed and useful analysis of the Taliban-affiliated networks founded by Jalalauddin Haqqani, [b]the former Central Intelligence Agency asset[/b] whose followers apparently were responsible for the kidnapping of New York Times reporter David Rohde. The Haqqanis are arguably the Taliban insurgency’s most potent force. Ruttig documents compellingly its connectivity with and separation from the Old Taliban around Mullah Omar and his leadership councils. There is much new information here—new at least to the open literature—about marriages and internal personalities within the Haqqani network. The sections of Ruttig’s research that overlap with my own work are unfailingly careful and accurate.
Overall, the work Giustozzi has pulled together here is as up-to-date as scholarship can be. There is an emphasis on how the Taliban have evolved and changed in local settings since 2001. Equally striking, however, is the portrait that accumulates of the Taliban’s continuity. The book’s essays describe how national and provincial figures from the nineties-era Taliban government, formally known the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, remain intact and operate as a shadow administration, holding portfolios similar to their previous ones.[/i]
The bolded text brings to mind something about cleaning up one's own messes.
(comment split up)
Dec 12, 2009, 07:38:42 libjpn wrote:
[i]I'd find his arguments about how and why other countries developed when they did more credible if you could find a respected development economist to back them up.[/i]
So, you think that Europe, East Asia and Latin America have become developed because of some other reason than the rise of the middle class and the integration of various economic enterprises? I'm not familiar with the field, but I would be very surprised if there was disagreement that these are important factors. If you argue that these are so far down the road as to be meaningless, looking at Amartya Sen, (though what he does is called welfare economics, which might be more to the point) and I believe that his prescriptions are much more in line with some attempt at creating some economic equality within Afghanistan than with simply pretending it doesn't exist.
Nous, all the points you are make are fair ones and on my bad days (which seem to come with some frequency lately) I think that Obama is on a fool's errand and I've said several times we may have gone too far down the road. But in rushing to prove that withdrawal is the only moral option, I see the picking up of arguments are not really compatible with the moral bases of that argument. If there is one thing thing that I would disagree with in what you say, it is that COIN has never been touted as a knockout punch. But on the other points, yes, that's a fair cop.
Dec 12, 2009, 10:22:41 nous wrote:
I agree that COIN is not a knockout punch, but I also think that most grassroots folk who support continued engagement and escalation do so because they believe that the military is not being given a chance to really take a swing a la the "we could have won in Nam" school and have no real concept of what COIN involves at a tactical and operational level. They operate on ideology and aphorism. Changing that requires a lot of front-loading and intervention (at least it seems to for me in the classroom).
Dec 12, 2009, 10:37:31 Turbulence wrote:
[i]Just the way they have, by making a committment to take steps and taking those steps.[/i]
LJ, this is obviously not true. Obama has made his commitment but Americans have not become any more interested in Afghanistan. As a whole, the country still neither knows nor cares about what happens to Afghans. You may not appreciate this reality since you're so far removed from American life and actual Americans; I imagine it is easy for someone in your position to project one's own beliefs onto his absent countrymen. Can you provide any evidence at all showing that Americans have become more knowledgeable or concerned about Afghanistan and the lives of Afghans?
[i]And when these natural resource shortages play out in various places, how will they be dealt with? By sending the USS Dick Cheney with a full complement of armed drones?[/i]
Perhaps we'd be better prepared to deal with them if we didn't waste 0.5-1.5 trillion dollars on a pointless boondoggle doomed to failure that you're so enamored with. Countries that have an extra trillion dollars or so generally have more options when crisis arrive than similar countries without the cash.
[i]Geography and natural resources. In an earlier era, we would give the natives smallpox blankets or let settlers deal with the Indian problem. I don't think that is an option now.[/i]
What are you talking about? This makes no sense.
[i]So, you think that Europe, East Asia and Latin America have become developed because of some other reason than the rise of the middle class and the integration of various economic enterprises? I'm not familiar with the field, but I would be very surprised if there was disagreement that these are important factors.[/i]
That's not really the thesis Coll is advancing, now is it? Coll writes [i]They did so by processes of economic integration, wealth creation, middle-class formation, constitutional politics (usually but not uniformly democratic), and technological modernization[/i]
But he (and apparently you as well) make no effort to separate out cause from effect. For example, I would expect that technological modernization is a natural result of increasing wealth or the passage of time...but that suggests that it can't be a simple driver of development. I mean, even the poorest countries in the world have surprisingly widespread cell phone networks; surely you don't think that means that development has succeeded uniformly in all countries, right? I'll also note that the phrase "constitutional politics" doesn't mean anything. If the point Coll is trying to make is that "countries that prosper economically tend to have stable political systems", well, that's a truism with almost no predictive power. Stable political systems might a key factor in economic growth, but there are plenty of countries with stable political systems that don't prosper much at all. And one would expect that growing wealth might dampen political instability: people who have something to lose become a bit more cautious about starting violent conflicts after all.
I haven't read a great deal of the literature in development economics and history, but what I've read has convinced me that this is a complex field with many subtleties and counterintuitive results. The truth is, we don't understand very much about how to make development happen. We know some things correlate with development, but efforts to bring about development tend to succeed in some countries and fail in other and we don't really understand why. Overall, I don't see any appreciation of just how little we understand about this field in either Coll's or your blithe statements.
[i]If you argue that these are so far down the road as to be meaningless, looking at Amartya Sen, (though what he does is called welfare economics, which might be more to the point) and I believe that his prescriptions are much more in line with some attempt at creating some economic equality within Afghanistan than with simply pretending it doesn't exist.[/i]
You need not speculate on what I wish to argue; I'll tell you directly. I want to argue that the theory of development your propounding here is (1) incoherent, (2) so vague as to be meaningless and (3) not supported by serious development economists. Moreover, I fail to see how a massive American military occupation would advance economic equality in Afghanistan (let alone promote development). Afghanistan has one real asset when it comes to development: opium. And so far, American efforts have been focused on eliminating that asset and cutting of Afghanistan from its only real source of cash.
Dec 12, 2009, 13:03:14 libjpn wrote:
Nous, I think that the kind of change requires a long term commitment. That's the opposite of complaining about how COIN is impossible and people like Gentile are correct in their criticisms. Like I said, I understand criticisms that it may be too late, but denigrating the necessity of COIN in order to win the argument seems short-sighted, which seems to be the way a lot of this discussion has played out.
Turbulence,
[i]Can you provide any evidence at all showing that Americans have become more knowledgeable or concerned about Afghanistan and the lives of Afghans?[/i]
Well, there is this
[i]Public support for the Afghan war and for US President Barack Obama have jumped nearly 10 points since his decision last week to send 30,000 additional troops to the war-torn country, a new poll has found.
Americans support the troop surge by a 58 to 37 per cent margin and back Obama's plan for a drawdown - to begin in July 2011 - by a 60 to 32 per cent margin, according to the poll published on Tuesday.
The December 1-6 Quinnipiac University survey of 2,313 registered voters found overall approval of the Afghan war jumped nine points to 57-35 per cent in favor, from 48-41 per cent in the previous poll on November 18.[/i]
http://news.smh.com.au/brea...
But I don't think that makes it right and and it is not going to be like flipping a switch. I think some positive results will have to occur. Eric's link at ObWi to Coll's blog post about negotiating with elements of the Taliban is important in this regard.
As for development, you seem to want a fully fleshed out theory of development before any steps are taken. If this were being proposed before we spent 8 years in Afghanistan, I'd agree with you, but that's not the case. Furthermore, in order to be able to distribute development aid that is necessary to get some economic equality, the security situation has to be stabilized.
In regards to that, the recent Oxfam [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/...]poll[/url] not only has poverty and unemployment as the most important factor in causing the conflict, but also has the Taliban more than the international forces viewed as a cause for the current conflict. If you look at the findings broken down by area, in Helmand and Kandahar, lack of support by the international community (not intervention by the international community) moves up the fourth place. So it seems that there is still a window of opportunity, albeit small and closing fast.
And as far as resources, Afghanistan has one more asset, which is location. And if things stabilized, the TAPI pipeline will move natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India. The other alternative destinations are China (not so thrilled about that one) and Russia (really not thrilled about that one) and, as Prime Minister Singh noted, India has 1 billion people. It doesn't really need a dissertation on development economics to figure this one out. But if there are development economists who have some points to bear on this, I'm all ears.
Dec 15, 2009, 01:45:43 russell wrote:
Here's my issue, or issues, with our intended efforts in Afghanistan.
Our goals there seem, to me, to be less about providing security for everyday Afghans, and more about defeating the Taliban (whatever that means) and propping up Karzai's central government.
Karzai's not a credible guy. The central government is profoundly corrupt. Something like 1/3 of the Afghan GDP comes from the illegal opium trade, and the government is knee deep in it.
People continue to be prey to constant fighting between warlords and rival tribes. Many of them lack basic things like water, electric power, adequate housing, and access to rudimentary public health.
By focusing on engaging the Taliban at a military level, we are putting the cart before the horse. IMVHO. If we want to reduce the influence of the Taliban, we need to help provide Afghans with basic infrastructure -- water, shelter, rudimentary electric power, health care, and schools -- and help them find a way to make a living that doesn't involve growing opium.
100K troops at a million bucks each, per year, is a trillion dollars a year.
For that money we could buy the whole opium crop for 10 years at better-than-market rate. Just buy it, burn it, and sponsor NGO efforts to move people to non-opium crops over a period of a few years.
We could fund millions of dollars in microloans to help Afghans develop rudimentary infrastructure *for themselves* and help them start small businesses and cottage industry. We could hire Kiva or Grameen Bank to run it.
We could make it clear that Karzai and his peeps do not have a get out of jail free card, and begin the process of working with indigenous Afghan political institutions -- tribal councils, loya jirga, whatever -- to develop a responsive government, in whatever form(s) they like.
What we're planning to do now is put American troops in country to prop up a discredited and corrupt local client government, and the form in which we're going to do that is by engaging a local, indigenous social and political organization (with militia attached) at the military level.
Who thinks that will work well?
Dec 15, 2009, 01:47:46 russell wrote:
sorry, 100K troops at a million bucks per is actually $100 billion / year.
that's still a lot of money.
Dec 15, 2009, 07:22:29 libjpn wrote:
Russell, I don't think there is any way to get the aid in there without at least getting a handle on the security situation. That's why I think that a refusal to deal with the security situation means that all of the aid aimed at the people of Afghanistan won't get there.
Dec 15, 2009, 11:15:50 russell wrote:
What does "get a handle on the security situation" mean?
Why is Afghanistan insecure?
Dec 15, 2009, 11:28:40 russell wrote:
To clarify -- I completely agree that basic security is a huge problem in Afghanistan.
I don't think that sending another 35K American troops there is going to do much about that.
If anything, it will simply reinforce the status quo.
Shinseki asked for several hundred thousand to secure Iraq. Afghanistan is bigger, with a more fractious population. A third of the GDP comes from trade in narcotics, and everybody has guns.
100K western troops are not going to make Afghanistan secure.
Dec 15, 2009, 20:57:42 libjpn wrote:
To get a handle on the security situation means to be able to distribute aid without people getting their asses shot off. If basic security is a huge problem, it has to be fixed. I don't think that Afghan units can be raised and professionalized without the presence of foreign troops. Accepting that a withdrawal is the only possible solution accepts that we can't really establish a basic infrastructure. If we can't establish a basic infrastructure, I believe that 5,10,15 years down the road, we are going to be back in the same place.
Dec 16, 2009, 02:19:22 nous wrote:
I think that someone likely will be going back to Afghanistan or someplace like it some years down the road. I don't disagree with this part of your assessment at all. When we, or the UN or whoever, do that I'm hoping that they plan things differently than we did in this fiasco.
The Afghans have to know that their wellbeing was and always will be an afterthought -- that we occupied the country in order to make an example of the Taliban for defying us and not turning over OBL to our sole sovereign judgment. And they have to know that we remain there not out of any concern for them but rather out of the fear that leaving will allow OBL to mock our weakness. Our priorities have always been pretty clear in the lack of aid or rebuilding immediately following the Taliban's displacement. I've always thought that we lost Afghanistan the moment we chose to ignore them in favor of Iraq. Our continued presence there is an odd coalition of conservative military pride and liberal penance.
I don't think there is anything we can do to convince them of our good intentions at this point. I know I would not be convinced if the situation were reversed.
We should be sick about our failure, but staying doesn't accomplish anything for anyone.
Dec 16, 2009, 06:41:12 russell wrote:
[i]To get a handle on the security situation means to be able to distribute aid without people getting their asses shot off.[/i]
I get that.
What I think is that (a) 100K is not, remotely, enough folks on the ground to secure the whole place, (b) we've taken what appears to be a hard anti-Taliban stance, so in lots of places we're going to end up being on the side of criminals and creeps, (c) it seems to me that Afghanistan is by nature a place that wants to run itself at more of a local level, so I'm not sure our focus on supporting the central government is going to win us all that many friends, and (d) when your focus is on militarily defeating folks who live there, asses are going to get shot off anyway.
I agree that security is important, and I agree that just walking away will make things worse.
I just think that Obama, through some combination of what the political traffic will bear and his own tendency to go with a conservative, middle ground approach is just perpetuating the status quo.
We aren't putting enough folks in to secure the whole place, or to decisively defeat the Taliban, or probably even to drive them out of their strongholds in the south. We're relying on winning hearts and minds through a COIN strategy, but we're going to be sponsoring a discredited and, in many cases, criminal government.
It's not a problem with a primarily military solution. But we're rolling out a primarily military solution. Most likely we're doing that because we can't think of anything better, but that's what we're rolling with. And IMO it's not going to bring about the goals we want to achieve there.
I'm just Some Guy On The Internet, so WTF do I know, but that's how it looks to me.
Dec 16, 2009, 11:53:32 libjpn wrote:
I think it might be useful to see where this discussion has moved from.
It started off with Eric and others lambasting Obama for considering anything other than an immediate drawdown of troops, and accused Obama of reneging on campaign promises. I pointed out that
-Obama on the campaign trail argued for greater involvment in Afghanistan (you could then discuss whether he was doing it because he actually believed it or if he was doing it as a political move to protect himself from right wing attacks, but that is separate from the question of holding him to his word)
-Our involvement in the geo-strategic situation does not allow a drawdown, and if it did, the only recourse we would have to influencing events would be the same old black ops and dirty tricks that got us in this mess in the first place.
The drawdown/withdrawal plans generally argue for a smaller but more lethal force to remain, isolated from the population. I have yet to see a drawdown plan that somehow provides for the basic security and infrastructure that we mentioned above.
This Wired article discusses the drone war.
http://www.wired.com/danger...
from the article
[i]Ironically, these two connected air campaigns are almost mirror images of one another. On one side of the border, there’s an influx of tens of thousands of U.S. troops; on the other, American boots on the ground have been largely forbidden, except for a handful of trainers from special forces. So instead, America uses a fleet of robotic aircraft, to avoid the prohibition against flesh-and-blood troops.
In Afghanistan, airstrikes have been strictly limited, to minimize casualties. In Pakistan — if news accounts about those assaults are even remotely accurate — the attacks are far, far more deadly. According to an analysis of public reports by the New America Foundation, 82 U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan since 2006 “have killed between 750 and 1,000 people.” Up to 320 of those may have been civilians. The Long War Journal, examining the same records, calculates that 447 people have been killed in 42 reported drone strikes during the first nine months of 2009. The website estimates that only 10 percent of those deaths have been innocents.
But since the Pakistani government bans reporters and aid organizations from the tribal lands, where the majority of drone strikes have been reported, no one can say for sure how many have really been killed by the unmanned attackers.[/i]
One reason that the two campaigns are mirror images is because there are US troops in Afghanistan. If there are no troops in Afghanistan, I do think that our operations there will become more like our operations in Pakistan rather than the opposite. That is what I object to and that's why I have argued there is a difference between arguing for a complete and total withdrawal (which then brings its own questions) to what Eric seems to advocate. Even the Long proposal has 13,000 troops in country and argues that they have to be the elite point of the spear folks. That seems a lot more like a primarily military mission than what is being planned.
I have also argued that there is also a demand to retool and repurpose our military. Thus, people who are opposed to COIN because they want to keep the kind of force structure that we had to deal with Russian tanks pouring thru the Fulda Gap are really not the best supports to argumentation here.
I really don't know if the military realizes this. I really don't know if the McChrystal plan is simply driven by a refusal to admit defeat, and a covert desire to get back at the Taliban. But if you see serious attempts to peel off Talibani and to try and deal with Karzai in a direct way, that could be taken as a good sign.
Dec 17, 2009, 01:30:21 russell wrote:
[i]But if you see serious attempts to peel off Talibani and to try and deal with Karzai in a direct way, that could be taken as a good sign.[/i]
FWIW, I agree with this.
The problem of Afghanistan is so far above my personal pay grade that it's laughable, but were I to offer an opinion about what a good approach might look like, the first two items on my list would probably be (1) try to spin off potentially friendly, or at least not-implacably-hostile, Taliban, and (2) address, directly and emphatically, the issues of corruption in the Karzai government.
Item (3) would probably be to buy the poppy crop at market rate for a few years, burn it up, and provide training and materials (and security) for local farmers to grow something they can eat.
Dec 17, 2009, 11:20:30 libjpn wrote:
I would just note that I got pulled into this discussion because there was this impression that withdrawal is such an obviously correct answer that the other side couldn't possibly have any points to defend it. I'd note that items 1 and 2 don't really happen unless we have a presence (theoretically, they could, but it is a bit unrealistic to think they would).
And for the poppy crop, there is a world wide [url=http://www.globalideasbank....] morphine shortage[/url], so rather than burn it, refine it. But that is not going to take place without a sizable presence in Afghanistan as well.
Dec 18, 2009, 00:51:12 russell wrote:
Oddly enough, if Obama were to say we're sending 400K troops to Afghanistan, I'd be open to it. If it came with a coherent plan for reconstruction, I'd go well beyond "open to it".
Because with 400K folks in country you could actually get something useful done.
At 100K, I think (my opinion only) it's just gonna be a prolongation of the status quo.
I agree with you that "just get the hell out" is not an obviously correct answer. At least to me. It's more an admission that the situation is so FUBAR that there's nothing useful left to do, and I don't think that's true.
If we're going to go in with 100K, to me it would make more sense to give up the idea of decisively defeating the Taliban, and focus on reconstruction in a smaller geographic area, one that we can effectively defend.
I guess my point overall is that focussing on military "victory" without addressing the political corruption and the dire need for basic, reliable infrastructure is not going to make things better, in any form, for anyone.
It's going to be what we see now, a couple of years later, with a lot more dead people.
Dec 18, 2009, 02:33:58 nous wrote:
I'm guessing that 400k troops would also necessitate a draft. The military is already shorting its personnel on their time out of theater. The military is being traumatized, slowly but surely, and any expansion that does not bring with it new troops will find itself hamstrung by increasing numbers of psychological casualties. It's just asking for another Haditha and every time our troops get pushed beyond that limit it sets back our other goals and makes the job that much harder and success that much less likely. We can't do this by throwing the same people through the meat grinder indefinitely.
Does anyone here think that the American public would accept a draft as the buy-in for a chance at victory in Afghanistan?
Dec 18, 2009, 10:45:14 JanieM wrote:
I usually don't comment on these topics because...what do I know. Ordinarily I pay the least attention to threads on the war(s), and as I've tried to tease out why, I've decided that it's because I unconsciously think that these are the issues where we as ordinary citizens and internet discussers have the least chance of making a difference in the decisions from on high. (This isn't the only reason, but never mind the rest.)
Yet when you (nous) ask this question about a draft, my instant response is: No way. Everywhere I look, people are hurting. Even people with jobs are under increased and increasing pressure because there's no money (businesses, universities, government agencies and functions). Maine is always more or less hurting economically, but it's worse now. Ditto for northeastern Ohio, where I grew up and where most of my family still lives. (msnbc.com linked to a long article just this morning about the dire situation in the "rust belt" between Youngstown and Warren. The area has been in a slump since I left in the late sixties, but it's much worse now.)
I think that a draft instituted so that we could more thoroughly occupy Afghanistan, and the accompanying implication of hugely increased military expenditures, would be just the thing to push an awful lot of people over the edge into...I don't know what, but some kind of open rebellion.
"Victory in Afghanistan"? There would have to be one hell of an impressive sales job to define "victory" in such a way that people would care, and in such a way that "victory" looked attainable.
Maybe my reaction to this is deeply rooted in memories of being a teenager and young adult during the Viet Nam era -- but I can't be the only one, and I didn't even have anyone close to me get drafted or killed in that war.
Another thing that plays into it, I suspect, is that personal effects of the wars we have been waging for the past 8 years have been so hidden from most Americans. No photos...etc. As has been observed before, the military families pay. The rest of us are (or were, according to Bush) supposed to go shopping.
Eh, practicing work avoidance I guess. But I will be curious to see what other people have to say about this.
Dec 18, 2009, 19:19:10 libjpn wrote:
[i]I agree with you that "just get the hell out" is not an obviously correct answer. At least to me. It's more an admission that the situation is so FUBAR that there's nothing useful left to do, and I don't think that's true.[/i]
I guess this points out how much this debate is, or at please my participation in it (following on JanieM's comment) is atmospherics. If Eric started his comments out with some sort of statement like this, I probably wouldn't be rabbiting on about geostrategic questions, or where our forces actually are now, or how we need to convert the military from an agent of kinetic warfare to an agent of non-kinetic warfare.
I tend to think that we got into the wars that we did (Desert Storm, Iraq, Afghanistan) because when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But I also think that you can't just shift organizations and retask them. Any organization of some age carries around a certain amount of baggage, and the military probably carries around more than most.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently for a number of perhaps tenuously related reasons. The first is that we had a big family renunion whose initial impulse was a memorial service for one of my aunts. Traditionally, these sorts of events get organized at the level of my aunts and uncles, and we 'kids' tag along. But this time, the day after the service, the cousins organized an outing to the beach, and, though the surviving aunts and uncles tagged along, it was us who were deciding everything. And it was quite amazing how things were remarkably similar to when it was my folks doing it.
The second impulse is that here in Japan, universities are hard up against the demographic trends, and it is not all that clear who will survive. My school is not in danger, but concerns are there. This crisis comes when we have a lot of the teachers and staff reaching retirement age, and it comes time for the newer generation of employees/faculty take up the various jobs that need to be done. To tell the truth, I'm in that cohort of people, so I'm wondering how to handle a job like department chair, and I've talked to lots of these folks, and wondering what will be changed, what can be changed and what must remain the same has me wondering about how organizations retask themsevles, or not. Sadly, it often seems that it requires real pain and suffering to deal with these changes. So it leaves me to wonder.
Dec 20, 2009, 14:46:13 nous wrote:
As far as retasking the military goes, I think that it's always going to be hard because the military is so top-down and the people at the top got there by being the best at supporting the previous paradigm. The previous big changes (after Vietnam and the RMA shift to tech) only happened because the former came after a huge paradigm busting loss in SE Asia and the latter had the support of the defense contractors and their representatives in congress and came on the heels of a shiny victory in SW Asia (as they liked to call it).
COIN is both low-tech as far as weapons systems go and labor intensive, and it goes against a lot of the prevailing doctrine at the top. Petraeus was willing to buck the system because he wasn't going to make it to the top within established doctrine so he made an end run. But the people he made an end run around will drag their heels as long as possible to try to preserve the institutions as they were. I think it will take another big defeat to really shift thinking.
I also have the sick feeling that we might as well be talking about traditional humanities departments here as well. It's the same story. The people in charge are trying to preserve what they know and love and losing the battle for the universities. Meanwhile, I'm busy trying to position myself for an end run.
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