Via Spencer Ackerman, I just read John Nagl and Richard Fontaine’s op-ed from two weeks ago:

As the Obama administration debates whether to stick with the counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan, opponents point to that nation’s flawed presidential election as a reason why this approach cannot work… This argument is badly flawed. Electoral fraud will render our task in Afghanistan more difficult, but it does not make counterinsurgency impossible. On the contrary, a counterinsurgency approach — and not a narrowly tailored mission focused solely on killing or capturing enemies — remains the best path to success in Afghanistan.

Ackerman’s worried by their proposal to effectively bypass the central government. I’m less so. They are being a bit too optimistic about the benefits this will be bringing to the Afghan people, and they’re certainly prettying up what the surge actually achieved in Iraq. Nevertheless, it’s one step closer to accepting that the best we can probably hope to accomplish is a loose confederation of warlord fiefdoms that more-or-less has control over its territory. Setting realistic goals is the first step to some kind of positive outcome to this whole mess.

Alex Massie draws my attention to a Jason Zengerle profile of Rory Stewart at TNR. It’s a good piece, worth reading in full¹. Of course, as is customary in these sorts of articles, Zengerle seeks out a dissenting opinion from COIN booster Andrew Exum.

Matt Yglesias explains the crux of their disagreement:

…it seems to me that the real disagreement here is probably driven by different views about the U.S. military than by different views about Afghanistan as such. Exum believes that the Pentagon has developed powerful new operational doctrines about counterinsurgency that make it possible to achieve things via U.S. military intervention that U.S. military intervention hasn’t traditionally achieved. I read Stewart as being skeptical about that idea…

A couple of random questions/points expanding on this:

1) Do COIN supporters think that the army is well-suited to doing development work? This is redolent of a sort of universalist bias in American thinking, which assumes that the only thing keeping an individual from flourishing is oppressive circumstance. In Iraq, we had the strong form of this thesis, wherein the removal of Saddam would lead to the rise of a functional, semi-modern democracy in the heart of the middle east. After Iraq, our aspirations for Afghanistan are lower, but the belief in the mechanism remains: if only we can limit violence, good things will happen. Limiting violence is a good thing in itself, to be sure, but it doesn’t causally lead to a stable state emerging. And a stable state in control of its territory is the minimum of what we’re after.

2) Do COIN supporters even know what development is capable of? I don’t claim to know either, definitively, not being a specialist in the field. But my father worked at the UNDP his whole career, and I did a stint at an NGO after college, so I have at least some kind of appreciation of both the ambition of development practitioners as well as the crushing difficulty of actually achieving these goals. Reading the McChrystal recommendations, the following bullet point struck me:

Facilitating Afghan governance and mitigating the effects of malign actors. Success requires a stronger Afghan government that is seen by the Afghan people as working in their interests. Success does not require perfection—an improvement in governance that addresses the worst of today’s high level abuse of power, low-level corruption and bureaucratic incapacity will suffice.

This sounds like the kind of development boilerplate one might see on funding proposals and grant requests. It blithely suggests that even achieving a percentage of perfection is within our reach. I doubt that it is even in the long term. I’m virtually certain it’s impossible in the 12-18 month horizon that General McChyrstal’s report is talking about.

3) We’re not thinking about time horizons correctly at all. Development, as a formalized field, has only existed since after World War II—that’s a bit north of 60 years. During that time, the great successes have been in eradicating diseases like river blindness and polio, and in fighting famines through the introduction of improved farming techniques. Creating good governance in post-colonial tribal societies in Africa, on the other hand, has been depressingly less successful. Surely we’ve all heard that the Afghanistan project will take as much as 50 years to get right. I’d say 50 years is the lowball estimate, even if we as a country were 100% committed to the project and suffered no setbacks in the interim.

Rory Stewart’s Tory conservatism is based on experience of not just Afghanistan, but of development work in general. The COIN proponents’ optimism seems to be based on a can-do American ethos typical of its excellent armed services. While I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the type of thinking that the COIN crowd is doing, I fear that as their star has risen in Washington, their vision has become more maximalist. All problems appear to be nails for their hammer, and all previous failures have been failures of not doing it the right way. But many of these problems, especially but not exclusively in Afghanistan, are fundamentally problems of political (not economic) development, and are devilishly hard to solve by outsiders. It’s folly to assume that a fresh pair of eyes and new determination will succeed where decades of effort have already failed.

I’ve long planned to read Petraeus’ praised counterinsurgency manual, but I just haven’t done it yet. With that said, I openly wonder what COIN orthodoxy says about suicide bombers.

Presumably, by ingratiating yourself with the local populace and ultimately gaining their trust, you will prevent insurgent groups from getting succour from an embittered population which resents your presence in the country. Using Mao’s famous metaphor for insurgent armies being fish swimming through the water of the general populace, you drain the water so the fish can’t swim.

Sounds good when applied to mobile guerilla bands who value their own lives and who occasionally fight real battles, however asymmetrical. But it sounds much less applicable to suicide bombers who have decided to forfeit their lives in advance and who don’t need a vast network of support to carry out their outrage.

I suppose one could hope that a sympathetic population will be able to rat out bomb-making nests and could point out suspicious activity to the authorities before an attack takes place. But the sheer susceptibility of even the most advanced, coherent societies such as ours to the irrational attacks of determined psychopaths suggests to me that past a certain population density, the full cooperation of a sympathetic population becomes much less effective than we’d like to believe.

I mean, what can we possibly do about acts such as these?