CIAO DATE: 09/07
The National Interest
Comments and Responses: Security Vortex, Warlords and Nation Building
Greg Mills, Terrence McNamee and Denny Lane
Full Text
Given the extensive discussion in recent issues of The National Interest both about nation-building and about Afghanistan (including contributions by Brent Scowcroft, Sandy Berger, Zalmay Khalilzad and, more recently, John Hulsman and Alexis Debat), we wanted to offer our own observations.
It is very easy to draw up reconstruction plans that look quite impressive on paper. When confronted by Afghanistan's veneer-thin human resources, shifting political alliances and abject poverty, many of these proposals end up being dead on arrival. So we all have to get real. Reconstruction efforts must benefit the population, not just international consultants and conference habitués. In a rural population heavily dependent on agriculture, doing so requires a narrowly targeted focus on projects with the greatest economic multiplier effect: roads, water and power.
One point missing from the discussion about the linkages between security and development so far has been mention of the ink spot strategy. Employed successfully by the British in Malaya fifty years ago and given more recent prominence by the former army officer and American academic Andrew Krepinevich, it involves focusing military effort not on hunting down the enemy, but instead securing key centers and improving conditions there so markedly that you eliminate support for an insurgency. Success then spreads slowly outwards as if from an expanding ink spot (hence the designation).
In Afghanistan, the importance of filling those "ungoverned spaces" where the Taliban has been undergoing a revival has been promoted by General David Richards, the British Commander of the current 36-nation NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
But spreading General Richards' ink spots--now labeled Afghan Development Zones (ADZs)--of stability and prosperity will require focus of effort and focus of force. There is a logical sequence of events to this strategy: First, the army goes in and cleans out areas. Second, they maintain a presence to ensure security of extant development projects by embedding security to the local army and police forces and through ISAF and the coalition's 23 provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) dotted around the country. Third, they also employ the PRTs, among other means, to roll-out concentrated spending on development projects which have a key economic and social multiplier value, such as bridges and roads (for trade) or wells and clinics (for well-being). Fourth, the foreign military offers a quick reaction spine as a guarantee against insurgent activity. Fifth, the military plays its part in ensuring top-down government-donor coordination in synch with Kabul's overall long-term development strategy.
In essence, the ink spot strategy might best be explained as being akin to expanding Kabul's Green Zone--known in more politically correct terminology as the International Zone--outwards to the entire country, where the benefits of the international presence, security, spending and government are visible and obvious for all. But since ISAF and its partners obviously do not have sufficient resources to cover the entire country all at once and certain areas are less secure than others, this begs the question: Where to go first?
It is logical that projects and geographic areas should be selected where the security-development-governance nexus is weakest, most critical and will have the greatest multiplier effect. However, this may not have the desired effect and may suck up a large amount of resources with minimal results.
Fundamentally, however, where to go has to be led by intelligence, and guided by a consistent and clear evaluation of economic activity. How to evaluate this economic potential is a formidable challenge. Inevitably, it will involve difficult political choices as communities bargain, twist and posture for development assistance. And it will be complicated by the political tension around dealing with narcotics, particularly since the bulk of the development and security attention will be directed towards the narco-provinces in Afghanistan's south.
The PRTs are an important nib through which the ink can flow at a tactical level. More than half of the PRTs are currently under U.S. stewardship, though these will fall under ISAF authority as a result of the expansion to the south and east in August and September this year. But at present there is little coherence. National directives and caveats mean that no two nation's PRTs function the same--and even the operations of American PRTs differ from each other. Whilst certain PRTs have already succeeded in sowing the seeds of development and bringing a modicum of stability in their areas, others are more akin to frontier outposts, manned by jittery soldiers with little concept of their purpose--other than manning the fort. Military force will remain the spine of the U.S. and ISAF presence in Afghanistan for some time, but its face must rapidly transfer to the PRTs, which need to become synonymous with development, not aggression. The PRTs don't have much time to prove that their intent is humane and their duration finite--or they risk looking no different than the countless foreign aggressors that came before them.
President Hamid Karzai said this June that there is "the need on behalf of the international community to reassess the manner in which this war against terror is conducted." The ink spot approach is a departure from past efforts in that it concentrates resources, seeks to unify the donor and security community, does not try to do everything (or every area) at once, and explicitly links security outcomes with development inputs. (A longer exposition on what we think constitutes a successful strategy for Afghanistan will be appearing in the forthcoming edition of Armed Forces.)
Henry Kissinger once put it: "The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose." Successfully countering the Afghan insurgency has to involve much more than winning military skirmishes. After all, counter-insurgency campaigns are won not by body counts, but by the absence of killing and satisfying citizens' hopes.
Greg Mills
The Brenthurst Foundation, Johannesburg
Special Advisor to ISAF IX
Terence McNamee
Editor, RUSI Journal,
London
(Both are drawing on first-hand experience in Afghanistan.)
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I arrived in Ba'qubah, Iraq, in the Sunni Triangle in December 2004 coming more or less directly from four years in Kosovo where I had been a Municipal Administrator. There was a riot two or three days after I arrived. A harried Iraqi appeared at the gate of our compound and asked that whoever was in charge come and talk to the mob. I was clearly not in charge having been reduced in this particular incarnation to minion status. (Had it been Kosovo, I would have gone. It was part of the job.) There being obviously no non-Iraqi present capable of talking to the mob, I asked my local language assistant if there was an Iraqi who had credibility with the mob. He responded that there was. "Get him", said I. "I can't", he responded, "he was arrested by the Coalition and is in jail in Baghdad."
I have had for many years an almost perverse interest in the psychology of warlords or better still the role of personal charisma in revolutionary and other related-type movements. I never met the late Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok, but I knew many of his followers and was consistently amazed by their loyalty to a man we considered one of the most vile members of the Khmer Rouge. It was in this regard that I was given and greatly enjoyed reading Alexis Debat's and John Hulsman's recent essay "In Praise of Warlordism." Other than not being entirely certain about the title's propriety, perhaps it might better have been called "Understanding Warlordism", or "On Charisma", I found it to be both important and provocative.
Our personal world views are to varying degrees the product of our individual experiences. My worldview is colored by a thirty-year career in the United States Army, the greater part of which was spent either on the ground in Asia or directly involved with Asia-related issues at the policy level in Washington. And if my military career was characterized by a certain degree of nonconformity, it was because my roots were somewhat obscure. To this end a series of assignment officers were never really certain if I was in fact an American or simply an exchange officer. Retirement in early 1993 came to be a form of cultural epiphany. There were no longer any imposed intellectual boundaries.
Following what I now call "liberation", I spent ten years in assorted Balkan countries as well as eight disagreeable and visionless months in Iraq as a local government team leader under the unenlightened management--there was clearly no leadership--of Ambassador Paul Bremmer's Civil Provisional Authority (CPA).
Democracy can be described as a linear, rigid and almost mechanical system specifically designed for the exercise of political power. And if "democracy" is a linear and rigid system of government, realities on the ground in states in which the political structure has lost legitimacy, if they ever in our view had legitimacy, represent a major ideological contradiction. The field administrator finds himself often faced with a non-linear "natural" social system that draws its structure of leadership from tribal or religious leaders who may or may not even have an official title but who at the same time exercise enormous power. A case in point is Iraq's Sistani. In early March 2004 I proposed placing a picture of Sistani at the entrance to my compound in Southern Iraq. Uncharacteristically, I did not do so mainly because my relations with Mr. Bremmer's local representatives from CPA were already strained. The challenge for the field officer is to close the gap. This requires that we acknowledge the "real"--but from our perspective the informal or even illegitimate social and political structure--within a quasi-democratic framework.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that overwhelmingly, individuals assigned to the "center" from whence comes policy and direction have all risen to their various and sundry exalted positions not by having pursued irregular solutions but by having scrupulously subscribed to a series of rigid rules and regulations. Perhaps somewhat simplistically I divide people into two categories, lunatics and bureaucrats. Both have essential roles to play. Lunatics are those individuals possessed with vision, intellectual flexibility and the ability to move people in a particular direction. Bureaucrats on the other hand exist to make certain that organizations function smoothly. It goes without saying that bureaucrats live in terror of lunatics. For better or for worse, bureaucrats are currently in ascendance. My experience to date with bureaucrats is that overwhelmingly they have absolutely no experience in dealing with anything other than the rigid rules to which they unconsciously and without question subscribe.
I often wonder of individuals possessed with a sufficiency of personal charisma--such as T. E. Lawrence, Orde Wingate, Ed Landsdale or my own personal hero and favorite, F. M. (Hatter) Bailey, were they to come along today and apply for a job as an administrator somewhere out on the fringe--would they be hired? Probably not. The reason is that the selection process is overseen by bureaucrats and bureaucrats hire "safe" individuals who are overwhelmingly cast in the image of bureaucrats.
There are no hard and fast rules related to insurgency or counterinsurgency but there are some very well established guidelines that remain neither appreciated nor understood by the architects of Iraq-related policy, if indeed there ever was any meaningful Iraq-related policy. Among them is the fact that you cannot "anoint" an individual such as Ahmed Chalabi as a potential champion unless he or she has been an integral and long-term participant in struggle for change. Without such experience he or she lacks the all-important element of popular support and little if anything can be accomplished without popular support.
In an editorial that appeared in the July 14, 2006 edition of the International Herald Tribune, Rory Stewart correctly observed that we seldom take the time to really understand local politics. We have come instead to rely on Western moral ideals, instead of real information; on an influx of money, often ill directed; and on armed force to attempt to solve what are essentially political or religious problems. The net result is that invariably we have further alienated popular support and without the element of popular support little if anything can be achieved. We ignore also the fact that invariably national and local leaders have a far better grasp of the limitations and possibilities of the local political scene. And when local leaders start to press for accommodation and compromise, we immediately condemn such initiatives as appeasement and weakness, preferring to rely on the vagaries of "constitutions", "democratic" reforms, and on abstract economic reforms theories vice engaging local personalities. The problem is us and not them.
Denny Lane
Senior Associate Member, St Antony's College (Oxford)