In his inaugural address in 1961, John F. Kennedy said the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend" in defense of liberty. Less than three months later, he decided not to supply air support to US-trained Cuban exiles who tried to overthrow Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. It wasn't a shining moment for American foreign policy. But JFK was right to turn off the spigot of American assistance if he wasn't committed to the fight. President Barack Obama now faces a similar tough decision. The war in Afghanistan is not going well. The rebuilding effort isn't going well. The effort to create a competent government isn't going well. So should he commit American support if he isn't committed to doing what is needed to succeed?
Mr. Obama owns the war in Afghanistan. He bought it, on credit. But he is fulminating at the cost now that the bill is coming due. Gen. Stanley McChrystal has made clear what the bill will be in terms of additional troops. And the president now wants a review to determine whether we're pursuing the right strategy. It is disappointing that this review comes after the president decided to keep 68,000 Americans risking their lives in Afghanistan. But Mr. Obama is right to give himself a chance to decide whether he is —to follow through on this war, given what it will cost in blood, treasure, and other things...
More at The Wall Street Journal.
Comments
Mark, I don't disagree with you that this lack of a cogent plan is a problem. However, I'd add that just having a cogent plan requires a broader understanding of what the plan requires.
If the plan is contingent on capabilities that are either unavailable or may not exist at all, it probably does not meet the feasible gate.
I don't get the feeling that we really know what capabilities we require (or how we would get them)to support a plan where nation building is required.
Best, Rob
The issue of staying in Afghanistan is deeper than a knee jerk reaction to bad news. The administration must formulate a cogent plan and stick to plan. The administration must also educate the American public and international community about the plan. What we have now is the lack of a coherent understand and leadership of what our national interests are as well as what they mean to the American and international publics. I am sure there is a plan but is sure seems that a void exists which does not serve the country well.
Mark:
I would much rather be in agreement with you on these matters than in disagreement!
Although I do not think you characterize my position on things correctly when you say this;
"...at least with the style of war that you favor focusing on..."
I do not favor one or the other and fully accept that when the American Army is told to go do nation building, stability operations, peace-enforcement, Coin, or whatever that that is exactly what it must do. I have and continue to argue, however, that in a world of limited resources, the most optimal force to do those kinds of missions along with the possibility of fighting at the higher end of the conflict spectrum is a general purpose force with an aim point that cheats much closer on the conflict spectrum toward high intensity combat. The problem that I have with the Coin crowd is that they have created this belief system that general purpose armies organized around the principles of combined arms and fighting cannot do coin and therefore we need to go in and radically adjust force structure and intellectual mindset within the American army to that discrete version of war. This I think to be a fundamental mistake.
But back to the matter of the Schake oped, I think that we should just accept the fact that if we are told to continue to do these missions of nation building in Astan then the reality is that the Army by and large will be the ones doing it and the idea of cajoling the American people into contributing more is just fanciful and not in the cards. Dr Schake should have directed her frustration at the American Army instead and said forget it, the cards are not there for greater civilian involvement so you have to do this on your own.
v/r
gian
I think this article brings up some great points.
First, its the issue of how Nation Building as a task relates to COIN in Afghanistan. If I read this right our logic is that in order to counter this insurgency (or at this point it is perhaps the alternative government at least n some parts) there must be some attraction to the counter (GIRoA), and there is also the desire to have the mechanisms to sustain and extend that attraction. Weve identified that because there is not a valid counter offer, e.g. those mechanisms that might represent the counter offer, does not exist , they must be built. The term nation building under this logic then requires the development of the physical, cultural, political, economical, security and ideological infrastructure be built so that a nation can exist where there is not a nation. The grounds for this new nation would then become basis for the counter. This assumes that what is built is in fact attractive to those who are currently either opposed to the idea of a counter, or who are indifferent.
By highlighting the need for nation building weve further identified that this is something beyond how weve defined stability operations, and the military tasks weve identified as being in support of stability. While those tasks are still valid in many circumstances in support of nation building, the actual scope of nation building is relative to the conditions in which you are trying to build a nation, and the military force support to this is largely limited to the provision of security either by doing it ourselves, assisting others to do it, or by developing those capabilities in others so that they can do it themselves (or some combination of two or more of the three).
So what are the capabilities required to build a nation as a task? What are the capabilities required to build the nation of Afghanistan so they can counter insurgency as a mission task?
The first requires a baseline understanding of what a nation is, and specifically what legitimate governments are expected to do given the willingness of the nation to invest authorities and responsibilities unto the government. There are some basic functions of government, the most basic of which is the provision of security. All of these assume I think that there is in fact a national consciousness that is willing or desires a government to do this. You dont have to go too far back in U.S. history to here debate over even the most basic of functions, you can turn on the news currently to here much contention over the role of expanded government.
A critical condition (assuming there is not a dictatorship imposed and maintainable by force) in desiring or allowing a central government to have legal and moral authority is legitimacy that is founded on action(s). The idea of a government that has no moral and legal basis as recognized by those who would be governed is to be resisted as it challenges individuals on an existential level - it is counter to how they see themselves. Another way to see this is to consider that in order for someone or something to represent you, it must be representative of you. It cannot simply say it is (although it may get it elected or a temporary stay until actions prove otherwise or something better comes along) it must demonstrate that it can and that it will do the things upon which that legal and moral authority was originally invested. Corruption of that authority may come in more than one form such as deviation from that original purpose, or the belief that the authority was assumed falsely.
With regards to nation building in Afghanistan I think the type of base conditions outlined above must be considered within the context of existing and desired conditions there. If you dont understand those conditions you will probably not get to the actual tasks that must be done to change current conditions to desired conditions. If you dont understand those conditions you will not know when you are being effective or not effective, you will not know if you are doing the right tasks, and you will not know when you are performing those tasks well enough.
With regards to what Mr. Schake has brought up in his article, you will probably not know what capabilities you really need to do those tasks, or how much of them. Im certain that while physically building a structure that can be used as a school, or as a courthouse, or as a police station, or as a market, or as a mosque - or building the roads and engineering projects which lead to and support them are in the possible for our military units with construction capabilities (albeit capacity is another issue), the capabilities to make all of those things work does not reside in those same units. The ability to provide local security and to act upon intelligence when the enemy becomes isolated resides in our military, however the issues of supporting the other parts of nation building - such as building an educational base - the generation of teachers, doctors, lawyers, markets, technicians, and the many other professions and their supporting infrastructure, or the cultural change required to accept them is probably beyond what the military can do (I did not broach the issue of "should") .
To do so either requires a mass resourcing of those specific capabilities if it is desired it should happen on a significant scale, or the acceptance of a long term commitment where focus is on the areas most likely to accept nation building and the re-engineering that comes with it. To resource the former would probably require a draft of civilian expertise in those areas to happen any time soon as there seems to be no evidence it exists elsewhere as a deployable capability to austere and unsecure conditions. If we wanted to replicate this capability in an all volunteer force, theyd still either need the skills to survive or the capabilities provide by the military as a deployable capability to protect them.
I just dont get the feeling weve really done the task analysis to consider what nation building really means on a significant scale (where is the JP on Nation Building?, or the UJTL task with all of its sub collective, leader and individual tasks), nor do I get the feeling weve considered in the context of conditions in Afghanistan.
There can be no question about the fact that the US should have a clear strategy and aim to win, or if its looking for an exit, then it should plan and act accordingly and be extremely mindful of the soldiers who are being asked to die for a cause that the leadership has already abandoned. I can imagine that even if the leadership has decided to exit, it may not want to announce that and operations may be conducted to make that exit as positive as possible, but the LEAST we can expect is that the people at the top KNOW what they are trying to do and what deception they are trying to perform and are mindful of the sacrifices they are asking of their trooops. They cannot sacrifice good men and women in a cynical attempt to limit the damage at the next election cycle or (almost as bad) because they just dont know what to do and are letting people die while they wait for instructions from God (or mammon, as the case may be). Unfortunately, in the head office of the sausage factory, the scene is even more sickening than it is on the factory floor. Too many fat managers walk around plotting office politics, eyeing secretaries, pushing paper, collecting kickbacks and planning their next round of loot and plunder at some other factory. This is still a great country and there may be enough good people in the head office to keep it going forward, but as an Obama supporter, I would certainly tell him he is getting close to the point where he cannot be given the benefit of the doubt any more, even by someone like me...
Gian,
I find myself in the novel, although not necessarily disagreeble, place of agreeing with you 100%.
But whatever the strategy ( and I am not convonced that either your nation or mine has yet determined a valid one for Afghanistan , nor gained the necessary bipartisan support for it) it will require 'whole of government' support. And despite six years of rhetoric and various lame attempts to arrange this, it has patently not happened.
The military does what it does because it can, and that is its inclination and disposition. The rest nod when confronted but ultimately do nothing fundamentally different. Let us be honest, the PRT in Iraq never hit their straps after the surge before the whole thing started to revert after the new SOFA was signed.
And the bottom line is that the political leadership don't really understand,period.
At least with the style of war that you favour focussing on, the focus is on the military and State et al can avoid the hard questions and keep their steely gaze on the latest debate on the next candidates for a non permmanent post at the UNSC and other items critical to the national interest..
How do we do this? How do we, as Dr Schake states, bring the "non-military parts of our strategy...up to the standard at which our military is performing?"
Do we force through the power of the state the creation of the "whole of government approach" or in more common language the creation of imperial institutions?
What if it is that the American President senses that deep down the American people are not on board for such a crusade to change Afghani society and create a nation there at the barrel of an American gun? Last year counterinsurgency expert Dr John Nagl called for "total war" against al queda and for the reorienting of national institutions toward that effort. Is such a thing really in the cards? More importantly, should it be in the cards in Afghanistan to do total commitment there where a cold, less ideological view toward strategy suggests that there are more scaled down, and limited alternatives?
Mostly questions stated above, but these kinds of call-to-arms pieces befuddle me to the point of throwing up my hands in the air and asking how in the heck do we make civilians want to do more? Draft them?
gian
I agree with Dr. Schake that the only realistic choices are withdrawal or supporting GEN McChrystal's recommendations, but I differ on why these are the only options, and I don't agree with the arguments that she presents to support this conclusion.
The most pressing problem in Afghanistan is not a lack of civilians, at least not yet. Rather, it is a lack of sufficient boots on the ground to execute a population-centric COIN campaign. One cannot engage in any viable development or governance efforts in the absence of security. In fact, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul is already confronting real-world problems with its District Stabilization Team concept which envisions deploying a development officer and a diplomat (i.e. USAID and State Department) at the district level. Most of the districts that have been identified as priorities for such an effort are presently too insecure to allow these civilian officials to do anything more than hunker down in the District Administrative Center. It defeats the purpose of having civilians there if they cannot move around to engage with the local population or if their movement requires a substantial investment of scarce military resources that could be more usefully employed in other task. (As an aside, I would argue that the most pressing interagency shortfall at the moment is actually expertise in criminal intelligence collection and analysis.)
I believe that a more fundamental misunderstanding by many commentators, theorists, and even practitioners of COIN in Afghanistan concerns who is supposed to be executing the security, development, and governance tasks. We (the international community) can get away with temporarily having the lead on security issues - with the idea being to provide a breathing space until ANSF can take over - and maybe also take a temporary lead in development efforts (more problematic) but it is absurd to believe that we can lead governance efforts in Afghanistan in place of Afghans. Afghanistan is not a colony and we cannot force Afghans to do as we wish. And good governance is not an objective that can be reached through a formulaic application of culturally-biased principles derived from academic study. I see elements of hubris and ignorance in the idea that we can create selfless, honest, and efficient Western-style Afghan bureaucrats by deploying Western (tor)mentors to counsel them, or that we can use our "leverage" to force the Afghan Government to eradicate corruption.