Afghanistan War: How a Model Province Tumbled into Violence by Anna Mulrine at the Christian Science Monitor. "Khost Province had been a U.S. success story in the Afghanistan war. But poor local leadership, an influx of insurgents fleeing U.S. pressure elsewhere, and the proximity to Pakistan are stubborn challenges."
Comments
The point of contention discussed in the first article (shall we emphasize our enemies atrocities or not, and how will various populations we aim to protect react?) reminds me of the following article (from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point) that I discovered via a Dr. Rid post at Kings of War:
<blockquote>Selfââ¬ÂInflicted Wounds examines the internal, or endogenous, reasons that have hastened the decline of the jihadi movement.(from the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point)</blockquote>
http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2010/12/self-inflicted-wounds/
The article is long (and way above my head) but the advice within to "tell the stories," in particular, struck me.
Back to the Petraeus article: in the short term, in Afghanistan, within the context of COIN and protecting the population, there may be some danger in emphasizing Taliban atrocities. Maybe we are reenforcing the "night letter" phenomenon. I don't know Afghanistan at all, so I may be completely wrong about that. I simply don't know.
In the larger ideological struggle, however, where ideas matter and we must use our persuasive skills to HONESTLY prove, cajole, inform, intellectually seduce, and convince skeptical populations, telling stories will have a role.
Our enemies use story telling all the time and they cleverly plug into the larger stories we in the West tell about <em>ourselves</em>. In this way, I believe, they co-opt our own "engines" of democracy to make their points. Nothing earth-shaking or new about that insight, except that describing a phenomenon is a lot easier than devising solutions.
Might one solution be changing our own intellectual framing, and thus, naturally, our own policies?
For instance, watch how our adversaries in South Asia cleverly say that, "The Americans are short-termers and we have long-term interests."
Nothing could be further from the truth. We may not have long-term interests that include multi-decade nation-building in Afghanistan but given the movements of trade and capital, the West has long-term interests in Asia. They don't go away any time soon. We will trade with China and India and Pakistan, and so forth. The parade of international leaders eastward will continue. The old calculations won't work.
Why do we let our adversaries - and friends, even - box us in ideologically? From Ahmed Rashid's book <em>Descent into Chaos</em>:
<blockquote>....but they also created emormous expectations of change and hope for a more sustained Western committment to the region that would lift it out of poverty and underdevelopment.</blockquote>
We cannot do any lifting by ourselves and we cannot lift that community which is uninterested in understanding why it cannot lift itself.
<blockquote>Yet, counterterrorist practitioners in the West and in the Muslim
world, with few exceptions, view victims of radical Islamism as mere statistics, with no
faces or stories to represent them.</blockquote> - from the West Point paper.
Yes. Individual human beings are not merely statistics. Our tendency in the West to desribe others by "multicultural" groups of our own devising is infuriating to some. Of course, the reverse happens too. It serves many nefarious purposes.
The problem with telling stories is that you are never quite sure how they will be interpreted. A solution may be to have the people talk to themselves....
Final comment about the first article (an excerpt follows):
<em>"If India comes across the border, Pakistan can fall back into Afghanistan and drive them out. Its about strategic depth vis-ÃÂ -vis India. As long as that continues to be a driving concern, Pakistans support for the Haqqani network will continue."</em>
I would argue that the above described, er, strategy of "strategic depth," has failed its real world test. It appears some cling to theory even when it has been proven wrong.
What good is keeping a proxy in play when the very thing it is meant to prevent has already happened? India is in Afghanistan precisely because the Pakistani military/ISI lost control of the proxies it need to maintain its theoretical "strategic depth."
The policy has failed. If I were Pakistani, I'd devise a new one.
One source of strength of the Taliban, to the extent it gains strength from non-coercive propaganda, is the perception that it acts as a check against warlords and provides some stability amid chaos. Truthful information to the contrary can sometimes contradict this perception. So long as we stick to factual reporting about Taliban atrocities, I see no harm. Truth will eventually get out - better to hasten that release when it benefits us. Now if we stray too far from informing and into the realm of influencing, I'd be less enthusiastic. After 9 years, I fear we're not culturally savvy enough for that.