Humanizing "The Man"

Thank you, Anonymous, for your kind remarks and especially for your reference to the Jones and Munoz RAND paper. I will look at it with interest.

You make good and important points. I don't disagree, really, with any of them. We went into Iraq and then Afghanistan without the faintest clue what we were getting into. The opening lines of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual make it clear how totally unprepared we were to fight these wars. We have made horrendous mistakes, and we are still learning. We still have a long way to go, and one of the most important spaces committed to this learning is the Small Wars Journal and blog.

As we get better at this, we will be able to help people at enormously lower costs than the very great costs we have bourn to this point. The nonmilitary strategy I have tried to present here reflects our highest idealism as a people; and if we focus on empowering other people, they will carry the burden of the fight -- and not rely only on us. The program I founded and run, Educate Girls Globally (EGG), is so powerful that governments are starting to offer to pay for it.

One final point on my argument about the impact on us if we leave Afghanistan and then watch a bloodbath in our wake. I did not mean to push on anyone my own moral belief that we cannot leave. I meant to be saying that our idealism as a people is such that if this happened, it could tear us apart. Imagine the political response, the energy that would go into attacking the barbarism of those in power. I am not taking sides here -- saying either side is right or wrong. I am only saying that if it tears us apart, the result would be really terrible.

If the Taliban win, they go back to slaughtering women and keeping them in servitude. If we "win", we can leave the country confident that slavery will not return to one-half the population. In most wars, "winning" is about who takes over. Our concept of winning is that we get to leave and no one takes over in a brutal regime than enslaves half the country. In that sense, I think we need to win. In this media age, I shudder to think of the effect on our national psyche and soul if we are forced, every night, in the comfort of our homes, to watch on the evening news genocide raging in a country we abandoned.

This war cannot be "won" by arms alone. Everyone knows that. I do think, perhaps aligned with your comment, that we are not paying enough attention to situations where the mere presence of soldiers stimulates opposition and even violence. I can't remember if I included it in the paper, but one NGO I know was driven out of a community where it had worked for 8 1/2 years by a military PRT, which came in and, without asking, fixed the roof on a school the NGO was supporting. The mere sight of a soldier allowed the Taliban to brand the NGO as a tool of the military, and they had no alternative but to leave.

I believe that the whole role of soldiers "doing good", at huge expense, needs to be rethought because I think military PRTs are often producing results the very opposite of those intended. I have heard this from multiple sources. Understanding why such PRTs can harm the coalition cause there requires focusing on empowerment as the key objective of nonmilitary actions there, as I argued in the paper.

I want to say one other thing about what I understand to be your position. I have written two books on a new "transpartisan" politics, and I argue in both that citizen empowerment is a crucial element that will bring right and left together -- does bring them together whenever it appears. The trouble is, our political idiom is so focused on conflict -- on what separates us rather than on what brings us together -- that there is little public discussion of how and why empowering citizens is essential not only to bring people together, but also to solve problems ranging from COIN in Afghanistan to the challenge of reforming U.S. public schools.

Although I suspect you regard yourself as strong aligned with one side of the U.S. political spectrum, the point you are arguing here can be framed in powerfully transpartisan terms.

If I understand kdog101's point, he has described the essence of EGG's program. EGG focuses not on "welfare and social engineering", but on empowerment. EGG gives no money to anyone. The great challenge in a tribal society like Afghanistan is to activate (the neuroscience term) a passive culture to take control of their own lives -- which includes empowerment to trade and also to cooperate actively in COIN. Individual freedom, which kdog101 emphasizes, depends on *empowerment*; it depends on consciousness, which is encouraged by different things, including *ownership*. EGG makes no promises; it operates invisibly, creating a space for disempowered people to become empowered. It humanizes The Man, creating an equal relationship of dignity and respect between us. I am with you, entirely.

I wanted to add thoughts on specific actions that I think would advance the position I argued in the article and would speak to the issues discussed by Jim M, MikeF, and Steven Meek.

From the perspective of my article, the idea is to initiate a study of these issues, examining the commander's narrative for its endorsement of empowerment and civil society as the central principles, and then reviewing the totality of operations in the theater for consistency with the narrative. The PRT example I cited -- and many others I have heard about -- directly contradict a true empowerment narrative. Part of such a project should also reach out to USAID and other coalition partner donor agencies and initiate a process that would encourage the partners to adopt the commander's narrative as their own. (If the narratives conflict, of course, there is more noise and no clear narrative.) This would provide a clearer standard by which to judge donor-funded projects that may have no connection to the military.

Imagining this narrative should govern activities in many countries, not just Afghanistan, informal consultation should continue, seeking buy-in from higher levels in the government and the coalition. The purpose, ultimately, would be to expand appreciation of the importance of a civil society-empowerment perspective both for the military and nonmilitary sides of the government and the coalition. Sustaining consultation on these issues could play an important role in promoting consideration of them in the large debates on foreign and national security policy.

Steven Meek's comments are excellent because they go straight to the central responsibility for leadership. As an IO officer, perhaps it is natural that he would focus the discussion entirely on communications and the narrative. However, as I tried to argue in my article, the central issue here is the consistency and coherence of both our actions *and* the narrative.

In my article I tried to emphasize the importance of *empowerment* as the central theme in both actions and narrative. In my next article here, which I am now writing, I focus on the centrality of *civil society* as a crucial partner in empowering people and connecting them. This is a central theme in my 2006 coauthored book STRATEGIC FOREIGN ASSISTANCE: CIVIL SOCIETY IN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY, which is focused on how to design foreign aid programs to support foreign policy strategically. My coauthors and I argued that a very central failing in the making of foreign policy is the failure of senior foreign policy leadership, starting with the President and the National Security Council, to provide leadership emphasizing identification of strategic aid projects and then investment in them at strategic scales.

There is no leadership from the top on either actions or a supporting narrative on the empowerment theme I think should be central because the entire foreign policy idiom is focused on states and on governments, and provides no role for civil society. The larger foreign policy community knows nothing about the issue -- read the foreign policy journals like Foreign Affairs and Foriegn Policy: it is all about states. The whole debate is about asking weak states to do things they have no capacity to do.

The answer to all of this, I believe, will not come from the top, which is doing what it knows, focusing on states. If there is an answer to this, it will come from the bottom. It will come from a powerful clarity about a new narrative -- action and communication. For complicated reasons I think leadership for this is much more likely to come from the military than from the State Department (which has that name for a reason). If the military, starting with the commander's narrative (see Jim M's comments above), promulgated a clear directive on this area and then enforced it throughout the command -- eliminating PRTs without consultation and "three cups of tea" -- that would provide an important beginning of leadership from which people on the civilian side of the government could then learn.

Being in the military -- which I am not -- it is easy to think that leadership needs to come from the top, with someone giving an order. But leadership can also come, in an area like this, from the bottom -- by example. I have talked to dozens and dozens of people on both the military and civilian sides of the government about the challenge of the narrative, and I have found nearly unanimous agreement about how the narrative should be articulated -- what is really important in it. The failure starts with a failure to articulate the *essential principles* in the narrative and then to design programs that reflect those principles.

Being clear in the command about what to do and how to implement policy to reflect the principles would be an important beginning. From there, private consultation with the highest levels of the government could begin a conversation about how to do the same throughout all coalition activities and narratives, both military and nonmilitary, that are influencing people's perceptions of us in Afghanistan and other places.

Jim M is right to say the narrative needs to be bigger than IO/PSYOP. Unfortunately, this is an area I do not know well. I would say, in fact, that the narrative *needs to encompass everything the coalition is doing on both the military and civilian sides* -- because all of it is influencing people's perceptions. My sense here is that the commander's narrative about these issues either has not been defined clearly enough, or it is clearly defined but is not effectively governing what goes out under it.

I hope all USAID projects are governed by the commander's narrative. If they are not (as I suspect), they are nevertheless playing an important role in influencing people's perceptions, and they are producing "noise" in the narrative. In this case, it is an urgent priority for DOD and State to rationalize the structure governing the narrative and all activities that influence it.