The New Physics: Key to Strengthening COIN

Dayuhan,

I agree with everything you say. I believe empowering is aligned with the non-local causation in the new physics, and I agree that the first principle of empowerment is to let people pursue their own objectives.

I agree current policies on NGOs are very problematic, and a major reason is their emphasis on helping rather than empowering. I am not in favor of increases in funding for international NGOs as currently organized.

Surferbeetle,

I did not, in fact, mean to promote anything to do with more quantitative analysis. I know that both NGOs and donor agencies are preoccupied with "measurable results", and that pushes them, almost inherently, toward helping, which is easy to quantify, versus empowering, which is much harder to quantify. I understand that the current nonprofit and donor financial markets are dominated by old physics concepts of helping. I wrote the article to call that objective into question and suggest a very different approach, which over time will yield enormously greater results at much lower costs.

My point works better in normal development policies than it does in disaster relief, such as in Haiti, where helping -- especially at the outset -- must be the principal objective. I would argue that in Iraq empowering should be a much greater priority than it is, however.

Slapout9,

Investing in local assets is very important, but empowering and connecting people needs to happen first to overcome the internal conflict in tribal societies. The local resources we want to strengthen need to be the resources of a *united* people -- or at least a people whose distrust is not so great that more resources could trigger a civil war. The key to increase trust is to promote communication across loyalties -- personal engagement. This objective needs to be given much higher priority in current policy.

Ken White,

A central question here is: what activities would catalyze significant attention to programs that are working and open the possibility of funding for them at strategic scales. At present, I think our government has almost no capacity to identify intervention models that are scalable and sustainable, and until such a capacity is developed, no information will exist to stimulate investment at strategic scales. I coauthored a book on this subject, focused on the challenge of making foreign aid strategic. It is called STRATEGIC FOREIGN ASSISTANCE: CIVIL SOCIETY IN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY (2006), and it explores four strategic issues and civil society programs that should be greatly expanded.

In general, I believe that programs that empower will produce far greater returns than programs devoted to helping. The program I founded and run, Educate Girl Globally (EGG), which has developed a powerful model for promoting girls education by reforming government schools, is an empowerment program of tremendous power and enormous potential scale. The ultimate test of returns is governments' willingness to invest in a model, which governments are starting to do for EGG's model.

Lawrence,  

I appreciate your paper and the discussion it has sparked however, while your  Physics analogy adds a certain quantitative cachet to your argument it conflicts with your underlying premise of finding success via efforts free from most quantitative benchmarks.  Nongovernmental Organizations interested in making payroll find benefit in organizational charts, workbreakdown structures, workplans, cost estimates, and schedules just as Taxpayers find benefit from transparency, oversight, and accountability of tax dollars spent.  I would suggest that you if you were to survey, compare, and contrast NGO business models with Governmental service models across the ages you would improve your chances of finding some of the answers which we all seek.  The concepts of helping and empowering, unlike many Physics concepts, are not rigidly defined as your paper makes clear.  The Hobbsonian human ecosystems in Hati and Iraq are examples of, and speak volumes about, the need for transparent and accountable Leviathans and NGO's which understand their role along the continuum of the provision of life saving, sustaining, and enhancing services.  In order to successfully apply hard science techniques and analogies to examine social science problems requires effort, but the resulting benefits are always worth the cost.

Steve

If we're asking "how we can empower them to mobilize for COIN", aren't we already setting aside the first principle of empowerment: that of enabling people to pursue their own objectives? Mobilization for COIN is <i>our</i> objective, but it may not be the objective of many of the communities we deal with. Many of them may prefer a neutral stance in the insurgent-counterinsurgent fight. Some may sympathize with the insurgent. Either way, if we dictate the goal of "mobilization for COIN", it's no longer empowerment.

After many many years of dealing with and observing NGO operations, I am not entirely convinced that expanding the operations of foreign NGOs (as opposed to local civil society) is necessarily a solution to the problems of places like Afghanistan. Part of the solution perhaps, but there are major obstacles and major problems that I feel are being glossed over in these pieces. Large-scale government funding of NGOs poses real challenges and there are significant pitfalls involved. These need to be at least acknowledged, and ideally addressed, in any discussion of such funding.

Just to start, I'd cite the extreme difficulty of obtaining accurate assessments of completed and ongoing NGO activities. If you read NGO reports (I have read many) you tend to wonder why the world has not yet been elevated to the age of Aquarius: everything is invariably reported as a glowing success, even when field visits reveal a very different story. This is a direct consequence of the extremely competitive struggle for funding, in which any admission of error or failure can be an enormous handicap. In reality, of course, any organization that attempts anything will have failures and errors: this is implicit in human endeavor. Anyone or any group that has never done anything wrong has never done anything at all. Unfortunately the desperately needed process of evaluation, correction, and learning is consistently obstructed by the prevailing refusal to discuss or even admit to errors and failures.

My own suspicion is that large scale government funding of NGOs would simply result in an NGO feeding frenzy, with the interests of the communities rapidly submerged beneath the interests of the competing NGOs.

zenpundit,

I have no problem with self-defense and deterrence coming from villagers themselves. The great challenge of COIN in tribal societies is precisely to empower communities to play active roles in a variety of activities they value, one of which is certainly security. An important problem to be overcome in the course of that is dealing with tribal societies' antagonism to outsiders, which includes other tribes, the Afghan federal government, and us. The more the communities can do, including security, the fewer the opportunities for the Taliban to play on the antagonism against outsiders and assert themselves, as happened in my story.

Ken White,

It is *possible* other things might have been going on. My understanding, however, is that the causal sequence became clear when the PRT came in, the Taliban appeared for the first time as an antagonistic force and attacked the NGO for being lackeys of the military. The beginning of serious conflict happened with the appearance of the outsiders, who were the military. They made no effort to overcome their role as outsiders because they did not consult either with the NGO or the community about repairing the roof). This complaint against a PRT is very widely expressed by NGOs working in the country.

Of course not all NGOs or PRTs are the same. It is difficult, however, to see the value in throwing up one's hands and saying, therefore, there is nothing that can be said about any of it. Enormous efforts, at enormous expense, have been expended trying to promote economic, political, and social change in Afghanistan. People may differ about this, but many believe we have much too little to show for the efforts than we should. My purpose here and in other articles is to try to understand why our returns are so low and what we might do to increase them.

Surferbeetle,

My own belief is that there is *too much* quantitative evaluation -- or perhaps evaluation of the wrong kind -- and not enough *conceptual analysis* of the challenges we face in a tribal society like Afghanistan and how to respond to them. I believe that antagonism to outsiders and low social trust are the great impediments to COIN, and I believe our outcomes there would be much improved if we reduced our focus on what *we* should do to fight the war and help them develop (our continuing Newtonian approach) and focus more on how we can empower *them* to mobilize for COIN by giving them the tools -- both practical and *especially social* to pursue progress on their own. The key to it is to empower them rather than help them -- empowering being aligned with the new physics and helping being aligned with the old physics.

Slapout9,

I am not entirely sure what you are saying, but I believe it is aligned with my argument. I also believe that *empowering people* is an essential precondition for people to organize stationary forces and production.

War is a horrible way to push the frontiers of human understanding, but it provides for measureable real-time feedback regarding the costs and benefits of ideas, theories, and TTPs. The study and application of Physics and Development have made tremendous strides during wartime, and both disciplines benefit from the results of efforts undertaken during wars as well as the interludes between them. Physics greats such as Planck, Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Pauli extensively relied upon quantitative methods in order to advance mankinds understanding of various aspects of the Physics branches of Newtonian and Quantum Mechanics. Roman Proconsuls such as Publius Iuventius Celsus (Asia), Festus (Africa), Sergius Paulus (Cyprus), and others extensively relied upon quantitative methods to manage Development efforts, with a focus upon taxation and financial management, in the provinces to which they were assigned. Modern day US Governors field legions of accountants and engineers in order extensively quantify their efforts to administer and Develop their states while bond markets provide regular insights as to their effectiveness. If we are to be able to transition from a 'Newtonian to a 'Quantum Mechanical understanding and application of Development Models and Methods the equivalent descriptions of 'Probability Theory and 'Hilbert spaces still need to be elucidated and subjected to the rigors of battlefield review.

Hi Lawrence,

Perceptions are important, agreed. And I find no fault with the reasoning in your anecdote.

However, the guns were not in the villagers hands, but in those of American soldiers. If the villagers could both repair the roof and deter armed Taliban strangers from coming in and intimidating their brothers, cousins, neighbors and friends by the capability of self-defense (or, more likely in an Afghan context, the prospect of eventual retaliation) so much the better. That deterrence is also a potent perception.

One reinforces the other.

Gian P Gentile and zenpundit,

Important perceptions come from many places, including the barrels of guns. Because Taliban guns are most likely to appear in response to our military symbols, the best way to keep their guns holstered is by promoting non-local action (as I argued) in local communities, removed from those symbols. I know of one NGO that had worked in an Afghan community for 8 years. A PRT project moved in and, without asking anyone, started fixing the roof of a school. The sight of people in army uniforms rebranded the NGO an outsider collaborator. And this NGO, which, again, had worked for eight years in this community, was driven away by this. If the village itself had repaired the roof without any guns, the NGO would still be there. Here the sight of our guns destroyed the NGOs authority and explicitly brought Taliban guns into prominence --
not a happy outcome.

Which is, in my view, a good argument for the widespread ownership of guns :)