by Colin P. Clarke
During my three months at ISAF headquarters, a commonly heard expression around the base was the term "Afghan Good Enough." Ostensibly, this translates to doing the best one can—given the resources available—even if the end product is less than optimal.
But the troubling reality is that the term is more than just a pejorative colloquialism used by Westerners to describe what they view as half-hearted efforts or the jury-rigging that accompanies commonplace tasks. "Afghan Good Enough" represents a harbinger for the future of the Afghan state and diminishing support for what has become an unpopular war in many NATO capitals, from Ottawa to Berlin.
One of the two overarching hindrances plaguing ISAF counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan is the Karzai government's refusal to take concrete steps toward addressing the issue of corruption (the other is the ubiquitous insurgent safe havens in Pakistan.) On the contrary, instead of behaving as a reliable and responsible partner in the effort to reduce corruption, the Government of the Islamic Republic (GIROA) has facilitated the rise of criminal patronage networks and thus remains a significant part of the problem.
Despite carefully choreographed public statements suggesting that President Karzai understands the corrosive effects of corruption on the legitimacy of the Afghan state, officials in his administration continue to operate in a culture of impunity. Karzai and his cronies pay lip service to the international community's demands for reform while simultaneously pocketing international aid, reconstruction assistance, and contracting funds, all without fear of prosecution.
Corruption in Afghanistan takes several forms and is pervasive. It occurs at the national, provincial, and district levels. Moreover, as the Kabul Bank scandal demonstrated, corruption has the ability to undermine confidence in some of Afghanistan's few trusted institutions.
The lack of political will exhibited by GIROA is astounding, especially when one considers that the U.S. and its allies have stood by Afghanistan's beleaguered President through myriad accusations of wrongdoing—including electoral fraud and empowering the Taliban through statements of solidarity.
Meanwhile, President Obama's decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to bolster counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan is beginning to show tangible results. In Kandahar province, the Taliban's traditional stronghold, the insurgency's momentum has been reversed. In neighboring Helmand province, where the bulk of the country's opium poppy is grown (and by extension a majority of the global supply), ISAF forces continue to target the nexus between narcotics and the insurgency, destroying heroin processing labs and disrupting key smuggling networks.
Military officials and counterinsurgency experts all agree that recent gains made by ISAF forces throughout the country are tenuous. A successful population-centric counterinsurgency campaign will require sustained and long-lasting support from the Afghans themselves. In turn, this requires a holistic approach to winning "hearts and minds."
Though the expression has become somewhat well-worn and hackneyed, the tenets buttressing this approach remain as true today as they did in 1950s Malaya, when British General Sir Gerald Templer is credited with coining the phrase. "Hearts" means persuading the population that its best interests are served by government success. "Minds" is shorthand for demonstrating to the population that the government has the ability to protect it from danger.
Since taking command of ISAF forces last August, General Petraeus has overseen a high- tempo kinetic campaign which has attenuated the Taliban through kill-and- capture operations. To be sure, these operations have forced insurgents back across the border into Pakistan, paving the way for the safety of Afghan citizens in previously conflict-ridden districts and villages. But while the counterinsurgents attempt to prove they can protect the population from the Taliban, many ordinary Afghans wonder who will protect them from the predatory actions of the government.
In what is now the longest war in American history, the United States has spent over $330 billion and lost nearly 1,500 soldiers' lives. Yet Afghan government officials and politically connected powerbrokers continue to prey on their own citizens, turning would-be supporters into sympathizers and potential recruits for the insurgency.
With the recent killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, calls to withdraw U.S. troops before 2014 are likely to grow louder. Crucial NATO allies, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Canada are all planning to withdraw a substantial percentage of their troops within the next year. Even to the most ardent hawks, an open-ended military presence in Afghanistan is unpalatable.
To many, the phrase "Afghan Good Enough" evokes memories of the British military officer and celebrated counterinsurgency theorist T.E. Lawrence, who famously quipped, "Better to let them [the Arabs] do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country ... and your time is short."
As 2014 fast approaches, only part of Lawrence's quote seems instructive. If the United States seeks to achieve lasting stability in Afghanistan, it may not be better to let the Afghans continue to do things imperfectly. However, Lawrence is correct about one thing: our time is short.
Colin P. Clarke is a project associate at the RAND Corporation and a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He recently spent three months embedded with CJIATF-Shafafiyat at HQ ISAF in Kabul, Afghanistan. The opinions and views expressed in this article are the author's alone, and do not represent the RAND Corporation, the University of Pittsburgh, or CJIATF-Shafafiyat.
Comments
Peter,
Not intending to insult your intelligence, nor neccessarily attacking your positions. I am just making some observations that you are free to use or discard.
The USG uses conceptual vehicles such as statements of work, work breakdown structures, project schedules, and cost estimates when contacting for services outside of it's core pr staff competencies.
Wikipedia is a quick, low effort way to get familiar with these topics (and other topics) or one can take short courses on Contracting Officer Representative duties, writing Statements of Work, preparing Cost Estimates, (RS Means presents a quality course), and Project Management, or one can peruse such books as
Naomi Stanford's Guide to Organisation Design, Fundamentals of Construction Law edited by Carina Y. Enhada et al, Construction Planning, Equipment, and Methods by Peurifoy et al, or one can even spend some time and pick up an engineering degree and a mba. Next comes proving oneself by consistently delivering projects on time and under budget whenever possible ;)
Whatever ones path, at the end of the day either we accomplish or fumble the mission that we are entrusted with. In-progress aar's are always part of the deal when one is entrusted with owners funds and decision making responsibilities.
Regards,
Steve
Surferbeetle,
No kidding. Got it, even without reading the Wikipedia entry about guns and butter. Thanks, though. Yet, like the pinball machine needed at CENTCOM to win the war, we at Defense often get what someone else wants to sell, not what we need. And we then use it in ways that are suboptimal based on the constraints of domestic politics and interest groups. Robert Keohane, for example, speaks to this directly in "After Hegemony," although there is no summary in Wikipedia. So, getting back the subject at hand, we are not only dealing with "Afghan good enough," we have "American good enough" based on domestic and interest group politics, bureaucratic inefficiencies and politics, and the lack of a strategic or even operational vision as to how to reduce corruption beyond just saying "corruption bad, stop." It took over a hundred years to get machine politics out of much of America, if imperfectly. It isn't a problem of rule of law and ethics, it is a completely different conception of the state, society, economy nexus in Afghanistan and similar places.
Follow the money; a tried and true method to determine what lobbies are effective.
Our top three US national expenditures are 1. Social Security/Health and Human Services 2. Department of Defense 3. Treasury Department per the website http://www.federalbudget.com/
Table 3
http://www.fms.treas.gov/mts/mts0511.pdf
Butter and guns
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model
Bill M.,
Good points about the experts. So, what is the answer? Of course, the military, State, etc, cannot be seen as steering policy, but the voices of these arms are so muted by self-embargo and the imperative of doing rather than reporting that these experts' voices are not heard outside of a very narrow channel. Is there a way that the voice of the think tanks could be better accompanied by the voice of government experts without impinging on the political process? I think there is a good amount of white space between our institutional actual and perceived self-censorship on one hand and the limits of ethical and relatively apolitical conduct on the other.
Posted by Ken,
""Had we not very foolishly tired to impose our ways where they are not wanted and, truly, will not work, we wouldn't be having this discussion. We made a strategic error in determining we could 'fix' failing states and Afghanistan is just one more example of flawed policies engendered by the so-called Think Tanks. Those things are populated by Academics who like to play 'what if and produce recommendations but who have no responsibility for results - or costs.""
Freedom imposed is not freedom.
We can't fix other nations' problems by imposing our solutions.
We have "real" military experts in our active duty ranks. We have real diplomatic experts in the State Department. We have real development experts in USAID. We have a lot of self appointed experts in various think tanks.
We should allow and even encourage contrary views, since there is no more powerful force in the world than ideas meeting ideas, so think tanks can serve a useful purpose if they are seen as just another voice instead of "the" voice.
I get the need for people to come, see what is going on, and report back to Washington and the American public. The problem is that this has become much more than a cottage industry, that each has their angle, that far too many are unqualified as experts in their field, far too many delegations of all sorts show up and gobble up resources and time that should be focused on the campaign, and far too many don't really listen to the people they visit because they already know the answers they are going back with.
Then there are the contract advisors that somehow get the military to pay to fly around the theater telling smart officers platitudes about COIN they already know. The answer is often "get the hell out of my way." Some captain who got out, read a few books, and then got a contracting job is no more qualified to preach COIN than the guys who have been there, reading the books and fighting the war the whole time.
And to get to the point of corruption... no kidding. Who in Afghanistan doesn't get that corruption is a problem? So what does he propose? Nothing in this article, just admiration of the problem. The corruption issue comes down to the fact that Afghanistan isn't. It is a collection of segmented groups and the actors there are driven by the imperative to provide patronage to the networks that support them. That takes a great deal of time to change and a new way to distribute well-being. If you aren't going to stay around long enough to effect this change, and we're not, then the best we can do is try to ensure that all the major players are brought to the trough, which for right now is the government, and each can distribute patronage to their people. If some are kept away from the trough, they'll keep fighting. This is a significant part of the stability programs being suggested by the captains and majors that are engaged at the district and regional level. And these are the guys that are sick of having to stop what they are doing to listen to the delegations and advisors tell them platitudes off of the jacket summaries of all the COIN books coming out. Where the rubber meets the road, people get it. The farther away you get, the more the churn, chaos, agendas, and cross-purposes distort things.
I could use a little bit of that homegrown corruption...need to start telling people what they want to hear though, rather than what they need to hear, and that price of admission is just too high.
As to Afghanistan, "corruption" is just part of their cultural system, we worry about the wrong thing when we throw such a broad label as a giant blanket condeming their entire system. Focus.
The real problem is the constitution that converted the historic localized patronage system into a ginormous Ponzi scheme of centralized patronage and super-sized corruption. Like all good Ponzi schemes it demands a constant influx of cash to operate, and the Coalition provides that in spades with security and development dollars and Euros.
If you want to cure the problem attack the Ponzi scheme system that is codified in a constitution that has only one man elected, and every major official from District level up owing his or her patronage to him. We attack and condem the players, we need to take away their game.
The problem is the Constitution, not "corruption." Oh, and it is the constitution that also fuels the Revolutionary insurgency between the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the Northern Alliance based government in Kabul. Kill two birds with one stone.
Make that three. The Resistance insurgency among the rank and file in Afghanistan proper, that 95% of our efforts work against only exists because they receive funding, motivation and leaderhship from the revolutionary leaders, and because (wait for it) WE ARE THERE.
Fix the constitution (rather create secure trusting conditions for a massive Loya Jirga that could go on for months) and let the locals sort this out Afghan style. If they can't sort it out, then we just have the balls to say "we tried" and go home anyway.
The "interests" touted for pinning us to this mat are grossly exagreated and certainly are not vital. Worse, pursuit of them makes them more unstable not better, and causes us to ignore truly vital interests elsewhere on the globe (many in the US proper) that are going un or under-serviced due to this little distraction.
Bob
<b>buckstar:</b>
While your aggravation is understood, with respect to Afghanistan, you are simply mirroring the frustrations of many who divert threads here and elsewhere. A lack of strategic coherence causes much casting about instead of focused effort...
You state the real issue is corruption in Afghanistan and what to do about it. That corruption -- as most in the West see it -- derives from a culture that is unlikely to change to our satisfaction in your lifetime or that of Mr. Clarke. The trait isn't going to be corrected therefor there is nothing that can be "done about it," thus a far better question in Afghanistan should be how we work around that issue without doing more damage than we already have done in trying to 'fix' something we cannot...
Mr. Clarke wrote:<blockquote>"One of the two overarching hindrances plaguing ISAF counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan is the Karzai governments refusal to take concrete steps toward addressing the issue of corruption (the other is the ubiquitous insurgent safe havens in Pakistan.)"</blockquote>Both those issues were fully known going in ten years ago. That he states they are still a problem is therefor not illuminating -- nor even beneficial. The fact that he writes those things is an indictment of the entire process of how we do business today.
Contractors and salaries aren't the issue. Nor, really, is corruption in Afghanistan. The reliance on Think Tanks to develop policies is a major and ongoing US problem. They would not exist were the entire government, not just the Armed Forces, to better use available talent and actually fix responsibility. You're of course correct in writing that <i>"...both have something to contribute..."</i> but that avoids the fact that only one has responsibility.
Had we not very foolishly tired to impose our ways where they are not wanted and, truly, will not work, we wouldn't be having this discussion. We made a strategic error in determining we could 'fix' failing states and Afghanistan is just one more example of flawed policies engendered by the so-called Think Tanks. Those things are populated by Academics who like to play 'what if and produce recommendations but who have no responsibility for results - or costs.
Those organizations must have 'crises' and 'problems' to justify their existence so they create and foster them for fun and profit. By deferring to them or to Contractors for decisions, supervision and policy, those who should have responsibility for actions get to avoid any penalties for failure.
<i>Thats</i> <u>real</u> corruption -- and it is not in Afghanistan...
Unfortunately, like so many other blog threads on this journal, the conversation has been diverted from the real issue (corruption in Afghanistan and what to do about it) to a gripe session about who "knows" more, civilians or those in uniform. Is it possible that both have something to contribute?
It would be nice to see people commenting on or debating the issue of corruption instead of digressing to the point of complaining about contractors and salaries.
Peter,
Interesting comment.
As you know, being able to function as a bridge between the military and civilian worlds is not an easy task. Active, Reserve and National Guard troops help to act as Ambassadors on military topics to specific demographics back home while a small force of CA/FAO and Commanders engage and influence a variety of civilian demographics past the waters edge. That is not enough however. Because the military experience is difficult to translate to the civilian world elites back home, experiences like embeds and codels are carefully planned and resourced.
Mr. Clarke took a few months out of his life, took some risk (by most civilian standards), and is now reporting his observations of the military world in Afghanistan to a variety of folks to include his civilian peers and leadership. Perhaps his military sponsors are hoping that the observations of an 'outsider' might have a greater chance of success with respect to developing/articulating a sustainable strategy, developing more effective management techniques, or perhaps focusing additional resources upon the problem than that of an 'insider'?
Perhaps the military will adapt it's organizational design in order to better disseminate, consider, internalize, and verbalize among the 'insiders' the experiences, observations, and ideas of folks like E4-Specialist? Perhaps the military will adapt its organizational design to share this info with the billpayers as well as the elites. Or, given our history, perhaps it won't.
Either way the return on investment of the Afghanistan mission is a topic of conversation by US billpayers. There have been recent bipartisan political efforts at the Federal level to redefine, limit, and or end the mission. The broader context is that America, unbelievably, is flirting with a Greek or Argentinian style bankruptcy/default. The AARP lobby is even changing it's stance on social security (not that I am seriously counting on social security to save my bacon when the time comes).
SWJ is a venue for change, but obviously, more has to be done. Perhaps real change can only start within our respective units.
Steve
<b>Peter J. Munson:</b><blockquote>"The contractors and think tanks have our fearless leadership convinced that they've got the corner on smart, and their smart outweighs your experience. This is why a three month embed makes him an expert worth big bucks and certainly smarter than anyone in uniform."</blockquote>That is sadly true and has been for some time.
In 1969, an Army LTC and I spent about a month doing as assessment of a foreign military force. We provided a 90 page report with pictures. Nothing happened for about six months -- then a team from the Research Triangle Institute came in, spent three months drawing heavy per-diem and were paid over $300K (about $1.3M in 2011 dollars) for their 120 page report with our words and pictures and what we'd originally recommended was implemented. Went well except for those few times where the RTI crew had differed -- and erred; those errors got implemented -- and they did some damage...
Sad to see we as a government and our senior leadership have not gotten a bit smarter. There's a tremendous amount of woefully underused talent in uniform in this country...
E-4 Specialist,
One of the best comments I've read lately. The reality is, though, that unless you are a civilian, you evidently don't know anything. The contractors and think tanks have our fearless leadership convinced that they've got the corner on smart, and their smart outweighs your experience. This is why a three month embed makes him an expert worth big bucks and certainly smarter than anyone in uniform. The cool thing is that if you get out, especially if you write a book about yourself, then you can be an expert too, even if you don't really know anything. All you have to do is put on a suit and associate yourself with a think tank. And once you do that, you can direct national policy, because no one else is smart enough and has enough time to steer the blogosphere and lobby Congress all at the same time. Even better, you can do all of this without having your ass on the line like the schmucks in uniform.
I would posit that achieving victory in Afghanistan requires more than just the 13 year commitment we are planning right now. It also requires more than the soapbox pontificating of a contract civilian whose three months in country more than likely left him with no real grasp of the reality of Afghan Provincial and District politics and how things work over here.
Well the first thing that strikes me is a commentary on what exactly is "Afghan good enough" is that it is from someone working within the cloistered walls of ISAF for three months. The most misunderstood view on "Afghan good enough" is often provided by those who have had little to no interaction with actual Afghans, either in the ANA or the ANP.
For those who are practitioners with the ANA on a daily basis the term "Afghan good enough" means something completely different. They spend their days working with an Army that is expanding exponentially before their very eyes, quantity has indeed surpassed quality, but this too will turn when the ceiling is reached on manning and qualitative issues become the focus. The daily battle that the Coalition often finds itself in is the wrestling match between the introduction of Western processes and systems to the ANA; an ANA that is more often than not content and capable of operating using nothing more than paper, index cards and talc. Our insistence that high tech solutions and computer tracking models for logistics will be their saviour that will guide them towards professionalism is misguided. From the practitioner's chair, everyday right beside their Afghan partners, they see "Afghan good enough" as the level of solution that the Afghans are comfortable with to achieve the desired effect and one that will be enduring to them. The bottom line is that if they understand it and will use it then it is indeed good enough.
The axioms of T.E. Lawrence are often misunderstood because they are vague until you have had time working with Afghans, I encourage anyone who has read Lawrence to re-read him after you return home. No one in the Coalition espouses letting the Afghans do anything incorrectly. Trying to build an Army to replicate Coalition practices is perhaps too challenging, therefore the Coalition must continue to strive to find that medium where the principle of the lesson can be inculcated within the ANA without building a mechanism that cannot be sustained without us propping it up.
Afghan good enough may indeed be good enough to last.