Implementing COIN Doctrine in the Absence of a Legitimate State

Mac,

When I referred to "civil society", I meant particular civil society organizations (CSOs), which certainly aim at achieving particular objectives. Some, particular CSOs, including my organization EGG, UNICEF's girls' community schools in Upper Egypt, the Instituto Libertad y Democracia in Peru empowering especially poor people by allowing them to get property rights, and many others are very much in the empowerment business. Unfortunately, our government and other potential funding sources have no capacity to identify those CSO models that have strategic potential, in order to invest in them at strategic scales. It is also unfortunate that, just as governments know almost nothing about the uses and poential of CSOs, people in debates like this one know very little as well. If you are interested in knowing more, I coauthored a book on the subject, STRATEGIC FOREIGN ASSISTANCE: CIVIL SOCIETY IN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY (2006), coauthored by A. Lawrence Chickering, Isobel Coleman, P. Edward Haley, and Emily Vargas-Baron.

Mr. Jones,

If a way can be found to get the Afghans to rewrite the constitution, we should go for it. However, when you argue for this without mentioning the difficulties of trying to influence a prerational, tribal society -- or the difficulties of getting a new constitution that defies current power relationships -- I feel no confidence either that you will get anything very different than what is there now, or, if seriously different, that such rewriting will have the effects you predict. What experiences can you cite of a deeply tribal society turned modern democracy by a constitution?

While the objective of my work is on educating girls, which will help in "the long run", my comments above and my article posted a week ago, and other writings are much broader. My central interest is how to "activate" (the neuroscience term) traditional, preconscious people so they can play active roles as citizens in working for change of traditional societies, including security and active cooperation with COIN. While educating girls can occur only in the long run, many other changes can happen very quickly, especially those influenced by *perceptions* based on real experiences.

Mr. Chickering:

I see from your work that you too are deeply involved in a very worthy, and important bottom-up approach. Improving the education of young women can only help in the long run.

My background is different, so I look at the problem differntly. I understand that programs such as yours can only flourish and reach their full potential if placed within a proper context. In Afghanistan the current context is designed to prevent from happening the very things you seem to hold dear.

The constitution does, however, provide for the holding of a Constituional Jirga to make necessary changes. By fixing the context we give the Afghan people to address legitimacy. By fixing the context we put checks on bad systems that enable the current bad behavior of government officials. By fixing the context we disassemble the elevation of Patronage to one man at the national level and break it back down to the local levels where it has functioned and served these populaces for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

We enabled a constitution to prevent the things we feared or hated about the old system, rather than designing one to enable the future good governance of the people of Afghanistan. This is difficult, but it is not impossible. This in turn will enable other grassroots programs to flourish.

Too often COIN is waged in the countryside, but it is won or lost in the Capital. It will only be once we have put the pressure on the Karzai regime put put constraints on their own powers while at the same time establishing protections of the rights this popualce holds dear, that we can truly turn the corner in Afghanistan.

Keep up the good work, your cause is a noble one.

Gentlemen,

Thank you for this outstanding article. Your central point, that the current central government COIN strategy alone is insufficient, is entirely persuasive to me; and is entirely aligned with the article I posted a week ago here, which focused on the search for a narrative to influence perceptions in Afghanistan ("Humanizing 'The Man': Strengthening Psychological and Information Operations in Afghanistan").

I want first to respond to a couple of points raised by your critics, who address the issue from the standpoint of good, Western rationalists, who make no effort to approach the challenge of understanding a tribal society, in which loyalties to sub-groups are superior to all other loyalties, including the central government. The underlying cause of this is a preconscious, traditional concept of self. None of the problems discussed can be solved, I believe, without addressing this issue, without actively promoting an expansion of the current tribal concept beyond family and tribe.

Robert C. Jones thinks all you need to do is move above your pay grade and write new words on pieces of paper (a new constitution), and this will solve the problem of promoting social trust and overcoming the challenge of a society in which people do not communicate across loyalties. I am sure he is right that much of the formal corruption in the country was institutionalized by the Constitution. The trouble is, the current constitution emerged out of the power relationships in a society without any national identity and authority structure. Even if we could get them back to the table for rewriting, why would one think we could do better with a rewrite? I think his idea is a perfect example of the old joke about a man who has lost a key in the dark and looks for it under a street lamp. When someone asks where he lost the key, he points out into the darkness and explains he is looking under the light "because it is light here". Of course there is lots of light when the issue is writing words on new pieces of paper (a new constitution) -- we know how to do that; but we know next to nothing about how to move people's concept of self from what it was in Europe in 1300 to what it became in 1800. My article "Humanizing 'The Man'" explains the challenge, and it suggests important clues about how to approach it.

Patrick raises an important point about legal systems and asks how can a legal system be created in Afghanistan that is not top-down. This, too, is a very large subject; and it immediately, again, illustrates the Western rationalist misunderstanding of traditional societies. The greatest failing implicit in the question, which runs through much of the discussion here --I hope it will be corrected in the second paper -- is a lack of any understanding of civil society, how it works and how it interacts both objectively and SUBJECTIVELY with traditional societies. Finally, the discussion lacks any understanding, through real experiences, of how civil society organizations have solved many of the problems people have raised here. No space to comment adequately here. My SWJ article addresses important parts of this.

We have not been able yet to do this, but my organization Educate Girls Globally (EGG) could easily introduce dispute resolution mechanisms into the governance system we install in government schools.

This is getting too long. Two more, quick comments. The first concerns scale. Achieving scale in a bottom-up strategy may seem impossible to achieve, but the National Solidarity Program in Afghanistan is now in something like 30,000 villages there. My article explores why it has not had a greater impact in making the country work. EGG (again, discussed in the article) has discovered important keys to building, ORGANICALLY -- from the bottom-up -- a very large citizen-based initiative for reforming government schools, with the potential for adding other applications, including a health program, a justice system, etc. from the ground up. This model works in active collaboration with the government of the very tribal state of Rajasthan in India, and there is no reason it could not work, from individual communities, in active collaboration with the central government in Afghanistan.

EGG is currently working in 2,340 schools - every school in Pali District in Rajasthan; and if we can get the funding, we will expand to 8,000 schools next year, in two other districts, also in Rajasthan. The federal Ministry of Education has pledged support within five years to expand to 100,000 schools serving 11 million children. (It is important to note that rural school in India are much smaller than most schools in Afghanistan -- average enrollment is 100-150 children.) We don't know what the limits of scale are for this model; I think it could be much larger than this. One of the really positive things about EGG's model is that it offers no monetary incentives at all. The only incentive is EMPOWERMENT, which means there is no space for corruption.

The greatest failing in the public debate on COIN in Afghanistan, I believe, is the failure to address the role of CIVIL SOCIETY there, especially how to mobilize it into active support of COIN. The reason people don't talk about it, I believe, is that almost no one in the foreign policy and national security communities knows anything about it. Civil society is the instrument for empowering people in tribal societies, for decentralizing service delivery and even security, and also for connecting communities to the government.

I hope you will address the issue of civil society in your second article. I will explore various aspects of it in future articles.

James, David:

Guys, I feel your frustration, attempting to support the COIN operations of a government with such a broad lack of legitimacy as GIORA is indeed a fool's errand. But after you identify the primary problem to COIN success, you then take a classic U.S. Military mindset of essentially "The main problem is above my pay grade, so we'll just make it happen at our level."

This is what we did in Vietnam. Supporting an illegitimate government that higher showed no inclination to fix, and that certainly had no inclination (or motivation) to fix itself, the guys on the ground busted a hump developing and implementing a number of effective tactical programs. And by ignoring the primary problem, lost the war.

I'm a big fan of VSO, and spent a lot of time selling it to RC South leadership and up at the Embassy in Kabul. Its a good program, and it does very well enhance local legitimacy of government and connect it to the official government at the District level. In so doing it extends a certain amount of legitimacy (recognition and acceptance by the governed of the right and duty of a body to govern them) to those District GIROA officials (officials is a great word for all of GIORA, as they are just that, they are not the legitimate government, but they are the "official" government. Two many of our leaders think that once one is deemed official one is also legitimate. The U.S. however, cannot grant "legitimacy" to any government, only the populace has that power).

But guys, "train villages in Shura Processes" and "Train villages in Traditional Justice"?? Really?

We can't "Little Red Hen" this problem. (No one will help me, so I'll do it myself...).

VSO is a great SUPPORTING effort for a few, carefully selected communities that based on terrain or some other factor can create a strategic effect by both their immediate success, and more importantly by the STRATCOM value of their example. But you can't build this from the bottom up.

I did not notice the word "Constitution" once in your piece. Above your pay grade, right? We cannot ignore that GIORA is broken and illegitimate. Legitimacy does indeed come from the bottom up, so we must understand how Afghans bestow legitimacy and what is preventing that from happening and then FIX THAT. Short answer from my perspective is that the current Constitution is the Decisive Point. We enabled a Disaster of a Constitution, and it led Afghanistan right back into insurgency. It destroyed traditional systems of bestowing legitimacy on government at all levels, and elevated the traditional patronage system to where it all resided in one man. We built a Ponzi scheme. It is making one little clique of guys very rich, it is fed by new investors, it is protected by ISAF, and it is unsustainable.

You are on the right track, and we have no choice but to work hard at the bottom, but do not take higher off the hook. DEMAND that the legitimacy issues be taken seriously, but don't let your frustration lead you to think we can do something equally illegitimate at the bottom and somehow turn two wrongs into one right. Tailor your local programs to enable and enhance, not replace; and continue to reach out and drag GIROA officials out to meet their populace and do their jobs; and remain relentless on keeping the pressure on higher to focus on their level.

Everyone loves a gunfight, but this won't be won by gunfights. We will turn the corner once a new Constitution is formed that is better tuned to preventing abuses of AFGHAN governance, and better tuned to protecting human rights seen critical to AFGHAN people, rather than the current model that creates a dictatorship. This must be coupled with reconciliation of THE ISSUES driving the insurgency with the leadership of the various insurgent groups. We don't need to reconcile people, we need to reconcile issues. The leaders will then either get on board or become moot. But that is what Amb Eikenberry and GEN Petreaus should be focused on.