How Do You Solve a Problem Like Afghanistan?
Ricks on Kilcullen’s central argument:
His [Kilcullen's] bottom line is that there are two real options in Afghanistan: Either tell the Kabul government we are pulling out, or put in enough troops to actually break the cycle of corruption, which he said would be a minimum of about 40,000. “We either put in enough to control, or we get out.” The worst thing we could do, he added, is put in enough troops to get more people killed but not enough to do anything to break change the behavior of corrupt officials. Also, he said, it is more about what you do than the actual number of troops — “If you do it wrong, you could put it a million troops and it wouldn’t make any difference.”
Can someone explain to me how 40,000 troops breaks a cycle of political corruption in another country? And in this case, Afghanistan?
I don’t want to be mean here, but this reminds me of the classic economist in a rowboat with a can of beans joke—-”assume a can-opener.”
“Assume a non-corrupt government.” Or assume somehow that troops and security will solve endemic corruption.
The only way I see troops “controlling” Afghanistan is through a direct, old-school colonial takeover, Vice-Regency style. At the end of the day, though I think unintended, this is where Kilcullen’s logic may be leading. At the very least, the US/NATO would have to install a strongman dictator.
A US surge in Afghanistan only delays the inevitable political confrontation that has to occur in that country.
The initial late 2001 US “shock and awe” invasion in a country as underdeveloped as Afghanistan created an opening moment that allowed for a quasi-political shakeup. The Bonn Agreement was inked, the government was sworn in, the Taliban (at that point) had been ejected, and then the country was basically abandoned to make way for the invasion of Iraq.
While COIN thinkers like Kilcullen will point (legitimately) to the failed follow-up military strategy for securing the country, I think the deeper truth is that the Bonn Paradigm has failed in Afghanistan at the political level. The recent elections in Afghanistan and the entire framework of an attempted centralized state build-up is central to that Bonn framework. Whether this could have worked had it received more resources from 2002-2007 is worth asking as a hypothetical but at this point is academic. The fact is that political consolidation has failed.
All of the discussion of an Afghanistan surge and COIN strategies simply dances around the edges and never gets what to what I believe is the core question: what is the political endgame if the state-led operation has failed?
Here follows a list of many of the key native political actors in Afghanistan: [Read more →]
November 19, 2009 44 Comments
