When counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen remarked yesterday that “the Taliban are kicking our ass at the local level,” he didn’t mean militarily, and he wasn’t saying anything that many people didn’t on some level already know. What he was taking about was something just as important as battlefield success in a counterinsurgency environment—winning the fight for influence over the population.
Speaking at the United States Institute of Peace with Tufts University’s Andrew Wilder about counterinsurgency and capacity-building in Afghanistan, the two men sketched a gloomy picture where American and international aid has grown dramatically since 2006, but violence has also spiked some 500 percent in that same time frame, according to Kilcullen. For too long, Kilcullen said, “we’ve been fighting the insurgents rather than the insurgency” while propping up an Afghan government that is comprised of little more than “little fiefdoms” that compete with one another for influence and resources.
Nowhere have we seen a better snapshot of these “little fiefdoms” than in Elizabeth Rubin’s sympathetic, yet ultimately damning profile of Afghan president Hamid Karzai in this week’s New York Times magazine, where she writes a man who is essentially cut off from the country he ostensibly runs, and who cuts deals with warlords, corrupt officials, and criminal gangs in order to keep a lid on dissent. The corruption at all levels of government from Kabul on down is so bad that Council on Foreign Relations’ Stephen Biddle—who just returned from a trip to advise US and NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal—called the government the “central underlying cause of the insurgency.”
Much of this corruption, Kilcullen and Wilder said, relies on aid money sent to do things like build roads, dig wells, and build some kind of infrastructure in a country that has precious little. Wilder also observed that while the vast majority of the aid money is going to projects in the violent southern and eastern regions of the country, those in the north and west have started complaining about the “peace penalty” they’re suffering—since their road and agriculture programs aren’t receiving the same amount of funding as those in Taliban-infested areas.
While the aid-giving powers are focusing their energies on projects in Taliban-heavy areas to try and win the population over, there’s hardly a consensus on doing business this way. Reuben Brigety of the Center of American Progress said back in March that development assistance “must be focused first in the most militarily secure areas” in order to “build momentum and demonstrate success,” by showing the populace in the more contested areas what could happen if they stop giving aid to the insurgency.
The solution many say is to increase the number, and sharpen the abilities, of indigenous security forces. Speaking yesterday at the offices of the Center for a New American Security, Andrew Exum, a CNAS fellow, said that it’s imperative to have “robust” Afghan security forces in the next 24 months, but pointed out that “we have to figure out how to engage with the Karzai regime after the election” which set to be held later this month. It’s widely assumed that Karzai will win, fairly or not—and rumblings about voter fraud are already being heard across the country. Asked what kind of legitimacy the local security forces can hope to have if the Karzai regime is viewed as illegitimate in the eyes of the Afghan people, Exum said that “there an expiration date on how long the security forces can stay effective” if the population views the Karzai election as illegitimate. He stressed, as others have, that “security is the first prerequisite for success” in Afghanistan.
Now we just have to decide what success looks like—something that the U.S. and its allies haven’t been able to do these past eight years.
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 08/10/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
http://www.thunderrun.us/2009/08/from-front-08102009.html
Posted by: David M | August 10, 2009 at 10:49 AM