Local coins for COIN

By Fester:

Zenpundit earlier this month reviewed the Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen and he noted one of the major problems in the entire COIN literature:

First, Kilcullen�s three principles are an operational and not a genuinely strategic doctrine. In fairness, no major COIN advocate has ever said otherwise and have often emphasized the point. The problem is that a lot of their intended audience - key civilian decision makers and opinion shapers in their 30�s-50�s often do not understand the difference, except for a minority who have learned from bitter experience. Most of those who have, the Kissingers, Brzezinskis, Shultzes etc. are elder statesmen on the far periphery of policy

This leads to a massive disconnect in planning, policy and goal sets, as operational goals (securing a modicum and 'decent' level of violence) overrides the minimally existent political constraints and goals. 

The 10 second description of the official US Army counter-insurgency doctrine is simple:

Enhance the host government's legitimacy and capability while denying legitimacy and capacity to the insurgent(s).

From this, everything else derives including the strong inclination to NOT using air strike, the argument that the best metric of success is not body counts but secured villages or neighborhoods.  This basic axiom should guide the actions of every leader from the E-4 fire team leader to the Secrtary of Defense and the President.  All actions that contribute to legitimacy and capacity enhancement of the host government are productive actions strategically.  All actions that do not aid in supporting legitimacy and capability are self-defeating actions. 

Time Magazine reports on the current US plan for Afghanistan.  It involves a surge of a few additional brigades, a doubling of the Afghani Army, increasing the national police force and expanding local militias.  There are many problems, including the dispersion of the legitimacy of violence to non-state militias, but there is a far more pragmatic concern of sustainability:

That's the reason the Obama Administration is considering doubling the size of Afghanistan's military and national police forces, to roughly 400,000. That's more than triple what U.S. officials had estimated would be needed to defend the country shortly after the U.S. invaded in late 2001....

But there's a problem with the option of doubling the size of the Afghan security forces: Officials inside and out of the Pentagon warn that the bill for setting up such a large force, estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion annually for several years, could prove daunting � more than double the budget of the Afghan government, and way more than could be sustained by Afghanistan's own economy for the foreseeable future.

Implied with this statement is that the current Afghanistani force structure is more expensive than the government's current budget.  So doubling the force structure either means the Kabul government will forever be a client government begging for outside funding to fund its oversized armed forces or it will be incapable of providing basic public services or it will be subject to the whims of the IMF and economic cycles that dwarf the Kabul government's capacity to influence.  None of those scenarios are legitimacy enhancing scenarios. 

The disconnect will lead to a minimization of political goals as our national decision loop short circuits itself to subjugating itself to the known processes instead of grappling with the needed questions as to what end states are achievable and desirable.