Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Friday, July 31, 2009

COIN's Dilemna: Legitimacy and Capacity

By Fester:


Clear, fairly limited goals are about the most that the United States should seek in Afghanistan. Even then, seemingly clear goals have the problem of running into reality.


Andrew Exum at CNAS has stated a COIN-centric goal set of building host-nation capacity:



The United States and its allies must have a coherent strategy for making the Afghan government realize, in Biddle's words, "its own best interest by making itself into a legitimate defender of all of its citizens� well-being." This goes beyond protecting effective ministers and governors, but that's a start.


The final truth is that even the most disciplined counterinsurgency operations in the world's history will fail in Afghanistan so long as the government of Afghanistan remains weak or illegitimate in the eyes of the people it aspires to govern.


Bruce R at Flit notes one significant problem with even the 'minimal' COIN goals. The goal set conflicts with the resource set. The US wants to build an Afghan central security apparatus that costs several times the annual revenue of the Afghan government. That security apparatus will not be a temporary expense but a ten to fifteen year expense if everything goes 'well.' That is a problem.



I'm frankly not sure how we can get to his necessary success-condition, that being an Afghan government that is not "weak or illegitimate," so long as we are paying 90% of the government's bills. Anything we do to try to make them more accountable for our funding (for instance, detention-sector reform) will necessarily risk making them look weak. But if we stay hands-off, there is no pressure to improve. And if we pull the funds, they collapse.

If Afghanistan were a country with a potential economic base even remotely commensurate with our ambitions for it, in terms of army size and so on, there might still be an easy way out of this, but I'm not seeing one, yet.


Right now any actions that increase Afghan government capacity in the form of foreign assistance decreases its legitimacy, while any actions that increase legitimacy decrease the type of capacity that the Afghan government's sponsors (mainly ISAF nations) want to increase. 



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