By Fester:
Money makes the world go round. It makes the world go 'round....
Cabaret
The Afghan government is a low budget operation. Its sustainable revenue streams from local sources are under a billion dollars per year. Currently, the Afghan domestic security apparatus costs several times annual revenue. That means either the Afghan government will forever be a weak pauper begging for hand-outs to chase local bogeymen of its funders or it will be bankrupt once the international sponsors pull back on their funds. And this is without any change in projected force structure or expense structure. That may not be the case.
The Washington Post reports that the Obama Administration wants to at least double the size of the Afghan Army from the currently projected growth path:
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that Afghan security forces will have to expand far beyond currently planned levels....
Such an expansion would require additional billions beyond the $7.5 billion the administration has budgeted annually to build up the Afghan army and police over the next several years, and the likely deployment of thousands more U.S. troops as trainers and advisers, officials said.
The Afghan army is already scheduled to grow from 85,000 to 134,000, an expansion originally expected to take five years but now fast-tracked for completion by 2011. Several senior Pentagon officials indicated that an adequate size for the Afghan force might be twice the expanded number.
This ties into the recent calls that Steve noted for more Afghani forces from US generals. The gradual escalation where any drawdown or a change in overarching paradigms of importance could not be contemplated while there were still escalation options in the pipeline has been played out in Iraq (where the political issues are still unresolved as Iraq is a resource rent extraction economy where violence is a cheap way to get seize cash cows).
Even if the escalation tamps down violence, unless there is systemic genocide and/or ethnic cleansing that kills or displaces a third or more of the Pashtun population to locations other than Northern Pakistan, this strategy will not 'resolve' the underlying political tensions while it delegitmatizes the Kabul government as the kept woman of the outsiders.
ReplyDeleteCurrently, the Afghan domestic security apparatus costs several times annual revenue. That means either the Afghan government will forever be a weak pauper begging for hand-outs to chase local bogeymen of its funders or it will be bankrupt once the international sponsors pull back on their funds. And this is without any change in projected force structure or expense structure.
Yeah, that's one of the several reasons I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of a counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan. As I understand the underlying theory you provide security for the population and then the population provides intelligence to help you go after the insurgents and the additional boots on the ground to go after them with.
The problem with this is that Afghanistan will never be able to put the number of boots on the ground that will be necessary.
Maybe this is all part of the new Obama approach to win over the 'hearts and minds' of the people as opposed to using military tactics. I would certainly feel more safe if my nation's army and police force nearly doubled in size. This video explains how effective this new stance on Afghanistan may/may not be.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newsy.com/videos/afghanistan_same_war_different_strategy
ReplyDeleteSlightly related, I just watched most of "The Kite Runner" on cable (45 minutes left to watch when it comes around again).
ReplyDeleteThis award-winning film is a must-see for anyone interested in that part of the world. Most Americans don't care about the social and cultural subtleties of Afghan, Pashtun or Pakistani peoples but that doesn't diminish their importance for the more discerning. I have a better grasp of the challenges we face than I did before. (And by the way, it also has a compelling, epic story line.)