Goal Set Dissonance and COIN

By Dave Anderson:

Bernard Finel at his day job makes the basic point about the disconnect between goal sets and how this creates a wedge between US actions and intents compared to local allies/clients actions and intents:

This has always been a key tension in the Iraq War. A lot of our problems there stem from the fact that our interests have diverged � or at least been seen as divergent � from the interests of the Iraq people and Iraqi elites.

If the Iraqis want us to leave, that should really be the end of the debate. We have no causus belli with the current government. They are not in violation of Security Council resolutions. Some commentators have argued that Iraqi sovereignty is �a fiction� that we can disregard at our pleasure. This argument makes no sense. Iraq has democratically elected government. They are effectively an American ally at present. We have to accept the wishes of the Iraqi government and people. Otherwise, we are simply engaged in an imperialist occupation, illegal under both international and domestic law.

There is another story that raises a similar issue. This time from the NYT:

Peace Talks With Taliban Top Issue in Afghan Vote � NYTimes.com

Essentially everyone in Afghanistan seems to support the idea of peace talks with the Taliban. Peace talks will, inevitably require at a minimum amnesty and reintegration for Taliban fighters, but will likely require either some power sharing or local autonomy agreements with Taliban leaders.

In Iraq, pretty much every relevant, indigenous political and military actor wants the US to leave so they can all get to the much more important business of squabbling over who gets the economic rents and thus the out-sized cash flow from the oil fields. Everything else is a secondary objective --- relationships with Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Isreal are not the highest salience issues for the interested parties in Iraq. The Kurds have a stronger interest intermediating their relationship with Turkey, but no one else does --- everyone else would not mind if the Turks occassionally beat down on the Kurds in punitive expeditions and spoiling attacks. The Maliki government and Team Sistani wants to consolidate Shi'ite control over the mechanisms of government and keep themselves on top and the Sunni's down. The US Army has been a useful tool for that but no more than that.

The US still wants an anti-Iranian, unified nation-state that is friendly to the US and willing to be an unsinkable and stable aircraft carrier in the center of the Middle East for future US power projection. That goal sailed out of the plausible by the second week of May 2003 when the US failed Occupation 101 of shooting anyone in the streets after a 6:00pm curfew on sight and allowed mass looting and state disintegration to occur.

The US goals in Afghanistan are a bit more complex because they have not been well enunciated for a while. The minimal goal set was the disruption and destruction of "far enemy" camps and operational infrastructure that would support future long distance strikes. That has been achieved. After that the US still thinks it can create a modern, multi-ethnic democracy on the Hindu Kush with centralized power and the effective suppression of the drug trade. Basically the US wants the the Pashtuns to suck on it for the next several generations.

No one else, including the relevant non-Pashtun Afghan actors want the Pashtuns to suck on it for the next several generations as the cost of suppression is way to high when there is plenty of money to be made in smuggling and drug dealing and nothing else. Instead most of the relevant local actors want to start cutting deals and restore the 'normal' environment after a bit of shuffling of who is on top. That is a much simpler, faster and less bloody goal set than the total transformation of Afghanistan's political and cultural norms as well as the suppression of one of the leading groups in the shared (and very weak) Afghan national identity.

Smaller and less transformative goals are much more achievable and will get significantly more buy-in from the interested parties than maximal goals imposed by outsiders whom everyone knows will leave someday.