Civilians Ebb instead of Surge

By Dave Anderson:

In March, President Obama authorized an additional deployment of 17,000 US combat forces as well as a large scale push for more civilian advisors and reconstruction experts.  These additions were supposed to help stabilize the Karzai government, improve basic service delivery and contribute to the material legitimacy of the political process. 

The New York Times is reporting that the civilian component of the March mini-surge is failing:

many civil institutions are deteriorating as much as the country�s security.

Afghanistan is now so dangerous, administration officials said, that many aid workers cannot travel outside the capital, Kabul...

Advisers to the administration said the
military was likely to do much of the civilian work in the foreseeable
future, at least until Afghanistan is more secure....

The judiciary is so weak that Afghans increasingly turn to a shadow
Taliban court system because, a senior military official said, �a lot
of the rural people see the Taliban justice as at least something.�

The Karzai government does not have sufficient presence or capacity to project its legitimacy past Kabul is how I am reading this report.  Basic governance and dispute resolution functions are undertaken by the insurgents which illustrates the legitimacy gap as well as the capacity gap.  This has long been observed as a key indicator --- the population seems to have decided that the Taliban may be brutal, but they are either fair or the only ones present with the power to compel local dispute resolution. 

The COIN community argues that COIN is successful when the local, host government is seen as legitimate by almost all interested parties, the insurgents are isolated and deprived of the sea of passive support to swim in, and the public is anti-insurgent.  These goals are reached when the government is able to provide a high level of material well-being, most notably in complex public goods and general economic growth, as well as possessing a security apparatus that is trusted, competent and non-corrupt. 

a January Defense Department report assessing progress in Afghanistan
concluded that �building a fully competent and independent Afghan
government will be a lengthy process that will last, at a minimum,
decades...�

Administration
officials reported some success in training the Afghan Army, but
acknowledged a failure to build up the Afghan police force, which is
widely considered corrupt and feckless.

Is propping up the Karzai government, whose legitimacy is a joke after the August elections, and whose competence has always been in question worth several trillion dollars, several decades and tens of thousands of lives lost or massively disrupted?