Just Look Nonchalant!

By Steve Hynd

Dexter Filkins has a long piece for the NYT's magazine based upon his trailing Gen. Stanley McChrystal around Afghanistan. It's not Filkins best work ever but it's still interesting reading. One paragraph that caught my attention reveals that McChrystal's famously spartan lifestyle - sleeping only a few hours and eating just one meal a day - means the general runs around exhausted and caffeine -fuelled. I doubt anyone who has tried that for extended periods thinks it is condusive to good decision making.

But for me the "money shot" is when Filkins asks McChrystal about the Afghan government's rampant corruption and subsequent illigitimacy, so essential to successful COIN operations.

McChrystal, as well as President Obama and the American people, are being forced to confront the possibility that they will be stuck fighting and dying and paying for a government that is widely viewed as illegitimate.

When I asked McChrystal about this, it was the one issue that he seemed not to have thought through. What if the Afghan people see their own government as illegitimate? How would you fight for something like that?

�Then we are going to have to avoid looking like we are part of the illegitimacy,� the general said. �That is the key thing.�

I'd love to hear how that's supposed to work - it certainly won't be through Fontaine and Nagl's prescription of just ignoring it and carrying on regardless. It's going to take some fancy footwork in the "just look nonchalant and innocent" department. After all, the U.S. invaded, occupied and then installed both Karzai and his coterie of narco-traffickers and warlords in their mansions. AP's Kathy Gannon, in an essay for Foreign Affairs today, sets out the case against any "blame Karzai and stay aloof" strategy:

Eight years ago, Washington's special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, told former mujahideen leaders -- the likes of Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf -- that they had a choice: either be part of the solution or the problem.

He jokingly said that Abdul Rashid Dostum, a notoriously vicious Uzbek warlord -- once aligned with the communists, later with the anticommunist mujahideen, then with the terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and finally with the United States -- now called himself a "man of peace." That was just months after Dostum had crammed hundreds of young Pashtun men who had fought for the Taliban, many of them wounded, into unventilated train cars in searing heat. Dozens of them died before arriving at their final destination: a grossly overcrowded prison in his stronghold in the northern province of Sheberghan. By then, Dostum had become Washington's new best friend.

Over five years ago, I argued in a Foreign Affairs essay ("Afghanistan Unbound," May/June 2004) that the windows of opportunity were closing for Afghanistan and that making allies of Afghans -- not military action -- would win what was then a loosing war. I wrote then that the alliances the United States and its coalition partners had made with Afghan warlords, whose internecine fighting had killed 50,000 of their own people when they were last in power, were returning Afghanistan to its lawless and insecure pre-Taliban days.  Choosing to ignore the warlords' past crimes, I argued, would embolden them, instead of making them the good partners the West so naively believed they could be. Washington would not meet its goal of greater homeland security, and for Afghans, peace and prosperity would remain elusive.

Indeed, as the United States and its NATO allies slog on in Afghanistan, it is Washington's mismanagement of local alliances that has proved to be the undoing of its strategy in the country. And, most damaging, these mistakes have cost the United States the allegiance of ordinary Afghans -- an allegiance that is critical to winning the war, collecting intelligence to find al Qaeda, and ensuring that Afghans themselves prevent whoever is in power, including the likes of Sayyaf, from using their country as a safe haven.

...It was implied by Khalilzad that there would be consequences if the former mujahideen-cum-post-Taliban leaders did not play by the rules and work to make Afghanistan a functioning, albeit fragile, democracy. That never happened, and, so far, the consequences for the culprits are difficult to see. But the effects of their rise to power have been excruciatingly clear to Afghan
citizens.

...In Afghanistan, making allies of the population is the ticket to success. But that will not come while the international community remains aligned with the very warlords who are making Afghans' daily lives so difficult; while Bagram jail holds as many as 600 men, barely a fraction of whom were actually picked up on the battlefield; while errant bombs kill civilian targets incorrectly identified by allies who go unpunished for their errors.

I seriously doubt whether Afghans think "ah, but now America has a Democratic administration". It's all just America to them and Khalilzad's promises were broken by America. Avoiding looking like the U.S. is part of the illigitimacy - indeed, is the instigator and driving force behind the illigitimacy - is hardly an option and hasn't been for years.

Which leaves us with Kevin Drum's accurate assessment of McChrystal's chances:

That's the issue: not whether corrupt states can "work," but whether a foreign army can successfully fight an insurgency when it's allied with a government that has little local support. 

...In the modern era, as far as I know, the track record of success for counterinsurgencies led by foreign powers fighting alongside unpopular local governments is approximately zero.  In fact, I'm pretty sure it's exactly zero.

Cue the helicopters.

Update: More from Gregg Carlstrom at The Majlis blog.