Big Uncle Knows Best

by Eric Martin

Colonel Gian Gentile, the antidote to the epidemic of irrational exuberance invested in the ability of counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) to solve any insoluble military/political conundrum, offers yet another reality check:

History shows that occupation by foreign armies with the intent of changing occupied societies does not work and ends up costing considerable blood and treasure.

The notion that if only an army gets a few more troops, with different and better generals, then within a few years it can defeat a multi-faceted insurgency set in the middle of civil war, is not supported by an honest reading of history.

Algeria, Vietnam and Iraq show this to be the case. Regrettably we don�t seem to be learning anything from history with regard to Afghanistan. We are making the same blunders.

When I was a combat battalion commander in West Baghdad in 2006, I asked an Iraqi Army general how long it would be before the civil war ended in Iraq. �Four hundred years,� was his answer.

It took the United States almost a hundred years to end its most divisive political and social issue, slavery, and it required a cataclysmic civil war. Could an outside force have come into the United States in the 1850s and resolved its internal conflicts at the barrel of a gun?

So why do we think we have ended Iraq�s civil war at the barrel of a gun over the past two years � or that we can do it in Afghanistan? 

There are myriad good reasons why outside powers have such a hard time prevailing in another country's civil war.  That number of reasons is multiplied when the outside power is geographically removed and has little cultural understanding or connection to the underlying country and its people.  Ultimately, the interests, traditions and patience of the indigenous people are more determinative of outcomes than the fleeting ambitions, grand designs and enthusiasm of would-be foreign conflict shapers.  As many Afghan insurgents are fond of pointing out, "You have the watches, we have the time."  They have more than that: they also know the place first hand.

A hint at the difficulties we're encountering is revealed by the concern on the part of so many observers that if we significantly reduced our troop presence (or withdrew altogether), the conglomerate of insurgent factions lumped together under the misleading label "Taliban" would soon take over the country (this would apparently be true even if we kept up aid, and possible air support, for the Karzai government faction). 

Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is how events would in fact play out.  Consider what that says about the relative popularity/support of the various warring factions.  In essence, the Afghan people are so uninterested in fighting for the cobbled together, massively corrupt, alien-seeming government formed under our watch that the government faction would soon collapse without its foreign patrons (and army) around to prop it up.  Even aid from afar would be insufficient to overcome its lack of dedicated local support.

Worse still from our perspective, a widespread conversion of Afghan hearts and minds seems unlikely in the near future.  This is evidenced by our continuously stymied efforts to field a motivated and committed army and police force. Those efforts suffer from the same apathy and disinterest as our attempts to rally the population around the political body of the Karzai regime.  Fundamentally, we are having difficulty motivating the Afghan people to fight the war that we want them to fight, for the causes and factions that we want them to champion.  They have different notions about what is, and isn't, worth fighting for. 

Which is predictable given that foreign powers with little cultural and geographical connection to a target country can rarely manufacture enough enthusiasm for its foreign-imposed faction/concepts to prevail in a civil war - or a multi-faceted civil war/insurgency hybrid. Basically, the Afghan people don't view their conflicts and culture through an American-lens.  The allure of democracy, whiskey, sexy only goes so far when there are more pressing needs such as food, livelihood, cultural values, security and, generally, staying alive.  Steve Coll touched on an aspect of this phenomenon in a recent piece:

Since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, attempts by foreign powers to shape events there have repeatedly been thwarted by what intelligence analysts call �mirror imaging,� which is the tendency of decision-makers in one country to judge counterparts in another through the prism of their own language and politics. The Politburo, for example, engaged in energetic debates about the extent to which Afghanistan might conform to the stages of revolutionary development contemplated in Marxist-Leninist theory.

As the Obama war cabinet now debates its choices, American discourse barely refers to Afghan leaders by name or to the particular equations of the country�s diverse provinces. Instead, historical analogies and abstract concepts from political-theory texts abound�arguments about �legitimacy� and �governance,� as if the Taliban were motivated primarily by the �Rights of Man.� Obama and his advisers might profitably consult the Democratic Party�s own book of rules, specifically an entry composed by a peaceable boss from Massachusetts: All politics is local. In the case of Afghanistan, there is a corollary: All local progress, or failure, will be political. 

Adding: All local progress, or failure, will be political and determined by the locals.  Even if we think we know better.  The best we can do is help the locals to set up their own political framework for addressing these conflicts, and then get out of the way.