And they are the "good guys?"

By David Anderson:

Spencer Ackerman reads through the McCrystal leak and pulls out a great selection on who we are supporting and the problem COIN supporters will have in actually implementing their doctrine:

Gen. Stanley McChrystal�s Afghanistan strategy review is absolutely scathing in its assessment of the Afghan government. It raises the effect of its corruption and incompetence to a strategic threat on par with the insurgency, and calls it a �crisis of popular confidence�:

� that springs from the weakness of [Afghan government] institutions, the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and power-brokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement, and a longstanding lack of economic opportunity. ISAF errors have further compounded the problem. These factors generate recruits for the insurgent groups, elevate local conflicts and power-broker disputes to a national level, degrade the people�s security and quality-of-life, and undermine international will. � Insufficiently addressing [this threat] will result in failure.

That should set alarm bells ringing. Is a government that was willing to return itself to power by stealing an election really willing to enact the kind of good-government reforms that would be necessary to mitigate this threat?

In another portion of the report, McChrystal breaks down some of the strands of the anti-government fighters and their political goal states.  One, the Quetta Shura Taliban is the reconstituted fragments of the 2001 Taliban government and they are providing local government, predictable order enforcement and dispute resolution in most of the Pashtun south.  They are the ones who are operating as a quasi-effective and quasi-legitimate government, not the Karzai government. 

The entire point of American COIN doctrine is that US forces can theoreteically be used to support the legitimacy and capacity of a weak but already legitimate government against an illegitimate insurgency that is attempting to either topple or usurp the powers of the state for their own political and economic gain.  The problem in Afghanistan is that the insurgent groups, or at least one of the major strains already possesses greatear governmental legitimacy than the supposedly legitimate government that is composed of the national nightly news "good guys."

Whoops!