By Steve Hynd
Do CIA spies count as civilians? Because it looks like that's the only civilian surge Obama's going to get in Afghanistan for the forseeable future.
Leon Panetta says the CIA is sending more agents to back the upcoming McChrystal troops surge. Other CIA officials have been saying the same thing, obviously part of a campaign to show the spooks have some skin in the game. What will they be doing there? Well:
McChrystal is expected to expand the use of teams that combine CIA operatives with special operations soldiers. In Iraq, where he oversaw the special operations forces from 2003 to 2008, McChrystal used such teams to speed up the cycle of gathering intelligence and carrying out raids aimed at killing or capturing insurgents.
Yup, more Camp Nama atrocities is exactly what a good COIN campaign by an occupying force needs.
However, the promised "civilian surge" that Obama said would turn the military and spook increases into something that rebuilt Afghan lives isn't anywhere near materializing.
When Obama unveiled his administration's strategy for Afghanistan in March, he emphasized that civilian experts were just as critical as the tens of thousands of additional U.S. military personnel he was sending at that time.
"We need agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers," he said. "That's how we can help the Afghan government serve its people, and develop an economy that isn't dominated by illicit drugs. That's why I'm ordering a substantial increase in our civilians on the ground."
To that end, the administration announced it would send about 450 civilians from several branches of the government by March 2010. The timetable was then accelerated to December of this year. But so far, only about a quarter of that number have been deployed to Afghanistan.
That's the first bit of bad news. The second is that a new study seems to show that aid programs don't help an occupier win "hearts and minds" nor do they reduce violence. Andrew Wilder, a research director at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, writes:
Some colleagues and I have spent the last year conducting more than 400 interviews in Afghanistan trying to understand the stabilization benefits of the billions of dollars worth of development aid that have been spent so far in Afghanistan. While many projects have clearly had important humanitarian and development benefits, we have found little evidence that aid projects are �winning hearts and minds,�� reducing conflict and violence, or having other significant counterinsurgency benefits.
In fact, our research shows just the opposite. Instead of winning hearts and minds, Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative. And instead of contributing to stability, in many cases aid is contributing to conflict and instability. For example, we heard many reports of the Taliban being paid by donor-funded contractors to provide security (or not to create insecurity), especially for their road-building projects. In an ethnically and tribally divided society like Afghanistan, aid can also easily generate jealousy and ill will by inadvertently helping to consolidate the power of some tribes or factions at the expense of others - often pushing rival groups into the arms of the Taliban.
In the southern province of Urozgan, an Afghan government official said to me: �In this area the family and friends of Karzai get everything. All aid in these areas is to make them more powerful. They are corrupt and cruel people, but donors continue to support them.��
The most destabilizing effect of aid, however, is its role in fueling massive corruption, which in turn is eroding the legitimacy of the government. Our research suggests that we have failed to win Afghan hearts and minds not because we have spent too little money, but because we have spent too much too quickly, often in insecure environments with extremely limited implementation and oversight capacity.
...This is not to say that the United States and other donor countries should not fund development projects in Afghanistan. But foreign aid should focus on promoting humanitarian and development objectives, where there is evidence of positive impact, rather than on promoting counterinsurgency objectives, where there is not. Without compelling evidence to the contrary, the United States should stop wasting money on a �weapons system�� that seems to be largely based on wishful thinking and the delusion that money can buy Afghan hearts and minds.
Yet more evidence that the gap between COIN on paper and COIN in practise by U.S. forces is a yawning one.
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