I didn’t see this one coming: that the nicest responses I have ever gotten to criticisms made on this blog came from military officers (both this time and on one previous occasion). I didn’t know that a command-and-control ARMY would prove about 1 trillion times more responsive than the civilians at USAID. I didn’t know that a Lieutenant General would handle criticism better than a Starbucks PR executivewho flamed out in response to another blog post (what DO they teach in PR school?) . OK, admittedly, the military hasn’t changed anything yet that I know of, but at least they’ve engaged in a dialogue.
Anyway I received this email from Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell IV in response to forwarding my mockery of the Powerpoint slides on nation-building in Afghanistan (also known as counter-insurgency or COIN):
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONEBill:
do appreciate you passing this along to us in Kabul. Gave up
command of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth on 2 November
and immediately deployed to Afghanistan. On 21 November assumed command
here of the NATO Training Mission — Afghanistan (which we activated at
the same time) and Commanding General of CSTC-A. That said — your blog
hits home for all of us here.Know that the ISAF team is looking at a variety of different products,
including those you highlighted in your tweet. What I can tell you is
that I have oversight and responsibility for our COIN Academy here and
we are not using these slides in our instruction. There is a place for
it among technical folks — but not for the practitioner on the ground.
Would be glad to share more about our Academy — but suffice it to say,
these are not our slides – and not how we teach COIN.That said — if anything, the slides reveal the sheer complexity of the
problem we are all contending with — at times so complex that it proves
elusive to social mapping, as you can see. Do want you to know that
those are only one of many items considered by the senior staff in their
analysis, as we focus in on how best to proceed in our mission. Believe
that as we leverage the best minds in this business — of which you are
a vital element — the future prospects for Afghanistan will become
brighter.As an advocate for the practice, want you to know that your blogs are a
welcome — and refreshing — presence. This is essential to our growth
as an institution, and to our ability to learn. Your efforts are
greatly appreciated, believe me.Best to you and your family this holiday season. We have snow in
Afghanistan, so at least we’ll have a white Christmas here, although far
from home and loved ones.Best — Bill
10 Comments
Gen. Caldwell is a rock star communicator, outstanding General Officer and a great all around guy. That being said, I’m not at all surprised.
Glad you shared the General’s email with your readers so they could get a glimpse of who the man leading our troops in Afghanistan is.
Find me on Twitter @imjamesdavis
Bill,
Key here is to recognize that after eight years of hard battles, ‘Searchers’ are coming into leadership positions within the military. Granting that this is not always the case, the Army at its best is relentlessly devoted to assessing its operations and discarding tactics that have proven fruitless. Good counterinsurgency practitioners focus their attention on the people who are supposed to be benefitting from military involvement, gaining their feedback and continuing tactics that produce the best results.
I’m sure that many others with experience ‘outside the wire’ in Iraq and Afghanistan read your book and, as I did, felt justified in our attempts to empower local citizens to help themselves. It’s great to see the same tunes being sung by the upper levels.
Regards
Tom
My experiences with American military people, although few, have been entirely positive. However they do not decide where the military goes and what their objectives are. The politicians do. Usually we think of this as a good thing. A civilian-controlled army is one of the pillars of our democracy, but it is also important to point out the downsides and our operations in Afghanistan are a great example of how politicians who don’t have a clue what they are trying to do or what is realistic can really make a (deadly) mess of things.
That is an excellent reply. As he offers to share more about the Academy, I think it would be great if you could get him to give an overview of what he favors for “practitioners on the ground” and then offer your commentary.
Agreed, that is a great reply. Armies are like oil tankers: slow to turn, but incredibly strong when they’ve turned (i.e. strategic ducks have been lined up). I also suspect having lives on the line, directly, provides a pretty powerful incentive to get things right, and a pretty powerful incentive against ideology (as a poster above has suggested, that drive tends to come from higher up the command chain).
The gushing overlflow of parise and support from like-minded folks is predictable. They admire their CO.
Or, as the case may be, some military minds have a strong sense that no matter how intricate their analyses, no matter how swift their feedback cycles, no matter how attune their leaders are to the blogosphere; they sense the chilling reality that looms. NATO/US can’t win this war. Their sense of denial is akin to a consciousness of guilt.
Billions of taxpayer dollars later, after the expiry of so many young lives, and at the behest of a local population with almost no say in what is happening to them; what will be left? Afghanistan reinvented for the Nth time.
I was really impressed by the blog mourning teh war in Afghanistan that was posted earlier this month: http://aidwatchers.com/2009/12/day-of-mourning-for-military-development/#comments
I asked myself why does the current debate and approach in Afghanistan and Pakistan bother many aid workers so much?
As a field practitioners who works on DDR and post-conflict recovery, I feel that ‘the Surgettes’ are already repeating many of the mistakes from Viet Nam. Mistakes that should never be repeated. No manual or doctrine – no matter how many copies it has sold or how media savvy its authors are – can paper over the debacle that is the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What many field practitioners like me worry about this latest Surge is as follows:
1. The cooption the aid/development vernacular within counter-insurgency/military policy discussion. This is pursued in order to give their tired views (yes, tired – Galula, Mao, Caldwell, etc. promulgated 90% of the doctrine) additional appeal. When Surgettes say development, human-security, governance, rule-of-law, and nation-building they mean something completely different from the way aid and development practitioners and civilians understand it. Each of these terms is an agenda item and separately and schematically they equate to their intention to socially-engineer profound paradigm shits in a tribal context of converted peoples which has a trauma history that is atypically vivid (and still forming thanks to continued military occupation). And in almost each and evry case development, human-security, governance, rule-of-law, and nation-building are reducible to a set of narrow military objectives. To a field practitioner, the use of the aid-idiom is disingenous to the point of being insulting.
I also think that the persistent confusion of long-term developmental objectives with short-term military objectives is precisely how domestic resolve ‘back home’ becomes exhausted. Just like in Viet Nam.
2. To an extent the “population-centric” approach is symptomatic of a military mindset. For an aid-worker in the field, the way that “nation-building” projects are selected and prioritised always presumes military objectives as part and parcel of “the process”. Take for instance, road-building; perhaps “the process is the outcome” (an old aid chestnut). But, the processes Surgettes applaud are “permanent presence”; bringing “the fight” to US/NATO troops on favourable terms, winning local support in order to precipitate an intel-cascade, and “integrated campaign management” which appears to suggest that government is a participant-spectator not really running anything important. Many of us are left with the unambiguous conclusion that the nation-building/development approach is clear, hold, build, KILL. And at least from where I look at it, that’s enemy-centric.
3. The entire corpus of contemporary counter-insurgency theory with respect to Afghanistan and Pakistan relies on the alignment of too many fundamental/critical/key/must-have/important requirements. I lose count of the number of conditions-precedent Surgettes prescribe for this COINtastic solution to work. “Priotization is critical”; “our strategy must seek first and foremost to build… an Afghan state capable of managing its own problems”; “Effective COIN requires security forces who are legitimate in local eyes”; “Population-centric…human-security 24 hours a day is critical”; “Integration with Pakistan strategy is also fundamental”; “Building the planning and oversight capability of the Afghan government is key”… It just goes on and on. Sorry, but from a technical viewpoint, the presumption of so many enabling factors being in place or being created concurrently only underscores the fact that this military approach is not working and won’t work.
Consider the following:
Annual funding for US combat operations in Afghanistan, 2002: $20.8 billion.
Annual funding for US combat operations in Afghanistan, 2009: $60.2 billion.
Total funds for US combat operations in Afghanistan, 2002-2009: $228.2 billion.
War-fighting funds requested by the Obama administration for 2010: $68 billion (a figure which will, for the first time since 2003, exceed funds requested for Iraq).
Funds recently requested by US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry for non-military spending in Afghanistan, 2010: $2.5 billion.
Funds spent since 2001 on Afghan “reconstruction”: $38 billion (”more than half of it on training and equipping Afghan security forces”).
This means that in 2002-2009 the proportion of military versus non-military funding for achieving the objective(s) in Afghanistan was approximately 92.9% vs. 7.1% respectively.
These figures are problemmatic due to source (The Nation) and the fact that I estimated 19 billion in reconstruction funds for 2001-2009 (the non SSR component).
What is alarming is that spending patterns planned for 2010 seem to indicate that the proportion of military versus non-military funding for achieving the new/tried objective(s) in Afghanistan will be approximately 96.5% vs. 3.5% respectively. This suggests that the COIN/winning the hearts and minds/ population-centric approach is being further de-emphasised by the Obama Administration. The figures also suggest, all other things being equal, the Bush administration put paid to winning hearts and minds to a much greater extent (in pure dollar terms) than Obama. Even so, the war has consistently gathered momentum at the expense of NATO/US largesse.
And to ‘governance’:
Annual budget of the Afghan government: $600 million.
Maintenance cost for the force of 450,000 Afghan soldiers and police the US plans to train: approximately 500 percent of the Afghan budget.
Unemployment rate in Afghanistan, according to the CIA World Factbook: 40 percent (2008 figures).
Monthly wage for Afghan National Police: recently increased to $165 or less than $7 per day.
Daily wage Taliban reputedly pays its fighters: $4-8.
Security sector reform (SSR) spending when viewed against public revenues is obviously unsustainable and poor policy-making, both on the part of the Afghanistan govt and the US. Unless of course Afghanistan has 10 billion barrels of oil squirreled away, or some other natural resource windfall. Which they don’t.
Given the unemployment rate is estimated at 40%, I wonder what will happen to all the police and soldiers when the military/civilian aid bubble bursts, and these trained police/soldiers are laid off? I suspect what we will see is more unemployment leading to felt-grievances, and a predictable backslide into conflict. The Afghan economy is primed for conflict: hardly the hallmarks of good governance, let alone the prospect of long-term stability. Again, Afghanistan reinvented for the God-only-knows Nth time.
Everything they (the Surgettes) do by way of reconstruction and “nation-building” – precisely because they are soldiers – is invariably suffused with prejudicial intent. Even the background to their actions – the COIN debate – suffers from abstraction, especially in its aloofness from the many post/between-conflict contexts that can be viewed around the world.
Stability and security can occur simultaneously with and without development. The problem is magnitude and permanence. Achieving macro-level development without stability is impossible because the magnitude of change in development (e.g. improvement in basic services, good governance, rule of law; all the big ticket items the COINettes claim to be striving for) is not matched by the enabling dynamic of stability and certainty.
The limiting factors they always fail to own up to are their own agency (i.e. a military occupation) and their tenuous grasp on how and what development in such contexts should be tackled.
If you doubt the substance of what I am asserting check out Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index:
All the bottom-order countries are post-conflict. Another way of grouping them together is “post-US-conflict”. The US armed forces simply cannot point to a reliable or sustainable precedent for their much vaunted military-led nation-building. The US military is very capable at leaving behind decrepit war zones, places riven with tribal and ethnic fault lines, infrastructure too costly to maintain, and atrocious governments floating on the shallowest of popular mandates.
Being that as it may, post-conflict recovery and stabilization always occurs within fragile, frequently violent (whether communal undercurrents or open violence), and uncertain socio-political contexts. Accordingly, the magnitude of interventions and their permanence should be adjusted to meet the short-run gains local populations demand or seek in an unstable, fractious, and dislocated contexts (i.e. the very same contexts that effective COIN and military action leaves behind – at best).
I believe military agencies should be getting out of there (Afghanistan and Pakistan) as soon as possible and not engaging in whatever their variant of “nation-building” is supposed to mean. Counterinsurgents and military types don’t really understand what socio-economic reintegration and community stabilization involves, and even if they did, they can’t do it because their are the wrong agents of change.
If they are truly population-centric, then they would understand – they’re not wanted and they honestly don’t know how to do it! Leave it to USAID, DFID, and all the other International and non-government agencies that, despite their many shortcomings, actually know what and how to develop and work within fragile and difficult spaces emerging from conflict.
The mockery of the slides reminds me of a political debate in Australia some years ago when Barry Jones of the ALP prepared a report called ‘Knowledge Nation’ and Peter Costello derided a chart similar to the Afghanistan charts as ‘Noodle Nation’.
Capacity building requires network analysis. The extreme complexity of social and political institutional networks is well captured in the complexity of the mocked charts.
The problem, as the USA seeks to ‘win hearts and minds’ in Afghanistan, is whether the analytical frameworks applied by strategic planners have adequately searched out all the factors in play and their relative importance.
@Robert Tulip
Ah, yes Bazza’s ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’. Yet he was and still is held out as one of our best minds.
As for ‘hearts and minds’, one might ask exactly whose hearts and minds?
It’s hard to win hearts and minds as an occupying force with an overt and in-your-face military culture. That is if its the ‘locals’ you are tring to win over.
If, however, it’s the folks at home, then it’s just a matter of plausibility and good PR. But even that’s hard when the event has been so hyped up and subject to saturation levels of derision and skepticism.
What a mess. Poor old Afghans can’t seem to catch a break!
I am told by those who have served in the military (although I have not) that it is probably the most evidence-based, results oriented organization in the world. That said, the military takes orders from politicians who demonstrably don’t place the same value on evidence and performance.
The following link is to slides from an actual counterinsurgency training presentation.
http://conflicthealth.com/afghanistan-briefing-reveals-softer-coin/
It’s not without a few cringey elements, but it’s probably not what you are expecting either, and it’s nothing like the presentation you posted.
Click, I think you’ll be surprised.
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