This text is, in actuality, a response to a colleague's thinking through a new counter-insurgency framework designed to leverage the proven benefits of the free markets to address the failing counter-isnurgency in Afghanland.
by NedMcD | July 2, 2012 - 9:52pm
Gentlemen,
As a life-long civilian, outside the tight culture of
the active duty military and even tighter one of the Special Forces, I would
like to make three points in my note.
1. I appreciate the Army
decision-making model, as a civilian who has worked with the State Department
in Iraq and USAID in Afghanistan.
2. The breadth of this Small Wars Journal article makes a succinct response impossible.
3. One's
conviction ought not to be assumed as arrogance.
Decision-making for the really dangerous real world.
What outsiders often find surprising is the amount of open debate within the
Army (and, by that, I mean all of the uniformed services). The chain-of-command
applies far more to the implementation than to the conception. Yours is a
great model for decision-making in highly uncertain, not to mention dangerous,
atmospheres.
Missive Impossible. Over the last few days, I have
written several drafts of this note; all end up being long and rambling because
I try to answer specific points from the text. In desperation, I clipped
thoughts verbatim from the article to narrow my view to the basics and ended up
with two full pages.
Don´t convict conviction. In writing you all, I really
have to confess to strong disagreement with assumptions underlying the appended
comments. The author's conviction reflects the world of finance from which
he and I each came. The fact is, in that world, if an innovator displays tentativeness, both he and the idea are gone.
Defense of the vision underlying this proposal. We
most assurèdly face the uncomfortable truth right now that the
‘whole-of-government’ mission in Afghanistan is not turning out the way we had
hoped. Such a truth is understandably difficult to accept in the face of your
comrades lost, our toil devoted and everyone’s treasure invested. Hopefully,
facing this truth can set us free from narrow or desperate thinking.
That possibility does not make things easy. Part of modernizing (i.e., joining the world
of and via globalization) entails ‘creative destruction’, not only of industries but of
traditions along the way. This process has occurred over time and across
time-zones in places as diverse as Europe, Africa and the Pacific Rim.
Nonetheless, time takes time and, sadly, many transitions exact blood with the toil.
The transition from tribalism to globalism in
Afghanistan will entail an eventual ascendancy to power of the middle and upper
middle classes against static power structures. With two years left in
Afghanistan, we are very fortunate to have this author with his strong sense
of the ground truth there, elaborating a new counter-insurgency model. After
all, almost all of the counterinsurgency literature out there is written by
those who lost one or formulated their ‘cutting edge’ ideas on K-Street for money or in
Cambridge for attention.
When one cuts through the essential details of this
proposal, what we have here is something that addresses why most
counter-insurgencies fail: modernization takes too long for kinetic adventurism. I am reminded of
Viêt Nam. Within twenty-five years of the fall of the South Vietnamese, that
society was beginning to resemble far more what we Americans had so wanted to
see during our intervention. In a sense, we won through losing.
What! How is that? Our presence planted the seeds for that society's inner growth toward its cuturally reconciled version of capitalism, modernity and democracy. The best of the
example we set remained with the people to be ingested over time and without
the off-setting distraction of the presence of ‘occupiers’. That is exactly
what this program can do: set an example of freedom and hasten the process of
modernization through empowering a nascent middle class inside the villages to
change the culture from the bottom up.
When enough villagers, born with that rare capacity of
dual-minded decision-making, have the confidence to apply it, they may well
begin to create a vanguard of change. How? By bringing up children as a new
generation of entrepreneurs and by mentoring others of their generation. The diffusion
of skills over time will present a more compelling model for counterinsurgency
than what we see today. Call the process one of ‘cultural evolution’.
All this will take time, several decades in view of
the country’s low education rates, for the newer middle class culture to
emerge. That is what we should expect, not because Afghans are inert or stupid
but because this modernization will have to come to terms with various deeply
ingrained indigenous traditions to make a lasting change -- one that is likewise reconciled with the culture. That is why I like to
say that the battlefield in situations like this one remains the future.
This proposal, then, enables select Afghans – an
entrepreneurial segment – to bring modernization gradually, through a growing
and uniquely Afghan version of a venture capital community at the country’s
current center of gravity: the villages. The departing example set by the U.S.
remains our choice. Nevertheless, the future of Afghanistan belongs to our
host-country counterparts. This program widens their choice for an alternate,
better, destiny.
Thank you for your
patience.
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