Until this week, but not because it was about Afghanistan in particular. On Thursday, USIP hosted a panel on the nexus of DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization, Reintegration) and SSR (Security Sector Reform) in Afghanistan. SSR is a pet topic of mine recently and USIP's current program on the topic is just tops. The confluence of DDR and SSR is an interesting topic in the defense world - one that is underdeveloped yet growing (the best primer out there was by Sean McFate at NDU). It was a good panel and well moderated to keep on time and topic (if you're ever on a panel moderated by Bob Perito, stick to your alloted time or he'll make you stick to it).
The major takeaways from the panel is that we (the U.S., NATO and Afghanistan) have not done DDR or SSR well and it doesn't appear that we intend to change that any time soon. Specifically, DDR was not even mentioned in the Bonn Agreement and when it was begun, it focused exclusively on parties to the Bonn Agreement, not now-labeled Illegal Armed Groups in the south. The program's only useful output was the reduction of some heavy weapons from the country, although it seems that most of these were unserviceable anyway. Metrics were focused on outputs, such as weapons removed, instead of looking deeply at the program's objectives, which were essentially unmet. Another interesting tidbit from this talk was that the senior leaders of the militias landed in the government and many soldiers landed in some sort of government or government-sanctioned group, but lots of soldiers ended up with nothing to do and most of the middle leadership were essentially excluded from everything. Not a very effective DDR program.
There were more details of past and current DDR initiatives, which were fairly separated from SSR, and the video is up so you can catch it all if that's your thing. There is also a paper coming out in the next couple of months by one of the panelists, Caroline Hartzell, which I'm looking forward to reading. This event did raise a bigger question in my mind, which has been plaguing me on other topics. We've bollixed this up for years and we continue to bollix it up. Here is my question: if we're not doing it right and we plan to continue doing what doesn't work, should we be doing it all?
The title of this post is from the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. In this regard, war is always harmful to some people, but should nations undertake programs and actions that harm their own mission? Is it possible that doing nothing would be better? I'm not speaking of the Afghan War writ large, but the programs therein. Our DDR policies aren't helping our mission at all and is hindering it in many cases, so should we doing it still? Same, same with police training. Or opium eradication. They all seems like things we should do, but what we are doing is counterproductive to our goals. It strikes me that maybe a better course of action would be to do nothing. Obviously, analysis would have to be done (some might ask why we'd start doing that now...) on the likely effects of doing nothing, but in some cases it seems like the apt course of action.
Afghanistan is becoming a tragic and elongated episode of Yes, Minister, where the leadership is some sort of coterie of Sir Humphrey Applebys. "[W]e don't measure our success by results, but by activity. And the activity is considerable." This is not to say that program and mission leaders aren't doing their best to meet their objectives, but we're putting a greater premium on doing things - anything, really - because it makes it look like we're trying. That's just not good enough. This war is costing everyone too much in everything to keep going down this path. There doesn't appear to be anything that will change the fact that we're going to be there for some time to come. But we need to start looking at what we're doing, what we're spending time and money on, and stop undertaking activities that hinder our ability to attain some modicum of success (however ill-defined that is). We need to start ensuring that we're first doing no harm.
