Plans for Afghan development aid getting it exactly backwards

Aid is a vital part of counterinsurgency, right? Development projects help back up improvements in security and win over support from the local population for the counterinsurgent and the legitimate government, so goes the thinking. We ought not be surprised, then, with this:

The White House is developing “clear targets” for both the Afghan and Pakistani
governments, possibly with specific timelines, as a way to signal that the American military presence will not last indefinitely, American officials said. It is not yet clear what the administration is willing to do if the targets are not met.

Among other things, the officials said, the administration will insist that Afghanistan fight corruption, speed up troop training and retention, and funnel development assistance to areas the Taliban dominate.

Emphasis in the above is mine. Only problem with the latter bit is that it's precisely the opposite of what we ought to be doing to help stabilize and legitimize the Karzai government. (A case can be made, too, that rapid expansion of the ANSF is similarly counterproductive to this aim.)

So why is it wrong? Well, it's pretty simple: pouring money and development assistance into areas dominated by the Taliban means that 1) everything we do will be much more expensive, 2) the prospects of failure are much higher, imperiling the government's overall legitimacy and control over areas previously deemed "quiet" and "safe," and 3) the enemy will gain from our efforts to the extent that any of them are successful in delivering benefits to insurgent-controlled (or insurgent-influenced) areas.

Control comes before collaboration. The support of individuals and groups is contested by the insurgent and the counterinsurgent through the provision of services and the suggestion of legitimacy, sure, but that only happens after one party is able to largely prevent the other from contesting territory and/or a subject population through force and security. The Taliban doesn't run sharia courts for the local nationals who work at Bagram; why? Because it's senseless to spend resources pitching a guy who cannot plausibly shift his support to the group that's unable to access or protect him. Pouring money and bridges and wells and so on into places that coalition or government forces cannot consistently and safely access decouples those resources from the counterinsurgent's most important tool: presence.

Kilcullen's been on this point lately, too: why spend all our resources in "red areas" when we've got a lot of light green areas we could be shoring up with those efforts? Why contest the hardest spots first? (And further, why work on connecting more of the population to a government that as yet doesn't seem to be competent enough to reap any benefit in legitimacy or support from being more closely connected to more of its citizens?)

There's a whole lot more to say about this -- it speaks to the "ink spots strategy" issues that Bernard and Christian have recently highlighted, and to which I've yet to respond -- and I hope to cover a lot more ground in a comprehensive Afghanistan "path-forward" post in the coming days.

We're Famous! Well, Sort of...

At least the name of our blog is gaining more traction, even if it has nothing to do with us. Starbuck (as you all know writes Wings Over Iraq) brought this great post from War is Boring to my attention this morning. So read on for those of you interested in the history of the term ink spots - there are some great links here.

Oil spots/ink blots approach in Afghanistan?

According to the New York Times and "administration officials," that may be what we're looking at.

President Obama’s advisers are focusing on a strategy for Afghanistan aimed at protecting about 10 top population centers, administration officials said Tuesday, describing an approach that would stop short of an all-out assault on the Taliban while still seeking to nurture long-term stability.

Mr. Obama has yet to make a decision and has other options available to him, but as officials described it, the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed. The question of how much of the country should fall
under the direct protection of American and NATO forces will be central to deciding how many troops will be sent.

At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.

Might this be the best possible middle road? It sure seems to beat the hell out of "muddling through," the other non-drawdown, non-escalation path currently being advocated by some people, in which we'd, uh, just keep doing what we're doing (because that seems effective).

The best line in the whole story cites one official calling the plan "McChrystal for the city, Biden for the country."

Of course, if this approach is adopted, there will be critics who object to the "abandonment" of parts of the country, and others who question the effectiveness of a sequential, oil spots approach. Bernard Finel has raised some reasonable questions on this point here, and I hope to discuss them a bit more in the near future.

As I've indicated over the last several weeks, I'm not convinced of the strategic necessity of this Afghan campaign, or that a pacified Afghanistan is vital to the maintenance of American security. I'm skeptical about the chances for success of a broad-based and open-ended COIN campaign in the region, and I think a massive, extended resource commitment to Afghanistan is a pretty bad idea. That said, I appreciate the political challenge that this poses for the President. I think it would be nearly impossible at this stage for him to seriously consider a substantial drawdown or redefinition of the mission (as much as I would welcome those things). So in the meantime, maybe this is the least-bad option...?

Giving the Taliban Ink by the Barrel

Go read Scott Wilson's article in the Post today discussing the Administration's developing policy on how to handle the Taliban in Afghanistan - it's a pretty good synopsis of the current issues and friction points in the debate. However, in addition to validating Michael Cohen's Afghanistan Mission Creep Watch (somehow defeat, disrupt, and dismantle al Qaeda translates into preserving a corrupt government engaged in what is essentially a civil war), there was another statement in this article that bothered me.

Wilson is not the first to report on this (and it's actually old news) and Wilson hits on the problem, but it keeps bothering me. I do not like this transfer of units from the countryside into the towns and cities, ceding that terrain to the enemy. So while we complain about the safehaven that the Taliban enjoys in Pakistan, we are going to hand over to them a large safehaven inside of Afghanistan itself from which to launch attacks on population centers.

But this problem goes beyond military operations. Counterinsurgency is about governance. If we remove coalition forces from the countryside the likelihood of the Afghan government governing effectively there is slim. Gee, who could fill that political vacuum? Oh right, the Taliban who has experience in this and being local actors are more likely to be well received in these regions. Instead of creating ink spots in urban areas, we'll be giving the Taliban their own ink spots from which to expand their own influence and governance. This will be exasperated when attacks from the countryside will cause turmoil in the cities. It will make the less than perfect, but relatively calm Taliban governed areas look pretty nice in comparison.

Even with the addition of 40,000 troops, we won't be able to effectively control the cities and the countryside. It will be a battle of our ink spots versus theirs and I don't know how well that will turn out.

(Editorial note: apologies for the dearth of posting - that whole day job thing has been keeping me pretty busy. Thanks to Gulliver for keeping up the momentum!)

(Also, apparently I shouldn't post before I've had my coffee. Otherwise words like "barrell" sit in the title all day.)