Tactical tribal engagement

While I'm posting today, I'd like to draw your attention to a piece that Abu Muqawama and I put together on tribal engagement at the tactical level. This abbreviated planning framework was the result of our discussions in the tactical working group at the Tribal Engagement Workshop that the boys at Small Wars Journal put together. We had a great group of experienced officers and civilians - many of whom have done this mission in Afghanistan. So head on over and give it a read!

UPDATE: You can also find it at SWJ where you can see it in all of its PDF glory.

Wargaming Season

I think it's been a little while since I've last posted. I was previously unaware that while the spring is the fighting season in various parts of the world, it's also wargaming and conference season in D.C. and elsewhere. It seems everyone is somewhere other than their offices figuring out how to win wars. I've been doing just that for the better part of the past three weeks or so.

The first event I went to was the Tribal Engagement Workshop (TEW) that the Small Wars Foundation (parent organization of the Small Wars Journal) put on March. This is the workshop's official webpage which has the background reading, the official summary report, and will link to posts and articles that come out of the workshop. I highly recommend reading Josh Foust's posts at Registan on this topic (links provided on the TEW page). Another great summary of the workshop is over at AM. There was a lot covered over those two days and I'm hoping to write about some of them this week.

The second event I went to was move one of Joint Irregular Warfare 2010, cosponsored by the Marine Corps, JFCOM, and SOCOM. It was only move one, so I'll won't go into much detail about it now. It was a pretty good crowd of military and interagency folks. Move 2 goes down in a little over a month, so I'll probably write more about it then. So stay tuned for that.

It seems that I'll be keeping this pace up for a couple/few months, which is great for meeting people and having interesting conversations. On the other hand, it plays merry hell with my schedule and makes blogging time hard to come by. But I'll do my best. I'm sure some of you will enjoy the respite from my screeds...

The Politics of Horse Betting

With all the hullabaloo about tribes these days (mainly with regard to our not likely being able to leverage them as much as we’d like) and the rampant corruption and subsequent illegitimacy of the Afghan government, it begs the question of how does ISAF build stability in the country if there doesn’t seem to be any sort of mechanism to adequately govern the people?

Here is another way to pose this conundrum: The Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan cannot provide governance to its people in almost any area: security, health, education, courts. The reasons for this are many and well known to our readers here. And the root causes for their inability to govern seem unlikely to change anytime soon. On the other side of the equation, there has been quite a bit of discussion on using local governance systems to achieve the same results because local leaders would be more receptive their constituency’s issues and would decrease corruption because these leaders wouldn’t screw their own people. It sure makes a lot of sense at face value, which is why MAJ Gant’s paper made a lot of sense to him and apparently a whole lot of other people.

There is, of course, a “but” at the end of that last sentence. The U.S. Government could not possibly support such an idea without significant systematic changes to the way we understand governance. Here is the ISAF mission statement:

ISAF, in support of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, conducts operations in Afghanistan to reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and facilitate improvements in governance and socio-economic development, in order to provide a secure environment for sustainable stability that is observable to the population.

We’ll come back to this in a second, but just keep it in mind. Let’s take the hypothetical that we’ll start to support the tribal structure, whatever that means. If, and that’s a big if, we manage to actually figure out how social structures actually work, then we begin arming, fighting with, and just generally supporting “tribes” all over Afghanistan. Local political powers would be given huge increases in their clout (to say nothing of the fact that many would have their clout taken away) at the whim after serious consideration by U.S. analysts commanders. In theory, this should all go as swimmingly as the Sons of Iraq program did, but with more non-security power given to local leaders.

I’m not going to belabor the many secondary, tertiary, and so on effects of this. Let’s look back at that ISAF mission statement. [I]n support of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Well, shucks, that’s going to be hard to do if we tell that Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan that they can’t find their fourth point of contact from their elbow so we’re going to empower all these other people. Promoting the power of local leaders would certainly decrease the power of the central government and vice versa (while I believe this to be fairly common sense, I’m sure that the Sons of Iraq program certainly supports this conjecture). By supporting local leaders in the ways that MAJ Gant suggests we would be undermining the mission of ISAF. Seems sort of silly to do that.

And don’t go expecting ISAF to change its mission any time soon. State-building is what the U.S. does and it’s just that. Building states. States that look like Western states from a governance perspective. Areas that are governed by local leaders are generally considered “ungoverned spaces” because of the lack of a Western-style governance structure. The government of the United States would never permit one of its military organizations to subvert that policy. So it seems pretty obvious to me which horse we'll really back and why. Even if we back the other for the short term, they better know that they're going to get screwed in the end if their interests collide with the national government's. If you do want to bet on this, the Trifecta is a sure thing: a bundle on GoIRA, Local Leaders, and ISAF in that order (ISAF comes in third because they can't help but shoot themselves in the foot).

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a political scientist and that these are rough ideas at the present. Hopefully (operative word) I’ll be able to draw them out in future posts, but I can’t make any promises. As always, I’d love input from the vast grey matter possessed by our readers.

Christian Is All Over This

Go read this post on MAJ Jim Gant's paper on tribal engagement, which I'm sure you're all familiar with. It is lengthy but well worth the read.

I'll just make one comment on this that Christian hits on and that certainly struck me when I read this paper shortly after it came out. The program this officer suggests means taking sides in local conflicts that have nothing to do with our own interests in the region, which would likely mire us further in Afghanistan. That is not to say that we shouldn't "engage" the "tribes" in other ways, but giving them each (or at least the ones we choose) their own personal special forces team is probably not the answer. FID was not designed to solve land disputes (unless we were training democracy-loving people screwed out of land by dirty communists of course).

Also check out Security Crank and Michael Cohen.