At a Washington think tank panel discussion, I expect at least mild intellectual stimulation, but not time travel. At the March 16th lunchtime on "Afghanistan: Regional Stability and Global Security" at the Institute for the Study of War, I was transported back to 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan seemed to be a manageable problem, and President Karzai a tolerable leader. Or perhaps the panelists had awakened from a deep sleep induced that year. The sense of fantasy that hung over the proceedings was frightening, given that two of the three panelists had recently advised General Petraeus on the Afghan war.
The one who hadn鈥檛, Peter Bergen, caught my attention by noting that Afghan President Karzai wasn鈥檛 so bad, compared with neighboring thugs like Uzbekistan鈥檚 Karimov. (He also extolled Afghanistan鈥檚 mineral wealth, a topic he also raised in an optimistic ,28804,2059521_2059653_2059652,00.html for Time magazine on March 17th. As I have elsewhere, the costs of extracting these minerals make it unlikely that Afghanistan will benefit substantially in the next twenty years.)
Lieutenant Colonel Joel Rayburn, who was also on the panel, saw progress in the fight against the Taliban in the north, preventing them from cementing a coalition of "multi-ethnic" Taliban. Oh wait, there were no Taliban in the north in 2006. But neither Lt. Col. Rayburn nor Dr. Kimberly Kagan, the founder and president of ISW, seemed to wonder why that was so. (And, since Lt. Col. Rayburn gave no statistics to support his views, I will follow suit and argue from anecdote: my Uzbek friends in Mazar told me this fall that their extended family in Faryab Province all support the Taliban now.)
Kagan said that the Haqqani network was one of the reasons we were still in Afghanistan. During the Q&A, I asked whether it was possible that we were one of the reasons the Haqqani network was still in Afghanistan. Dr. Kagan didn鈥檛 seem to understand the question, repeating her earlier remarks to the effect that she was not saying it was going to be easy, or that the Haqqanis were not still dangerous.
I interrupted to clarify, "I鈥檓 suggesting that the insurgency in general has grown along with the American troop presence." Statistics suggest a nearly straight line correlation between US troop strength and acts of insurgent violence. Now, correlation does not necessarily imply causality. My idea鈥攁rticulated early in the Iraq War as the "antibody" theory鈥攎ight be wrong. But an experienced policy analyst like Dr. Kagan, who holds undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Yale and has consulted widely for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, should be able to discuss it cogently. Why was it inaccessible from inside the conceptual schema adhered to by ISW鈥攁nd by extension by General Petraeus?
Indeed, in his to Congress a day earlier, General Petraeus offered a high noise to signal ratio. The general referred to "a four-fold increase in recent months in the number of weapons and explosives caches turned in and found," but didn鈥檛 say whether this was countrywide or in a particular area. It鈥檚 also unclear what precisely he was discussing. "IEDs turned in by the population" has long been a counterinsurgency progress measure, but that鈥檚 not quite what the general said. General Petraeus also said that Marja now has 1,500 shops, but without saying how many they had three or four years ago. That was about it for evidence of progress, unless you include adding more men鈥攖emporarily鈥攖o the attrition-plagued Afghan National Army and police.
I was also surprised by the bland platitudes of the panel, for ISW鈥檚 own Carl Forsberg has produced hard-hitting reports on Kandahar that are very much worth reading. His December "Counterinsurgency in Kandahar" exposed the damage done by careless American empowerment of criminals with lush Kandahar Air Force Base contracts. He even took some swipes at President Karzai鈥檚 half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a political boss, CIA pal, and contracting kingpin widely suspected of involvement in the opium trade. But when I picked up a hard copy of the report at the panel (I鈥檇 read a PDF previously), I was surprised to see that the "executive summary," which I had skipped online, buried the indictment of American contracting policy as the last item and didn鈥檛 mention the name of Ahmed Wali Karzai. Presumably someone at ISW figured the really big deal policy people wouldn鈥檛 go beyond the executive summary, so no need to upset them with reminders of unpleasant phenomena like AWK.
Lt. Col. Rayburn鈥攚ho previously taught history at West Point, and, it seems, $50,000 on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" in 2005鈥攚as freshly back from working in Afghanistan for General Petraeus, and his short overview of "progress" echoed his boss鈥檚 testimony. The only statistic he gave didn鈥檛 exactly show success; he spoke of a battalion that had lost 200 of its 700 soldiers in Kandahar. As he correctly noted, these are World War II levels of casualties, yet our troops are fighting guys on motorbikes armed with assault rifles, guys who don鈥檛 wear helmets or body armor. What does this tell you about our "progress" in Afghanistan?
It was hard to fasten upon particular inaccuracies in Dr. Kagan鈥檚 presentation, because of the vagueness of her style. (Dr. Kagan鈥檚 remarks never evoked the reality of being in Afghanistan, though she 150 days there in 2010 conducting research for General Petraeus, according to the ISW website.) I did hear her say that another reason our military presence was important was in providing the security to nuture good Afghan governance. But it seems not to have occurred to her that (1) in many places with a heavy U.S. troop presence, there is terrible Afghan governance and local leaders try to enrich themselves on whatever aid we bring their people; (2) in many places with no insurgent or US troop presence and little foreign aid鈥攖he north, for example鈥攖here is also terrible Afghan local governance, and a stable security situtation; (3) while bad local governance may make Afghans support the insurgency, it鈥檚 not clear that good local governance makes them go very far out of their way for the Karzai government; (4) in some insecure areas, Afghan district governors and police chiefs go out of their way to be honest and upright; and (5) we have little knowledge of why some do this, or how we can make this behavior more common.
We don鈥檛 have any answer to this last question because I don鈥檛 think anyone has studied local governance in Afghanistan in a rigorous fashion to find out what correlates with success. Our military鈥檚 approach, nine years into the war, is to find someone who鈥檚 not an obvious thief, drug dealer, murderer, or boy-raper, and do anything to help him out. Often, we over-empower such people and make them more corrupt and sometimes more annoying to their communities. Carl Forsberg has noted that the US tends to "place unjustified importance to the role of the district governor, who is historically only one of many elements of a district鈥檚 politics." We try to get rid of the noxious leaders (often they are reinstated by Karzai), but no one seems to be thinking beyond the level of good and bad individuals to how to create a local governance system that encourages good behavior.
These are not brilliant reflections鈥擨鈥檝e heard crisper versions from a dozen American officers I鈥檝e met on embeds鈥攂ut they reflect reality as I and many others find it in Afghanistan. Reality was in short supply at the ISW event. And that doesn鈥檛 bode well for the strategy of the folks Dr. Kagan and Lt. Col. Rayburn work for.