The New York Times is running a story documenting an administration officials journey into the reality of the Afghan economy here. (Registration and login required).
The author takes a while to come around to the gist of the story:
"There was no coherent strategy to resolve these issues among the U.S. agencies and the Afghan government. When I asked career officers at the State Department for the interagency strategy for Afghan counternarcotics, they produced the same charts I used to brief the cabinet in Washington months before. "There is no written strategy," they confessed."
(Note: This is a followup to my post yesterday.
This story, which will appear in the Times Sunday magazine section, is torturous reading for anyone with a lick of common sense. The author, Thomas Schwich, takes a long time to narrowly focus on technical aspects of his mission, without questioning or challenging the fundamental assumptions that underlie his mission.
In a nutshell: Afghanistan's current violence is a direct result of an institutionalized, myopic perception of the root causes of that violence and the failure of imagination on the part of political leaders in NATO and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan brings the contradictions in US foreign and domestic policies into bright relief, and our current national response is: more troops, more guns, more law enforcement. When what is needed is clearer perception of the operational environment, better self-knowledge about the limits of our own resources and capabilities, and a reduction in national hubris about our ability to do good around the world whenever we want.
Each of these three steps requires a lot of work to overcome existing institutional barriers within government, and between government agencies, the media, and the American public. It requires a committment towards transparent policy and practice; restraint of both ego and id; and a strong committment to conversation and response-ability. And therefore, it ain't gonna happen. But that doesn't mean we can't strive towards those goals.
It was quite clear to me, in 2006 during my brief visit to Kabul and in discussions with many people with extensive experience in Afghanistan, that until NATO and the government of Afghanistan developed synchronized security and economic policies that possessed a realistic chance of success, the violence in the country would escalate. What shocked me then, and what continues to appall me, is the absolute fantasy world that exists in the space between real events on the ground, and governmental attempts to understand, adapt, and react to that reality.
While the Bush administration is largely to blame here, this tendency for fantasy to substitute for perception has been a consistent feature of US foreign/security policy management, at least in my lifetime. Not a single administration since the 50's has managed to address this reality vacuum, and I blame it on the Cold War bureaucracy and mindset that has really never left our foreign policy and security institutions.
This mindset is embedded into the very fabric of relationships between our security and foreign policy institutions, and combined with normal bureaucratic tendencies (competition for resources, desire for status trumping performance, risk aversion) produces a consistently faulty analysis of the world, and more importantly, produces a poorly matched set tools and policies to deal with the challenges of a global economy, competing democracies, and global real time access to raw data on a scale unimaginable to the architects of our current political institutions.
Even within and at the highest levels of government, the levels of ignorance about some of the most basic aspects of how the world currently works is appalling. How can a presidential candidate not understand even the basics of using the internet? How can Congressional leaders not be aware that their lack of fiscal oversight completely hobbles our nation's ability to know what our resource limitations are?
If you are a healthy person, and care about your task, you never want to look at how federal books are kept. This is a direct result of executive branch malfeasance, Congressional mendacity, and public apathy and ignorance, and this dynamic has existed on a national scale throughout my lifetime.
I used to think (while I lived and worked in DC) that this condition was unsolvable and unaddressable. But since moving to Montana, I realized that no, government CAN work to organize itself to express the will of the people. It simply requires transparency, responsibility, and accountability.
It's easy here in Montana (we share a climate with Afghanistan, and much of our arable land could also support a thriving poppy industry) because there are so few people here. I KNOW my city, county, and national representatives. I know that on most any Thursday or Friday I can go down to one of our local breweries and bend the ear of a staffer of either of my senators, or the the governor, or a local county commissioner; sometimes I run into them personally. It's a quirk of the culture here that good beer levels the political playing-field and makes it possible to talk directly with politicians and policy makers. But again, it's because Montana is small.
Further, we collectively have a fairly acute sense of the limits of government, and the benefits of collaborative action, (both on a private and public scale). This grew out of our state history. Montana was originally organized to support a single industry: mining. (Interesting parallel with Afghanistan's single industry: poppies). Our state slogan is "Oro y plata" (Gold and silver). Our state myth includes vigilantes, a group of folks who self-organized to protect the results of their mining activity against theives and corrupt officials. Montana could easily be Afghanistan, and vice versa. The main difference is that Montana organized and exploited a "legal" commodity, whereas Afghanistan has to deal with the consequences of developing around an "illegal" commodity.
In Afghanistan, there is currently little transparency, which produces little responsibility and consequently accountability is normally addressed through cycles of violence. Montana's addressed this specific issue in our 1973 constitution which mandates a strict set of open government practices. I suspect the rest of the country, and Afghanistan, could benefit from similar practices.
But enough about my home state, lets get back to poppies.
The New York Times article, in too many words, describes the waste of effort caused by poor perception and inadequate thought about the political economy of Afghanistan. It is as if somehow the halls of the State Department, the White House and the Pentagon and Homeland Security were infused with their own version of opium smoke.
The reality of Afghanistan is that absent another industry, poppy growing is the backbone of the economy and the finance and distribution networks that support it are at the center of the internectine violence that plagues the country. Religious fundamentalism and ideological differences are smoke for the real smoke.
To adequately address this problem will take extreme political courage (because it will require confronting the shibboleths of US security, economic development, and counter-narcotics policies). The next act of political courage will be to create new institutional structures to address reality, knowing that many of the experiments will fail. But the ultimate rewards for getting the perception, policy formulation, and execution right will be not having to expend our lives and wealth on lost causes whose consequences end up harming us in unforseen ways.
So, getting back to Afghanistan. The dynamic is that both the Karzai government and the Taliban are struggling over the opium trade because it is currently the sole, significant wealth-producing industry in Afghanistan. This industry currently feeds into the illegal drug trade.
US policy in Afghanistan should be to make it more attractive to feed the opium into the legal drug trade, then, in small increments, exert pressure (primarily in the form of incentives, punctuated by visible and dramatic sanctions) on people and groups involed in the trade to diversify their activities to develop other forms of industry and commerce.
This is good business practice, takes advantage of existing relationships and strengths, and does not attempt to impose new structures and industries in a country incapable of supporting those structures and industries.
UPDATE
Thanks to Halcyon's comments, I found this little nugget in a NY Times article on "How a Good War in Afghanistan Went Bad":
But Henry A. Crumpton, a former C.I.A. officer who played a key role in ousting the Taliban and became the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, said winning a war like the one in Afghanistan required American personnel to "get in at a local level and respond to people’s needs so that enemy forces cannot come in and take advantage."
"These are the fundamentals of counterinsurgency, and somehow we forgot them or never learned them," he added. He noted that "the United States has 11 carrier battle groups, but we still don’t have expeditionary nonmilitary forces of the kind you need to win this sort of war."
"We’re living in the past," he said.
Exactly.