So I did watch "Obama's war," eventually

Finally I got down to watching Obama's War, the documentary, and there were some interesting moments. More could be worth getting back to, but for now I will just highlight the part about Pakistan - see the content of the various interviews made on the subject here, and view the entire documentary here. What I found noteworthy about the part on Pakistan, in an ironic sense (beyond the always interesting and actually overall-determining ghost-war-aspect that is touched upon there), was how, despite the fact that some seemed to expect a magical shift in attitudes on the part of the Pakistani middle classes (or whoever) in the wake, and as a result, of the Taliban threat emerging near Islamabad, and as a result of all the things that were going on in places like Peshawar and the Swat valley, the Pakistani government was still not in a position to endorse the killing of Baitullah Mehsud. That, after they themselves had been demanding, earlier on, an extension of the US strikes against the TTP leadership, on occasions.

Time to react to the big news from four days ago...

So it turns out the CIA was/is working closely together with Ahmed Wali Karzai who is alleged to be in control of a great part of the drugs trade in southern Afghanistan.
Here are some of the things this might reveal.
- Firstly, and very basically, that there is this issue of drugs... Surrealist CT (counterterrorism) enthusiasts and population-centric COIN (counterinsurgency) fans will continue their great battle for Washington hearts and minds over the right Afghanistan strategy, without giving a damn about Pakistan which makes both arguing for launching effective strikes across Pakistani airspace to landlocked Afghanistan and for controlling Afghanistan's population for the long run totally futile efforts in and of themselves, no matter what. And they will continue to do so even without taking notice of the loud CN (counternarcotics) crowd and how influential and yet equally mistaken that crowd is...
- Now we might possibly know more of the Kandahar Strike Force which might have been behind the firefight that saw Kandahar's police chief, Matiullah Qahteh, killed, along with others. (CNN reported then that "A U.S. military official with direct knowledge of the situation told CNN that his understanding at the moment was that the security forces accused of the attack included 40 Afghan nationals hired to do counterterrorism work with U.S. special forces. Without the assistance of any U.S. or NATO troops, the official said, the nationals tried to get a friend out of a Kandahar jail.")
Etc.
But the bigger question is of course something that Jari Lindholm wrote of a couple of days ago: "the Pentagon’s Joint Integrated Prioritized Target List — a roster of 367 approved terrorist targets — had been expanded to include 50 “nexus targets”, or Afghan drug lords with links to the insurgency. Since Mr. Karzai, a “suspected” drug boss, obviously isn’t on the list, the only conclusion one can draw is that the United States is wiping out his competitors for him."
Is this good? Or bad? Can this be judged in good-and-bad terms at all? The safest answer to this could be something that Joshua Foust wrote - in a comment at Registan (that he is writing comments instead of blogposts for Registan nowadays is a blow to the Afghanistan campaign in my personal opinion btw): "If we had (...) ignored the opium side of things and focused instead on the insurgency and the economic/social/political issues that underpin an opium culture, there’d be far less moral incoherence in coopting AWK to suit our purposes."

Indeed. But at the same time there is a question hidden in Jari Lindholm's and Joshua Foust's implicitly contrasting comments. Is/was AWK and asset or someone coopted? The two are not necessarily all the same. Depending on this, you might weave different personal motives into a narrative of what happened to the control of the drugs supply market in southern Afghanistan post-2005. The NYT recaps the narrative you could creatively interpret:

"In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Haji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year.
Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai’s arrest." (And I should add to this that Haji Juma Khan has since also been arrested, and for the second time, just like Haji Bashir Noorzai who was first detained post-2001 and then released back on the field for a couple of years, before he was arrested in New York eventually and put to court in the U.S. - P.M.)

Whatever is the case regarding Ahmed Wali Karzai, it ought to be realised that his alleged use as a readily committed or a coopted asset is partly what put Hamed Karzai in an ungovernable, illegitimate sort of situation in the end.

Finally, one needs to note that the fact that news of AWK's alleged dealing with the CIA came now, is something that could very easily have been timed to come just this much before the second round of the presidential elections - it might have come not entirely randomly coincidentally in fact.

Superficial quote of the day

Individual perspectives make a difference: "Believe me, I feel safer here in Afghanistan" - says an Estonian soldier serving in the French Foreign Legion, even though they come under fire regularly where they operate, in the Uzbeen valley, out of Combat Outpost Rocco. As reported by Yaroslav Trofimov, for the Wall Street Journal. (This Yaroslav Trofimov, by the way.)

Securitisation puzzles

The Taliban also happen to profit from the drugs trade, as many others do as well, and the revenue from the trade helps them finance their war effort, for which they have much support from other sources as well. That is the truth. Now, I really got used to people not giving a ..... about that, and this does not bother me too much any more, in the sense that it does not distract me in my work.
So many seem to think the Taliban are basically narco-terrorists, and, don't forget, they also think, at the same time, that narco-terrorists are normal in the Pashtun part of the world and that one just can't change this, and one just needs to show resolve to bomb them and to assassinate their morally retarded leaders forever. One has to deal with the prominence of such views, with a close-to-zero chance of incluencing the discourse in a major way.
One way to deal with this personal challenge for an analyst is to retreat back to the ivory tower sometimes, for a little abstract reflection on all that is going on. An example of what might be interesting in such moments is to contemplate what exactly is being securitised - i.e. more or less consensually regarded as a security threat - when it comes to Afghanistan, and just exactly how (abandoning interest for the moment about what the analyst oneself considers to be threats, being interested only about what people's threat perceptions are).

Is the drugs trade securitised? Is terrorism securitised more in the Afghanistan context, if one can look at this in relative terms? Is the nexus of the two securitised? Who are the securitising agents? Who are agents of the threat itself? And what or who should be referent object(s), i.e. that what needs to be protected? And so on. These are the sort of questions one is asking.
Now, UNODC, a major securitising agent, by default, when it comes to the drugs trade, has, as many will know, once again turned up the volume to spread the word about the threat which by the way does not really "originate" in Afghanistan, as precursor materials and weapons, made largely outside Afghanistan, are necessary to sustain it. So who or what is the referent object? When it comes to the drugs trade, a vague definition of the referent object is usually that it is societal cohesion in general that is being/should be protected, as put forward by a number of sources that I won't bother to cite right now. But getting down to the details of how this is viewed in public discourse may be interesting.
UNODC is claiming (by way of guesstimate more than they are ready to emphasise) that "Heroin overdoses kill more than 10,000 people in NATO countries every year -- five times the total number of alliance troops that have been killed in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion of 2001." See? Shipments of heroin structurally amount to ballistic missiles fired by the Taliban at German, Austrian, British, Italian, French and other streets, at ordinary people living there. And it is a self-sustaining barrage (unless we intervene really-really-really decisively, with a relatively minor sacrifice in terms of troops killed), because the money that returns helps the shipments continue.
At the same time, however, this view of the situation is challenged by others. This CNN blogpost by Randi Kaye seems to go for the safe default option of blaming everything on the traders and the dealers, on the distribution network connecting (poor Afghan) farmers and (desperate, unfortunate) drug users, neither of whom should really be harmed more than they are right now.
Finally, as far as this non-comprehensive overview is concerned, a recent article in a British paper was published with the telling title of Drug users 'funding attacks on touring soldiers.' It starts off saying that "Drug users who buy heroin on the streets of our towns are paying the Taliban to attack British soldiers in Afghanistan." Drug users here seem to be presented as facilitators of the threat themselves, structurally a part of the enemy. But then some phrases later on make the argumentation more ambiguous. Drug users are again "our young people," whose "lives are destroyed" (by the enemy).

Like I said, this was not meant to be a comprehensive presentation of the discourse. Of course there are many other views as well. The picture you get is this diverse.

(Alright, I'll get back to work now.)

Korski and Gowan on EU civilians' role in crisis management

This new ECFR report, penned by Dan Korski and Richard Gowan, is a must-read for those wondering about how Obama's civilian surge, or ESDP for that matter, could work. In other words, it is a must for those interested in finding out how state-building could possibly work in the increasingly interdependent contemporary security context, in places rather different from Bosnia and more similar in general to Somalia, Gaza, or Afghanistan.

Tellingly, in a twisted sort of way, of the Obama team's civilian-surge idea and ESDP's civilian component, it is the latter that came much earlier, based on the recognition that crisis management may require a broad array of civilian capabilities that are distributed across ministries/departments of all kinds in the governments that could be contributors of civilians to foreign missions. What hasn't come with this recognition so far, for the majority of EU member states, however, is a willingness to tackle the challenges related to making these capabilities available in said foreign missions.

The ECFR report deals with both the challenges and the possible ways to solve them, largely within the confines of what one can realistically expect, in my estimation. At the same time, though, it is ambitious conceptually, as it goes way beyond just trying to deliver the civilian component to "Obama's war," beyond just trying to make something work this one and only time. It includes recommendations for setting up a system to comprehensively deal with failing states on the watchlist of the well-informed. It devises a "scalable assistance partnership" model, whereby EU Special Representatives could see a significantly increased role in guiding the EU's conduct in host countries, possibly with a direct say about military operations even, if ESDP missions are deployed there.

In order for this system to work, the EU still has a long way to go. This concerns some countries more than others - as many ECFR reports before, this report also comes up with its own categorisation of EU countries, classifying them according to their performance. "Strivers," "agnostics" and "indifferent countries" are offered a number of benchmarks regarding what they should do to catch up with the best achievers. Setting up a roster mechanism in order to have a list of truly and reliably deployable civilians with appropriate skillsets, establishing procedures for the proper debriefing of mission personnel and for documenting and disseminating lessons learned are among the tasks that a country like Hungary should be looking at.

There are recommendations for the European Union as a whole, too. EU Battle Groups should be developed into truly comprehensive, whole-of-government military-civilian "packages" - as logical as this may seem, especially for "civilian power Europe," this is still a task for the future.

But these were just a few examples of what is there in the report. Go read it - particularly if you are a strategic EU civilian!

Options, quotes

Copying and pasting from the harvest of recent times, a selection of significant contributions to discussing basic strategic issues at a time when Pakistan has just launched a major operation in South Waziristan, likely leading to the displacement of a lot of fighters...
First with Ashraf Haidari, writing in the Washington Times:

"So far, Pakistan's sweeping military operations to retake the lost ground from the Taliban have led to a massive humanitarian crisis and displacement of civilians in the North-West Frontier Province. This has alienated the border region's most impoverished tribes, among whom al Qaeda has heavily recruited desperate and illiterate youths to carry out suicide attacks in Afghanistan.
At the same time, Pakistan's conventional operations have proved inept against an unconventional, elusive enemy. These operations have either displaced Taliban fighters to new areas in Pakistan or pushed them over into Afghanistan."

For a while, Afghanistan seems set to face a tougher insurgency, with added manpower. Should this make the US abandon hope of turning the situation around? Should offshore or in-theatre CT be the options one ultimately needs to resort to? I have answered this question myself a couple of times, but not in as much detail and as precisely as the Kagans did in a recent presentation, that is by now widely cited. See pages 40-44. Absolutely necessary.

"• The range of an armed Predator UAV is less than 500 miles—reaching the areas used in the 1990s as training camps for al Qaeda requires bases in either Afghanistan or Pakistan

• Special Forces teams can launch from further away, but require the availability of Combat Search and Rescue capabilities which, again, require bases in either Afghanistan or Pakistan
• The only option for pure CT operations that does not require local bases is longrange precision‐guided munitions fired either from manned aircraft or from ships or submarines
– But PGMs can only hit the targets they are aimed at; they cannot gather additional intelligence on the ground or react to changing circumstances as SF teams can, nor can they hang around to review the effects of their initial strike and then re‐target, as UAVs can

– The likelihood of seriously disrupting any network using only long‐range PGMs is extremely low.
(...)
• Adopting an over‐the‐horizon CT approach means depending entirely on Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and CIA networks to locate targets
• Enemy leadership is very SIGINT savvy and very hard to target using only such information
• CIA networks, even supplemented by ISI reporting in Pakistan and local reporting through US and allied forces in Afghanistan, are not able to provide targetable intelligence on key enemy leaders even now
– It took months to gain actionable intelligence on Beitullah Mehsud even with thousands of Pakistani troops milling around his bases and an enormous bounty on his head
– Insurgent leaders move into and through Afghanistan even now despite ISAF efforts to target them."

To these two key excerpts, reading their bulletpoints about the "difficulty" of maintaining CT bases in disinterested Pakistan and an abandoned Afghanistan is also a must.
What are al-Qaida's options then? If they suffer major, structurally relevant losses nowadays, can they just relocate, following a global militants network's special OLI paradigm? Steve Coll makes an important argument, similar to which I have used in the past:

"These are credible, serious arguments that accurately describe some of al Qaeda's character as a stateless, millenarian terrorist group. But they misunderstand the history of al Qaeda's birth and growth alongside specific Pashtun Islamist militias on the Afghan-Pakistan border. It is simply not true that all potential al Qaeda sanctuaries are of the same importance, now or potentially. Bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, have a 30-year, unique history of trust and collaboration with the Pashtun Islamist networks located in North Waziristan, Bajaur, and the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. It is not surprising, given this distinctive history, that al Qaeda's presumed protectors -- perhaps the Haqqani network, which provided the territory in which al Qaeda constructed its first training camps in the summer of 1988 -- have never betrayed their Arab guests.
These networks have fought alongside al Qaeda since the mid-1980s and have raised vast sums of money in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states through their connections. They possess infrastructure -- religious institutions, trucking firms, criminal networks, preaching networks, housing networks -- from Kandahar and Khost Province, and from Quetta to Karachi's exurban Pashtun neighborhoods, that is either impervious to penetration by the Pakistani state or has coopted those in the Pakistani security services who might prove disruptive. It is mistaken to assume that Bin Laden, Zawahiri, or other Arab leaders would enjoy similar sanctuary anywhere else. In Somalia they would almost certainly be betrayed for money; in Yemen, they would be much more susceptible to detection by the country's police network. The United States should welcome the migration of al Qaeda's leadership to such countries."

Finally, here is Michael Scheuer, whom I often find simply scary. Like when he said the best hope for responsible action from Washington is if Osama can... etc. This time I found him simply realistic, about many of the things he recently discussed in an article for Foreign Policy:

"On point "a," it is no news at all that the Taliban and al Qaeda are separate entities; they always have been and will be. What is important is that they are working in tandem toward the same clear and simple primary goal -- to drive out the United States and NATO, destroy Karzai's corrupt and incompetent regime, and re-establish their Islamist emirate. In working toward this goal, al Qaeda's combat role in Afghanistan has decreased as mujahideen forces -- Afghans, Iraq veterans, and other foreign volunteers -- have grown and become better armed, trained, and funded. This should have been apparent to U.S. officials several years ago when Osama bin Laden named Mustafa Abu al-Yazid as al Qaeda's Afghan commander. Yazid's long-practiced fortes are logistics and finance, and he is now running the main components of al Qaeda's changed but still essential Afghan effort: logistics and training, intelligence collection, and media operations. (Nota bene: This is nowhere near a full commitment of al Qaeda's resources, and its remaining assets are assisting other insurgencies -- such as in Somalia, Algeria, and Yemen -- and preparing coming attacks in the United States and Europe.)
On point "b," one has to wonder what can be meant by arguing that the Taliban does not pose a "direct threat" to the United States. Did the drafters of the new strategy bother to ask the intelligence community whom the United States is fighting in Afghanistan? The Taliban and its allies are unquestionably a direct threat to deployed U.S. military forces -- ask the commander of the U.S. post at Kamdesh, Nuristan, mauled on Oct. 4 -- and they intend to prevent everything Washington cites as a goal in Afghanistan: democracy, secularism, the rule of (Western) law, elections, constitutions, central government institutions, women's rights, coeducational schools, and the annihilation of al Qaeda. By protecting al Qaeda, incidentally, Taliban leader Mullah Omar's outfit is also facilitating a "direct threat" to the continental United States."

Given these continued fighting seems to be the logical option if the US wants to protect its key interests. But this is difficult. As Jari Lindholm put it some time ago:

"We realised AIDS was a problem only after someone died; there still isn’t a cure, yet no one is saying all that research has been in vain. In other words, without 9/11 we wouldn’t be in Afghanistan, but I seriously doubt things would be better in South Asia."

Enough food for thought isn't it? Of course there are the elections at the same time, but one shouldn't take one's eyes off the ball. It is bouncing in South Waziristan today.

The contracts officer: Updates

1.) Are only NGOs paying the Taliban? Have the Italians paid as well? How about others? Rumours are going to be swirling around now. The story of the French naively entering the Uzbeen valley is untrue, though. They went there knowing of the insurgent presence in the area, they even had information of militants who had crossed over from Pakistan. So part of these rumours is certainly manufactured to be a dark tale...

2.) Else. I presented a scheme of how far civilians of different organisational affiliation can get out in the Afghan "risk space." I wrote there that NGO staff is the most restricted, because of a lack of readiness to work with militaries. This assertion did not take account of the obvious possibility of paying for increased access, which seems to be a common practice in fact. Although one has to add that in most of the projects I am familiar with, whether bribes were used or not it was only a local employee of the NGOs concerned who was allowed to venture to the project's site, at best. But in some cases there was not even that degree of control, and contractors were just doing stuff they were paid for, on their own. (I will soon revisit the issue of civilians in Afghanistan by the way...)

The contracts officer

So that's what you find at the end. Much earlier this year, Alex Strick van Linschoten noted that NGOs need to pay what is essentially a protection racket to the Taliban, if they want to operate safely and deliver on projects. Some Afghanistan observers, even watching from a distance, including me, took this seriously. Then in the Spring I met an Indian professor who formerly worked in the Afghan MFA as an advisor - he knows insurgencies very well, especially the ones in Northeast India... And he said that if one wants to execute development projects there, it is perfectly normal to assume that a given percentage of the money will go to insurgents. So why would it work any differently in Afghanistan? Then all sorts of news emerged which confirmed that there is, indeed, a system of bribing the Taliban into keeping back from behaving like purely destructive insurgents. And then Jean MacKenzie reported something that I only noticed recently:

"A shadowy office in Kabul houses the Taliban contracts officer, who examines proposals and negotiates with organizational hierarchies for a percentage. He will not speak to, or even meet with, a journalist, but sources who have spoken with him and who have seen documents say that the process is quite professional."

I just had to note this, even this late. It is so fundamental.

A superficial comment about Nuristan and history

Normally (by ambition) I like to try and come up here with more practical analysis, but I do feel the inclination every now and then to post insights relevant rather in the internal world of the ivory tower. This is one of those occasions.

Given Nuristan's prominence in the news recently as a rationally abandoned, sparsely populated area (or a liberated area from the Taliban's perspective), I decided to read Richard Strand's study, Ethnic Competition and Tribal Schism in Eastern Nuristan (from 1978), thanks to Christian who highlighted it.

It is brief, fascinating reading, and I very much recommend it to everyone, but not really because it would point you out the sort of population faultline that can be exploited in the spirit of divide-and-rule COIN, for the marginalisation of all anti-government elements, all of a sudden. Rather because it doesn't: at least definitely not in a direct sense. Like I said, this post will be relevant from that ivory-tower perspective.

So, in six pages there, you get a picture of conflict in the Landay Sin valley over pasture use between Koms on the one hand, and Gujars and Meswanis on the other, the latter two referred to by Koms as "Gujirbandevol." It was a conflict in which the resource of state authority was called on even, on various levels, and it was complicated further by the presence of an entire "Gujar faction" among the Koms that showed more of a readiness to accept Gujirbandevols' access to certain lands, because of a number of reasons. These reasons included intercommunity marriages creating cross-faultline connections, economic interests, and also, interestingly, the power of the concept of being "Afghan" from which an acceptance of community between Koms and Gujirbandevol can stem. Highlighting the latter factor, Richard Strand demonstrates that the conflict is partly a modernisation-related one. His study could be one of many lessons in history to those who think that "Afghans" are these revenge-making, xenophobic, war-like beings who would never change.

As to change, fast-forward time: nowadays different things are the key determinants of armed conflict in the area. Land disputes are not gone, of course, and related issues of community formation could be as complex a subject to study today as ever. Yet today the reason why anthropologists are most likely to go this place embedded with the U.S. military is a new conflict involving radicalised Muslim militants intent on waging jihad against the superpower that once used to fund them. That, in a place formerly referred to by Muslims as Kafiristan...

In Peace and Conflict Studies, there is a commonly used scheme of the process of conflict as it leads from a more peaceful state of "social change" (usually constantly eroded by latent conflicts of all kinds) through escalation to all-out war, and how conflict resolution can bring about a transcendence of the original critical conflict starting from the dire state of warfare, leading back to the state of "social change" (like I said, never really free of conflict). It is a result of this, as a result of conflict dynamics, that the interaction of whole new actors and whole new incompatibilities may be constituting conflict in the same place as time progresses. Nuristan is a particularly spectacular example of this.

If this post is to have any policy relevance, it would be that one needs to get down and study hard. And produce policy-relevant posts only when there is really, surely, the spark of an intelligent idea. Too bad this standard is just practically impossible to enforce. Including for me, on myself.

An interesting addition regarding Nuristani developments...

... appeared in Newsweek before the latest bloody, large-scale insurgent attack there. It is the story of "Masihuddin," one of the guerrillas interviewed by Newsweek for their special project on an oral history of the Taliban (by Sami Yousafzai et al.).
Masihuddin's narrative of the insurgency, summed up bullet-point-style:
- He was studying at a Nuristani madrasa when the Taliban were chased out from the area in 2001. Left for Pakistan, to continue madrasa studies, ended up doing so in really poor conditions, near Peshawar. Local people were willing to help by bringing food for example, but couldn't always afford to do so, and Pakistani police were harassing them sometimes.
- Last summer, they attacked the US base in Barge Matal. Masihuddin was by this time a commander, having volunteers signed up for the mission. Postponed the attack for two weeks because of bad weather ill-affording fighting with the sort of gear they had. Then they moved, together with a filming crew which was documenting their advance and the attack. Says they lost 12 Taliban to US air support (helicopters) eventually. He sounds confident now they will never need to resort to the sort of more asymmetrical tactics that are typical of the fight in the south of Afghanistan.

(If you are asking whether these guys were HiG or Taliban, these are the sort of people to whom, socialised as they are into this new conflict, that sort of question could be practically meaningless. For now. So I would speculate.)

Look, who's watching?

Zbigniew "I would do it again!" Brzezinski is saying that it's bad to be an occupier in Afghanistan, and so Obama shouldn't "mindlessly escalate." Putting aside the confused/confusing nature of this statement, I find it especially remarkable how he gets introduced to the readership in the NYT:

"Few policy makers have studied Afghanistan as long..."

His "studies" got some serious killing going.

Today I am reading in the Washington Post (but not from today) something else I'd note now - long excerpt coming up:

"Before Brostrom moved to Wanat, he went home on leave to see his parents in Hawaii, where they had settled after his father retired from the Army. One evening, he showed his father videos from Afghanistan. Most of the clips were of Brostrom and his troops under fire at the Bella outpost.
In one video, Brostrom's battalion fired artillery and white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon, at a distant campfire in the mountains where it had killed insurgents earlier that day. Someone had come to collect the bodies. The soldiers were determined to kill them.
"Here comes a mighty big explosion on this little candlelight ceremony that the Taliban is having for their buddies that died there earlier," one of the soldiers says on the video. "This is going to be glorious. It is going to be a bloodbath."
A few seconds later, the mountainside exploded with fire, and the soldiers let up a raucous cheer.
Human rights groups have criticized the United States for employing white phosphorus to kill enemy fighters, but this type of use is permitted under military rules. The elder Brostrom weighed his words carefully before he spoke. "How do you know those people dragging the bodies away weren't villagers coming to get their relatives?" he asked.
"They are all [expletive] Taliban up there," the son replied."

There (in the area Brostrom is talking about) they are certainly not all [expletive] Taliban. But there is an al-Qaida/Lashkar-e-Tayba presence, along with the local HiG fighters that will now go undisturbed, with US forces pulling back from there, if all goes according to plan.

What's the analysis here? There is not all that much in the way of analysis, I admit...

Two remarks on Afghanistan strategy (so this blog doesn't die)

1. Dan Korski visited my area of operations recently, and delivered a talk about the future of ESDP (European Security and Defence Policy). His constructive outspokenness is always thought-provoking and welcome, and I want to react to something he raised in connection with the Obama administration's idea of the civilian surge needed in Afghanistan. He really wants to make this work, and he outlined a few ideas regarding how it could possibly work. Among them he said he sees a need for some countries, especially smaller countries, to go for specialisation in niche capabilities in this area, too. For example, some countries could specialise in the provision of civilian agricultural experts that can be deployed to places like Afghanistan.

I perfectly understand the rationale of why this idea emerges in the Afghanistan context, of course. But I can't stop myself from taking a step back and going critical of this, taking a look at the larger picture. There are, in fact, organisations specialising in providing experts with the sort of "niche capabilities" that could be very useful in places like Afghanistan. They are sometimes referred to with the abbreviation IO/NGOs. International (or Intergovernmental) Organisations and Non-Governmental Organisations. Fascinating insight from me, this, isn't it? Anyway, it's important, in order to see a crucial aspect of the challenge: that we just want to get people with the same skill sets, but also with a readiness to work in grave danger - in greater danger than some of the quite brave people from the IO/NGO crowd would be willing to take for a longer period.

I even have some visualisation here, regarding this. It is, as the title of the figure indicates, a by no means perfect illustration of the outreach of organisations of different types, in Afghanistan. NGOs (not ready to work together with militaries), IGOs (that are somewhat more ready to operate together with ISAF), PRTs (whole-of-government in name, but more military in general, in practice) - and then the mostly all-military-manned FOBs and COPs (Forward Operating Bases and Combat Outposts or Combat Operations Posts). An imperfection of the scheme, tolerated for the sake of reasonable simplicity, is that state agencies, such as USAID, and their contractors, may be willing to go further beyond the boundaries of the area of operations permissive for civilians than NGOs and IGOs, but working with significant security detachments of course. The civilian surge is really just meant to push useful civilians outwards in the scheme below - that would be the point.

Some added explanation regarding the scheme: it is perhaps interesting to mention what's beyond the COP-reach line. Well, sometimes the Pakistani border, sometimes extremely difficult mountainous terrain, with the narrowest outlying valleys, sometimes just generally difficult terrain which nobody has the resources to cover for now (neither ISAF, nor ASFs). An example could be Gizab district in Uruzgan, where militant fun includes the running of training camps (yes, there are training camps in Afghanistan even - so just send the cruise missiles, I guess...).

2. The Afghanistan "strategy," which doesn't exist because such a thing cannot exist, as I pointed out here earlier, with its wider context in mind, resembles a hammer-and-anvil kind of military operation in general. Pakistan is the at times softish, at times quite hammer-like, anvil, against which a well-resourced US counterinsurgency effort could smash militants (or militancy, in abstract but more accurate terms). Of course it doesn't really work that way, as the US effort is not well-resourced (and perhaps will never be), while Pakistan, as just discussed, is not playing a perfect anvil, in one sense or another, at times.

Read Joshua Foust's excellent article on recent developments in Nuristan, btw, to get some of the specifics regarding this, and also follow his links to Richard Strand's page. See the mention of all those kids going to get education in Pakistani madrassas? The problem is, as long as you let that happen, and if no radical change occurs on the other side of the border, you get people coming back, killing whom might, in this terrain, take as much as 250,000 rounds per capita (or even more, especially if you count training rounds), an x (certainly dreadful) number of civilian casualties, many own casualties, and a lot of time of course. Probably not the amount of time in which critics want to see major improvements.