The politics of coalition burden-sharing: The Steve Irwin way of doing COIN

There is a new report out from the Australian Land Warfare Studies Centre by Col. Peter Connolly, on counterinsurgency in Uruzgan province. (To make this clear before somebody misunderstands me, the title of Colonel Connolly's study is much more modest and unassuming than the one I gave to this post out of my own free choice.)

The colonel has great experience in COIN operations, from past deployments to Somalia in 1993, and East Timor in 2000 -- experience already from before Afghanistan, where he was then Commanding Officer of the Australian MRTF (Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force) Two in 2009. In his study, Connolly credibly claims similarly long-running experience for the Australian Defence Forces in general. In one telling reflection, on pages 50-51:

"The Americans at JMRC (Joint Mission Readiness Centre – Hohenfels, Germany) commented on how good our (Australian and New Zealand) soldiers were at switching from a hearts and minds focus to killing the enemy, and then switching back just as quickly to caring for the people. They asked how we had trained them to be like that, and I concluded it was our culture rather than any specific training."

Now, this may have been the well-known institutionalised bilateral patting on the back intended to encourage an ally. A matter of military-to-military diplomacy. But looking back at Australia's experience over the years along with others in southern Afghanistan who equally tried to make the most of their stay there, the ADF do indeed seem to have something in them that was missing from some of the so-called "allied caveat and stand aside forces." Maybe this is not down to Australian national culture as such, rather to a healthy organisational culture or set of norms (along with the political will from above to let this work). But it certainly is there in their case and not so much there in others' cases.

They were keen on doing dismounted patrols in dispersed operations, to try and dominate valley-floor "green zone" areas. They would rent qalas for section or platoon-level operations like this, with soldiers buying their food from locals. They would counter Taliban nightletters with nightletters of their own - in Colonel Connolly's words, quoting from page 50:

"The delivery of ‘night letters’ to population centres was occasionally employed to develop the perception amongst the population that the ANA and ISAF ‘owned the night’. These letters would counter insurgent propaganda and spread messages concerning local government initiatives and progress. This technique required immediate follow-up the next morning to reinforce the themes delivered through the night letters and assess any changes to atmospherics."

The bottomline is that they were willing to take calculated risks to a greater extent than has been the case with so many other contributors to ISAF's operations. This is what I refer to as the Steve Irwin way. Dispersed operations in areas like Uruzgan's green zones do carry much such calculated risk, and can be realistically compared to working with a stingray's barb in the vicinity.

And that is why we, with my colleague Nik Hynek, in our book on coalition burden-sharing, were determined to look at not only quantitative measures of individual countries' contributions. We assumed that their guiding role conception in ISAF, that is, whether they see themselves as, say, "strivers," or mere "servants" rather, will affect the quality of their contribution even in a dynamic sense - strivers are those countries that not only contribute significantly in qualitative terms, but adapt to the changing circumstances -- which are constantly evolving on various levels of analysis.

The politics of coalition burden-sharing: "Stand aside" forces

Note the term "Allied caveat and stand aside" above. This slide may be quite telling, regarding the importance, in a negative sense, of caveats (informal, i.e. not openly declared, but officially/mutually registered restrictions on the use of different countries' armed forces in coalition operations) in affecting NATO's reputation in the future. It is an old theme of those complaining about the problems of burden-sharing in places like Afghanistan, within coalitions like ISAF. And it has come up recently once again, in a Canadian lessons-learned report which I posted on here a few days ago.

The above slide is from one of Anthony Cordesman's presentations, and in fact it figures in several of these compilations of his at CSIS. Whether or not the term comes from Anthony Cordesman himself, or from a military source on which Cordesman and his team may have relied in their work, if you do a quick Google search, you may realise that most of even the non-CSIS links that pop up with occurrences of the term "stand aside forces" contain reference to his presentations.

In our book, which I heralded at this blog in September (published back in the summer, by Routledge, in London and New York), with my colleague Nik Hynek we refer to this phenomenon slightly differently, and identify four basic role conceptions that countries may have depending on whether alliance dependence or threat balancing (or both or none of those) is/are driving their involvement in Afghanistan. Those who are alliance-dependent primarily, or not even that, will be either "servants" or "onlookers," respectively, in our categorisation. And largely it is of course these two categories of countries from which you will find Cordesman's "allied caveat and stand aside forces" deployed.

Regardless of by what terms we refer to this phenomenon, it will inevitably form an important part of security debates in the future.

The politics of coalition burden-sharing: Canadian lessons learned

Over at Travels with Shiloh, there is a recent entry on my and Nik Hynek's book's chapter on Canada, which was written by Ben Zyla. A good apropos to bring up that there is a new report out on Canada's lessons learned from their operations in Kandahar - FYI.

Full reference:

David J. Bercuson - J.L. Granatstein (2011): Lessons learned? What Canada should learn from Afghanistan. Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute, October 2011. (Hyperlink)

The report focuses a lot on Canada's complaints about the informal caveats put in place by alliance partners in Afghanistan. A turn of fate after in Bosnia, Canadian battalions were sometimes referred to as "Can'tbats" because of their respective restrictions (imposed on them by decision-makers in Ottawa). Afghanistan started out similarly, but evolved fast into a largely unrestricted engagement by Canadian troops, by the time of the Canadian PRT's and Battle Group's move into Kandahar province. Press reports on Granatstein's and Bercuson's study seem to focus on this aspect mostly, claiming that "The refusal (by allies) to help Canada in Kandahar cost lives."

The report itself is more cautiously worded, and does not look to simplify causal relationships to this extent. Although who could deny, of course, that if Canada would have had to do less, and the burdens in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan would have been more evenly shared, less Canadian soldiers would have died? Moreover, the study also refers to how in terms of MEDEVAC Canadian Forces were regulary let down, and could only count on US support in this respect with real consistency.

I would stop by yet another point here, and it is the study's discussion of the reasons for Canada's decision to go into Kandahar, and not somewhere else. Based on what I know, I can agree with the authors' conclusion that it reflected a genuine desire to be there and be important at the same time. An important exception to the Realist paradigm's "Threat balancing vs. Alliance dependence" framework of interpretation for countries' participation in coalition operations, which would not leave room for normative considerations playing a role (i.e. for a logic of appropriateness as opposed to one of consequences) - something we indicate in advance in our book's opening chapter, even while putting forward the above mentioned framework as a baseline theory of coalition contributions.

Accordingly, a Canadian DFAIT (i.e. foreign ministry) official is quoted on page 21 as saying, concerning this, that the reason for the extent of Canada's involvement was:

"We didn’t do it because someone in NATO wanted us to do it, or because the Americans made us do it… We did it because Afghanistan was a serious issue, we were a serious country… and we were determined to behave accordingly. Which is why we dismissed options like sitting on a mountain top in the middle of nowhere."

Telling enough.

I also found remarkable, after my previous post on the Netherlands (and how the G20 as a forum mattered in their case), how the G8 was an important issue here in Canada's case. Of course the G8 is generally an important foreign policy influence multiplier for Canada, but here it was explicitly connected by some Canadian officials themselves to the Afghanistan mission. PM Paul Martin's communications director, Scott Reid is quoted (p.21) as having said:

"There was a feeling that this was the price of being a G-8 country."