The news filtering out of Afghanistan has been damning for what some have called the American cowboy of doing politics. Shoot first; ask questions later. Defeat your enemy in battle; only then figure out a way to keep him defeated in the war.
Game theorists work with a concept called subgame perfection, where the stable (and hopefully winning) strategy in any given game is the also the stable winning strategy in any portion of that game. Wars are won by winning battles. And if things go well, the strategy by which the war is won is also the strategy, the method of winning each battle, in turn.
So, even as the Obama Administration is back-pedalling on the import of the WikiLeaks documents, and trying to seem to smooth out its differences with the Pakistani military, its biggest and daunting challenge remains far out of hand, unmanageable by wit and worry. And that daunting challenge is to make the government of Afghanistan care about Afghanistan and its people. The Obama administration has claimed that the way to win the broader war is to have the Afghan government work with its allies, to provide good public services and protection to its people so that in time, those people reject the Taliban’s influenced. Roughly put, this is General David Petraeus Counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy . Unfortunately, things are not working out in that way. COIN, which game theorists consider to have been the sub game perfect in Iraq and perhaps, Afghanistan, hasn’t quite had the chance to take off yet; the fault, dear reader, lies not in our stars but squarely in the Afghan government.
The U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan under President Bush and subsequent retreat of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has redoubled on the Obama Administration. Corruption, controlled in some measure by the perceived systematic religious fatalism of Taliban rule, has become systematically random, cumbersome and costly. Over the last three years $3 billion in aid money left Afghanistan through the airport in Kabul, the money simply stuffed in suitcases, pilfered by war lords and government functionaries. Moreover, drastic, shifting changes in investment, strategy and leadership has yet to moderate the par boiling conflict into one that can be solved through political means, simmering in negotiation and compromise.
The latest COIN strategy, so lauded in Iraq, has become the victim of circumstances in Afghanistan, its new home. A long term, near-moral strategy that turns on winning the hearts and minds of the citizens in the field of operations, COIN has succumbed to the sheer, devastating revelation that the one lynchpin to its successful implementation, the government and security apparatus of Afghanistan, is despised by the silent majority of Afghans.
The Afghan police force, still diminishingly small, is run through with miscreants who reports show have raped their way through towns and villages. Indeed, soldiers who fought and died in the deadly 2009 fire fight in Command Outpost Keating, faced down ammunition from a police station. Afghan soldiers, who until recently got paid more to fight for the Taliban than to defend their country against the Taliban, seem to kill NATO allied troops in some perverse monthly rotation. So it comes as no surprise that the CIA has been forced to round out new P.R strategies to persuade the German and French coterie in ISAF to remain in the field. This, as it is becoming more obvious by the day, that even as each provisioned soldier steps onto Afghan soil by late fall, politics in Washington D.C. might trigger, within a few short months, a hasty departure of many of those recently arriving soldiers. This is hardly the world countenanced in the COIN strategy.
Just today, President Obama tried to get ahead of the damage caused by the leaks by arguing that the leaked documents only show information that we have known for years. He argued that Afghanistan’s recent history is the reason he has surged troops into the field and has changed the structure of, and the personnel that constitute, the ISAF leadership in Afghanistan.
Carl Hulse writing for the New York Time’s At War blog quotes the president;
“While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan.”
He went on “Indeed, they point to the same challenges that led me to conduct an extensive review of our policy last fall.”
Further, President Obama claimed: “For seven years we failed to implement a strategy adequate to the challenge in this region, the region from which the 9-11 attacks were waged and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been planned. That’s why we’ve substantially increased our commitment there, insisted upon greater accountability from our partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan, developed a new strategy that can work and put in place a team, including one of our finest generals, to execute that plan.”
But Congressman David Obey, thinks that the new revelations about corruption and violence in Afghanistan merit serious reconsideration of the U.S. military and its ISAF allies’ plan, the COIN strategy. Congressman Obey, is the Democratic Chairman of the Appropriations Committee and holds the purse strings to the administration’s war funding. And he has vowed to vote against the very bill that he helped bring to the floor.
Mr. Obey claimed :
“As chairman, I have the obligation to bring this supplemental before the House to allow the institution to work its will. But I also have the obligation to my conscience to indicate – by my individual vote – my profound skepticism that this action will accomplish much more than to serve as a recruiting incentive for those who most want to do us ill.”
He is not alone. Other Democrats are arguing that the war dollars should be spent at home. It will be a better investment; after all, we are only just clawing our way of the worst economic downturn since the 1930’s.
Hulse and Calmes quote Congressman James McGovern: “With all due respect, I think we need to do more nation-building here at home.”
Nevertheless, the supplemental funding for the war will pass and will likely end up on President Obama’s desk by end of day Tuesday. The element missing in this puzzle? Some feasible way to get the Afghan government to do all the things required for COIN, the strategy widely deemed sub game perfect, to work.
