The Afghanistan Study Group report is out, and the fight is on. A number of critiques have been leveled at the report, one of the most influential being Joshua Foust's over at Registan.net, chunks of which are percolating upward into larger outlets. Foust is a smart guy with whom I regularly debate, but there's a particularly offensive landmine hiding at the end of Foust's post that I want to highlight:
But in a real way, this is symptomatic of much of the anti-war movement in this country: it starts with a conclusion and works backward to develop justifications for it. That is an inversion of reasoned argument, as it relies on assumption and beliefs to shape reality, rather than using reality as a base for arguments and beliefs.
That's pretty rich, especially considering the outrageous intellectual dishonesty on display over the past couple of weeks with regard to the pro-counterinsurgency decision-makers in this country, who spent the last few weeks furiously redefining not only reality but their own doctrine. I don't mean to deflect from Foust's substantive critiques of the ASG's report, some of which I plan to return to in a latter post, and I should be clear that I also have some points of contention to raise with some of the particulars of the report, but this drive-by smear is too offensive to let go without a detailed response.
I read Joshua's swipe as calling out the anti-war movement in the current debate as being the parties particularly guilty of this activity, and if that's the case, let me go out on a limb here and say that such an assertion is flatly ridiculous on its face. This is particularly offensive given that in the last couple of weeks, our opponents have worked furiously to construct a dishonest narrative of "progress" while their strategy is clearly failing to arrest the deterioration of security in Afghanistan.
To get a sense of the pro-COIN crowd's continuous intellectual dishonesty, let's take the most glaring example: how they deal with the "north star" of counterinsurgency, "a legitimate host nation government."
A writer might mean "legitimate" in a couple of different ways:
- Winning tangible local support such that the population is either a) tangibly supporting government efforts to root out insurgents, b) refusing to tolerate insurgent operations in within their area or population, or c) all of the above.
- Relatively non-corrupt. This aspect of legitimacy influences the prior aspect. It's an especially important aspect of legitimacy in the current conflict because corruption was a major factor seized on by the Taliban in their last rise to power (hypocrisy notwithstanding).
Now, let's talk about that "tangible local support" for a second. The dream of the counterinsurgent is that "living among the population" and "protecting them" from the insurgents (U.N. condemnation of this practice as one that endangers civilians notwithstanding) is supposed to give locals the "freedom" to side with the counterinsurgents and the local government. Two of the most important manifestations of that support are supposed to be:
- increased intelligence from the locals about insurgent activities, and
- a measurable increase in the number of locals willing to put their lives on the line by siding with the local government against the insurgents.
As Matthew Hoh points out in his response to Foust and others, the Afghan population only reported one percent of the improvised explosive devices found or detonated in June. That number has been in decline every year since NATO started adding troops in Pashtun areas in 2006:
In late 2005, the civilian population was informing U.S. and NATO troops of about 15 percent of of all IEDs planted. That proportion fell to just over nine percent in 2006, to less than seven percent in 2007 to about three percent in 2008, and again to 2.8 percent in 2009.
In the first six months of 2010, that ratio dropped to 2.6 percent, and in May and June it fell to 1.4 and one percent, respectively.
This is especially salient given that one of the other bloggers attacking the ASG report, Andrew Exum, previously identified this as a core metric for local support and security:
Conversely, a drop in the proportion of IEDs found and cleared indicates the population is not passing on information to security forces, and is standing by while they are attacked -- a sign of deteriorating security.
Spontaneous tip-offs from the population, where local people volunteer information about the enemy (known as "walk ins" in the intelligence community), indicate confidence by the people in the government and security forces, and are another useful measurement of cooperation and progress.
And, as I pointed out earlier this week, efforts to recruit for the Afghan National Army out of the local populations that form core insurgent constituencies are failing abysmally, with the only 66 of the more than 3,000 recruits in August coming from the southern Pashtun population (Recall that in February, the deputy commander of the NATO Training Mission called the ethnic makeup of the ANA a "very sensitive issue.").
In other words, on points 1 and 2, U.S. and our allies are failing to see the signs of increased legitimacy among local populations that are essential for counterinsurgency. Yet, war supporters drone on and on about how public opinion polls--that don't mean squat without #1 and #2 above--show "popular support" for the Afghan government and opposition to the Taliban.
And corruption. Oh, corruption. Over the last few months, we've seen a string of statements from U.S. and NATO officials, including Petraeus, that corruption is, "an enemy," "counter to our strategy," that addressing it is "an operational imperative." Petraeus' most recent counterinsurgency guidance (.doc) calls corruption one of the "recruiters for the Taliban." He tells his forces:
Act with your Afghan partners to confront, isolate, pressure, and defund malign actors - and, where appropriate, to refer malign actors for prosecution.
President Obama said last Friday that tackling corruption was essential to "helping President Karzai stand up a broadly accepted, legitimate government."
Let's not leave out the admonitions from Andrew Exum from last year, either:
In the next 12 months, however, the priority of civilian-led efforts should be neither small-scale development projects, nor ambiguous "capacity building." Instead, the civilian surge should have one overriding objective: visibly decreasing corruption inside the Afghan government in order to increase the confidence of Afghans in their own government.
And yet, the moment the full extent of the corruption of our "partner" in Afghanistan breaks into full view with a financial fraud and political corruption scandal that implicates virtually the whole top echelon of the Kabul administration, we get headlines like these:
Exum also abruptly "admitted" he "was wrong," saying "I am not sure that we should focus to heavily on corruption as an issue unless we plan on retaining a very strong presence in Afghanistan well past June 2011." Admitting when you're wrong is laudable. However, it's one thing to say you're wrong and another thing to admit just how far into your position's premises such an admission eats. As recently as September 1, Exum wrote:
Corruption is not something to be opposed merely on the grounds of principle or morality...There are many other reasons, but perhaps the most damaging in the current climate is the effect it has of alienating the disenfranchised and propelling them to turn to non-state actors to provide security, legal redress or relief. It shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that ending corruption is a recurrent theme with extremists.
I don't understand at all--nor does Exum's explanation illuminate--how one can support a policy that views "Karzai as our man in Kabul" while holding the above (correct) view. If one is intellectually honest, admitting that highly caustic corruption is so endemic to your local partner that you can't address it without the whole enterprise coming apart is tantamount to admitting you shouldn't be doing counterinsurgency with that partner. After all, as Exum points out, Pillar #1 of counterinsurgency doctrine is supposedly "protect the people," to which all other COIN directives must be subservient. Yet we've seen that the people we have to protect the people from apparently includes the Karzai administration and the private business cronies around it. How exactly does building a nice, shiny security force that answers to corrupt human rights abusers "protect the people?" I wait with bated breath for a real explanation.
Petraeus is trying to put lipstick on the pig by saying things like, "So, there's actually been quite a bit of activity in the realm of anti-corruption," pointing to the arrest of a police official as his evidence. Well, yes, general, they did arrest a "very important provincial police chief," but that's a little myopic while government workers and security force employees are being literally beaten away from trying to get their salaries out of the president's brother's corrupt bank, isn't it? (This, by the way, is emblematic of Petraeus' spin campaign: use tiny bites of "progress" to try to paint a narrative while the broader strategic picture is rapidly deteriorating. If the reporter had pressed him a bit on this, you would have seen his other standard response, "Yes, absolutely, more needs to be done, but we're making progress.") This is intellectual dishonesty in the extreme and a blatant case of starting with a conclusion ("progress") and working backwards to find facts that fit the frame.
Foust is a frequent critic of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. He thinks "the fight in the south is a waste of resources" and says so, so I don't want to try to try to lay the burden of defending all the outrageous contradictions listed above on him. But in the context of the above, it really takes some gall to try to portray the anti-war movement as the faction starting with a conclusion and working backwards to develop justifications and frame reality.
Every movement has elements that frame facts to fit their interpretation to win arguments, on both sides, and it's fair to call those folks out when it happens. If one wants to assert that a particular person is being dishonest in their interpretation of facts, just make your case and be done with it. This kind of swipe is an evolution of the old smear that those with anti-war views are irrational and "don't live in the real world," and it betrays more bias in those that use it than in those it targets. Here's a little bit of that bias peeking through in Foust's over-the-top criticism of ASG's report, emphasis mine:
"[T]he Afghanistan Study Group blames our problems on Afghanistan--the civil war, the al Qaeda safe havens, and so on. It's the equivalent of complaining, "math is hard" when you do poorly on a math quiz. ...To be clear: the real problem in Afghanistan isn't Afghanistan itself...So [ASG's report is] misdiagnosing the problem, and perpetuating the likelihood that a similarly mishandling of policies and expectations will happen next time.That is a incredibly dangerous thing to do, and, ultimately, cowardly."
But I don't recall him calling Exum "cowardly" when Exum showed a similar tendency last year while he was helping with McChrystal's strategy review, emphasis mine:
I was and am still haunted by one of the last paragraphs in David B. Edwards' majesterial Heroes of the Age: "Afghanistan's central problem [is] Afghanistan itself, specifically certain profound moral contradictions that have inhibited this country from forging a coherent civil society. These contradictions are deeply rooted in Afghan culture, but they have come to the fore in the last one hundred years, since the advent of the nation-state, the laying down of permanent borders, and the attempt to establish an extensive state bureaucracy and to invest that bureaucracy with novel forms of authority and control." Ooph. With that paragraph in mind I set about examining ISAF operations and strategy...
To try to indict the anti-war movement as being particularly guilty of framing facts to fit untrue realities after the last nine years is intellectually dishonest and, may I say, total garbage. I would, however, be happy to hear a clarification from Foust that I'm reading his comment incorrectly, and I'll be happy to correct this post if it turns out he took Exum to task for his "cowardly" frame of mind during McChrystal's strategy review. (I don't think any of this is necessarily intentional. Mostly I think Foust got carried away by requests he received for him to "destroy" the ASG report.) But I'd be even happier to hear counterinsurgency pushers either stick to their doctrine and announce that we have no business doing COIN in Afghanistan if Karzai is our "partner," or admit that the stuff they've been shoveling for the last 9 years on Afghanistan originates from the back end of a bull.
Update: Foust let me know that he did criticize Exum for a number of contradictions last year, and I want to include the link here to be fair.
If you're fed up with this brutal war that's not making us safer and that's not worth the cost, join us at Rethink Afghanistan: