February 10, 2023
(What follows is just a brief look at the piece I am working on for next week. Enjoy at your leisure or come back next week for the full piece.)
In August of 2021, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), John F. Sopko, and his team, released its most comprehensive analysis of lessons learned from twenty years of U.S. and international experience attempting to vanquish the Taliban and to reconstruct the country in such a way that a democratically elected government in Kabul could eventually take over. However, these efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, as Kabul fell to the Taliban the very same month that the SIGAR report was issued.
While there were numerous mistakes and missteps that led to the ignominious U.S. withdrawal from the country, ultimately the United States’ failure to stabilize the country after its 2001 invasion was the result of a failure to properly prepare for what such a stabilization process would take to complete as well as a lack of understanding regarding the length of time the process would take to accomplish. Moreover, as former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley told SIGAR, “We just don’t have a post-conflict stabilization model that works. Every time we have one of these things, it is a pick-up game. I don’t have confidence that if we did it again, we would do it any better.”
In light of these past failures, Roger B. Myerson’s fascinating, “Stabilization Lessons from the British Empire,” for the Texas National Security Review, offers some particularly interesting insights into both why American efforts towards stabilization in Afghanistan repeatedly failed as well as how the U.S. might better approach such a scenario in the future. In his piece, Myerson would seem to agree with Hadley that, “the frustrations and failures of costly state-building missions in recent years have created a widespread belief that nothing can be done to help states that fail.” However, for Myerson, there is a way out of this dilemma that can be achieved by looking at the historical example of the British Empire, where, “the primary lesson that can be drawn from the history of British colonial administration is that the management of a political stabilization mission should rely on a decentralized team of agents who can negotiate effectively with local leaders throughout the country,” with the British empire’s local plenipotentiary agents known as “district officers.”
However, one merely has to examine another SIGAR report from 2018, “Stabilization: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan,” to discover that, far from empowering knowledgeable experts on the district and below levels to accurately report on efforts towards stabilization at the village-level, a lack of coherent overall strategy for stabilization, there was no single point of contact at the village or district level to assess and evaluate those efforts that were implemented, resulting in a waste of taxpayer money and a failure to stabilize the country that led to the Taliban taking control once again.
Therefore, it is best to examine some of the failures to achieve stabilization in Afghanistan in light of how a district officer-type figure might have prevented these problems from emerging in the first place. As the 2018 SIGAR report notes, “properly defining stabilization is particularly difficult because it is often used by policymakers in cables, strategic documents, and speeches as a vague euphemism to mean ‘fixing’ a country or area mired in conflict.” However, “on the ground in Afghanistan…stabilization refers to a specific process designed to keep insurgents out of an area after they have been initially expelled by security forces,” with most, “stabilization projects…intended to be a temporary stopgap measure to solidify the military’s gains in territorial control through improvements in local governance, better position the Afghan government to assume control and build upon the initial gains, and create the necessary conditions to allow for a coalition drawdown.” Different from the general goals of development, especially in Afghanistan, stabilization was designed to be a short-term focus on areas of insecurity that aimed to pave the way for the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) to establish its legitimacy in the eyes of a population that had often seen little actual formal governance for years.
However, efforts towards stabilization ran into difficulties from the start, with Bush administration efforts to stabilize the Pashtun-dominated south and east prior to the start of the 2004 Afghan presidential election out of fear that continued attacks would undermine the legitimacy of the fledgling Kabul government. But it is here that the U.S.’ whac-a-mole-like efforts towards stabilization would first emerge as well as well as the short-termism exhibited by decision makers whose Quick Impact Projects (QIP) were intended to allow USAID officers located within Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) to implement projects of less than $500,000 that aimed to ultimately build support for the Kabul government. According to Brigadier General Martin Schweitzer, who commanded U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan during the 2005-2007 period, “what was lacking…was an interagency strategy that brought the military, USAID, State, and other civilian agencies together to plan and execute an integrated strategy,” with the result that there was never an overarching plan with specific targets for what a post-conflict Afghanistan would look like. As such, it was inherently difficult for any of the U.S.’ myriad stabilization efforts to actually achieve a real impact, as programs merely addressed symptoms of insecurity rather than providing the necessary scaffolding on which to build up community trust in the government.
While the ultimate crux of the SIGAR Stabilization report is that many of the problems relating to the U.S.’ failure to stabilize many areas of the country—and, as a result, to demonstrate the value of the central government in Kabul—stem from the Obama administration’s fateful decision to follow a brief surge of troops with a rapid withdrawal of U.S. and coalition forces, the report actually shows how these problems stem back to the very first days following the U.S. invasion back in 2001. Lacking a coherent, down-to-the-village plan for both what a post-insurgency Afghanistan would look like, the Bush administration’s decision to begin stabilization efforts through PRTs which, according to a 2005 report from the United States Institute of Peace’s (USIP) Robert M. Perito, lacked, “a central coordinating authority, a governing concept of PRT operations, and a strategic plan,” ultimately, “resulted in an ad hoc approach to Afghanistan’s needs for security and development,” that was indicative of how the U.S. approached the overall concept of stabilization. The result of which was a predictable failure to make the country secure or burnish the credibility or popularity of GIRoA.
More than these ad hoc approaches, though, the timelines envisioned by U.S. decision makers dramatically underestimated the problem or demonstrated a troublesome lack of understanding of the true situation on the ground. This disconnect was illustrated by the statement of USAID Assistant Administrator for Asia and the Near East James Kunder in his remarks before the House Committee on International Relations’ Subcommittees on Middle East and Central Asia and Oversight & Investigations in March of 2006, said that, “there are three stages in the transition strategy for Afghanistan. The first stage was from 2002-2005, the current stage is focusing on stabilization and building systems,” and that, “USAID assumes that the final stage – the normal development process will start from 2008.”
To begin, his statement that, “things have measurably improved” since the U.S. invasion began is highly misleading. As Seth G. Jones would later write in the pages of International Security, the fighting in Afghanistan, “which began in 2002, had developed into a full-blown insurgency by 2006,” as, “during this period, the number of insurgent-initiated attacks rose by 400 percent, and the number of deaths from these attacks by more than 800 percent,” with, “the increase in violence…particularly acute between 2005 and 2006, when the number of suicide attacks quintupled from 27 to 139; remotely detonated bombings more than doubled from 783 to 1,677; and armed attacks nearly tripled from 1,558 to 4,524.” Yet despite this increase in instability, a high-ranking USAID official was still telling Congress that normal development would be able to commence in Afghanistan within twenty-four months, a remarkably hopeful figure given the increasing levels of violence.
While Washington did eventually recognize that more needed to be done on the ground, the Bush administration, “remained focused on Iraq, where security was unraveling quickly,” in the 2005-2007 period, leaving the, “decision about whether to pursue a ‘fully resourced’ counterinsurgency strategy,” to the incoming Obama administration. Unfortunately, the incoming president was, “overtly searching for a short-term exit strategy,” from Afghanistan during National Security Council discussions of the Pentagon’s proposed large troop surge, with the result that even in discussions about sending more troops to Afghanistan—in addition to the 21,000 the administration sent earlier in 2009—were always centered around how quickly they could be withdrawn. While the president likely correctly felt that, “an open-ended surge would divert critical resources away from mitigating the damage from the 2008 financial crisis,” it is hard to see how the short timeline provided would ever result in a stable Afghanistan. As a result, “the mission had all of the ambitions and expectations of a long-term counterinsurgency effort, but without the recommended, prolonged timeline.” Moreover, despite agreeing to the timeline, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander Gen. David Petraeus, “also calculated the military could buy more time later if they made enough progress by the time the July 2011 deadline arrived,” despite President Obama calling Petraeus and others to an Oval Office meeting two days before his speech announcing the troop surge where he asked all of his chief advisors to agree to the 2011 drawdown timeline.
The idea that top-ranking military figures would agree to a plan in a meeting but privately hope for a change of heart later on is tremendously disconcerting and demonstrates how many top-level decision makers could never really reconcile the president’s decision to conduct a rapid withdrawal, ultimately undermining every effort towards stabilization that followed. Ultimately, this failure to have a unifying conception of what stabilization policy should be—and the timeframe for it to be completed—led to a situation where policymakers were almost making it up as they went along. As the SIGAR report on stabilization notes, even as counterinsurgency (COIN) theory was evolving amongst top-level policy makers, “State and USAID had to operationalize this theory…and devise a framework for those civilian-led activities that supported COIN,” with the result that U.S. strategy, “soon moved away from focusing on districts seen as tipping points to those districts that had long since tipped towards the Taliban,” in key terrain districts (KTD) as part of what would become known as the clear-hold-build approach.
In a shift from prior practice, where focus was mainly, “on areas that were contiguous to already stable regions, the priority was now often on ‘critical high-population areas’ that included ‘key infrastructure’ and were controlled or contested by insurgents.” It is here that U.S. stabilization strategy under Obama took what may be a second fateful turn, as a clear-hold-build approach would ultimately, as David H. Ucko wrote in a 2013 article for War on the Rocks, “have a tendency to wish away the very problems that cause insurgency in the first place: a lack of government legitimacy, split loyalties among the population, and contested governance among a range of armed political groups,” especially as U.S. and coalition forces struggled to consolidate security gains and extend the control of GIRoA. To paraphrase what Ucko wrote, “in the counterinsurgency vernacular, [U.S.] forces clear, but struggle to hold and build.”
What’s more, the problems with clear-hold-build were not only visible after the fact, but were directly apparent to even Afghan government representatives who, “expressed concern about this approach from the outset,” arguing that, “only districts that Afghan and international security forces could hold over the long term should be targeted with ministerial support.” Furthermore, despite the focus of stabilization efforts on the most insecure parts of Afghanistan, soon after these districts were identified as the focus of coalition efforts, “dozens of civ-mil District Support Teams (DST) were staffed with personnel from State, USAID, and USDA,” where, “once on site, DST personnel were tasked with integrating all stabilization activities and planning at the district level to build local governance capacity,” despite these areas often not being entirely secure and Afghan governing partners often not being empowered to operate freely without the approval of the provincial governor.
However, even as USAID’s Provincial Reconstruction team office was rebranded as the Stabilization Unit (Stab-U) in February of 2010 and it provided a clearer definition of stabilization as, “help[ing] to reduce key [sources of instability] by engaging and supporting at-risk populations, extending the reach of [the government of Afghanistan] to unstable areas, providing income generation opportunities, building trust between citizens and their government, and encouraging local populations to take an active role in their development,” the steps required to achieve this goal were not clearly defined by policy makers, leaving each region to devise its own, preventing any unified “theory of change” from emerging and ultimately hindering efforts to uniformly institute stabilization programming.
As a result of this haphazard approach, which included programs such as the Community Development Program (CDP) and Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Productive Agriculture (AVIPA), cash-for-work programs were initiated that were intended to build community relationships with government officials that would select laborers from competing local groups for construction projects. While that approach was seen as a way to quickly and easily win the hearts and minds of local civilians by giving them jobs that they often desperately needed while simultaneously reducing the number of men that might pick up a rifle for the insurgency, these cash-for-work programs, “spent indiscriminately because the number of laborers hired and person-days of employment were the primary measure of success,” since the U.S. often had little if any presence on the ground to conduct any more robust measurement and evaluation of the impact of its projects.
(To be continued…)
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