Tentative Guidelines for building partner armies post conflict

[Dayuhan]

Dayuhan, I hear what you are saying and all too often you are right. But what I mean by advice - and this is the way I practiced it as a civilian USG type, soldier, and free lance researcher - is that my advice to my counterparts was just my best guess as to what would work to achieve their goals. I never claimed to have a monopoly on truth and I always listened to their views. Sometimes their views would come out on top; sometimes mine; most often some amalgam of both brought out by mutually respectful discussion during which there was quite a bit of disagreement.

I agree that's the ideal way to do it... i just feel that our approach often makes that ideal more difficult to attain. The perception that "shared goals" are a precondition to US support creates an incentive for our partners to conceal goals that may not be shared and exaggerate those that are. At the same time, Americans often assume that our goals are universal and of self-evident virtue, and may not perceive that the other party may have divergent goals.

Disagreement, in these cases, is a good thing and one to be encouraged: it means that the goal divergences are out in the open and being discussed, and can likely be managed. If there's no disagreement, either everyone is on exactly the same page and pulling in exactly the same direction (yeah, right) or the goal divergences are not being recognized, which is not so good: they've a way of emerging to bite us on the ass at critical moments.

Of course there are times when there's outright manipulation. Lots of people wistfully remember the good old days (for them) when the word "communist" was the key to the US treasury. Then that stopped working, and all of a sudden here's the word "terrorist".... ka-ching. Of course that's not always the case, but it's something that we need to be alert to, and in general I'd say our people need to be more aware of the reality of divergent goals and the need to address and manage them.

If there's one piece of advice I'd give an adviser-to-be it would be this...

If you see people doing things that make no sense to you, don't assume they're stupid, irrational, or deranged. Assume that there is some factor in the picture that you don't see - because there always is.

A one year tour is simply too short to get a solid grounding in all the situational and personality quirks. Two years would be much better with, generally, return to the same area after going home for "reblueing."

With this I'd agree completely, but would add an additional concern with rapid turnover: Americans are typically comfortable with institutional relationships, but many of the cultures we work with think in more personal terms, and a relationship with one individual may not be inherited by a successor simply because they both represent the same institution. Of course rotation is inevitable, but we need to be more aware that a counterpart may see their relationship as one with an individual, not with the US Government, and this may take time to rebuild.

The key question is how to provide security for development, with an African bias because Africa is usually under-examined.

That of course brings us to the question of what development is, and how to provide it, which is often even thornier than the problem of achieving security! Hopefully you don't have to deal with that one...