WHAM in Afghanistan: a report on development aid in COIN ops

[Steve the Planner]

No.

The military mission has become a muddle of public service, diplomacy, development aid an political/administrative confusion. All administered on an ad hoc basis by soldiers without the requisite background, experience and resources for this accidental mission.

An Adhocracy.

After WWII, there was an occupation, and a Civil Affairs Corps to administer occupation. It's clear mission, was to stabilize and reconstruct.

Here, we don't occupy, don't control, but are solely dependent on the civilian administration/political issues. Nor is Afghanistan being defined as a stab/recon exercise, but some ill-conceived muddle of transformational development, social re-engineering, economic development, and nation-building.


The alternative being tried today, Clear Hold Bribe, led by piecemeal efforts without transformational value, is like Rory Stewart's explanation of giving advice to the US officials. They call me in and ask: Should I wear seat belts when I drive off the cliff?

So it is an Adhocracy that doesn't seem to be working well.

My take is that Afghanistan is a logistical bottleneck. You can only send so much, and what you send must be used to accomplish whatever you are going to do.

So, soldiers are there, and they are traveling about well-armed. There are no cadres of well-tooled and supported development civilians, and deploying such (with all their own support/security/logistics chain) would, of necessity, require trade-offs against the military.

So the "tools" we have are soldiers, and some structure needs to be rapidly created to frame, guide and support their civilian-related work. They must become the Civil Affairs/Transformational engine, or there will not be one.

In this day and age where poor Bangladeshi farmers can go to a village level computer and show their leaves, via Skype, to an ag specialist at a university miles away, it is hard to imagine that distributed technologies, and background support/planning can't be done better than Adhocracy.

The one thing that Wilton Park and others have not wrapped their brains around is that, unlike other exercises in development, this is an exercise of logistics-constraint. It can only succeed by radically transforming the capability and deployability of development through an Army in the field. It is a radically different challenge, and can't be done without intentionality and purpose.

But our focus is accidental and amateur, AND THE RESULTS SHOW.