The Clausewitz Collection (merged thread)

[Dayuhan]

5. HVIs are the final refinement. This is the list of specific projects. At this point that platoon leader on the ground, or that USAID worker, etc should be able to show how their project maps all the way from HVI-HVT-CV-CR-COG as part of a comprehensive, yet focused scheme of engagement. Assessments must continuously refine this list and prioritize communities and projects for maximum effect.

Its a process. If it helps, use it, if not don't worry about it. If you employ some variant of this and it helps or doesn't, I'd love to hear about it as I continue to refine my thoughts on such things.

Again, though, where is the host nation government in this process? Is it just US Military, USAID, US Agencies involved?

If the key problem is, say, the lack of a road or a bridge or an irrigation system, it might be possible to address this with a project funded by AID and protected by the military, driven purely by US involvement. Rarely is it so simple. What if your driver of conflict is, for example, conflict over land between a migrant and an indigenous population? Or central government support for a regional governor that a segment of the population considers to be irretrievably hostile to their interests? Or a government's desire to extract resources that a portion of the population regards as theirs? Or a perception that government is taking sides in a longstanding clan or tribal dispute? Or... obviously this could go on and on, but the point is simple: more often than not the problems driving insurgency are not things that one set of Americans can draw up a list of and whistle in a group of American agencies to neatly solve. More often than not elements of host country government will be neck deep in the problem; they may not be at all sympathetic with the solutions we may propose. There may be a number of actors on the ground with conflicting agendas. Some of them may have agendas quite conrary to ours. The idea that "we" - by definition outsiders and not direct parties to the insurgency - can simply walk into a situation, identify "the problem", and develop a program among our agencies to solve it seems to leave out some realities that are almost always present in these situations.

[Bob's World]

Again, though, where is the host nation government in this process? Is it just US Military, USAID, US Agencies involved?

If the key problem is, say, the lack of a road or a bridge or an irrigation system, it might be possible to address this with a project funded by AID and protected by the military, driven purely by US involvement. Rarely is it so simple. What if your driver of conflict is, for example, conflict over land between a migrant and an indigenous population? Or central government support for a regional governor that a segment of the population considers to be irretrievably hostile to their interests? Or a government's desire to extract resources that a portion of the population regards as theirs? Or a perception that government is taking sides in a longstanding clan or tribal dispute? Or... obviously this could go on and on, but the point is simple: more often than not the problems driving insurgency are not things that one set of Americans can draw up a list of and whistle in a group of American agencies to neatly solve. More often than not elements of host country government will be neck deep in the problem; they may not be at all sympathetic with the solutions we may propose. There may be a number of actors on the ground with conflicting agendas. Some of them may have agendas quite conrary to ours. The idea that "we" - by definition outsiders and not direct parties to the insurgency - can simply walk into a situation, identify "the problem", and develop a program among our agencies to solve it seems to leave out some realities that are almost always present in these situations.

HN must be out front. Sorry not to state something so obvious. In fact, best if the HN is doing this all by itself, all the time, and never requiring any outside assistance what so ever.

Which goes to my points that COIN is no more and no less than the continuous process of governance by the HN for its own populace. And only when it loses touch with its duties to its populace does it find itself facing an insurgency. Outside parties come to such troubled states either to protect their interests there (FID) or to create interests there (UW). It is a continuous process in every country, everywhere, everyday. We only notice when it goes kinetic and somehow involves us.

This is why I caution severely any (and this is most) who think they are doing COIN when they go to another's country. To take such a perspective on your role is to set yourself on a course of inappropriate actions and mission creep. And I don't see the fact that one invaded and removed the existing government as an excuse unless you also annexed the country and claimed it as your own and intend to keep it as such. Otherwise, you are back in the FID role again and need to work diligently to not take on too much of the role of the sovereign, nor to create too much of a perception that the new government draws its legitmacy more from you the invader than from the populace of that land. Tricky business all around.

[wm]

I think I understand Bob's World's position about the onus being in the government to provide for its citizens. However, this requirement applies only under certain of the many mythologies that explain the formation of nation states, to my mind most prominently in the social contract myth, like those of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, so prevalent in the Western world.

Other possible explanations for the origin and function for government exist. One might check out Clifford Geertz' Negara for example. Or the Chinese Legalist position of Han Fei Tzu(not to mention the neo-Confucianism of Chuang Tzu or Lao-Tzu's Taoism) [apologies for not using the latest and greatest transliterations of Chinese names].

And, the Western myths aren't univocal. Revolution against a bad instantiation of the great Leviathan/government is not allowable according to Hobbes, but is according to Locke and, arguably, is required in Rousseau's version.

I see paternalism at work here: telling people what is good for them and then trying to force them to do it. Maybe a better course of action might be generated by first figuring out what the people whose lives we are trying to improve really want to improve those lives. Perhaps that would be a better way to proceed than ramming some external conception of good governance down their throats.

[Bob's World]

I've never recommended paternalism, or controlling of the populace by government, but always that government exists to serve the populace, and that when they are weak in that role discontent will build, particualrly when it manifests in a building sense of injustice or disrespect among a significant (not by size necessarily) segment of the society, who also perceives that they have no legitimate recourse.

Most governments need to take a 12-step program when faced with such blowback from their populace, and step one is to say "Hello, my name is the government of X, and I have a problem." Way to easy to rationalize your problems and blame those around you as you go down in flames...

[Dayuhan]

HN must be out front. Sorry not to state something so obvious. In fact, best if the HN is doing this all by itself, all the time, and never requiring any outside assistance what so ever.

Which goes to my points that COIN is no more and no less than the continuous process of governance by the HN for its own populace.

Having this same discussion on another thread, I guess that's not too unusual.

It may be obvious that the HN government must be out front, but it seems equally obvious to me that if the HN government had the will and capacity to be there, there wouldn't be any need for our presence. If we're in the picture, the HN government probably lacks that will and capacity in the first place.

This is why I caution severely any (and this is most) who think they are doing COIN when they go to another's country. To take such a perspective on your role is to set yourself on a course of inappropriate actions and mission creep. And I don't see the fact that one invaded and removed the existing government as an excuse unless you also annexed the country and claimed it as your own and intend to keep it as such. Otherwise, you are back in the FID role again and need to work diligently to not take on too much of the role of the sovereign, nor to create too much of a perception that the new government draws its legitmacy more from you the invader than from the populace of that land. Tricky business all around.

A very tricky business. In our current case, the perception that the host government draws its legitimacy and existence from us is already there. We choose between trying to take on responsibility ourselves, and possibly undermining the government we wish to succeed, or passing responsibility to a government that often has neither the will nor the capacity to use that responsibility to achieve what we believe to be the necessary goals. It's a thin line to walk and in some cases there may be little or no space between those poles.

[Bob's World]

Having this same discussion on another thread, I guess that's not too unusual.

It may be obvious that the HN government must be out front, but it seems equally obvious to me that if the HN government had the will and capacity to be there, there wouldn't be any need for our presence. If we're in the picture, the HN government probably lacks that will and capacity in the first place.



A very tricky business. In our current case, the perception that the host government draws its legitimacy and existence from us is already there. We choose between trying to take on responsibility ourselves, and possibly undermining the government we wish to succeed, or passing responsibility to a government that often has neither the will nor the capacity to use that responsibility to achieve what we believe to be the necessary goals. It's a thin line to walk and in some cases there may be little or no space between those poles.

As a LT in West Germany, at the end of a 6-week Graf-Hohenfels rotation there would be long lines of tanks and APCs across the motorpool, waiting to get on the washrack so that they could be cleaned and loaded onto the train back to Mannheim.

The warning was always "never cut between the vehicles, either go around, or go over, but never between." Everyone understood the dangers of getting between two such dangerous forces, yet most also rationalized that getting crushed was something that happened to others who weren't nearly as capable of crafty about executing such a maneuver as they were.

Yet every so often another soldier would be crushed or cut in half giving it a go. The benfits were obvious, and the odds low, thought the consequences high.

Nations intervening in the insurgencies of others is very similar in many respects. And I am sure all are quite surprised when the find themselves suddenly, and often fatally, trapped by the decision.

[Dayuhan]

Nations intervening in the insurgencies of others is very similar in many respects. And I am sure all are quite surprised when the find themselves suddenly, and often fatally, trapped by the decision.

This is certainly true, as we learned (one hopes) in the cold war. It's worth noting, though, that our current engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan do not really fall into this category. In neither case did we intervene in the insurgency of another. These were cases where we intervened to remove governments that we found distasteful. In both cases the removal was relatively straightforward; the difficulty came in the aftermath.

Removing a government creates a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum, in politics as much as in physics. We built our interventions around the assumption that once national governments acceptable to us and the international community were installed, the vacuum would be filled. That assumption proved overly optimistic. In my view what we see in Iraq and Afghanistan is less insurgency than continued armed competition over the right to fill the vacuum left by the removal of the previous governments. We may have declared that vacuum filled by the installation of the governments that now exist, but that declaration has not halted the competition.

[Bob's World]

These things take time to sort out. I actually was thinking about my poor governance definition when I woke up this morning (I know, sadly this is in fact what I was thinking about as I rolled out of the rack at about 0430 to hit the gym on a Christmas morning...)

I decided to modify the first part of my test. I am keeping "disrespect" and "injustice" as major causal factors of insurgency, but am dropping one I was never really satisfied with of "outrage" and replacing it with "illigitimacy." When a populace feels that it is being disrespected by its governance, receiving injustice from its governance, or that its governance is illigitimate; AND they feel they have no legitimate means of recourse to address the problem; then you have "poor governance" and causation for insurgency.

This is much better.

So, going to Iraq and Afghanistan; our invasions may have done much to address issues in those countries prior in regards to injustice and disrespect; but, and this is the big but, how does one overcome the perceptions of illigitimacy that are the natural side product of any externally driven change of governance?? In the near term, not much.

This is why I think the key to success in Afghanistan lies in the Loya Jirga. While any government enabled by the coalition will lack legitimacy; and any government formed by western-style voting coupled with Afghan-style manipulation will lack legitimacy; the Loya Jirga is well recognized across the populace as legitimate. We must tap into this source of legitimacy to really have a chance to free the government here from the stench of Western illigitimacy.

The issue becomes one of control. Western policy is rooted in exerting control of outcomes (or not recognizing outcomes that are outside that control and contrary to Western desires). This is the catch-22. We cannot enable the legitimacy requried to strike at the roots of the insurgency without first relinquishing control of both the process and the outcomes.

Do we have the moral balls to do the right thing? I don't know. I fear that we don't, but I hope that we do.

[slapout9]

These things take time to sort out. I actually was thinking about my poor governance definition when I woke up this morning (I know, sadly this is in fact what I was thinking about as I rolled out of the rack at about 0430 to hit the gym on a Christmas morning...)

Sounds like good Airborne training to me Merry Xmas.