Studies on radicalization & comments

[Dayuhan]

Every culture has some process for selecting leaders. Many may not have the same hierarchy, but one can probably expand the hierarchy of an existing system more effectively than they can scrap an existing system and replace it with our own.

For example, the Sioux Indians had no concept of a single over-arching "Chief," but they had a very sophisticated and effective form of council-based governance with a variety of leaders in a system that worked for them. We needed one guy to sign treaties, so we picked on. Predictably, disastrous results came of that. We created an "official" system of governance, but it was not a "legitimate" system as well. Ideally we would want both; but if you can only have one, you want Legitimate....

In Afghanistan they have system of Shuras and Jirgas with Village, Tribal and Religious leaders all feeding into it. Since the mid 1700s they have used this to create national governance as well (National Afghan-style, not Western-style). I would recommend enforcing and enabling the systems that already exist within a culture. Sometimes these systems get damaged by outside interference or internal manipulation. Returning to the roots of what works for a culture is more apt to produce "legitimacy" than a wholesale replacement by outsiders with a foreign system.

I believe that we will learn that we can be even more successful fostering and working with Legitimate governments than we ever were in working with those that we had manipulated to merely being "Official."

I pretty much agree, and certainly in Afghanistan I think the system of shura and jirga would have made the strongest basis for a new government. It seems to me that in both Iraq and Afghanistan our method of establishing new governments was targeted mainly at perceptions of legitimacy among our populace and among our allies, not at the local perception of legitimacy. Our people wanted to see the immediate establishment of a centralized government that we could recognize as a government, established in a way that our people perceived as legitimate.

Unfortunately, once you start down that road it's not easy to reverse course, and now that we've put our backing behind these processes and the resulting governments it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to change our approach. It's not as if we can announce that the whole idea was a mistake, and now we're going to remove this government and give them another. We can of course withdraw support, let the government fall, and try to work with the successor, but there's no assurance that the successor would have any interest in working with us, and there's a good chance, at least in Afghanistan, that this would mean a return to the same circumstances that generated our intervention in the first place. It's not an easy situation and I don't see any advantageous way out of it, but we made the bed and one way or another we're gonna lie in it.

The problem with legitimate is that it implies "free from outside influence and manipulation." Big problem there for the good Cold Warriors, as "containment" was rooted in controlling the periphery; so we have become used to sacrificing legitimacy in favor of official all in the name of containment.

I think that model is obsolete, and the current "GWOT" is essentially the popular backlash to such manipulation of governance.

Can't entirely agree with that, not least because I don't think there is really a "GWOT". There's a whole raft of factors involved, and I don't see any single overarching explanation that can cover the range of phenomena that we're facing. Barnett's hypothesis of reactionary backlash against the changes implicit in modernization and globalization is part of the picture, as is the Bernard Lewis observation of "aggressive self-pity" rising out of the whole history of Islamic decline, of which US policy is but a small part. Groups like AQ ride on locat conflicts that are driven primarily by local issues, just as the 3rd world communist movements of the cold war gained traction by riding on local conflicts based on local, not global, issues.

Also worth noting that self-determination is not simply a factor of us not taking control. There are other outside influences in play in virtually every conflict on the planet, and many are even less sympathetic to true self determination than we are. A power vacuum does not necessarily mean that traditional means of selecting a government will prevail. Often the response to a power vacuum is simply that whoever can muster the largest armed force takes over, kicks the stuffing out of everyone else, and imposes their own rules. Governments like that of Sadddam's Iraq, Qaddafi's Libya, or for that matter like the Taliban's in Afghanistan were not imposed by foreign powers, but the level of self-determination enjoyed by their citizens is debatable.