Lessons Not Learned

[Surferbeetle]

Slap & Steve,

Thanks for the references...I am currently moving through the enjoyable Galbraith link and will have to chase down a copy of Phebe Marr's book Modern History of Iraq.

With respect to Government Agencies, Germany, China and Capitalism I ran across this article on the online German Newspaper Stern tonight: Chinesen wollen Opel mit allen Jobs

Da waren's plötzlich vier: Einen Tag vor der entscheidenden Sitzung im Kanzleramt taucht ein weiterer Interessent für den kriselnden Opel-Konzern auf. Der chinesische Autohersteller BAIC hat dem Wirtschaftsministerium offenbar ein äußerst verlockendes Angebot vorgelegt - angeblich soll kein einziger Job in Deutschland verloren gehen.

My quick translation:

And then it was suddenly four: One day before the decision-making meeting in the Kanzleramt another interested party surfaced in the brewing crisis of the Opel-Group. The Chinese auto manufacturer BAIC publicly presented the business ministry an extremely tempting proposal - apparently not one job in Germany will be lost.

So apparently Fiat, Magna, BAIC, and Ripplewood are now all duke-ing it out for the good pieces of GM...

Best,

Steve

[Steve the Planner]

Surferbeetle:

The really interesting Iraq histories (and probably for AfPak too) are the Cambridge Archives. They have all the British Colonial Reports.

Used them through UN in Baghdad, but they are so cool (for history geeks) that you can easily get lost in reading the 1880's era handwritten local consul's journal of trying to collect taxes from bandits up past Khanaqin, etc...

You can buy a whole set for like $3,000, but I suppose some university has a set somewhere in the US---or ought to get a copy since we are so closely "walking in their footsteps."

I'm more interested in tracking the post-Ottoman villayet systems (walayets in Afghanistan), and the associated districts and subdistricts. All the same basic structure. Must mean something.

Steve

[Surferbeetle]

Steve,

Lord Kinross' The Ottoman Centuries, The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire is on my history bookshelf and has been getting a workout of late...haven't run across the cambridge archives for iraq before...3 grand!...good grief charlie brown, maybe if I hit the lotto I'll check the library this weekend.

Steve

[Steve the Planner]

CFR has a new on-line pub: Nourishing Afghanistan's Agricultural Sector (May 26, 2009), where Greg Bruno describes the amount of "tripping over ourselves" that is going on there.

He references Col. Dan Harris's (Texas Army National Guard's agribusiness development team in Ghazni Province), observation of our "drive-by" approach:

"But perhaps the most common concern is what some experts say are competing agendas and a lack of coordination among donors, governments, and agencies. "It's a mess to be quite honest," Pain says. "Basically, everyone has been going their own way." Col. Harris, who is two months into a year-long tour, says the lack of communication between the Ministry of Agriculture in Kabul, the district office of agriculture in Ghazni Province, and non-Afghan organizations is hindering progress. He says he didn't even know the United Nations had an aid program in his sector until reading about it in a U.S. Department of Agriculture newsletter about other Ghazni Province programs. "I call them drive-bys," the colonel said, explaining how he typically learns about the agriculture-related work of other agencies in the province. "Somebody will drive by and say, ‘Hey, we heard such and such an organization is here,' or ‘Hey, do you want to go along on a mission with us somewhere?" Unless the coordination problems like these are solved, Harris says, "all that time, money, and effort will probably amount to very little.""

Little changes (like planning together?) that, it seems, could make a big difference.

Steve

[Steve the Planner]

Beetle made a big point:

"None-the-less it can be a educational experience to examine a train wreck...why in fact did the train leave the rails and where were the rails headed towards? How would have Mahatma Gandhi's ideas about "decentralized political and economic structures rooted in India's rural villages..." benefited the population as compared to Nehru's socialist ideas or Patel's capitalist ideas? Who filled the comparable roles for Afghanistan?"

My big dumb idea (probably shared by a lot of other folks on the ground at different times but always lost in a dust storm) is that we have a huge advantage over locals in being able to see what's going on around their country, and source out and re-target resources and, under some billets, getting a chance to synchronize some of this stuff for their benefit.

I always thought that, for stabilization and reconstruction, somebody needs to be sitting at the big table (mil/foreign affairs) whose sole purpose is to be an advocate for the civilians (not just the politicians and made men). A properly developed civilian advocacy process (or maybe a bypass loop between them), from the top down to locals, is the only way to take what we know and do, and use it to create propulsion for the locals to find their next level of stability.

Finding a productive job for your son, or shoes for baby, or a meal and some water is the key to S & R, and defeating bad influences.

Instead, we seem to have a lot of disconnected elements, programs and activities that, when you add them up, go nowhere, to help real folks put things back together.

A big problem in these conflict zones is that, by the time we all get there, it's not just the impact of our arrival, but, usually, a twenty year pattern of disruptions and conflict that sowed the seeds of why we had to go in the first place. With lesser life spans than us and not a lot of written records and repositories of collective wisdom, 20-30 years between "how things used to work OK" and today is an impenetrable gap for locals trapped in a conflict zone.

They don't necessarily know, for example, that ancient regional irrigation canal systems existed, but had to be maintained by organized work parties coordinated on a regional basis to deliver sustainable wheat production (despite droughts). They only know about local, recent and immediate things.

Sure, our imagery can detect the systems, and map them, and, with a D9, we could probably reopen them in a heartbeat. But, in most circumstances, we don't have a process geared to identifying them, developing strategies, or work with them to create a process for reopening and sustainable maintenance.

In April 2008, I attended a US Conference at Al Faw where folks from around the country were trying to identify the old canal systems in order to develop piecemeal work projects, but they didn't know where they were. Fortunately, we had just located them in older map sources, and could make them available. But that was in year six....

Not to denigrate the folks that were trying, but look at the system failures that got us to that point (short term assignments, constant rotation, Tower-of-Babel like silos and stovepipes, and disconnected programs operating without an overall strategy or coordination.

I sit in all these "Lessons Learned" symposia that the think tanks in DC are putting on, and all they talk about is the inter-agency turfwars, budget fights, contract disputes, and Inside the Beltway bureaucratic fights---but they never focus on the big picture: coordinating our efforts to deliver solutions to the local population, and effective implementation of those solutions. How is this stuff going to get done? Who is doing it in Afghanistan (for Afghans)?

That's my rant for the day. Good question, Beetle.

Steve

[Surferbeetle]

I sit in all these "Lessons Learned" symposia that the think tanks in DC are putting on, and all they talk about is the inter-agency turfwars, budget fights, contract disputes, and Inside the Beltway bureaucratic fights---but they never focus on the big picture: coordinating our efforts to deliver solutions to the local population, and effective implementation of those solutions. How is this stuff going to get done? Who is doing it in Afghanistan (for Afghans)?

Steve,

When one is on the mat or in the ring solely trying to muscle ones way through the match failure is not far behind...you have to be able use your opponents mass to your advantage in order to win...that and a bit of ruthlessness at the appropriate moments SOF work uses this type of judo/MMA thinking in order to work with the population to achieve common objectives and defeat common opponents.

COIN warfare is population focused, and we are in a COIN match. Throughout the fight we need to understand four basic things in order to win:

1. The mass of the civilian population of Iraq and Afghanistan outmasses the opposing forces, and whomever can add the mass of the population to their side outmasses the opposition.
2. America does not have enough serving native/trained speakers of Arabic, Dari, and Pashto who have professional credentials in politics, planning, agriculture, medicine, infrastructure and who understand the cultural context of the problems and solutions intertwined in the conflict.
3. GoI and GoA have native speakers of Arabic, Dari, and Pashto who have professional credentials in politics, planning, agriculture, medicine, infrastructure and who understand the cultural context of the problems and solutions intertwined within the conflict.
4. Hunting bad guys is equally as important as stabilization operations.

My AAR of our match so far is that we are highly skilled at # 4 and need to hit the gym hard in order to work more on #’s 1-3 if we want to win.

I always thought that, for stabilization and reconstruction, somebody needs to be sitting at the big table (mil/foreign affairs) whose sole purpose is to be an advocate for the civilians (not just the politicians and made men). A properly developed civilian advocacy process (or maybe a bypass loop between them), from the top down to locals, is the only way to take what we know and do, and use it to create propulsion for the locals to find their next level of stability.

Finding a productive job for your son, or shoes for baby, or a meal and some water is the key to S & R, and defeating bad influences.

Instead, we seem to have a lot of disconnected elements, programs and activities that, when you add them up, go nowhere, to help real folks put things back together.

We cannot do this alone. See # 1, # 2, and # 3.

A mixed team heavy on local actors and light on multinational advisers at the 'big table' orchestrating the plan at village, city, region/province, and country would certainly benefit from a simple and defined portfolio of national objectives agreed upon by the populace. This might be as simple as defining the following metrics:

1. W % unemployment by demographic/employment specialty sector
2. X # of security incidents/population size
3. Y kw-hours of electricity/per family/day
4. Z liters of water/per person/day


Steve

[Steve the Planner]

1-3 are bang-on.

1. The mass of the civilian population of Iraq and Afghanistan outmasses the opposing forces, and whomever can add the mass of the population to their side outmasses the opposition.
2. America does not have enough serving native/trained speakers of Arabic, Dari, and Pashto who have professional credentials in politics, planning, agriculture, medicine, infrastructure and who understand the cultural context of the problems and solutions intertwined in the conflict.
3. GoI and GoA have native speakers of Arabic, Dari, and Pashto who have professional credentials in politics, planning, agriculture, medicine, infrastructure and who understand the cultural context of the problems and solutions intertwined within the conflict.

The strength is in learning to work with GoA so that they can do their part. Why, for example, isn't an appropriate Afghan the intermediary?

Are the wrong voices being heard? Or the right voices silenced? Or, as likely, does the American Bureaucracy move so fast and busy that it forgets who its audience should be, or bewilders the hell out of them.

Problem I have is that when we start throwing billions everywhere without focus or metrics, we may be muddying up the water hole too much---induced corruption, bureaucratic confusion, collateral damage, etc...

So how to get the Afghan voice to the surface????

Steve