FID or COIN? does it matter

[Dayuhan]

Well, as I told MG Carter this morning, we are really dealing with two insurgencies. The rank and file fighter is primarily fighting a resistance movement. They fight because we are here and because they can draw an honest wage for an honorable Pashtun profession to do so. I would like to think that I would be an insurgent if I were Afghan.

I suspect that most insurgencies bifurcate in this manner to some extent... how many of those who fought in “communist” insurgencies were actually communists?

This is the bulk of the insurgency, but it is not the aspect of the insurgency that the COIN effort must focus on to resolve. The COIN effort must go after the top of the insurgency, the senior leadership that are much more the Revolutionary insurgents; who believe they have a superior legitimacy than Karzai does. Once this is resolved, and no amount of population centric tactics nor killing of insurgent fighters will resolve it;

What will resolve it? Would any change in governance that we promote satisfy or de-motivate the core insurgent leadership? Might it not be more effective to try to de-motivate the rank and file and disaggregate them from the core ideologues, who are too heavily invested in the insurgency to back away?

you can then take a much more palatable position in support to the emergent, legitimate government, and reduce presence in a manner that takes the steam out of the larger, rank and file, resistance insurgency. Not "go after" as in KILL (though some may well just have to eat that bullet); but go after as in targeting the causal factors of illegitimacy and lack of mechanisms recognized and trusted by the populace for shaping government.

Sounds great, I approve, but where do we find an “emergent, legitimate government”? Now that we’ve thrown our weight behind the Karzai government and the process that put it in power, how do we reverse that support without setting ourselves up as the arbiter of legitimacy? I like the idea of reducing presence; I’m sure we all do... but I’m not seeing how we get to that emergent, legitimate government that will allow us to do that.

If we had no stake in the matter, we could simply withdraw, let Karzai fall, and deal with whatever replaces him. In the real world, though, that will probably be the Taliban, which puts us right back where we were before, in a position that didn’t work out well last time around.

It would of course be lovely if Karzai would hold a real Loya Jirga and abide by the outcome... but I don’t see that happening. More than likely he’ll pack it with his people and try to manipulate it to put a stamp of approval on his rule; I doubt that he and his inner circle are going to stage anything that would undercut their own power. I wouldn’t bet a half a groat on us being able to outmaneuver him in that kind of scenario.

As far as FID vs COIN goes, I’d submit that we are doing neither. We’re doing regime change. It’s what we started out doing, and we’re still doing it.

Regime change has 3 fairly obvious stages:

First you have to remove the old regime, something we’ve proven we can do.

Second, you have to develop a new regime. This is a lot more complicated: any regime put in place by an outside power is going to face serious legitimacy issues, and if we wait for a new regime to emerge on its own we face a long period of instability and competition for power, with a strong possibility that whatever regime emerges will be unfriendly. We’ve chosen the former method, which is why we find ourselves backing regimes with massive legitimacy issues.

Third, we have to manage the transition by which the new regime becomes a government. This is a key distinction. Just because we’ve put a regime in place doesn’t make it a government, even if we call it that. It’s not a government until it can govern, and until the people it proposes to govern accept it as their government.

My objection to the “doing FID” approach is that it assumes that this step is complete, that there is an actual acknowledged functioning government in place, and that we are simply helping that government defend itself against insurgents. That may be what we want to see, but it may not accurately describe what’s going on. If the regime we’ve put in place does not govern and has never been accepted as legitimate by those it proposes to govern, it’s not a government. If there’s no real government, we certainly can’t be “doing FID”. We can’t be “doing COIN” either, because you can’t have COIN without an insurgency and you can’t have an insurgency without a government. Is this really an insurgency situation or is it a continuing armed competition to fill the vacuum left by the removal of the Taliban? I know we say that vacuum has been filled by the Karzai government... but is that claim realistic? If we’re not doing FID or COIN, what are we doing? As I said above, I think we’re still doing regime change... or trying to.

Just like the key to the problems in Southern Philippines lay in manila; the problems in Southern Afghanistan lay in Kabul. All of the outside parties in both who like or hate the conditions in those respective captitals (the FID and UW actors) conspire to shift focus to the manifestations of violence among the affected populaces. Smoke and Mirrors.

Possibly true, but not reassuring. If those in Manila or Kabul don’t have the will or capacity to solve their problems, and we have no means to replace them or to create that will and/or capacity, we’re left with few effective ways to pursue our objectives.

The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that we need to be a whole lot more careful when considering regime changes, and a whole lot more conscious of how difficult it is to fill the gap left by the removal of a regime with a credible and legitimate successor. We seemed to have overlooked that last time around, though I don’t see how.