Applied Smart Power by a SEAL

[Dayuhan]

Dayuhan,

Is it fair for me to Reply to your well-considered note a full eleven months after you wrote it? This feels a bit like the pace of exchanging letters from war during the 18th century.

Fair enough, though it almost went unnoticed... would have if not for casual curiosity over what happened to another thread.

I don't think we're all that far apart on the principles, and what I have to offer are less objections than points of caution. My perspective is possibly different because it comes from a very different background: from aid industry to journalism industry to political/financial analysis industry to going mostly native (10 yrs and counting) in a 3rd world indigenous community (one with an occasional insurgency problem, though the locals see the insurgents as less of a problem than the armed forces that occasionally come round looking for them). That perspective is naturally different from what you'd get from a military background, no more inherently valid, but different.

From that perspective, some points of caution:

That's why applied smart power (ASP) has the word "applied" built into it. We have to apply what we understand, not just form committees to debate whether we should form a committee to explore the theories.

The danger here is our inclination to overrate our own understanding. Any time we think we understand fully it's best to come to a dead stop and reassess, because there's likely a bit of self-deception involved. Again, perspective-based: after 30 years plus in my own chosen 3rd world backwater I've come to believe that the post dangerous point in the newbie learning curve is after 3-5 years in country. Before that they don't understand, but they know they don't understand. About 3 years in they hit a point where they still don't get it but they think they do, and that's when we have the ability to make a really stellar mess.

Nothing wrong with applying what we understand, but we must remember that our understanding is almost always incomplete and may be dangerously flawed. There are almost always going to be factors in any given picture that we don't see or that we don't fully understand. When we see people behaving in ways that seem irrational to us, that's a good time to assume there's something going on that we don't see.

Let's be coldly objective about the two options described. Let's take the optimistic view that fixing an economy costs exactly the same as winning a war. Which provides the greater value in the end?

We can "win" a war and end up with a shattered economy that implodes the week after we win and fly back to Los Angeles. The result is plainly lose-lose: we again face the threat of radicals streaming out of the freshly-crumbled society and spend the money all over again to win again. Or we can fix an economy and empower the legitimate (an entirely different subject for debate!) government to easily subdue and isolate the enemy force.

A coldly objective caution: we don't know how to fix an economy. The development types have been banging their heads on this one for decades, arguing with appallingly verbose passion and filling hundreds of thousands of pages with erudite and incomprehensible discourse, and we still don't have a clue. We know that broken economies can heal, over time. We know that economies can develop, over time. Comparative assessment of successes yields no recipes, though: all we learn is that each case is different and what works in one may not work in another. I can't think of any case, anywhere, where an outside intervening party has successfully "fixed" an economy.

Additional cautions:

Economic repairs are a governance function. Are we prepared to govern Afghanistan? Can we do so effectively? Given that Afghanistan already (sort of) has a government, do they need another? Are we going to replace, compete with, or (yeah, right) complement the existing government?

The obstacles to economic development are often political. Attempting to overcome those obstacles is likely to lead to direct conflict with established local power structures, whether traditional or recently developed, that find the current economic environment congenial. That's not necessarily bad, if we've fully assessed the consequences of that conflict and are prepared to manage them... but have we, and are we?

In such simple terms, it's painfully clear where the better investment is. It would even be justified to spend more for such a worthy outcome

Certainly true, if we have any assurance that the proposed worthy outcome will be achieved. Certainly fixing the Afghan economy would be a very good thing to do, if we could do it. I'm not convinced that we can.

I've nothing against the use of smart power, if we know what is going to be smart in any given circumstance. I'd have to argue, though, for what one might call the smart use of power. That, to me, means that before we even think about understanding the environment in which we propose to use power we have to understand ourselves. We have to know our objectives, and assure that those objectives are clear, practical, and achievable. We have to honestly, even ruthlessly, assess our own will and the commitment of resources that we are prepared to make and sustain.

The smart use of power requires clear, practical, achievable objectives that are proportional to the resources we are willing to commit. If we fail on that level - and I suspect that our effort to establish western-style central government in Afghanistan represents failure on that level - then even the use of very smart power may not get us where we want to be... in essence, that would be the stupid use of smart power. What we want is the smart use of smart power, if that makes any sense at all...

If we've reached a point where the only way we can achieve our objectives is to fix the Afghan economy or transform Afghan society, I'd submit that we do not need a smart way to fix an economy or transform a society: these are things we can't do and shouldn't be trying to do. We need a smarter set of objectives, one that can be achieved by means we actually have at our disposal.

PS: to clarify an apparent discrepancy: 30+ years in this country (mostly), 10 in this community. Too long on both counts according to some, but it works for me!