Reconciliation and COIN in Afghanistan

[Dayuhan]

No single faction can force a solution that is designed to oppress the losers without immediately finding themselves in a COIN campaign of their own. Those who believe that they are somehow exempt from this reality are dreamers.

Of course Pakistan wants their interests to prevail, why should they be any different than us?

Of course the Taliban want total control, why should they be any different than the Northern Alliance?

It is possible - indeed likely - that the Pakistanis and the Taliban understand that their preferred outcome will involve a COIN campaign, and that they find this acceptable.

All of those desires are true and natural and reasonable. They just won't work.

That depends on how you define work. If you assume that any given party wants to break the cycle, then no, it won't work. If they accept the cycle as a given and believe that they can sustain their turn on top, then it works for them, and that's what matters.

Insurgency is caused by government, and when one produces a certain type of government insurgency is inevitable. By type I mean one that does not treat the entire populace equitably, one that does not ensure that there is justice under the rule of law for the entire populace, one that is not perceived as having the right to govern by the entire populace, and one that does not allow legal vehicles and venues for the populace to shape or address their concerns about governance.

When you say "when one produces a certain type of government insurgency is inevitable", you have to look at who "one" is. If we are producing a government in Afghanistan, insurgency is inevitable no matter what we produce. Acceptability to "the entire populace" is easy to say, but in many circumstances impossible to achieve, especially when various parts of the populace all see "we rule" as the only acceptable form of governance.

So, we either force the two sides to reconcile and craft some form of shared governance and focus on enforcing trust between the two (rather than enforcing the ability of one side to dominate over the other); or we leave, let it sort out, and work with whomever emerges (regardless of who might have helped them to get there).

This is the corner we've painted ourselves into. Reconciliation and trust cannot be achieved under duress. All we could force would be a brief facade... that might be enough to buy us a marginally credible exit point, but we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking it would last, or that our exit would force reconciliation.

If we just leave, most of the world will perceive that as defeat. We can probably live with that, and we'll probably have to, sooner or later.

We are too focused on trying to control an outcome, and that is a fool's errand.

Well, yes, but focusing on trying to "force the two sides to reconcile" or on "enforcing trust" is also trying to control an outcome, and possibly even more a fool's errand, as we have no capacity to force anyone to reconcile or trust.

We win by taking a neutral position and working with whomever it is that happens to prevail.

Neutrality is like virginity: once you lose it, you can't get it back. We lost our neutrality in Afghanistan a long time ago and we have not even a shred of credibility as neutral mediator.

We've just gotten ourselves sucked into this internal power struggle, and we are not well served by working to sort out any particular side prevailing over another. Such advocacy makes us a target of the opposition, regardless of which side we pick. Better to pick neither and to work with either.

We weren't sucked into it, we created it, when we chose to install and maintain a Government in Afghanistan.