Strategic Narrative

[Dayuhan]

How do we make good governance less costly for the likes of Karzai and Kabila?

Who exactly is "we" in this picture? May I be excused?

I don't think there is any "we" that can "fix" these situations... and in all honesty, even with the best will possible, I doubt that a Karzai or a Kabila could. Institutions and systems aren't built or installed, and the societies in question have to grow with them. Sometimes that means they have to break into less incompatible parts.

We don't solve this. This is a question for the people of Afghanistan to work out with their own government. When effective legal means are available to work these things out we call it "politics"; when such means are not available we call it a wide range of things depending on who one asks, but I call it "insurgency."

What is adequate varies widely by country, by culture and over time. Those societies which develop trusted and certain systems to legally make necessary adjustments create the flexibility and populace control necesary for stability. Those systems that become overly rigid and inflexible hold strong until they break, and when they break they break hard. Most societies that have flexible systems now had to act out illegally and typically violently, to break some pre-existing inflexible system. Too often one has to tear down the old to build new, and too often what is built looks far too much like what was there previously, only to have to tear it all down yet again.

This is all very natural. It has undoubtedly happened since man first organized into social groups. It will continue to happen.

But the better we understand it, the better we can mitigate the negative aspects and effects. But step one is getting governments to step up and take responsibility, and that is more often than not the hardest step of all.

In the language of the thread, I suspect that you may be imposing your personal narrative on situations where it doesn't necessarily apply. No narrative is universal.

Insurgency is not necessarily about "a populace" and "a government". It can be about two or more subsets of a populace fighting for power. When one of those subsets happens to be the government we call it "insurgency", but the root conflict is populace vs populace, not populace vs government. Put the Taliban back in power and you still have insurgency, just with different parties wearing different hats. Of course we can imagine a unified government representing all the populaces involved, but we can imagine lots of stuff. Imagining it won't make it happen.

Imagining "a society" with an inflexible "system" that needs to become flexible overlooks the reality that in many conflict areas there are multiple societies with irreconcilable expectations, lumped together in arbitrarily designated "nations" based on little more than the whims of colonial cartography. I don't know how realistic it is to expect systems to grow that will accommodate those parts, and it's definitely unrealistic to think any outside power can make that happen.

The idea of "getting governments to step up and take responsibility" seems to assume that the government is something separate from the societies and populaces it governs, and does not necessarily reflect their divisions. Again, not realistic. We are not going to persuade any government, anywhere, to do what we want it to do if it sees that action as opposed to its own interests. They may fake it in exchange for concessions (we make that easy), but not much more.