Setting up effective, local security forces

[Bob's World]

The real question is, are we attempting to build a security force to protect a government that we think is best from its own populace; or, are we attempting to help a government that its own populace wants protect them from some rogue threat (internal or external). If internal, does that "rogue" threat have any legal, trusted and certain options for engaging its government, or are they forced to resort to illegal / violent arguments?

This is a fine line, and it is one where the perceptions applied matter. Our perceptions as the intervening power are the ones that matter least, and one can rest assured that the perceptions of the government in question will be heavily biased to the preservation of their own status quo.

I am happy to argue to any audience that in Afghanistan we attempt to do the former and that more than any other factor is why we are still there slogging away after all this time and why the security force can't seem to become a competent, self-sufficient organization. GIRoA is a Northern Alliance monopoly. We think that is the right answer, and GIRoA seeks to preserve the monopoly. The excluded segment of the populace have no trusted, legal and certain means avialable to them, so they act out illegally. We brand them all "Taliban" with little regard to which are revolutionary actors seeking to force GIRoA to break their monopoly, and which are resistance actors who are simply weary of our foreign occupation of their home and the violence we bring to them on behalf of GIRoA.

Such approaches were the model for both Colonialism and for Containment as well. In the modern era, however, the pursuit of such approaches is demanding ever increasing energy and producing ever decreasing effects. It is also a major driver of the motivations that lead young men frustrated with the governance of their own country to not only join nationalist insurgency movements, but to also volunteer to support trans-nationalist terrorist organizations such as AQ.

Sometimes there may still be times and places where creating and sustaining artificial systems of security designed to protect and preserve some government against the express insurgent will of its own populace. I suspect those cases are rare.

Increasingly we are better served by employing our influence to bring those governments and populace to the table to work out new guards for their future security, and be willing to work with whatever and whomever emerges from such a process.

We need to evolve.