Studies on radicalization & comments

[Dayuhan]

Governance is not unlike this. My one liner there is "Ensure the governance is seen as legitimate in the eyes of the governed."

Is it possible for us to ensure the legitimacy of someone else's government?

When the military is tasked to assist with an insurgency the first questions go to "how do I defeat the insurgent?" I would offer that the first questions should go to "why is there an insurgency?" What I find is that it can almost always be traced back to governance that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of most, or at least some key segment of its populace.

In this case I would have to say that the "insurgency" does not trace back to "governance that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of most, or at least some key segment of its populace". It traces back to invasion, conquest, and occupation by a foreign power. The insurgency was not generated by resentment against the Karzai government, it was (like the Karzai government) a consequence of our intervention.

We didn't go to Afghanistan to support a government against insurgents. We went there to remove a government that gave aid and shelter to people who attacked us. For that reason, an acceptable end state for us is not only the presence of a legitimate government, but the presence of a legitimate government that does not harbor our enemies. If we arrive at a legitimate government by sacrificing the objective that brought us there in the first place, we haven't accomplished anything.

Afghanistan has suffered under nearly 30 years of illegitimate government. Address that first, and the rest will follow. Ignore it, and no amount of good COIN tactics and hard effort are likely to produce more than temporary suppression of the symptoms of the insurgency.

I agree. Unfortunately, our initial efforts to create a government in Afghanistan were undertaken by an administration that was under fire on the home front and internationally, and our actions were calculated not to establish legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghans but to establish legitimacy in the eyes of our own populace and an international audience. That has led us to a pretty uncomfortable place. The next obvious question: how do we get from where we are now to where we want to be? Having put the weight of our approval and support behind a government and a process that were not appropriate to the environment where we were operating, how - short of going back in time and doing it all differently - do we undo what we've done and move back to some course that has some reasonable chance of generating a legitimate government that has reasonable prospects of surviving and that will not give aid and comfort to our enemies?