Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
That's consistent with my observations... and I suspect that the eurocentric culture is going to cause us some problems down the line, not only in matters of stabilization and reconstruction. The rest of the world is becoming ever more significant, Europe is not the center of the universe, and we badly need to develop new peer-to-peer approaches to emerging nations that we once treated as subordinates, threats, or simply as irritations.



The ideal would be a multilateral agency, which could tap a wider range of expertise and avoid much of the baggage associated with direct American involvement... but of course that's even less likely to happen.



That's what State does. I think they could do it a lot better, but that will require new directions from above and a conscious attempt to change the culture within.

State is at least theoretically equipped and tasked to develop and implement foreign policy. The military and to a lesser extent CIA are equipped and tasked to manage CT and COIN. Nobody is equipped and tasked to manage stabilization and reconstruction, so these tasks are simply ignored, or handed off piecemeal to those who have neither the capacity nor the inclination to perform them.

I quite agree with your assessment of local perceptions of the Karzai government, but what to do about that problem remains a problem. Of course we can dump him and bail, but that almsot certainly means the return of the Taliban and of AQ, which would sacrifice the objective of the entire operation.

This just underscores the difficulty of creating and installing governments in other countries. It's exceedingly difficult, and if the first go doesn't work you can't simply dissolve the government you've created and have another go. If it doesn't work as planned it's easy to end up strapped to a government that cannot stand, but which you cannot allow to fall. Bad place to be.
COIN is an effort by a govenment to resolve an insurgency with a hard and fast condition of maintaining the current government in power. When we think we are doing COIN, we too fall into the trap of buying into the condition of maintaining the current government in power. The tactics of "Population-Centric COIN do nothing to alleviate our commitment to that dangerous condition.

FID, on the other hand, creates enough intellectual maneuver room to allow a clearer perspective. When one appreciates that true success in COIN comes from addressing the perceptions of failure on the governments part within critical at risk segments of the populace, the FID actor can be more pragmatic. At the end of the day, the goal of FID is to preserve your national interests in a particular region and ANY government that is willing to work with you on those interests AND is also able to maintain stability among its populace is fine for your ends. This is what my work on Populace-Centric Engagement / Policy is about. It recgonizes our ends are best met by focusing on the needs of the populace, and not the needs of any particular government that happens to be in office.

BLUF: If our current efforts in Afghanistan have somehow morphed to being tied to preserving a particular form of government, or even particular personnel in office, it has become dangerously flawed at a strategic level.