Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
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.
I appreciate the distinction and fundamentally agree. What the distinction overlooks in this case is that the government in question is our creation. We designed it, we built it, and we have publicly declared it legitimate. Those realities do bind us to that government to a much greater degree than would be present if we had stepped into a pre-existing conflict to assist a pre-existing government.

In theory, of course we could work with any government that is willing to work with us on our interests and is able to maintain stability among its populace. Realistically, our options are pretty limited. We cannot remove the Karzai government without completely de-legitimizing our involvement in the Afghan political process. If we cease to support the Karzai government and let it fall, it will almost certainly be replaced by a government that is totally unwilling to deal with us on anything.

Back in the Cold War days we'd have dealt with this sort of situation by letting it be known in certain circles that we would be willing to deal with an internal coup carried out by someone willing to work with us. That didn't work out so well for the most part. It will be interesting to see what we come up with this time round. The current policy seems to be to shape the Karzai government into something other than what it is. I'm not at all convinced that we can accomplish that. If we don't, there are a very limited number of options available, and none of them are very appealing.