WHAM in Afghanistan: a report on development aid in COIN ops

[Steve the Planner]

Wow.

There are Lessons Learned, and there are Lessons Missed.

I found the Leavenworth Blog interesting for the huge gap between theory and practice.

I was reading one comment where development professionals and field implementers for Stability Ops where trying to get across what is really needed, and others trying to explain what they were doing.

Very little connection between the two.

At issue is the on-going ambiguity of COIN as a theory, and COIN as a practice, and the continuing ambiguous "bullet points" of COIN objectives, and the practical means and resources to define, support and accomplish them.

Politicians are routinely accused of making ambiguous "sound bite" claims during the campaign, but without any means strategy or resources to actually accomplish any campaign claims, which are all quickly abandoned once in office.

While that accusation is often overstated in actual politics, it is increasingly seems to be the sum and substance of COIN as to Stability Ops and Development.

"Captain, Sergeant: Go into that village, district, and establish stability, effective governance, and a high level of public services and a prosperous economy that will defy intrusion by bad guys (and not become a feeding zone for corrupt government officials from above. If you have any questions, look it up in our policy manual which contains more detailed policy "bullet points" for what you should accomplish. Good luck, and report back to me next month on completion, or sooner if you are able to exceed expectations.

PS- We have a web portal and TTPs capturing Lessons Learned from other Captains and Sergeant who, with sporadic results, also struggled with this same mission in locations and circumstances which may or may not have anything to do with the circumstances you will face (of which we are unaware.)"

Is it any wonder we are going into the next decade of this?

Reality mandates, as many of the experienced development and field implementers of Stability Ops on the Leavenworth bloggers noted, a new conceptualization, support system, and structure to the effort.

In the professional development/public administration arena, experts struggle with years of professional, technical and field experience to learn how public systems and governance structures actually operate, and how, when problems arise (as they always do), how to correct, or substantially restructure (or abandon, start-over, redefine) failing efforts and systems.

Behind any effective system is a depth of operational training, management/administration, budgeting/financial controls/accounting, logistical/equipment/construction/technical support. None of this, in real life, is successfully done by cross-trained staff on temporary assignments to any area and context alien to their prior experiences.

Here, we take perhaps the most challenging circumstances, and, instead of sending in Tiger Teams of experts to support and assist the Captain and Sergeant in (1) defining the core problems; (2) developing, with local realities and participation), the effective reasonable strategies and tactics; and (3) setting up (in the background and at regional or above levels) effective support and implementation processes, systems and funding to make that village mission credible and possible.

A few months ago, I listened to a presentation on civilian deployments in Afghanistan. The agency was recruiting low-level generic "governance" folks, and deploying short-term federal civilians from various agencies. The explanation was that it took six to nine months for these types of recruits to become effective, and then their tour was up.

My point, which has never been captured in any Lessons Learned that I am aware of, is that if actual and qualified SMEs, experienced in immersion trouble-shooting in their subject fields, were built up as effective Tiger teams (and adequately supported), they could actually make a difference in the success outcomes of the Captain/Sergeant's efforts, but the answers, solutions, strategies and tactics realistically applicable to any individual problem set/locality cannot be speculated on until they have actually done it.

Such a Tiger Team, within 60 days of various deployments, would begin to build/develop/coordinate systems of both knowledge and effective support wherein one plus one can start to equal one or two (instead of one or less, as is the metric today).

The US mission, as articulated and scheduled, mandates performance at transformational levels (one plus one equals four or six), and cannot actually occur until a credible strategy and system is developed to first, with some consistency, achieve one plus one equals two.

For anyone actually interested, myself, Surferbeetle, Dayahun and others have loaded this site with questions, answers and recommendations that I have never seen coming from any think tank or manual. But the problems on which they are based continue to be reflected in reports from Winton Park, Leavenworth, etc...

I think the problems are well-defined, but the pursued solutions (which seldom work) seem to capture lots of Lessons Learned (don't try that again), but seldom incorporate any credible strategies from experienced SMEs in those fields. ?????

There are ways to accomplish things, but they are not, to my mind, being pursued.

I continue to be amazed at how this process of doing the same thing over and over again with the same inadequate results could ever amount to anything.

[William F. Owen]

Such a Tiger Team, within 60 days of various deployments, would begin to build/develop/coordinate systems of both knowledge and effective support wherein one plus one can start to equal one or two (instead of one or less, as is the metric today).

....but why? The military problem is finding and killing the enemy. Security enables development. Development does not enable security.

[Steve the Planner]

No.

The military mission has become a muddle of public service, diplomacy, development aid an political/administrative confusion. All administered on an ad hoc basis by soldiers without the requisite background, experience and resources for this accidental mission.

An Adhocracy.

After WWII, there was an occupation, and a Civil Affairs Corps to administer occupation. It's clear mission, was to stabilize and reconstruct.

Here, we don't occupy, don't control, but are solely dependent on the civilian administration/political issues. Nor is Afghanistan being defined as a stab/recon exercise, but some ill-conceived muddle of transformational development, social re-engineering, economic development, and nation-building.


The alternative being tried today, Clear Hold Bribe, led by piecemeal efforts without transformational value, is like Rory Stewart's explanation of giving advice to the US officials. They call me in and ask: Should I wear seat belts when I drive off the cliff?

So it is an Adhocracy that doesn't seem to be working well.

My take is that Afghanistan is a logistical bottleneck. You can only send so much, and what you send must be used to accomplish whatever you are going to do.

So, soldiers are there, and they are traveling about well-armed. There are no cadres of well-tooled and supported development civilians, and deploying such (with all their own support/security/logistics chain) would, of necessity, require trade-offs against the military.

So the "tools" we have are soldiers, and some structure needs to be rapidly created to frame, guide and support their civilian-related work. They must become the Civil Affairs/Transformational engine, or there will not be one.

In this day and age where poor Bangladeshi farmers can go to a village level computer and show their leaves, via Skype, to an ag specialist at a university miles away, it is hard to imagine that distributed technologies, and background support/planning can't be done better than Adhocracy.

The one thing that Wilton Park and others have not wrapped their brains around is that, unlike other exercises in development, this is an exercise of logistics-constraint. It can only succeed by radically transforming the capability and deployability of development through an Army in the field. It is a radically different challenge, and can't be done without intentionality and purpose.

But our focus is accidental and amateur, AND THE RESULTS SHOW.