Studies on radicalization & comments

[Dayuhan]

But as the airwaves and print are full of the same steady drum beat of a majority opinion that has us 8 years into a war, and strategcially worse off and an economy in tatters and a national reputation at arguably an all time low to show for it.

I could be wrong, its theory and I have no metrics to prove my case.

There are strong metrics however that the majority opinion is wrong.

There are certainly strong metrics to suggest that current strategy is misguided... though the relationship between "GWOT" strategy and our economic issues is pretty tenuous. I'm not convinced that this strategy is built around a majority opinion on radicalization, though: it seems to me to have derived more from a poorly considered backlash after 9/11, an impulse that was exploited by a relative minority who had long believed that US military force could be used to reshape the Middle East.

It seems to me that the fundamental flaw in current strategy was inaccurate assessment of capacity: we believed we could do things that we did not in fact have the capacity to do. We believed that we could remove governments, and we were right. We believed that we could quickly replace those governments with fully functioning alternatives that would be accepted by the various populaces involved, and we were wrong. We also significantly underestimated our antagonist's capacity to muster opposition to our operations in the countries involved.

It seems to me that your proposal suffers from many of the same problems. You suggest that we can use the threat of withholding aid to move countries to govern better, satisfy their own populaces, and reduce the motivation for insurgencies that target both host nations and the US. For this to even be possible, 4 conditions have to be met:

First, there has to be a government: we can't press a government to reform if there isn't one. Won't work in Somalia or in the various ungoverned spaces in our target areas.

Second the government has to have the capacity to implement the reforms we want. If a government lacks the capacity to perform, pressing it to reform is like threatening to stop feeding a paraplegic who refuses to walk: all you get is starvation. Misgovernment is not always a consequence of willful neglect or exploitation by despots. It also happens when a weak or ineffectual central government is unable to control exploitive or abusive local clans, tribes, power brokers, military units, or other elements of a factionalized populace. I think you'd find that these conditions apply in a number of our target countries.

Third, the government in question has to be dependent on US aid. Many of the countries involved are not. The insurgency in southern Thailand, for example, could certainly be resolved with reform, but the government does not rely on US aid and the threat of withholding aid is not likely to have any effect. We might want to influence the Saudis but we can't do it by withholding aid, because they don't get any aid from us, nor are they in any way dependent on us. Libya, Kuwait, Syria and Sudan are not on our aid list.

Fourth, we have to apply pressure in a way that is not going to provoke a backlash against us. As I've said before, many countries are extremely sensitive to anything that could be perceived as American interference in domestic affairs, and our efforts are likely to be interpreted as self-interested meddling. Populaces are anything but uniform, and substantial parts of any given populace may see our pressure as an unwelcome threat. A country where a portion of the populace opposes the government may also have a portion of the populace that supports the government and resents are pressure. We've recently seen this problem in action: the US put its weight behind a fatally flawed "peace agreement" in the southern Philippines that was supposed to placate one restive segment of the populace, totally failing to anticipate the response of another segment of the populace. Good intentions are not necessarily interpreted as such by the intended beneficiaries. The road to hell, they say, is paved with 'em.

(Oh, and 5 minutes of google research on foreign fighers and and insurgent movements will show you the clear connections that I speak to.

After rather more than that, I don't see a connection. Correlation, perhaps, but no solid evidence of causation, and even the correlation is tenuous. Looking here:

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/jou...p/49-watts.pdf

Ranking by foreign fighter intensity (fighters/100k Muslims) we see that by far the most intense sources of fighters are Libya and Saudi Arabia. Both countries face internal dissent, but in neither case has it reached a level that could credibly called insurgency. The Libyan government is hardly a creation or a tool of the US, and since neither country receives aid from the US it isn't likely that we can change their policies by withholding aid. In Saudi Arabia in particular any suggestion that we are applying pressure toward a move away from monarchy would almost certainly inspire far more resistance than sympathy among the populace.

Next down the list we have Yemen. Substantial US aid, but it's very doubtful that the government has the capacity to initiate significant reform, and the most probable consequence of aid withdrawal is a collapse into full ungoverned-space status. Not a desirable outcome.

Then we have Kuwait, Syria, Tunisia, Jordan... Kuwait and Syria aren't getting aid from us, no leverage there. Tunisia and Jordan, possibly, but now we're getting into environments where the number of foreign fighters is really pretty small and unlikely to be significantly influenced by the policies suggested.

On top of all of this, where is the compelling evidence that foreign fighters are part of a populace driven to insurgency by misgovernment? Experience shows us that religious or ideological fervor, personal discontent, and testosterone can drive some individuals to violence in virtually any governance environment. There's a significant difference between distributed discontent and insurgency.

And I have NEVER, EVER said we should impose our values on others, quite the contrary. In fact, I beat a steady drum that we need to stop the hubris, and stop trying to control every outcome, and to help enable populaces everywhere to enjoy their own self-determination, and that in so doing we will turn down the heat on a global security environment.)

Isn't self-determination one of our core values? Aren't we assuming that populaces want structures that allow for regular changes in government? Don't we tend to let our definitions of these values guide our evaluations of governance in other countries?

Suppose we have a country where .05% of the population is radically disaffected and willing to use violence to express its disaffection, 30% are substantially discontent, may provide indirect support to violence but not participate, and the balance have some gripes but aren't all that opposed to the status quo. Are we going to come in and demand changes that may not satisfy even those who are angry... and who may want to see changes very different from those we are trying to promote?

Certainly the desire to control can cause problems, but it's not the only cause. For much of the 1990s, when our current problems were brewing, our policies seemed driven less by a desire to control than by a desire to deny and ignore.

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to Leah Farrell on .... .This could drop into the Yemen thread, but sits better here, even if a short article and a pointer to a short clip from the film:

Starts with:

The Oath," a documentary by filmmaker Laura Poitras, opens a window into the world of al-Qaida, Osama Bin Laden, the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and the image of the United States in Yemen. (Ends with). Poitras does not take sides. She says she tells it like it is. Her documentary "The Oath," links al-Qaida's growth in Yemen to anger at U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and to the controversial detention of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

[davidbfpo]

An interesting angle on radicalisation in Pakistan entitled 'Frustrated Strivers in Pakistan Turn to Jihad':http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/wo...8youth.html?hp

[Bob's World]

There are certainly strong metrics to suggest that current strategy is misguided... though the relationship between "GWOT" strategy and our economic issues is pretty tenuous. I'm not convinced that this strategy is built around a majority opinion on radicalization, though: it seems to me to have derived more from a poorly considered backlash after 9/11, an impulse that was exploited by a relative minority who had long believed that US military force could be used to reshape the Middle East.

It seems to me that the fundamental flaw in current strategy was inaccurate assessment of capacity: we believed we could do things that we did not in fact have the capacity to do. We believed that we could remove governments, and we were right. We believed that we could quickly replace those governments with fully functioning alternatives that would be accepted by the various populaces involved, and we were wrong. We also significantly underestimated our antagonist's capacity to muster opposition to our operations in the countries involved.

It seems to me that your proposal suffers from many of the same problems. You suggest that we can use the threat of withholding aid to move countries to govern better, satisfy their own populaces, and reduce the motivation for insurgencies that target both host nations and the US. For this to even be possible, 4 conditions have to be met:

First, there has to be a government: we can't press a government to reform if there isn't one. Won't work in Somalia or in the various ungoverned spaces in our target areas.

Second the government has to have the capacity to implement the reforms we want. If a government lacks the capacity to perform, pressing it to reform is like threatening to stop feeding a paraplegic who refuses to walk: all you get is starvation. Misgovernment is not always a consequence of willful neglect or exploitation by despots. It also happens when a weak or ineffectual central government is unable to control exploitive or abusive local clans, tribes, power brokers, military units, or other elements of a factionalized populace. I think you'd find that these conditions apply in a number of our target countries.

Third, the government in question has to be dependent on US aid. Many of the countries involved are not. The insurgency in southern Thailand, for example, could certainly be resolved with reform, but the government does not rely on US aid and the threat of withholding aid is not likely to have any effect. We might want to influence the Saudis but we can't do it by withholding aid, because they don't get any aid from us, nor are they in any way dependent on us. Libya, Kuwait, Syria and Sudan are not on our aid list.

Fourth, we have to apply pressure in a way that is not going to provoke a backlash against us. As I've said before, many countries are extremely sensitive to anything that could be perceived as American interference in domestic affairs, and our efforts are likely to be interpreted as self-interested meddling. Populaces are anything but uniform, and substantial parts of any given populace may see our pressure as an unwelcome threat. A country where a portion of the populace opposes the government may also have a portion of the populace that supports the government and resents are pressure. We've recently seen this problem in action: the US put its weight behind a fatally flawed "peace agreement" in the southern Philippines that was supposed to placate one restive segment of the populace, totally failing to anticipate the response of another segment of the populace. Good intentions are not necessarily interpreted as such by the intended beneficiaries. The road to hell, they say, is paved with 'em.



After rather more than that, I don't see a connection. Correlation, perhaps, but no solid evidence of causation, and even the correlation is tenuous. Looking here:

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/jou...p/49-watts.pdf

Ranking by foreign fighter intensity (fighters/100k Muslims) we see that by far the most intense sources of fighters are Libya and Saudi Arabia. Both countries face internal dissent, but in neither case has it reached a level that could credibly called insurgency. The Libyan government is hardly a creation or a tool of the US, and since neither country receives aid from the US it isn't likely that we can change their policies by withholding aid. In Saudi Arabia in particular any suggestion that we are applying pressure toward a move away from monarchy would almost certainly inspire far more resistance than sympathy among the populace.

Next down the list we have Yemen. Substantial US aid, but it's very doubtful that the government has the capacity to initiate significant reform, and the most probable consequence of aid withdrawal is a collapse into full ungoverned-space status. Not a desirable outcome.

Then we have Kuwait, Syria, Tunisia, Jordan... Kuwait and Syria aren't getting aid from us, no leverage there. Tunisia and Jordan, possibly, but now we're getting into environments where the number of foreign fighters is really pretty small and unlikely to be significantly influenced by the policies suggested.

On top of all of this, where is the compelling evidence that foreign fighters are part of a populace driven to insurgency by misgovernment? Experience shows us that religious or ideological fervor, personal discontent, and testosterone can drive some individuals to violence in virtually any governance environment. There's a significant difference between distributed discontent and insurgency.



Isn't self-determination one of our core values? Aren't we assuming that populaces want structures that allow for regular changes in government? Don't we tend to let our definitions of these values guide our evaluations of governance in other countries?

Suppose we have a country where .05% of the population is radically disaffected and willing to use violence to express its disaffection, 30% are substantially discontent, may provide indirect support to violence but not participate, and the balance have some gripes but aren't all that opposed to the status quo. Are we going to come in and demand changes that may not satisfy even those who are angry... and who may want to see changes very different from those we are trying to promote?

Certainly the desire to control can cause problems, but it's not the only cause. For much of the 1990s, when our current problems were brewing, our policies seemed driven less by a desire to control than by a desire to deny and ignore.

Self-Determination is the ultimate form of Democracy, even if a populace chooses for itself complete dictatorship. The point being that the populace, through processes that they see as legitimate in their culture, chooses the form and make-up of government that THEY desire. This means free from outside shaping and manipulation.

If the US still stood for the principles we claim so boldly to stand for, we would have embraced Hamas when chosen by the people of Palestine. But instead we rejected them because WE didn't like them. Hypocrisy.

Whatever a populace believes is right for them is "self-determination." Tell me the populace, tell me the culture, that believes that it is better if some foreign body shapes their governance instead?? Is this American? Only so far as America is one country with the stones to put such bold empowering words into law. But the human principle is universal.

[M-A Lagrange]

Self-Determination is the ultimate form of Democracy, even if a populace chooses for itself complete dictatorship. The point being that the populace, through processes that they see as legitimate in their culture, chooses the form and make-up of government that THEY desire. This means free from outside shaping and manipulation.

If the US still stood for the principles we claim so boldly to stand for, we would have embraced Hamas when chosen by the people of Palestine. But instead we rejected them because WE didn't like them. Hypocrisy.

Whatever a populace believes is right for them is "self-determination." Tell me the populace, tell me the culture, that believes that it is better if some foreign body shapes their governance instead?? Is this American? Only so far as America is one country with the stones to put such bold empowering words into law. But the human principle is universal.

Bob,

You are absolutly right and that is why none of the liberation wars were won by the colonial forces, evem malaysia as the british did give independance.

The ultimate question is: what if not elections?

M-A

[Bob's World]

Bob,

You are absolutly right and that is why none of the liberation wars were won by the colonial forces, evem malaysia as the british did give independance.

The ultimate question is: what if not elections?

M-A

Every culture has some process for selecting leaders. Many may not have the same hierarchy, but one can probably expand the hierarchy of an existing system more effectively than they can scrap an existing system and replace it with our own.

For example, the Sioux Indians had no concept of a single over-arching "Chief," but they had a very sophisticated and effective form of council-based governance with a variety of leaders in a system that worked for them. We needed one guy to sign treaties, so we picked on. Predictably, disastrous results came of that. We created an "official" system of governance, but it was not a "legitimate" system as well. Ideally we would want both; but if you can only have one, you want Legitimate.

The problem with legitimate is that it implies "free from outside influence and manipulation." Big problem there for the good Cold Warriors, as "containment" was rooted in controlling the periphery; so we have become used to sacrificing legitimacy in favor of official all in the name of containment.

I think that model is obsolete, and the current "GWOT" is essentially the popular backlash to such manipulation of governance.

In Afghanistan they have system of Shuras and Jirgas with Village, Tribal and Religious leaders all feeding into it. Since the mid 1700s they have used this to create national governance as well (National Afghan-style, not Western-style). I would recommend enforcing and enabling the systems that already exist within a culture. Sometimes these systems get damaged by outside interference or internal manipulation. Returning to the roots of what works for a culture is more apt to produce "legitimacy" than a wholesale replacement by outsiders with a foreign system.

I believe that we will learn that we can be even more successful fostering and working with Legitimate governments than we ever were in working with those that we had manipulated to merely being "Official."

[M-A Lagrange]

Every culture has some process for selecting leaders. Many may not have the same hierarchy, but one can probably expand the hierarchy of an existing system more effectively than they can scrap an existing system and replace it with our own.

For example, the Sioux Indians had no concept of a single over-arching "Chief," but they had a very sophisticated and effective form of council-based governance with a variety of leaders in a system that worked for them. We needed one guy to sign treaties, so we picked on. Predictably, disastrous results came of that. We created an "official" system of governance, but it was not a "legitimate" system as well. Ideally we would want both; but if you can only have one, you want Legitimate.

The problem with legitimate is that it implies "free from outside influence and manipulation." Big problem there for the good Cold Warriors, as "containment" was rooted in controlling the periphery; so we have become used to sacrificing legitimacy in favor of official all in the name of containment.

I think that model is obsolete, and the current "GWOT" is essentially the popular backlash to such manipulation of governance.

In Afghanistan they have system of Shuras and Jirgas with Village, Tribal and Religious leaders all feeding into it. Since the mid 1700s they have used this to create national governance as well (National Afghan-style, not Western-style). I would recommend enforcing and enabling the systems that already exist within a culture. Sometimes these systems get damaged by outside interference or internal manipulation. Returning to the roots of what works for a culture is more apt to produce "legitimacy" than a wholesale replacement by outsiders with a foreign system.

I believe that we will learn that we can be even more successful fostering and working with Legitimate governments than we ever were in working with those that we had manipulated to merely being "Official."

I do agree but (As there is always a “but”) then we have separate problematic that do affect stabilization operations or build or what ever phase.

First, as you pointed it, there is this need to have an interlocutor whose similar to us (by us, I hear weberian like governments). This has been pointed by many, including Kilcullen, and denounced by several anthropologists. This shows a difficulty from our side to adapt after the cold war consensus on “democracies victory”. If we won, this implies that our form of governance is better, even the only one legitimate and sustainable.

Then, the example of Afghanistan is interesting in the sense that the constitution was debated through a large council based on cultural researches and cultural approach to form a new government. I remember that at a point some were talking about bringing back a Kingdome in place.
Apparently, the cultural approach failed to bring a culturally endorsed and accepted form of governance. One of the main obstacle being the non recognition of such form of centralised governance (the weberian state) by at least a part of the cultural assembly and more precisely the religious part of it, but not only.
One of the hiccups may lay in the fact that cultural approach has been used, up to now, to find a way to impose weberian state by making it culturally attractive or at least acceptable. Rather than using culture studies to dig out governance mechanisms, it has been used to prove that there were pre democratic practices in a defined culture. And use them as levier to impose a governance copycat system.
The second one lay with us. Basically a “president” needs an interlocutor and not a complex group of leaders that he needs to talk with. And that is may be our biggest weakness in countries as Afghanistan as it leads us to not imagine any other forms of governance and administration.
On the other hand, post communist/neo communist/ extreme liberal see in the weberian state the most powerful revolutionary governance concept. They justify it through it success through history and both communist and capitalist form of governance. According to them, radical Islam, by rejecting the weberian state, is then doomed. So, by imposing the weberian state we do provoke an ineluctable mutation of the governance to which populations are ineluctably leading their leaders.
This may be also part of the narrative concept of justification…

[davidbfpo]

An academic study pub. Jan. 2010 'Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans', which I found intriguing and here is the opening paragraph:

In the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, and subsequent terrorist attacks elsewhere around the world, a key counterterrorism concern is the possible radicalization of Muslims living in the United States. Yet, the record over the past eight years contains relatively few examples of Muslim-Americans that have radicalized and turned toward violent extremism. This project seeks to explain this encouraging result by identifying characteristics and practices in the Muslim-American community that are preventing radicalization and violence.

Link:http://www.sanford.duke.edu/news/Sch...or_Lessons.pdf

[Dayuhan]

Every culture has some process for selecting leaders. Many may not have the same hierarchy, but one can probably expand the hierarchy of an existing system more effectively than they can scrap an existing system and replace it with our own.

For example, the Sioux Indians had no concept of a single over-arching "Chief," but they had a very sophisticated and effective form of council-based governance with a variety of leaders in a system that worked for them. We needed one guy to sign treaties, so we picked on. Predictably, disastrous results came of that. We created an "official" system of governance, but it was not a "legitimate" system as well. Ideally we would want both; but if you can only have one, you want Legitimate....

In Afghanistan they have system of Shuras and Jirgas with Village, Tribal and Religious leaders all feeding into it. Since the mid 1700s they have used this to create national governance as well (National Afghan-style, not Western-style). I would recommend enforcing and enabling the systems that already exist within a culture. Sometimes these systems get damaged by outside interference or internal manipulation. Returning to the roots of what works for a culture is more apt to produce "legitimacy" than a wholesale replacement by outsiders with a foreign system.

I believe that we will learn that we can be even more successful fostering and working with Legitimate governments than we ever were in working with those that we had manipulated to merely being "Official."

I pretty much agree, and certainly in Afghanistan I think the system of shura and jirga would have made the strongest basis for a new government. It seems to me that in both Iraq and Afghanistan our method of establishing new governments was targeted mainly at perceptions of legitimacy among our populace and among our allies, not at the local perception of legitimacy. Our people wanted to see the immediate establishment of a centralized government that we could recognize as a government, established in a way that our people perceived as legitimate.

Unfortunately, once you start down that road it's not easy to reverse course, and now that we've put our backing behind these processes and the resulting governments it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to change our approach. It's not as if we can announce that the whole idea was a mistake, and now we're going to remove this government and give them another. We can of course withdraw support, let the government fall, and try to work with the successor, but there's no assurance that the successor would have any interest in working with us, and there's a good chance, at least in Afghanistan, that this would mean a return to the same circumstances that generated our intervention in the first place. It's not an easy situation and I don't see any advantageous way out of it, but we made the bed and one way or another we're gonna lie in it.

The problem with legitimate is that it implies "free from outside influence and manipulation." Big problem there for the good Cold Warriors, as "containment" was rooted in controlling the periphery; so we have become used to sacrificing legitimacy in favor of official all in the name of containment.

I think that model is obsolete, and the current "GWOT" is essentially the popular backlash to such manipulation of governance.

Can't entirely agree with that, not least because I don't think there is really a "GWOT". There's a whole raft of factors involved, and I don't see any single overarching explanation that can cover the range of phenomena that we're facing. Barnett's hypothesis of reactionary backlash against the changes implicit in modernization and globalization is part of the picture, as is the Bernard Lewis observation of "aggressive self-pity" rising out of the whole history of Islamic decline, of which US policy is but a small part. Groups like AQ ride on locat conflicts that are driven primarily by local issues, just as the 3rd world communist movements of the cold war gained traction by riding on local conflicts based on local, not global, issues.

Also worth noting that self-determination is not simply a factor of us not taking control. There are other outside influences in play in virtually every conflict on the planet, and many are even less sympathetic to true self determination than we are. A power vacuum does not necessarily mean that traditional means of selecting a government will prevail. Often the response to a power vacuum is simply that whoever can muster the largest armed force takes over, kicks the stuffing out of everyone else, and imposes their own rules. Governments like that of Sadddam's Iraq, Qaddafi's Libya, or for that matter like the Taliban's in Afghanistan were not imposed by foreign powers, but the level of self-determination enjoyed by their citizens is debatable.

[Steve the Planner]

Bob:

Brilliant:

In Afghanistan they have system of Shuras and Jirgas with Village, Tribal and Religious leaders all feeding into it. Since the mid 1700s they have used this to create national governance as well (National Afghan-style, not Western-style). I would recommend enforcing and enabling the systems that already exist within a culture. Sometimes these systems get damaged by outside interference or internal manipulation. Returning to the roots of what works for a culture is more apt to produce "legitimacy" than a wholesale replacement by outsiders with a foreign system.

The problem, as I have heard from a very few wise folks, is that the problem is in the Constitution, pushed by us, and adopted by a few under pressure without deep understanding.

Now, the have tried it, and the problems in implementation are evident.

As a dumb Marylander, I know that our state constitution actually provides for a diversity of county, town, and special area/purpose governance structures. There are three hierarchies of County forms (from virtual autonomy to minimal), and every manner of municipality (big cities, six person towns), and tons of special purpose, regional and multi-regional formal regulatory structures. If you are bored, you can always go to a local school board meeting, or County zoning committee, or formal community association with special tax district authority.

How could anybody believe that Afghanistan could not be the same way. Our overly-simplified one step approach for "other" countries never could have worked here, and won't work anywhere else.

How to facilitate systems that can work, and are deeply embedded in the Urf of what is known?

[Bob's World]

There are always many ways to achieve any given effect, and what works great in one circumstance may be a complete failure in another. But if one has achieved an understanding of the essence of the problem, then they can tailor their approaches accordingly. This has always been my personal approach to problem solving, and one that we have applied in the Strategy Division at USSOCOM over the past couple of years as well. Personally, I feel that the most useful form of "strategy" is not one of generating ever more vague guidance for ever higher headquarters (like I learned at the War College...) but rather to dive into a problem, peeling back the layers to seek fundamental understanding that can be employed by leaders AT ALL LEVELS of command to achieve effects that collectively contribute to the ultimate strategic effect that one is seeking.

A simple example: the 2-minute push-up event on the Army fitness test. Over the course of my career I have met so many soldiers who "just can't do push-ups." These soldiers are often very motivated, and want to excel, and have read the dozens of articles published by various people who max the test that offer specific work out programs that worked for the author, but not for the frustrated soldier who ultimately resigns him or herself to "not being able to do push-ups."

I thought about this a lot as an LT. "Why” I asked. Not "how." When one shifts their focus from how to why, they are, I believe on a longer journey, but one that will ultimately get them to a much more universally effective answer to the "how" question.

The answer I ultimately came to on this little problem was simply "train for the second minute." As I asked those who couldn't do push-ups how they trained, and then compared that to workout that were generally more successful, and my own personal experience, I came to realize that most people who "just couldn't do push-ups" were constantly replicating the conditions of the first minute of the test in their training programs. You don't max your push-ups in the first minute, it is the ability to do push-ups in the second minute that earns the high score.

Based on this simple concept I developed a couple of example workouts (that I still use to this day for three or four weeks prior to an APFT in lieu of my normal workouts that I use to prepare for life rather than a silly test that doesn't really do that very well) and would simply advise people to train for the second minute, why, point out how their current program doesn't to that, and then offer them a couple examples, but also urge them to find what works for them personally, so long as it follows the second minute principle. Many soldiers who could never do push-ups now do them very well, because they were given a little understanding and encouragement, and then allowed to find their own path to success.

Governance is not unlike this. My one liner there is "Ensure the governance is seen as legitimate in the eyes of the governed." For some cultures an election will create this. For others it comes from some form of councils. For others it may be as simple as a single religious leader saying "this is the guy." Who are we to judge??

We need to judge less, and understand more. Principles are pure, but values are principles with a judgment applied to them. We tend to push values over principles, and no one I know likes to be judged.

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.

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.


But this is just what I have come to in my own personal journey. Maybe just killing all who dare to challenge the government is enough. Maybe if a government is effective enough the populace will ignore its lack of legitimacy. Maybe. But I don't buy it.

I think that Gen McCrystal's plan for the military in Afghanistan is sound. I have far less confidence in policy decisions that are still rooted in a belief that "official" is good enough. The people of Afghanistan deserve a government that is legitimate as well. And truth be told, it probably would not look much different than what they have now, but it is how it is perceived that matters.