Military-led Development Efforts

[Global Scout]

First, three kinds of aid, not to be confused: relief, reconstruction, development.

This is helpful for me, and your points about the first two being somewhat clear cut and short term objective focused help me shape my thoughts on this topic, and your points on development merit more discussion.

We treat it as a problem of money and expertise, when in reality the primary obstacles to development are political. Fact of life: real development is almost always going to piss someone off, usually someone powerful.

Since we're all being politically correct (factual versus idealistic), I think development would be better partnered with something that looks more like like political operatons than COIN. Before any serious attempt at providing assistance for development, we promote (for example, through political advice to grass roots movements) a political revolution of sorts that sets the conditions for development efforts to work. I'm not necessarily talking about having an underground make bad politicians disappear, as that would go awry very quickly (a true pandora's box), but rather use tools like twitter to create movements to discredit and pressure the status quo leaders to change their behavior or risk undesirable consequences. Also find means to separate the bad politicians from their sources of power (money, security forces, etc.). Obviously rough thoughts, but if you look at what happened in Poland with the Solidarity movement that removed the old system (at least enough of it) to allow economic development to flurish, there may be opportunities in the world to do similiar activities (not so much in Afghanistan or Iraq).

[Dayuhan]

Since we're all being politically correct (factual versus idealistic), I think development would be better partnered with something that looks more like like political operatons than COIN. Before any serious attempt at providing assistance for development, we promote (for example, through political advice to grass roots movements) a political revolution of sorts that sets the conditions for development efforts to work. I'm not necessarily talking about having an underground make bad politicians disappear, as that would go awry very quickly (a true pandora's box), but rather use tools like twitter to create movements to discredit and pressure the status quo leaders to change their behavior or risk undesirable consequences. Also find means to separate the bad politicians from their sources of power (money, security forces, etc.). Obviously rough thoughts, but if you look at what happened in Poland with the Solidarity movement that removed the old system (at least enough of it) to allow economic development to flurish, there may be opportunities in the world to do similiar activities (not so much in Afghanistan or Iraq).

Possible... but I think we tread on very thin ice when we try to promote political change in other countries. When we're caught at it (as we will be) we can actually discredit the very movements we hope to support: many despots are eager to paint reform movements with the "agents of western imperialism" brush.

We cannot create these movements, and we are likely to step on our dicks if we try. Where they exist we may be able to help them, but we have to be very very careful and very very subtle... and it's usually best if we keep our distance. We do need to make sure we're not helping the other side, or actively assisting them to suppress reform movements, that's utterly counter-productive, even when the reform movements are not necessarily on our side.

In short... we should not support despots against their own population. We should, to the extent that we can and through multilateral pressure if possible, discourage them from violent repression of reform movements. We should (and must) accept that opposition to reform is likely to come less from central government than from regional power brokers, and that central governments are often unable to control regional power brokers... especially in nominal democracies, where regional power brokers control votes.

Taking it to the other extreme and jumping into the fight on the side of reform movements... sounds good, but I have doubts. Can get very messy and generate all kinds of unintended consequences.

If we're looking at political reform as a tool for military leaders in stability ops, I'd say don't expect much. It's a process, it has to be locally initiated and locally led, it takes a long, long time, and its a process that we cannot direct or control without destroying it. It happens, it's vital, and we need to work with it... but it's not a tool that we can pull out of our kit and apply to our purposes.