The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report last week on Afghanistan’s security environment. The verdict: not so good. From the report:

…total attacks against coalition forces between September 2009 and March 2010 increased by about 83 percent in comparison to the same period last year, while attacks against civilians rose by about 72 percent. Total attacks against the ANSF increased by about 17 percent over the same period…DOD data indicate that, overall, more than 21,000 enemy-initiated attacks were recorded in 2009—an increase of about 75 percent over the total number of attacks in 2008.

The report also helpfully reminds us that successful reconstruction and development projects are “contingent on improved security,” and thus, “the lack of a secure environment has continued to challenge reconstruction and development efforts.” In English, I think this means that most development projects in Afghanistan are pretty much a waste of money.

Huh, didn’t see that one coming.

Gregg Willhauck at Democracy Digest argues the international community can foster stability in Afghanistan by encouraging private sector development:

Perhaps it is time to encourage Afghan leaders to listen to their own business people’s views on what needs to be done to spur economic growth, new jobs, and higher living standards…

While the military operations in the south – moving from Helmand to Kandahar – will remain a hot topic, talks [between Karzai and the Obama administration] should also emphasize improving the Afghan economy since success in that realm will reverberate across nearly every other sphere of society…

Why not encourage the Afghan government to engage the indigenous private sector more proactively in order to identify obstacles to growth in the domestic economy and to fashion appropriate reforms?

Does this the type of private sector development count? Got to love the spirit of a true believer! I don’t mean to pick on Willhauck, but the survey he cites strikes me as a bit pointless. Lack of security – not red tape for starting a business – is the basic problem facing Afghanistan today and you don’t need a survey to find out that people don’t like IEDs and trigger happy private security. Political stability is the best thing that could happen to encourage private sector development in Afghanistan. You don’t need a survey to find this out, either.

Oh God. I thought we were done with the development first crowd. Apparently I was wrong. The latest comes from Philip Auesrwald at The Coming Prosperity. Auesrwald approves of the priorities in Presidential Study Directive 7, the DOA NSC development policy directive:

“broad-based growth” is listed before “democratic governance.” What does that mean? It means that the people who wrote this draft get it: expanded economic opportunity precedes democratic change. Both together lead to increased prosperity.

OK Prof, exam time. What do you do when the government doesn’t want growth? What about when you need democracy in order to eat? I guess the good Prof would tell us just to give into the dictator.

Michael Cohen does a fairly good job of destroying David Brooks’s laudatory column on counterinsurgency:

…there is no perhaps no place in the world worse to do counter-insurgency than Afghanistan. Perhaps instead of writing love letters to David Petraeus, Brooks could buy the Army’s Counter-Insurgency Manual, FM 3-24 and try to figure out how to square this statement from pg. 199 “Success in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations requires establishing a legitimate government supported by the people and able to address the fundamental causes that insurgents use to gain support,” [with] the current corrupt and illegitimate regime that is our “ally” in Afghanistan.

The point here is that the education process Brooks thinks is so wonderful has some fairly significant intellectual holes…but that hasn’t stopped Army thinking from becoming fixated on the platitudes of population-centric COIN.  And because the of that “blinkered thinking” we continue to try and stick the square peg of counter-insurgency into the round hole of Afghanistan. I ask this question all the time and I’d love for a COIN advocate to give me an answer: If not for the fact that COIN is the “new black” in the US military; and if not for the supposed success of COIN in stabilizing Afghanistan; and if not for the publication of FM 3-24 and the veneration of COIN by Petraeus et all, would anyone think that doing counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is a good idea?

Brooks is right that there has been a transformation in the US military toward counter-insurgency. Where he’s wrong is in believing that this is something to be celebrated.

This is a two-fer for me. David Brooks drives me nuts and I think US policy in Afghanistan makes no sense.

Helen Epstein has a great takedown on the development first crowd (i.e., economic development should come before democracy) in the current edition of the New York Review of Books. The subject of her article is Ethiopia, specifically focusing on President Meles Zelawi:

Meles’s Ethiopia is now the subject of an informal experiment to see whether “the big push” approach to African development will work. Its foreign aid receipts, which have tripled since 2000, amounted to some $3 billion in 2008, more than any other nation in sub-Saharan Africa…

Unfortunately, this aid is also subsidizing a regime that is rapidly becoming one of the most repressive and dictatorial on the continent.

Read the rest of this entry…

If you are happy not knowing about the situation in Afghanistan, stop reading here. Believe me, ignorance is bliss. As for the rest of you fools…

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In a recent post, I discussed in broad terms the Obama administration’s FY 2011 request for D&G programs. Overall, I wrote that I was pleased with the budget (except for Afghanistan). There were lots of details I did not include – some good, some bad – that seemed to narrow to address in an overview. Thus, I decided to leave them for future posts. Read the rest of this entry…