Wishful thinking isn’t enough edition:

The operation in Marjah is supposed to be the first blow in a decisive campaign to oust the Taliban from their spiritual homeland in adjacent Kandahar province, one that McChrystal had hoped would bring security and stability to Marjah and begin to convey an “irreversible sense of momentum” in the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan.

Instead…President Barack Obama’s plan to begin pulling American troops out of Afghanistan in July 2011 is colliding with the realities of the war.

There aren’t enough U.S. and Afghan forces to provide the security that’s needed to win the loyalty of wary locals. The Taliban have beheaded Afghans who cooperate with foreigners in a creeping intimidation campaign. The Afghan government hasn’t dispatched enough local administrators or trained police to establish credible governance…

Progress in Marjah has been slow…in part because no one who planned the operation realized how hard it would be to convince residents that they could trust representatives of an Afghan government that had sent them corrupt police and inept leaders before they turned to the Taliban.

So what do we learn from this article? We learn that Marjah was supposed to deliver a strong blow to the Taliban in the area, but it has failed to do that and McChrystal is frustrated as a result. Why did the operation not succeed as much as he hoped:

• Not enough troops.
• Taliban kills people who cooperate with the US and Afghan governments.
• Not enough police or civil servants.
• People don’t trust the Afghan government because it sent corrupt police and incompetent civil servants in the past.

As usual, Michael Cohen gets it right:

The notion that the challenges we’ve seen in Marjah were unexpected is utterly ludicrous. And if its true, it suggests a lack of military planning that is downright scandalous. The problems we are seeing today in Marjah were completely predictable…For anyone to plead ignorance three months later is a good indication of how divorced from reality this entire mission has become.

Yup.

Wali Karzai (aka Don Wali) is shaking down ISAF:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is weighing approval of an expansive new business deal that could give his controversial half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, increased influence over the lucrative security business that protects supply convoys for U.S.-led forces in southernAfghanistan…

Karzai’s critics view the security consolidation as a covert effort to solidify Ahmed Wali Karzai’s already-unrivaled hold on power in Kandahar. His grip on the city is widely seen as a major obstacle to establishing good local governance, a critical requirement for the success of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency operation.

“The concern seems to me to be that he may be creating a security force which responds to him and subverts the formal institutions and formal security forces of the Afghan state,” said Carl Forsberg, a research analyst and Afghan specialist at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington.

I wonder how Forsberg came to that conclusion. Here’s my guess.

Gregg Willhauck wrote a fairly angry response to my recent post on his survey of Afghan business people. He had a right to be angry – it was a pretty biting post and I admit that I went a bit over the top. I will stand my ground, however in the policy criticism. That is what I meant to do and I accept I did not make that as clear as I could have in the post. Let me be clear about what I meant to say.

First, I do not believe that the US needs to be engaging business people at this point. The absolute best thing the US can do to help Afghan business people is to improve security in Afghanistan. A recent GAO report makes clear that the security situation is deteriorating and that all the development projects in the world won’t make a difference as long as there is no security.

Second, I will stand by my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that ISAF’s use Wali Karzai’s private security firm is an example of working with Afghan business people – because it directly focuses on security. This was a harsh criticism, but a valid one. ISAF will never gain control of Kandahar without Karzai’s support. At the moment, Karzai is deliberately keeping the Afghan police in Kandahar weak so ISAF will need to rely on his incompetent private security guards. Thus, not only is the person that ISAF needs to secure Kandahar ripping off ISAF, he is making the security situation worse.

Third, my point about red tape was not that this is what the survey finds. My point was that we don’t need surveys to tell us that people in Afghanistan want security.

I agree that my tone in the post was biting, but I have been – and will continue to be – a harsh critic of policies in Afghanistan that do not seem to me to be contributing to improving security. I did not mean to attack Willhauck or the survey. I meant to attack a policy that thinks it is important to survey business people in the middle of a war.

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.