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.

Austan comments on my recent post, How Exactly did the System Fail, on Faisal Shahzad:

the system of prevention failed while the system of apprehension worked…and those are two different systems.

I am going to say something few of our elected officials have the courage to say: a free society must make trade-offs between security and civil liberties. While there is no clear line – that is for democracies to solve themselves – you can’t have a police state and a democracy. I don’t know if we can do terrorism prevention (I have my doubts), but I am certain that a robust terrorism prevention policy can’t exist in a democracy.

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.

The tee vee has been talking at me over the past few days about how Faisal Shahzad’s botched attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square shows that the US system to fight terrorism is failing. Excuse me for being dense, but how exactly did the system fail?

Consider the chain of events. On Saturday evening, Shahzad parked the SUV in Times Square. Soon after, a nearby vendor saw smoke coming from the SUV. He contacted the police. The police swiftly cleared the area and defused the bomb. Subsequently, they traced the SUV to its previous owner and got Shazad’s cell phone number from her. Even though they did not have Shazad’s name, he previously gave the number to a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent who had questioned him the last time he returned to the US from Pakistan. The CBP then gave the information to the FBI. Thus, when the police traced the number, they got the name from a FBI database. Because the FBI feared he would leave the country, they put his name on the no fly list and alerted the CBP. The CBP found out he had bought a plane ticket to Dubai. Even if Shazad’s flight had left before the CBP caught up with him, they knew where he was going and thus could have arrested him when he got to Dubai. The entire process from the bomb attempt to Shazad’s arrest took a little over two days.

I am no fan of US anti-terrorism strategies and have mocked them mercilessly on my rants about security theater. Nevertheless, I was quite impressed with how quickly the police/FBI/CBP arrested Shazad. The New York City Police Department also handled the situation extremely well –  Times Square was functioning normally by Sunday morning.

In short, the system seemed to function very well – almost seamlessly, in fact. Yet the tee vee keeps telling me the system failed. Am I missing something here?

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…

Read the rest of this entry…

Freedom House has recently released its analysis of the Obama Administration’s FY 2011 budget request for D&G programs (which the US Government calls Governing Justly and Democratically). Overall, it is a pretty good picture, although there are some troubling signs. Read the rest of this entry…