How to Create an Afghan Blackwater

SPC Greg Carr I think we all romantically look at the idea of a punitive expedition: go in fast and hard; smash stuff and kill people; and leave. The reason why Afghanistan became the cradle of 9/11 is because it was a failed state. Effectively God's little blind spot where bad viral stuff grows in the shady Petri dish. The idea at the time, is if we broke it, we bought it (Pottery Barn Rules ala Colin Powell). The fallacy is it was broken before we got there. If we stood up a Government that would exercise sovereignty (security, enforce borders, levy taxes, provide public goods) they would shun future bad transnational actors and we could leave. If we executed a punitive expedition and left, the logic was, we'll be back in 5-10 years to do it again. Wouldn't we look ridiculous and waste the first effort if we didn't fix it right, once and for all. Incurring an occupation like structure as in Germany, Japan, or Korea wasn't palatable.

I don't think we had a bad idea. After all, let the Afghans run their own house....eventually without us makes sense. We fundamentally just didn't factor in the subtle power structures that really make the region (I won't call it a nation) run. Corruption. Patronage. Tribe. Sub Tribe. Clan. River valley fiefdoms. Little positive perception of a central government. Graft. Pashtoon wali the living embodiment not just the words. Machiavellian maneuvering by power brokers. Epochal grudges and score settling. Just because someone shows up to pull you out of the shit, doesn't mean they are there to help you. The Taliban was actually really 12-20 different subsidiaries that would act indenpendently and sometimes counter to each other. Safe havens.

I thought Richard Armitage's comment was apt. I was there during the Iraq Surge , Afghanistan was the economy of Force operation from a strategic perspective. Had we been able to flood the zone 2006-2009, I think we could have put things down to a dull roar and leave the Afghans to it. BCTs were spread millimeters thick since 2002 and given governmental roles: Battalion Commander to Provincial Governor partnerships. I wonder what could have been if we had more assets and force structure. If we built a bottom up government instead of top down. All politics is local, if the people are getting what they need from a local a government, it's a success. The thing that makes America successful is we have security. Usually generally always you can walk the streets at night with minor exception. There are no IEDs on Main Street USA. Instead we built a top down government so we had someone to talk to and tried to go down. We figured this out later, but by then we did not have enough force structure to "thicken" security. Every time a guy pops up and wants to do something bad, we needed to be there to whack him down. Without that threat, we get what we get.

I agree with this assessment. Our approach to Assghanistan was totally flawed from the beginning.