Our Low-risk, Low-return Afghan Surge

Our Low-risk, Low-return Afghan Surge – Rodger Shanahan, The Interpreter.

… Advisors who never get to interact with the locals outside the security of coalition bases are severely restricted in both the situational awareness that will inform good decision-making, and in their ability to manage projects. If advisors are not out among the population, it is fair to question the quality of advice they can provide to locals and to their superiors back home. The Government’s announcement that our contribution to the US-led ‘surge’ would be additional police trainers is likely to replicate this risk-averse approach. So I don’t share Mark O’Neill’s view that the announcement was ‘sound policy’.

Sound politics, for sure, but sound policy? Just as advisers who cannot go outside the wire are constrained in the quality of the advice they give and receive, police officers who train but cannot mentor will produce sub-optimal results. This is not to criticise the efforts that the police trainers will put in. Rather, the issue is that training without mentoring produces good objective data (numbers of police trained) but no subjective data (how do they perform once they leave the base?). There is little point in training police inside a base and then releasing them into their own cultural environment with the attendant familial, ethnic, financial and cultural pressures and expect them to become bastions of probity and respected members of the community. When the security environment is deemed too risky for the trainers to accompany the Afghan police officers on their task, it doesn’t send a great message to the trainees…

More at The Interpreter.

Dr. Rodger Shanahan was the Chief of Army Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and is now a non-resident Fellow at the Institute. The Interpreter is the blog of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, an independent international policy think tank.