Gambling on the Districts
Gambling on the Districts:
All-In at the GIRoA Casino
by James Sisco and David C. Ellis
Download the Full Article: Gambling on the Districts
The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan is gambling in the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) Casino at a table with a crooked dealer. ISAF is preparing to go all-in at the National GIRoA table, betting that National GIRoA reform initiatives and the recent troop surge will extend accountable, responsive government to the population. At the same time, National GIRoA’s dealer is dealing from the bottom of the deck to former Mujahedeen powerbrokers (and possibly the Taliban) to distribute the table’s winnings (international funding and key districts) for his own benefit. ISAF needs to diversify its gamble by moving some of its chips from the National GIRoA table to the Local GIRoA table, which has a more legitimate dealer and better odds of winning.
Download the Full Article: Gambling on the Districts
LCDR James Sisco is an Afghan Hand currently serving in Afghanistan. His previous tours include the Navy Irregular Warfare Office, Deep Blue, and service in Afghanistan in 2005-2006 as the military liaison for President Karzai.
Dr. David C. Ellis is a SOCOM human terrain analyst currently deployed to Afghanistan. His research covers peacekeeping, ethnic conflict, democratization, and economic development.
The views of the authors do not necessarily reflect the official policies and positions of the Department of Defense, U.S. Army, ISAF or the U.S. Government.
Guys, I enjoyed your article.
However, when one finds himself at a crooked table, it is probably best to just cash in the chips and play somewhere else. It is not likely we will beat the house at their own game on their own table.
Bob
Good article, although IJC might retort that they are district-focused through the Key Terrain District plan.
I found it especially interesting that many of your assumptions are opposite those that ISAF and its subordinates operate under- even though you’d be hard-pressed to find where we have identified those assumptions in our plans and how we plan to test them, much less change if they are wrong.
The most obvious one: “Power in Afghanistan, in turn, depends on powerbrokers ability to extract wealth from the ground …or the international community. In the end, power emanates from controlling the population, especially in the absence of legitimate government and international resources.”
In the workup to Operation Omid II, powerbrokers were specifically discounted as a force with which to deal with. Instead, the nebulous concept of “the people”- and specifically people in “valleys” and “villages” were defined as where the power in this country lies- and that if these people were provided legitimate government they would actively fight the insurgency, or at least not support it.
Whether this line of thinking made it into the final plan is debatable (I don’t think it did), but that line of thinking did and comes from the non-debatable concepts of “the people” being the Center of Gravity in any insurgency and that legitimate government can be provided (from, as you say- the national level) as opposed to it emerging locally, and it permeates many of the things we do.
Unfortunately I’m not sure we will ever adjust to our assumptions being wrong. Instead I usually hear that the plans were executed incorrectly. I do believe that the plans are many times ignored at the lower levels, but whether or not they are executed incorrectly or the logic of our assumptions is flawed is another question.