Lessons From the Coalition: International Experiences From the Afghanistan Reconstruction - Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction Report

Today, SIGAR's Lessons Learned Program released a conference report entitled "Lessons From the Coalition." The conference discussed was cohosted by USIP and brought together representatives from eleven major donor nations, the EU, UN, World Bank, and NATO to share common experiences and lessons from the Afghan reconstruction effort. In attendance were seven sitting ambassadors, five former ambassadors, and the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The report notes:

-- The confluence of conflicting goals and divided actors led to a situation in which countries were often pursuing disparate and sometimes ill-defined missions in Afghanistan.

-- Many nations were unclear as to what they were trying to achieve in Afghanistan.

-- Conference participants were critical of instances when military forces undertook development work, indicating their efforts often ended up costing more and being less effective than those of their civilian counterparts.

-- Coalition nations sometimes held contradictory strategies for accomplishing shared goals.

-- Many countries were primarily motivated by their alliance commitments to the United States, rather than specific strategic goals related to Afghanistan -and were often more focused on what was happening in Washington than in Kabul.

-- One participant stated the PRT model had resulted in the partition of Afghanistan into geographic areas controlled by different donors, and that, if one looked out from Kabul, one saw "a number of different flags with different policies, with different strategies, [and] with different priorities."

-- Inability to understand the local context led to projects that unintentionally benefitted corrupt officials, threatened local governance, led to escalating violence and sabotage of the project itself, and wasted resources.

-- Development projects did not "buy" security. Participants believed that when development projects occurred in insecure places, the projects either benefited the insurgency or insurgents increased violence to counteract any potential gains.

-- One participant referred to the regular turnover of personnel as an "annual lobotomy."

-- Conditions placed on funds were often not credible, as donors were ultimately unwilling to withhold funds that were essential to preventing the collapse of the Afghan government. Afghan officials were aware of these limitations and were able to call donors' bluffs.

-- When faced with a donor's unwanted conditions, Afghan officials could often obtain funding from another donor.

-- Several participants noted efforts to reduce the insurgency in Afghanistan were ineffective when not combined with serious engagement with Pakistan.

-- Donors need to avoid creating incentives that cause organizations to hide their failures and instead seek to incentivize them to honestly report and learn from failures.

Read the full report.

Unconventional Warfare is Not the Answer to Your Problem by Andrea Filozof, War on the Rocks

A group of disenchanted humanitarians recently launched a spin-off of the infamous game Cards Against Humanity entitled JadedAid. Included among the deck’s many satirical (and subtly true) combinations is the game’s tagline: “Coming to terms with the fact that your intervention is the problem.” The expression applies equally well to the interventionist foreign policy the U.S. has broadly followed since the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. Although the Obama administration has dialed back large-scale counterinsurgency and stabilization operations, it has also sought to intervene through a new mechanism: unconventional warfare.

At first glance, unconventional warfare appears to provide the ideal solution to many of the problems the administration faced with prolonged occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns. President Obama attempted to strike this balance in his initial strategy against ISISL, vowing  to “increase [U.S.] support to forces fighting these terrorists on the ground” while preventing American ground troops from becoming involved in a combat mission.  Unconventional warfare, per the U.S. military’s Joint Publication 3-05, “consists of operations and activities that are conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an auxiliary, underground, and guerrilla force in a denied territory.” This doctrine holds that the United States can exert its influence through limited involvement to achieve its policy objectives, sidestepping the publicly unpalatable notion of large and prolonged military commitments. Yet the perception that unconventional warfare requires only limited involvement is a dangerous illusion. Not only does training and equipping proxy forces still exact a heavy financial cost, but the operational success of proxy forces often does not lead to the desired political outcome. Serious problems arise when ways and means are not connected to ends. Without organic political solutions to accompany unconventional warfare campaigns, the United States will at best waste vast amounts of defense spending; at worst, it will find itself entangled in the same costly, long-term operations it has endured in Iraq and Afghanistan with little to show for its efforts…

Read on.