For more in the COIN Cops debate, I’m going to reprint an email I got from J’myle Koretz, a young sailor to whom I owe a debt. J’myle was the guy who painstakingly rewrote the template of my old blog to parody the way TNR’s website looked in late 2006. To this day I have never met the guy — he just read the blog, liked my stuff, and volunteered to help me play a joke, something that forever gave me faith in the internet.

With that out of the way, here’s J’myle’s take on counterinsurgency theory and urban security. As you’ll see, he flips it around in a most interesting way.

Reading your discussion of COIN v. criminal justice and I have something I’d like to add: The will of a community to organize against any type of injustice can be weakened–substantially weakened–every time an injustice is committed.  Specifically, when a community organizes and works to correct a problem, but for whatever reason fails, it becomes substantially harder to get the same community to work together the next time.

A great example of this happened in New York City in the 1950s and 60s, and was documented in the phenomenal biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker.  In the mid-1950s, when Moses was building the Cross-Bronx Expressway, he chose a route through Fairmont, a community of about 50,000; mostly Jewish, mostly middle-class.  He wanted to condemn apartment buildings along E. 176th Street, evicting over 1,530 families.  A committee of Fairmont housewives commissioned a study showing that an alternate route through the north side of Crotona Park would require only evicting about 25 families, would save the city about $10 million in condemnation costs, and would allow the city to keep more than $200,000 a year in property tax revenues.

The Fairmont citizens fought Moses for years. They worked day and night, got the alternate route studied again and again, with the same results, and even got mayoral candidate Robert Wagner to promise–flat out, explicitly promise–not to approve Moses’ plans.  But Moses, whose power as ‘City Construction Coordinator’ from the 1940s to the 1970s was beyond imagination, was able to steamroll them and ended up literally tearing a fifty-foot deep trench through the Fairmont neighborhood.

A few years later, in 1959, the citizens tried to get a project organized to build a 200-unit housing project a few blocks north of the Expressway, to again provide a place where young Jewish couples might want to move and try and protect what was left of the neighborhood.  When they discovered that Moses’ Triborough Authority owned the property, they gave up practically before the fight began.

Every time we fail to protect an Afghan town from the Taliban, or from the Karzai government, the chance that we can get support from the citizens the next time we need their help drops substantially, and the amount of effort we have to put into earning allies increases exponentially.

Of course, every time we do kick a ruthless warlord out of some farming village, or build a school, or whatever else, it becomes easier to get their support the next time.  And the longer we are seen as a force for justice, the easier it becomes to keep that reputation.  And the price goes down over time, as we earn trust; but every time we step back and let, for example, an election be stolen, we have to start over at the beginning.

The key to support from the Afghan people is reliable, consistent acts to benefit the Afghan people.