Tweet
Lest it be said that I’m picking on Tom Friedman, there’s a general sense out there that the administration’s Afghanistan strategy refashions the country in a western image. My friend Lindsay Beyerstein asked last week, “Isn’t it kind of crazy to think that the U.S. can transform the nation of Afghanistan into something we like better?” The answer depends on what you mean by “something we like better.” An under-explored aspect of the refined strategy really does seem to be a shift away from nation-building and toward more fulsome development work.
I’m reminded of this when reflecting on Undersecretary Flournoy’s talk this morning at AEI. She and her colleagues described restricting U.S. support to key ministries focused on security and (mostly agricultural) development; immediate-impact short-term development projects like irrigation; efforts out in the provinces and districts to expand the relevance of those ministries to local communities; and backing away from set targets for how large the Afghan Army and police need to be. Paul Jones, deputy to Richard Holbrooke, talked about moving in more USAID personnel and reducing reliance on U.S. contractors, even giving the selected Afghan ministries “direct assistance if they increase transparency and accountability,” in part out of a recognition that foreign money can drive corruption.
No mention, in other words, of the structure of the Afghan government; no normative judgments about the structure of the Afghan economy; nothing at all about culture or religion. It’s sure not like the U.S. is backing away from Hamid Karzai. But I think we can fairly infer that the strategy aims at mitigating Karzai’s deleterious effects and enhancing both capacity and, crucially, constituency among Afghans for better governance. It isn’t “necessary, nor is it feasible,” Flournoy said, to make Afghanistan a western-modeled nation state. Indeed, I would say if that was the aim of this strategy, it would be incoherent. This looks more like meeting Afghan society where it is, not where we’d like it to be.
None of this is to say that the strategy doesn’t have its share of flaws. But I don’t think it’s fair anymore to view this as a nation-building strategy.
4 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About ATTACKERMAN
RSS/XML Feed
“No normative judgments about the structure of the Afghan economy…”
What about opium production?
On the contrary, I don’t think nation building requires or even suggests remaking the country in our image. We didn’t try to de-Islamify Bosnia or Somalia; we did try to remove the militarism from Germany and Japan, but we didn’t take away the lederhosen or the kimonos. In any case, if the mission in Afghanistan is to build them into stable, functioning nation-state along the lines that they would eventually build for themselves I’m all about that. And don’t get hung up on the semantics of nation- versus state-building; it’s called ‘nation-building’ because ‘state-building’ would have further alienated the Perot voters.
Excellent point. Yes.
“The answer depends on what you mean by “something we like better.””
Doesn’t it also depend on what we mean by “nation building”?
There are three core problems here:
(1) I am not sure we actually know how to do development. It is a massively faddish discipline, and it has had shockingly little success historically. And yet, every few years the “development community” issues a variety of white papers and reports confidently predicting that the problems of the past have been resolved and that the programs of the future will bear fruit. Okay, maybe.
(2) At this point, there is a broad divide, actually, in the development community. Broadly, you still a powerful group of good governance and contingent aid people (MCC is the essence of this approach). You have the micro-finance cohort. And you have the public-private partnership people. All three approaches would require significant transformations in Afghan society. I don’t think that anyone in the development world really believes that you can get development just by adding a superstructure onto any preexisting social system. I’ve made this point before… but the military folks tend to be much more optimistic about development than the development people I talk to. A lot of the people around McChrystal, in particular, seem to be operating from a misconception about how easy development is, especially in a war zone.
(3) A lot of the development stuff is based on a fundamental misreading of the challenge in Afghanistan. It is based on this $10 dollar Taliban meme, that sort of assumes that the Afghans are just pissed off because they don’t have enough stuff. So give them a school and a tractor, and presto, they’ll like us and tolerate rule from Kabul. Maybe, but color me skeptical.
Anyway, the big issue is that it isn’t nation-building, but we may need to build a nation to make the development approach work. Just like we’re not doing counter-insurgency, but we may have to engage in counter-insurgency to make our CT goals work.