A WikiLeaks roundup

As with many an explosive headline, the real meaning of the WikiLeaks release didn't really become clear until the second day's story - and each day has brought some new perspective. Having followed the releases, the responses, and the discussions, I'll offer a brief summary for those with less free time:

Possible revelations

• Pakistan maintains close ties to the Taliban, and ISI seems to cooperate directly with the insurgency.
• Special Operations forces keep expanding - which the McChrystal profile also revealed, though this detail was drowned out by the political story.
• Civilian casualties, often unreported except after large-scale accidents, are in fact a regular tragedy, as the non-fatal shooting of a deaf man and many other leaked reports illustrate.
• Our allies are often part of the problem, with many strategically-placed profiteers taking advantage.

A debate about what the documents really add to our understanding of Afghanistan soon began. None of the reports contained anything that was both revelatory and verifiable - some of the RUMINT reports delve into wild territory, but most of the wilder speculation they contain vanished into the database unsubstantiated and likely ignored. Professional Afghanistan-watchers soon noted the consistency of the documents with public information on the war, disputing the Pentagon Papers analogy. Others pointed to the difference between day-to-day reporting and the sort of big-picture coverage the WikiLeaks trove had inspired, as well as reminding the pundit class that not everyone follows Afghanistan coverage in all its detail, and that the bold headlines could still surprise casual news readers.

The best reporting using the WikiLeaks documents put the reports in context, incorporating other sources to weave a complete narrative out of these incredibly narrow snapshots. C.J. Chivers used the documents to add very-human detail to the already-known tragedy of Combat Outpost Keating, while Noah Shachtman described his embed last summer in order to illustrate the gaps left by a situation-report view of the war.

And finally, retaliation against Afghan informants appears increasingly likely. Their identities are carelessly redacted, and the Taliban have issued threats against them. If (for the most part) the content of these reports is mundane and hardly worth its Secret classification, the WikiLeaks staff's lack of concern for non-military identities is one glaring exception.

The true value - and costs - of the leak remain undefined. The sheer quantity of information here is a researcher's dream, and valuable work could yet come from the repository. The possibility that a series of WikiLeaks murders take place in Taliban-controlled areas also looms large, however. Sometimes even the sixth-day story doesn't bring a full conclusion.

Afghanistan in black and white

One good thing about the security lockdown surrounding the Kabul Conference is that I have enforced quiet, punctuated only by the arrival of fresh iced coffees, in which to write. Expect a pileup of posts on Wednesday, as tomorrow all my usual haunts will be closed and I'll have to settle for chilled Nescafe in my own shaded-but-internet-free garden.

I've been reading good articles on Afghanistan in quantity of late, following current developments but also discovering older studies that just didn't fit into a busy academic schedule. For the moment, though, I'd like to express my annoyance with the Wall Street Journal, who this past week took an important story in Helmand Province and framed it very one-sidedly. The article's title, U.S. Rebuilds Power Plant, Taliban Reap a Windfall, demonstrates all the depth of analysis to appear in the article.

Believe me, there are plenty of stories to be written about the United States inadvertently supporting the opposition. I've noted before that logistics sub-contracting has created a self-sustaining protection racket, encouraging local leaders to manufacture instability along major roads and funnel bribes to the Taliban, for example. But building and maintaining power plants in provinces with insurgency is not as uniformly bad as the article, and subsequent blogs about it, appear.

The brief "on the other hand" pivot in the article acknowledges as much:

U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials acknowledge that the insurgents benefit from Kajaki's electricity. Yet, they say, winning over the South's population centers - Kandahar city and the Helmand provincial capital of Lashkar Gah - is the overwhelming priority, and providing them with more power for industries and homes furthers that aim.

"Electricity is changing people's lives. Whatever industry we have in Helmand is booming" since the Kajaki turbine was repaired in October, says Rory Donohoe, the U.S. Agency for International Development field program officer for Helmand.

Like most aspects of security and development work here, there are tradeoffs involved in the project - and exactly how they measure on the balance isn't necessarily clear. However, the author makes no attempt to do so. Reading between the lines of the next paragraph: "American civilian and military officials in Afghanistan have been arguing for months over whether further investment is warranted in Kajaki. Civilian officials point to the hydropower plant's sustainability and long-term potential, while military commanders are pressing to remedy the rolling blackouts that strike Kandahar and Lashkar Gah through a quick fix of installing diesel-fuelled generators in the two cities." It appears that the debate is over how best to extend electricity production, not whether to do so. If this many officials agree on one thing, I think the positives outweigh the negatives, at least in assessments by people on the ground.

Development projects often help both the population at large and insurgents living among them - part of the tricky nature of insurgency is its embeddedness among a much larger group of innocents. The fact that the Taliban are able to collect electricity fees is problematic, but it's not the entire story. Questions I've have liked to see answered: What are the estimates of the populations living in both areas? Is the Taliban able to take credit for providing this electricity, or do residents even in insurgent-held districts know that a Western development project powers their lights? How many jobs rely on the Kajaki plant? Is there any sign that electricity provision and development could reduce public dependence on Taliban governance in these districts? (okay, so the last question may be over-optimistic, but the point stands.)

"Counterinsurgency is complex" is a common trope, and "Afghanistan is complex" isn't a new statement even on this blog. Still, is it so hard to offer some balance in telling what seems to be on the whole a moderately successful development project with a notable downside?

Against Postponing Elections

In Sunday's Washington Post, Candace Rondeaux argues for postponing parliamentary elections. Her main points are:

• Security is still deteriorating
• Known flaws in the elections process haven't been fixed since last year
• The international community isn't sufficiently involved

I don't actually take issue with any of these arguments, but I don't think that they add up to postponing the elections...

Security is a huge unknown, and it could just as easily deteriorate as improve over the next six months. If we postpone in the hope of a free campaign environment, we could find ourselves waiting quite some time (at least in certain districts). If the security situation is too bad for elections now, then any postponement would become indefinite.

The elections process is indeed terribly flawed. In explaining the quirks of the voting system, I've only scratched the surface. The process of removing candidates with ties to illegal armed groups functions even more poorly than she described - but given the relevant government ministries' refusal to thoroughly vet would-be parliamentarians, it's near-impossible for outside bodies to even begin researching all 2500 candidates. The institutions we helped form are opaque and dysfunctional, but we're losing leverage to reform them. This is a question worth addressing, but unless we can spell out a new framework for electoral management, halting campaigns already underway hurts many legitimate candidates without changing the underlying deficiencies.


Finally, the international community is deliberate in its distance. In the presidential election, their involvement was able to highlight flaws without being able to prevent fraud or solve the crisis. Again, without the leverage to change how these elections are carried out, the international community is quite possibly better off not associating itself with the process. But the solution still shouldn't be postponement or cancellation now that campaigns are underway, candidates are already printing posters and hosting rallies and spending both their hard-raised funds and taking well-calculated risks. An election clearly stolen by supporters of the president would be a disaster, but a suspension of elections could create just as much public disillusionment.

The solution, such as it is, should be harder behind-the-scenes work for effective administration, combined with a highly concerted effort to ensure election-day security and plenty of training and support for organizations like the Free and Fair Elections Foundation and the Commission, who are playing an active advocacy role. Elections are much harder to carry out here, due not only to security and administration but also because of questions of media, geography, and the near-total loss of social trust over years of conflict.

The word "solution" makes these problems sound addressable, though some of them may not be. But we've begun holding elections here and to halt this one step towards democratic governance doesn't even begin to fix all these other issues - it's just a concrete action that feels like a solution in the face of a tangle of challenges too complex for any easy proposals.

Inside baseball

(postscript 6/24, 8:30am - the powers that be are obviously in agreement - that was a fast response.)

So the Rolling Stone article on General McChrystal is the talk of the expat community here - and the wonks in D.C. as well. Yes, an aide calls Vice President Biden "Bite me". Yes, McChrystal ignores Ambassador Holbrooke's emails.

The inner circle is "shocked and dismayed" at the portrayal, while some say these comments "put the whole war in jeopardy." Possible "fire McChrystal" scenarios are floating about, while the finger-pointing game has already expanded to include "it would be a travesty if we fired McChrystal and kept Eikenberry." (Small Wars Journal does its usual fantastically thorough round-up of the press and punditry.)

Around the office? Well, McChrystal is respected, so there's some concern as to what this means. I think Foreign Policy has summed that angle up with its usual skill.

And still, understanding how critical it is that the military commanders actually respects the civilian leadership, and knowing that unity of effort is foundational to successful implementation, I feel like all this outcry is even more counterproductive than the initial scandalous remarks (even acknowledging that they're clearly in violation of the Uniform Code). Long speculation and "fate in limbo" headlines compound the damage exponentially. Quite frankly, I can envision resolutions that end in McChrystal's resignations and others that return him to Kabul, but all I'm really hoping for is that the decision comes quickly. This is the kind of inside baseball that destroys real efforts in the service of personal grudges.

The Essence of Confusion

(apologies to Graham Allison)

After (nearly) four weeks in Kabul, I've now gotten into enough conversations about current events to make some tentative generalizations. This is anecdote, not data; if nothing else, the sample is limited to Anglophones with the patience to explain very simple things to the American girl who obviously doesn't get it.

The most common reaction to news about American military strategy is bafflement. They dump more funds than can be spent effectively into unstable districts but provide minimal development assistance to peaceful areas that remain loyal to the central administration even despite their own complaints with its governance. ("Bamiyan will start an 'insurgency' just to get aid," one person remarked offhand.) They take advice from former and current warlords. They offer huge contracts for logistics and transport and then express surprise that the companies who take them pass a protection cut along to enemy forces. Trying to make sense of this, the main question I get is, are they stupid, or is there some secret plan - and, really, what's the secret plan?

Cut to Professor Allison: in The Esence of Decision, he proposes three models of analysis and applies each to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The first depicts the state as a unitary, rational actor - it evaluates courses of action and selects the value-maximizing option. The second considers a government instead as a bureaurcracy, dependent on defined organizational roles and responding to new situations using existing patterns of action. The third considers leaders as political beings and evaluates actions as opportunities for exchange between these many players, with external decisions reflecting internal competition and bargaining.

So when I open the New York Times Sunday Magazine and read "I asked Jones one morning how he could square his fondness for Shirzai with his new task of establishing good government. 'I guess I hadn't thought about it that much,' Jones said, transparent to a fault. 'The people probably did view him as the thug. But what else could we have done?'" I see the organizational model at work - the same article notes that Shirzai "may have been loathed by the people but could be counted on to deliver American war materiel to anywhere in the region for only $5,000 a truckload." It isn't a case of the American military deliberately promoting Shirzai as a model leader, it's a case of using the guy who has the power to wield it on your behalf. It's probably similar institutionalizing of the simplest method that leads to articles like Dexter Filkins's latest, revealing that a portion U.S. transportation logistics dollars are almost certainly being passed along to the Taliban as protection money.

But I'm not talking to experts in American politics, or political scientists with coursework in game theory or Graham Allison. The simplest model, rational actor analysis, treats the United States as a single player led by the will of President Obama - and this assessment yields utter bewilderment. Why would President Obama have met with Shirzai on a visit to Afghanistan back when he was still a Senator? For that matter, why is Shirzai the governor of Nangarhar, seeing that he was so unpopular he had to be removed from Kandahar? The New York Times didn't even mention Shirzai in its initial account of the visit, as it simply wasn't a critical element of the story among an American audience. Here, on the other hand, it led to rampant rumors that Shirzai was invited to the inauguration. As far as public diplomacy goes, it doesn't even matter that this is patently false - it's widely believed, and the perception is damaging. If the United States is working with these kinds of people, dark ulterior interests must be at work. No one can possibly claim ignorance of his reputation, and the "I hadn't thought about it much" defense seems dangerously implausible coming from the representative of a superpower.

What's more, it stems from the fact that the U.S. does have a working relationship with the man Sarah Chayes described as a "source of insecurity" in 2003. I count among my friends an Army officer who has worked in Nangarhar: he, too, found Shirzai to be a valuable political partner despite his past and his personal shortcomings. I also count among my new friends a colleague who tells stories of Shirzai's violent dog-fights and tyrannical leadership.

This is a difficult balance - while it's possible that working with Shirzai (who is really a sample case for many similar choices the U.S. makes regularly here) is absolutely critical for success, and that those who despise him are not so passionately opposed as to expand the insurgency, that's simply not an equation I can calculate. I'm not certain if anyone can.

As another example, when Andrew Exum writes, "For a variety of reasons - some good, some less good, some having to do with massive oil spills that didn't exist in 2009 and a financial crisis that didn't exist in 2007 - the United States and its allies will likely not provide the resources necessary for a long-term counterinsurgency effort," I hear a political model at work, assessing just what agenda the President and Congress can successfully balance for both the good of the country and the goodwill of the population. It's my own government, after all, and I've spent long enough following the twists and turns of politics to know just how complex the process is. What comes across here is that we don't care about the Afghan people, and given that their desires really don't play a direct role in the policy evaluation process, that's a hard claim to rebut. Of course we care; but that's not why we're here, and empathetic concern alone isn't going to keep a large American aid presence.

There's still some chance all this will succeed, and that by pursuing the American national security interest we'll manage to offer Afghans the leadership and development they fervently hope for. But in the meantime we certainly can't teach all of Afghanistan Graham Allison, and so these choices, and analyses, look pretty damning to their eyes.

(postscript: On an analytical level, nothing expressed here is novel, let alone revolutionary, but I do think it's important to keep in mind. Furthermore, there's a clear lack of implied action stemming from these observations - an obvious flaw from my policy-wonk perspective. We'll see if I can come up with anything in the weeks to come.)

In the footsteps of [insert name here]

In his introduction to the latest edition of Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana, Rory Stewart writes of walking through Herat and then sitting to describe the city on paper: the image of the European-uniformed traffic officers seemed the perfect vignette, if somehow too familiar. He recalled cracking open Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and finding a description of exactly these traffic police, and yet the language felt unfamiliar. Opening Byron's text, he found that someone else had indeed already put in print exactly what he had hoped to say.

Kabul feels this way some days - each of us who comes here indulges a sense of novelty, of seeking the exotic and pioneering the unfamiliar in a place that even today feels very far from home. And yet, even preparatory reading for such a journey reveals this adventurer's path to be quite well-trodden indeed. There is nothing new under the sun for the would-be wanderer: wherever you go, some young Brit probably got there more than a century before, caught some exotic disease doing so, and got a Geographic Society medal for his efforts. What fun is it to repeat the trek with modern vaccines and easy air travel? As Rory found, they probably documented it more eloquently, to boot.

The colonialists of the Great Game weren't even the first to beat me here, despite the unusual flair with which they did so. Last summer, I visited an exhibition of Afghan National Museum pieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first room displayed relics from Ay Khanum - a Greek city built by Alexander the Great on the Oxus River. The Oxus is now the Amu Darya, but somehow the idea of a pagan temple in Afghanistan seems even more incredible thing from contemporary Kabul than when I marveled at its ruins in New York. Other exhibits offered scraps of Silk Road riches - Venetian glass, Indian furnishings, Egyptian idols. I write as one seeing something new and yet undiscovered, and still try to remember that all I see is familiar to many others. I have much to see for myself, but what I write here is but a pale imitation of the many who have already told this tale.