Ann Marlowe: Peace Later!

Why did the U.S. let President Karzai steal the August 2009 Afghan presidential election? And why have we kept him in office—and indeed, alive—in the increasingly doom-ridden months since, as he blithely ignores his promises to stem corruption and improve governance?

I believe we should have encouraged Karzai’s opponent Dr. Abdullah to pursue his candidacy in the second round, and even that we should have put enormous pressure on Karzai to withdraw. “Go live off your ill-gotten gains now, and you will die in your bed as an old man,” we should have said. “Or continue in your ways, and we will not lift a finger against your enemies.”

Afghans have their own answers, which run to conspiracy theories like “the United States plans to hand Afghanistan over to Pakistan.” I used to assume the answer was a combination of ignorance of the alternatives and lack of cultural confidence. And I do think these are part of it, especially the latter. We’ve grown so wishy-washy in our moral precepts that someone in a high position can be depended on to say, “Afghans have a different culture” no matter what catastrophic failing is under discussion.

A better answer came to me while reading Gordon Goldstein’s 2009 Lessons in Disaster. I’d avoided this book after hearing that it was all the rage in the Obama White House, but finally succumbed after hearing the smart, articulate author at an Asia Society panel on Feb. 24th. The book isn’t as bright as its author, but Goldstein’s discussion of the coup against Vietnam’s President Diem in 1963 is one of the more detailed I’ve read.

By 1963, American patience with Diem was wearing thin. As with the Karzai administration, the president had a corrupt brother who was, along with his wife,  a truly bad influence. (Karzai has more than one over-reaching brother, but sisters-in-law aren’t much of a problem in Afghan governance since women have little power.)  As with the Karzai administration,  the Americans felt that the president was a basically decent man who was too weak to stand up for the right against his brothers and inner circle of advisors.

At the time, the CIA was still empowered to conduct assassinations overseas. But the obvious move was unpopular among Kennedy’s counselors. One of the reasons many in Kennedy’s administration opposed American support for a coup is that adage that became familiar to us in Iraq, “you broke it, you bought it.” If we deposed Diem, we would be responsible for what came next. And the next leader might not be an improvement.

A similar line of reasoning is at work today with respect to Karzai & Co.

I suspect that some relatively wise men in the Obama administration said, “Well, if we back anyone  besides Karzai and it isn’t a win, we may find ourselves without a graceful way out. We may have to support that man to the bitter end. While as long as we have Karzai, we can always back out of our Afghan committment at some point, claiming that his corruption is just too much.”

Then too, having Karzai bumbling through a crude parody of governance allows the U.S. deniability. Can’t make the counterinsurgency work? Well, the government is rotten to the core, so no wonder. (The problem is, this is true—the counterinsurgency will NEVER work as long as there isn’t a government worth trusting.)

We act as though reducing the political sphere and political options in Afghanistan were the best way to increase security. The opposite is true. The messy hubbub of democracy is exactly what’s needed there. The giant void where civil society should exist will take decades to fill—but jumpstarting the political component is a good first step.

The late-April loya jirga (“grand council”) proposed by Karzai for negotiations with “moderate” Taliban would be a fine occasion for opening up the awful Afghan constitution for amendment. Mandating direct elections of governors and mayors, and giving real power to the elected provincial councils, would give rural Afghans a better choice than their current options, Taliban tyranny or an often- rapacious outsider appointed by Karzai. Grow a thicket of local ties that improve peoples’ lives, and gradually the incompetence of the president will become less and less important. Afghanistan needs time to grow a proficient political class—and space for them to practice. And by the next presidential election, the U.S. should make it clear to Mr. Karzai that his services are no longer wanted.

In our Afghan counterinsurgency, some of our best weapons are exactly those traits of our society that are least comprehensible by the insurgents—and most alien to their culture. The popular image of the Americans’ big bombs and drones fighting IED-planting guys in flip-flops and pajamas who live in mud-brick houses isn’t false. But it’s perhaps the least interesting part of the picture. A combination of social and mathematical analysis is likely to be a better weapon in the long run. And these abilities simply don’t develop in closed societies where critical thinking is not valued—like the jihadi circles of the Middle East and Afghanistan.

IEDs—improvised explosive devices, for those who have just awakened from a sleep of several years—are the leading killer of our military in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are particularly critical in Afghanistan, where terrain much more rugged than that of Iraq means that often there is only one way in and out of an area by road. Since 2007, a huge, well-funded cross-disciplinary military group called JIEDDO (Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization) has been working on ways to eliminate the IED threat.

The obvious one—up-armoring IEDs to make them bombproof—is in some ways the least productive. It takes a lot longer to get a new up-armored vehicle through production and testing than it takes an Afghan bomb-making cell to adjust its improvised explosive devices to destroy a vehicle and its occupants. It’s also not clear that bigger is better for troop transports; as paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne told me in Zabul Province, Afghanistan last November, bringing in the enormous Stryker vehicles to the province this past summer “just made the IEDs bigger.” (The Strykers were sent to Helmand this winter.) And another obvious effort, training troops to avoid and detect IEDs, is necessary, but it doesn’t solve the root causes of the problem.

JIEDDO’s third and most intellectually fascinating goal is to map and eliminate the insurgent networks that build and plant IEDs and discover the cause-and-effect of creating explosives.

“The enemy can adapt its tactics faster than we can field new equipment, so we are focusing on analytics,” said Major Sam Huddleston, an instructor at West Point and a former brigade planner in Iraq, who sat down with me on February 12 to describe his efforts to help senior Army commanders defeat IEDs. The topic could not have resonated with me more than at this very moment: I was at West Point to attend the funeral of Captain Dan Whitten, a 28-year old paratrooper of great promise who was killed by an IED in Zabul Province, Afghanistan on February 2.

Huddleston is preparing a book for internal Army use explaining how a commander can use trend models, forecasting, crime hot-spot maps, spatial choice models, risk assessment, and network analysis to defeat IEDs in an area of operation.

One of the most promising fields is the relatively new discipline of social network studies. “We’ve got some of the best network analysts in the world floating in and out of JIEDDO,” Huddleston said. (He later e-mailed me Chris Wilson’s terrific series on Slate about how the heavily mathematical theory was used to find Saddam.)

Moving deeper, to the whys of IEDs, involves studying the Iraqi or Afghan population. Do poorer areas breed IED-makers? Are they associated with certain tribes? As an embedded reporter in Afghanistan, I’ve seen that this work is complicated by the absence of government-collected data. Estimates of the population vary by as much as 10 million people. 

In an op-ed I wrote last December in The Wall Street Journal, I lamented the unsophisticated data analysis I saw at the battalion and company levels in the course of five embeds with the American Army in Afghanistan.

I charged that while we are fighting a population-centric war, we are graphing a terrain-centric war. I’d never seen a PowerPoint slide with an “x” and “y” axis establishing a correlation between sets of data. Most of the Army’s massive production of slides revolves around maps.

Colonel Tim Trainer, the head of West Point’s systems engineering department, very graciously addressed some of my concerns. He explained that this sophisticated data analysis goes on at a higher level than I had seen [INS: during] my embeds. I’d been spending time on the battalion level—a group of about 600-700 troops commanded by a lieutenant colonel. The analysis I wanted to see takes place on the brigade level (3,000 troops commanded by a colonel) or higher. I subsequently heard from a number of ORSAs (Operations Research and Systems Analyst—basically, Ph.D.-level analysts) deployed in Afghanistan.

Huddleston explained that there was a mathematical reason it made more sense to analyze some data at the brigade level. “At a company level, this analysis does no good. It is some help at the battalion level, and a lot of help at the brigade level. If you look at the IED frequency in a battalion’s area of operations, it may have a lot of noise, spiking up and down. But if you look at the whole country, you may see a clear trend.” 

He compared the situation to the “noise” in a high-beta (high variance) individual stock’s performance compared to the more predictable variations in the stock market as a whole. The uncertainty of results of statistical analysis falls as you go up from company to battalion to brigade level.

The problem, from the standpoint of the Army’s ORSAs, is that everyone who becomes a general spent intellectually formative years at the data-noisy company command level. So many commanders who could gain from ordering data analysis are skeptical of it. For instance, a commander without much background in data analysis may look at a map of IED sites and think, “Bad place to go.” But with more sophistication, he might add, “Good place to set an ambush for the enemy…especially at such and such a time on a Friday.”

Also, commanders are crazily busy in the field. And the Army’s higher education program for field-grade and general officer levels—when they have time to work on their skills and analyze their experience—do not require exposure to sophisticated quantitative techniques. Every West Point graduate must take two years of math and one course in statistics, but that’s often forgotten 20 years later. Officers who obtained their commissions through ROTC or OCS may have much weaker backgrounds in math.

And even as quantitative sophistication becomes more important in nearly every phase of life, West Point students—like American-born college students generally—are veering away from quantitative majors. (West Point provides about 20 percent of the officer corps, with ROTC providing another 40 percent, and the Army’s Officer Candidate School the remaining 40 percent.)

As Huddleston pointed out to me, the percentage of U.S. Military Academy graduates choosing to major in math, science or engineering has fallen almost steadily over the last ten years. The numbers are significant, given that the West Point class is around 1,000 a year: from 64 percent in 1999 to a low of 46.7 percent in 2007 and back up to 55.6 percent in 2009. (I had thought the explanation might be that during the Iraq war, more cadets chose to major in Arabic and other foreign languages. This is true, but, Major Joe Sowers, a public affairs officer at West Point, notes that the increase in Arabic majors (and more generally foreign language majors) is not sufficient to account for the decrease in quantitative majors.)

But as the efforts of JIEDDO show, we have a massive and culturally fascinating advantage over our current—and probably our future—enemies. It takes certain cultural habits to abstract from individual instances to generalizations, and to criticize and break with old patterns of thought to solve new problems. We may eventually defeat IEDs, and whatever replaces them, with the strengths of our culture, not our armaments.

Watching The Ghost Writer last night, I thought about a couple of sentences that have been obsessing me for months:

“Twentieth-century America produced no major right-wing novelist... The conservative emphasis on precedent and experience...leads conservative authors to autobiography.”

This was written by an academic, Michael Kimmage, in A New Literary History of America. (Full disclosure: I’m also a contributor to the volume). Kimmage, the author of The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, is onto something interesting here, though I don’t think he has it exactly right.

There may be something innately conservative about the memoir as a literary form: It usually describes a coming to maturity or awareness. Often this is associated with a farewell to one’s wild days and an acceptance of a place in the social order. And the popularity of the memoir—arguably the dominant literary genre of the last few decades—may tell us something about the real trend of American society since Reagan. Vast—and desirable—social changes in the position of women, minorities, and gays have taken place since the 1980s, but our master narrative for a good life is still the same.

Even Obama felt obliged to produce two memoirs—in fact, it’s hard to imagine him having been elected without them. Dreams From My Father raises as many questions as it answers, but I liked the modest, serious, self-scrutinizing Obama of this book far more than the vain, disconnected man I saw on television. I also found the trajectory Obama described in his own life far more reassuring than the empty calls for “change” of his campaign.

The Ghost Writer says some interesting, if not particularly novel, things about political memoirs in the language of film. The autobiography Adam Lang (played by Pierce Brosnan) is writing with the help of the Ghost (Ewan McGregor)—or is it the other way around? —is aimed at rounding up a career, not jumpstarting one. But it is an anodyne example of the genre, filled with clichés. The young, ironic, indeed almost Bond-like Ghost sneers as he reads one sentence written by his predecessor: “The Langs are Scottish folk.”

By the end of the movie, the Ghost understands that this and other corny phrases were chosen to reveal the hidden truth of Lang’s career. Lang has been betrayed by his isolation, the isolation of great power; if he’d written the book himself, or even looked at the manuscript, this couldn’t have happened. But ultimately, the ghost speaking from the memoir seems not to matter. The form has trumped the content.

Polanski’s movie is politically even-handed about the issues of rendition and interrogation surrounding Lang, but the plot that the Ghost discovers is the stuff of the most tired lefty clichés. (If only the CIA were a fraction as competent as the film would have it!) The idea that a tiny cabal is actually running the world—whether they are “the Jews”, “the Trilateral Commission”, or “the CIA” —is especially ridiculous at a time when it is clear that no one’s span of control is very large anymore. But to some, this reductionism is comforting.

Come to think of it, that may be another reason for the popularity of the memoir: Like a conspiracy theory, it reduces a frighteningly complex reality to a single, comprehensible point of view, usually the author’s. Most writers of memoirs, political or otherwise, assume that they are the masters of their destiny. Movies, with their ability to show different, conflicting points of view on the same events, often suggest otherwise.

In the middle of the Marja offensive, General Stanley McChrystal  has turned his attention to what seems to me to be a non-problem. He just ordered commercial fast food establishments at American bases in Afghanistan to shut, along with many stores selling non-essential items.

“MWR should never be the distracter that changes the focus of the mission,” General McChrystal stated, using the military acronym for “morale, welfare and recreation”.  I’m not sure how the amount of activity I’ve seen at the half dozen fast food outlets at Kandahar Airfield (KAF) could impair readiness – much less the scene at the solitary little Subway at the Salerno Airfield in Khost.

According to Army Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall another item that’s to go is first-run film screenings. The argument is that they will “free up much-needed storage facilities” in Bagram and Kandahar to make room for additional equipment to support the surge troops.

How much space does a film reel take up? Seeing a movie in a public screening room is a communal, social experience; watching on your laptop in your bunk is not. A real screening is a harmless plus in a war zone.

I myself avoid fast food to the point of preferring to go hungry, but banning it strikes me as silly—and culturally fascinating. It’s all about a new monasticism, exemplified by the General himself, who only eats one meal a day. It’s about ideology rather than practicality. And it’s historically at odds with the culture of soldiering, which until well into the 20th century still retained the raffishness of both its aristocratic and its ruffian origins.

My guess is that this new monasticism is another way the American public has outsourced our wars: Our soldiers should be ascetics, with lots less opportunities for fun or relaxation than they used to have, while citizens at home become more and more coddled, unfit, and unwilling to defend their country.

The typical enlisted soldier in the American Army in Afghanistan doesn’t have a cushy life. He lives in a remote combat outpost—and enjoys it. But he also gets homesick. It gets old patrolling a muddy little bazaar where the most exciting thing on offer is off-brand Pakistani chips, and there is nothing like civil society: No art, culture, or sports. Maybe once a month, this 20-year-old man gets to go on a convoy to one of the bigger bases—perhaps Salerno or KAF. Why is McChrystal so keen to deprive him of the pleasure of a Whopper and shake?

I read that significant numbers of soldiers are prescribed anti-anxiety or anti-depressant meds, and weird drug abuse like inhaling canned air is apparently rife, so isn’t keeping the harmless little indulgences of life a more reasonable option?

To be fair, Hall promises improvements in gym facilities and more bandwidth for  “more affordable (perhaps even free) Internet services.”  This is a good step. While gyms at the bases in regional  headquarters are excellent, they become much less impressive as you move to more provincial capitals like Qalat or Mehtar Lam. And in a tiny, remote outpost like Nawbahar, Zabul, the gym is outdoors and consists of pretty beat up old equipment. Yet it’s in places like this that a higher level of fitness is needed. Staff officers at KAF aren’t going to be running in full battle gear across a 6,500-feet elevation plateau chasing the Taliban.

Some would go further than I in rewarding our troops. A retired Army lieutenant colonel and Vietnam vet, Charles Krohn, recently published an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing that we should bring back the Vietnam-era two-beer-a-day ration as a way of preventing binge drinking. As to readiness issues, he wrote of Vietnam in a private e-mail to me that “the issue was irrelevant when soldiers went to the field: (1) we had enough to carry and (2) field operations were life and death, and we all wanted to load the odds in our favor.”

Afghanistan can be a strange place to be deployed; in many areas, there is no shooting war, but then you drive your Humvee down the road one day and your legs are blown off. The young men and women who volunteer to serve there deserve some consolations. They aren’t to blame for the fact that the generals have not won the war—and taking away their little comforts isn’t a substitute for a strategy.

Former congressman Charlie Wilson died on February 10 at the age of 76. The colorful Texas Democrat was widely eulogized for his role in obtaining arms for the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s, culminating in the bestowal of Stinger antiaircraft missiles on the jihadists. In mid-1986, Afghan historian Amin Saikal says, the muj were able to use their new Stingers to shoot down almost one Soviet aircraft a day. Wilson was also responsible in part for the massive influx of military aid to Pakistan, our so-called ally in the war on terror.

I am sure Wilson acted in good faith at the time. And I am thankful that the Soviet Union was dismantled and that tens of millions of people have a better life as a result.

I’m just not sure the Afghans are among them.

If there was anyplace that the Soviets, and Afghanistan’s own peculiar version of communism, arguably did some good, it was Afghanistan. Simply put, they gave the country some inkling of what modernity and civil society looked like. And their secularism was a valuable antidote to the mullahs who had been showing their teeth in Afghanistan since the 1920s when King Amanullah tried to introduce progressive measures and was deposed.

It’s not as though Afghanistan would have had a long lasting Soviet regime in any case. As Saikal notes, Mikhail Gorbachev, who replaced Chernenko in March 1985, needed to end the unpopular Afghan war to gain the leverage to make other changes.

But a more gradual withdrawal, with conditions that allowed Afghan President Najibullah to govern effectively, might have been the outcome. And that might have been a good thing for Afghanistan.

The Soviets and their Afghan allies had some terrible ideas for Afghanistan, like a 1978 land redistribution bill that was poorly planned even for the genre, but also some good ones, like prohibiting the forced marriage of under-aged girls that persists today. They thought everyone should be educated—an idea that is still by no means common in Afghanistan, and one that King Amanullah had advanced in the 1920s.

Progressive currents in Afghanistan were far stronger before the jihad than they are today. To take a tiny example, middle-class Afghan girls in the bigger towns rode bicycles in the 1970s—now, it’s considered “un-Islamic.”  We have the mujahedeen that Wilson empowered to thank for all that.

It is no coincidence that Afghanistan’s north, where support for the various Communist governments was strongest, is relatively functional today, with rapid economic growth, high levels of school attendance, and an incipient civil society.

Around Mazar-i-Sharif,  some of the best infrastructure are still the 1973 Kode Barq fertilizer plant and gas works, and nearby model town, all built with Russian help, and the housing blocks near Shiberghan. Kabul’s Russian-built microrayon housing projects may look like slums to American eyes, but Afghans still consider them desirable homes. In Kabul and the north, the Soviets built playgrounds, pools, and basketball courts that are used today.

Yes, I know the Afghan Communists arrested, tortured, and murdered thousands of their presumed opponents. But they were just acting on a larger and more efficient scale than every Afghan administration of the past—not differently. There never has been a human rights tradition in Afghanistan. It’s true the Soviets imposed their rule by force, but so did every preceding ruler of Afghanistan.

Without the Stingers, the Soviet-backed Afghan government might have had a few more years to make some incremental changes in Afghan society such as increasing education levels and gender equality. Without the huge amounts of American aid, the muj parties might never have been able to turn back the clock in Afghanistan. (Much of the aid, incidentally, went to one of the very worst of the Islamists, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is still killing Afghans and Americans.)

Tantalizingly, Afghanistan might have been spared the chaos of the Rabbani government that followed—and the formation of the Taliban in reaction. Osama might never have returned to Afghanistan in May 1996; perhaps he would have been captured before he was able to plan the 9/11 attacks.

I would never have wished the Soviets on Afghanistan in the long haul. But it’s worth considering as a thought experiment that without Charlie Wilson’s well-meaning support for the Afghan muj parties, Afghanistan—and perhaps Pakistan too—would be a better place today.