Our Knowledge Problem in Afghanistan Won’t Be Solved in One Friedman Unit
Do we need to increase our efforts in Afghanistan or do we lack the sort of partner who can make counterinsurgency work? Maybe stringing things out for another Friedman Unit will resolve the matter:
“We’re going to know in the next three to six months whether he’s doing anything differently — whether he can seriously address the corruption, whether he can raise an army that ultimately can take over from us and that doesn’t lose troops as fast as we train them,” one of Mr. Obama’s senior aides said. He insisted on anonymity because of the confidentiality surrounding the Obama administration’s own debate on a new strategy, and the request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan, for upward of 44,000 more troops.
Like Spencer Ackerman I’m skeptical. What can you really tell in six months? Karzai knows we’re considering sending more support to his government. He also knows we’re concerned about corruption. So he’ll almost certainly deliver on some kind of anti-corruption measure. But will it be effective? Will it even be intended to be effective? It would be the easiest thing in the world to make a big show of curtailing abuses by one or both of the other Karzai brothers, and then ease up as soon as attention drifts elsewhere.
The good news about this is that I think the significance of creating a corruption-free Afghan central government is being overstated in the American debate. But in terms of creating one, recall that US foreign policy is always at its least-effective when it comes to manipulating the domestic politics of other countries. We have more more than Karzai. And more guns than Karzai. And better satellites than Karzai. But we don’t have a better understanding of Afghan domestic politics than Karzai. On the contrary, Karzai—like most important foreign leaders—probably understands our politics a lot better than we understand his. Karzai, and lots of key figures around him, reads English and can fire up his web browser and see what’s going on in the New York Times or Politico or whatever. What’s the highest-ranking American official who reads Dari or Pashto?
15 Responses to “Our Knowledge Problem in Afghanistan Won’t Be Solved in One Friedman Unit”
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November 2nd, 2009 at 10:51 am
Friedman sounds like a complete chump. The comic refrain about “6 months” sounds just like “YOU ARE FAR FROM BEING A BAD MAN” from The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
He has to know that he summons up scarifying mockery whenever he does it. And doesn’t care. I guess when you make a certain amount of money, shame becomes an appendage. In jettisoning shame, Friedman’s a trailblazer for the Freakanomics duo.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:51 am
The good news about this is that I think the significance of creating a corruption-free Afghan central government is being overstated in the American debate.
Come on–no government is ever entirely free of corruption, and nobody has suggested that Afghanistan meet a standard of purity existing nowhere else in the world. But if you think corruption in Afghanistan is overstated, then maybe you can give us some evidence in support?
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:59 am
It’s a common style of foreign policy planning and advising in which you advocate for a certain approach whose victory requires an impossible conjunction between the absolutely perfect functioning of institutions we well know to work imperfectly at best and the miraculous falling of all events in our favor. Seems like a good approach.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:03 am
Christopher,
Yeah, that sentence struck me as well. The goal isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) to make Afghanistan corruption-free. It should be to make them ‘only’ badly corrupt because that would be a significant, important step up.
The problem is that making even minor gains in corruption reform efforts is extremely problematic under ‘normal’ circumstances.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:07 am
But we don’t have a better understanding of Afghan domestic politics than Karzai.
I think we know enough to realize that, like many national leaders, Karzai has been forced to trade government posts for political loyalty. Except of course in his case he’s dealing with war criminals who have (or who can constitute in short order) their own personal armies.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:07 am
The good news about this is that I think the significance of creating a corruption-free Afghan central government is being overstated in the American debate.
I agree with Matt. We should push the Afghan government to be more effective. But I also think we are wasting too much time on the corruption issue. It is a good way to say something that sounds plausible–”we need to improve corruption in Afghanistan…”–about a situation that is clearly a quagmire and about which very little positive can be said. It allows the speaker to dodge other issues and seem serious.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:12 am
Trig or Treat, yup. The assumption is that corruption increases instability, but that assumption doesn’t deal with the alternative scenario, which is that a significant crackdown could have disastrous consequences for security.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:16 am
David,
I’m not sure I agree. It’s true that most of the underdeveloped world is capable of muddling through with extremely high levels of corruption. The problem is that Afghanistan appears to be among the handful of nations with dysfunctionally high levels of corruption that make governance next to impossible. Add to this the fact that perceptions are important: ISAF and the like need to increase Karzai’s legitimacy and one of the best ways to do that is to increase the perception that corruption is a target of reform. Granted, once you go down this road, you’re eventually going to need results as well
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:33 am
Trig or Treat:
I don’t entirely disagree, but I do think if the Afghan government were delivering more the perception of corruption would decrease and the govt’s legitimacy would increase. I’m all for anti-corruption measures that we think will plausibly work, but I find some people’s ideas of anti-corruption fighting naive. Not your’s btw.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:54 am
Wait, Blake Lively is one of those Dari speakers?
Shit, and she plays such a complete, utter dumbass on television. Now that’s some good acting.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:00 pm
In the ME rulers take power by force and intimidation and if made to hold elections by Western pressure they cheat. They hold that power by giving their close relatives power and authority over the state because close relatives are the only people there who are inhibited in any way from turning a coup and taking power for themselves and their kin.
Once in power, they use it to direct wealth to their personal accounts and to establish layers of police and secret service protection for their administration. Their police arrest, torture and often kill those who even hint at a desire to take power from them. We call this corruption but that just shows our vast cognitive egocentrism and naivete at work.
I agree that Karzai and his brothers do not suffer from the same myopia and that they understand us much better than we, them. But people in the ME do not consider that corruption. It is what any ME state leader must do to live another month or another year. If he succeeds at that and then improves the education system a little and adds some hospitals then he is a just and kind leader for his people. When we give him guns and money which he distributes to his brothers and family – we are not supporting corruption. We are helping the people of that country in the only way they could possibly be helped. When a naive and ignorant US president comes into office and tries to change that system – like Jimmy Carter did with Shah – we are not helping the people of that country find better lives. We are not “allowing them to lift the yokes of corruption”. We are making their lives infinitely worse.
Perhaps the greatest idiocy is when our politicians regularly arrive at the incredible conclusion that Islamist clerics who hate the West are somehow different from the rulers who the West has preferred in the past and instead derive their power from the popular approval of their people – when they claim that radical Islamists there don’t hold power in exactly the same way that the Shah held it or Mubarik holds it or the Saudi princes hold it or Hashemites hold it or Hisb’allah holds it. There is one formula for holding power in the ME and it is the same one that’s been there for millennia.
We can understand and accept this and use their own ways and traditions to encourage and support ME leaders who do not hate us and who would like to give their people some small elements of Western freedoms, education and economic prosperity (those are the great sins that al Queada says justifies their desire to destroy the West BTW) – or we can continue to delude ourselves that they are really better off under the reign of their clerics and if we don’t antagonize those clerics and if we show them how much we love them that they’ll love us back and not bomb us or Israel and maybe they’ll stop hanging homosexuals and stoning their women and maybe they’ll give us a better price on their oil too.
And even if they don’t do that and their society regresses to the middle ages and all their educated professionals are executed or move to Europe we can say that it least we didn’t “corruptly” interfere in their affairs and that makes us good progressives.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:04 pm
All of that would be true except that the stated goal in Afghanistan for years has been “democracy building.” Abandon that and 1) the GOP hypocritically jumps down your throat and 2) there doesn’t seem to be much independent justification for the war left. Very few non-neocons would support their kids dying to turn Hamid Karzai into an Afghan Saddam Hussein.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:09 pm
All of that would be true except that the stated goal in Afghanistan for years has been “democracy building.” Abandon that and 1) the GOP hypocritically jumps down your throat and 2) there doesn’t seem to be much independent justification for the war left. Very few non-neocons would support their kids dying to turn Hamid Karzai into an Afghan Saddam Hussein.
Technically, the GOP would jump down the Democrats’ throat if they opposed a complete withdrawal, had that redeployment offshore (thanks for that one, Ronnie!) occurred under Bush.
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:37 pm
[...] to hobble our ability to achieve anything useful in Afghanistan. But I do think it illustrates that manipulating Afghan politics is not likely to be America’s strong suit. Foreign politicians usually understand how to manipulate US domestic politics much better than our [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:33 pm
I was involved in a project a few years ago evaluating anti-corruption efforts in a number of Eastern European countries. We came up with some damning lessons, but one of the key findings was that every society defines corruption differently and every society knows corruption when they see it.
People are not naïve about corruption. They know if their elites are corrupt. They know if the policeman or politician down the block is corrupt. They know that this corruption has serious repercussions and it pisses them off. But all of this “knowledge” is within their social definition of corruption. Not ours.
When outsiders emphasize a particular normative definition that does not jibe with local perceptions, local people tune out the message – and eventually the messenger.
It is pretty easy to avoid this trap: ask people to define corruption and ask them (in a non-deck stacking way) about a bunch of examples. Then work with them on what they define as corruption and ignore the other stuff until later. Of course you need to be able to talk to people and, more importantly, listen to them.