Via Spencer Ackerman, Vegetius at Small Wars Journal makes the case against “hearts and minds” and inadvertently, I think, lets slip everything that’s wrong with the current COIN boom:

Hearts and Minds is a wonderful name for a teen romance novel, but I’ve always thought it to be a poor name for a counterinsurgency concept. The idea of winning the hearts and minds of the population carries the connotation that there is somehow a magic formula that will turn the population from willing puppets of the insurgency into enthusiastic supporters of the national government. The reality is that the key to defeating an insurgency is in shaping the human terrain so that the host nation can conduct governance and economic development in conditions approaching normalcy.

The bolded part strikes me as a bizarre was to think about insurgency and counterinsurgency. In an insurgency situation you’ve got a government, and you’ve got an anti-government insurgency. Those are the primary actors. If someone is going to wage a counterinsurgency that should be the government against which the insurgency is directed. Could that government get assistance from a third party? Of course. Lots of governments receive lots of kinds of assistance from other, wealthier or more powerful governments. Could the wealthier or more powerful government be the United States of America? Sure. Could the assistance include the direct deployment of military forces? I suppose it might.

But no matter what level of assistance is provided, you’ve still got a government on the one hand and a waxing or waning anti-government insurgency on the other. Not an insurgency and the U.S. Army and then some “host government” lurking in the corner.

This isn’t just a matter of semantics. There’s something kind of nuts about the amount of time and energy being spilled over the question of how or whether the U.S. government can get Hamid Karzai to do what we want. It’s as if Afghanistan is of central, overwhelming importance to the people and government of the United States but a kind of peripheral area of secondary concern to the people and government of Afghanistan. But that’s absurd—Afghanistan is on the other side of the world. There are reasonably strong moral and practical arguments for helping the Afghan government fight off the Taliban, but this is something they should be asking us to do, not something we should be asking them to do.

I wondered yesterday how serious David Obey was about the idea of paying for the Afghanistan war with higher taxes. Today the answer seems to be that he’s pretty darn serious, with Ways & Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel and Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank joining Obey, who chairs the Appropriations Committee, and also picking up Conference Chair John Larson and Jack Murtha who chairs the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. That’s a blockbuster leadership lineup and a clear signal that any House backbencher who feels like jumping on this bandwagon is safe to do so.

The details of the proposal:

Dubbed the “Share the Sacrifice Act,” the six-page bill exempts anyone who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan since the 2001 terrorist attacks as well as families who have lost an immediate relative in the fighting. But middle-class households earning between $30,000 and $150,000 would be asked to pay 1% on top of their tax liability today — a more sweeping approach than many Democrats have been willing to embrace.

That’s a bit of a gimmicky construction, but the basic principle is clear enough.

Back in October, David Obey floated the radical idea that war spending in Afghanistan should be put in a “normal” budgetary context and put in the same fiscal constraints as health reform. Today he’s taken that idea one step further and said an escalation in Afghanistan should be paid for via a “war surtax” on high-income households.

It’ll be interesting to see how far he goes with this. Does he put together a bloc of progressive legislators who say they’ll only back a tax-financed version of the war? Would any Blue Dog budget balancers join such a group?

For a while now I’ve been saying that the fastest way to end the war in Afghanistan would be to to ask General McChrystal’s staff to produce a plan to make it deficit neutral and find sixty votes in the senate for his financing plan. Today, Spencer Ackerman points out that an excellent LA Times piece by Christi Parsons and Julian E. Barnes that digs into the issue of how much going bigger in Afghanistan would cost seems to indicate that the Pentagon agrees with me. Thus, they’re fudging the numbers to make their preferred policies look cheaper than they really are:

The Pentagon cost includes higher combat wages, extra aircraft hours and other operations and maintenance costs, but omits such items as new weapons purchases — one-time costs that vary by year — and support equipment like spy satellites and anti-roadside-bomb technology.

The Pentagon also does not try to estimate costs of new bases for additional soldiers.

But in a memo early this month, obtained by The Times’ Washington bureau, the Pentagon’s own comptroller produced an estimate that broke with the customary Defense formula and did include construction and equipment.

Estimating weapons and equipment costs is clearly going to be difficult. But it’s equally clear that $0 is the wrong estimate. And as we see, the DOD has some way of doing this for internal consumption.

Meanwhile, I’d like to see Paul Krugman or other advocates of more stimulus weigh-in on whether debt-financed escalation of military effort would have a beneficial impact on the labor market situation. I think it’s deplorable that U.S. political culture tends to regard military-related appropriations as exempt from normal budgetary considerations, but it’s possible that that’s a loophole worth taking advantage of in this case. All those new weapons purchases the Pentagon doesn’t want to estimate are manufacturing jobs for someone, right? Obviously this shouldn’t the primary consideration in dictating military strategy, but I do think a comprehensive look at the macroeconomic impact of defense policy choices—both the costs and benefits of hugely expensively military undertakings—is a necessary element of the strategic consideration.

Afghanistan is a big country. So in addition to the question of how many resources should be sent to Afghanistan, there’s the question of where they should go. Recently, the tendency has been to throw additional resources at the parts of the country where things are worse. In his latest Carnegie Endowment report “Fixing a Failed Strategy in Afghanistan”, Gilles Dorronsoro argues that this would be a big mistake. The resources being contemplated, he argues, aren’t enough to win the war in the South. Sending them there would merely guarantee that we also lose the war in the North and the East, without making much progress in the South.

Instead, he prefers to adopt a more defensive posture in the South—securing main cities where the Taliban is disliked—and focus our attention on winning what he regards as the more winnable struggles in the North and East where the Taliban is making gains but isn’t deeply intertwined with local communities. I can’t really assess how true this analysis is, but he certainly seems to make a strong case. This also accords with my sense that the best case for staying in Afghanistan isn’t really scare stories about al-Qaeda but simply the fact that we have something of a moral obligation to help anti-Taliban Afghans defend themselves. That means in the first instance focusing both our troops and our reconstruction money on the places where we’re wanted.

One point here is that we now seem to be looking at the consequences of a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to Afghanistan. Maybe if we’d just been spending $30-$40 billion a year from the get-go the situation never would have deteriorated to the point where we’re looking at appropriations of $170 billion and rising. Another point is that it’s a little bit odd that the big escalation debate is happening now, since any further increases in expenditures will probably be smaller than the increase that already happened back when nobody was paying attention.

A third, loosely related point, is that the question “how much are we spending on the war in Afghanistan” is a surprisingly difficult research question. You would think this would be the kind of thing that hardly requires a CRS report, but there’s no more straightforward way for members of congress to figure out what they’ve appropriated than to have someone research it. And it’s full of sentences like “In a recent report, GAO raised questions about whether DOD war cost reporting accurately captures the split between Afghanistan and Iraq” and so forth. The whole issue is surprisingly murky.

(DOD Photo)

There was some kind of effort underway in the military bureaucracy to portray sending an additional 40,000 or so troops to Afghanistan as a “middle” option, but Spencer Ackerman points out that something in the 30-40k range is at the very limits of what’s logistically feasible:

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002. [...]

Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well.

I don’t really think we need to worry too much about the possible lack of a contingency force to fight off an invasion from Mexico. But I think this underscores the fact that even though it’s annoying, from the point of view of a political observer in Washington, to see the internal administration Afghanistan debate drag on like this there’s no particular practical urgency to making a decision. The U.S. presence in Afghanistan has been scaled-up substantially in the two years, and further increases would need to be implemented over time.

That said, the specific method of trying to do this by talking to male religious leaders about birth control seems to me to be at odds with most of what we know about this subject. As a recent Economist story on fertility trends emphasized, women in the developing world generally have more children than they want to. When we see falling fertility rates, it’s normally a result of women being empowered to make more decisions about their own lives:

A surprising amount is known about how many children parents want, thanks to a series of surveys by the Demographic and Health Surveys programme. The picture it paints is of huge numbers of unplanned pregnancies. In Brazil, for example, the wanted fertility rate in 1996 (the most recent year available) was 1.8; the actual fertility rate then was 2.5. In India the wanted rate in 2006 was 1.9, the actual one, 2.7. In Ghana the figures for 2003 were 3.7 and 4.4. The rule seems to be that women want one child fewer than they are having (except in some rich countries, where they say they want more). [...]

That points to another big reason why fertility is falling: the spread of female education. Go back to the countries where fertility has fallen fastest and you will find remarkable literacy programmes. As early as 1962, for example, 80% of young women in Mauritius could read and write. In Iran in 1976, only 10% of rural women aged 20 to 24 were literate. Now that share is 91%, and Iran not only has one of the best-educated populations in the Middle East but the one in which men and women have the most equal educational chances. Iranian girls aged 15-19 have roughly the same number of years of schooling as boys do. Educated women are more likely to go out to work, more likely to demand contraception and less likely to want large families.

Of course, the case of China and the one-child policy does show that massive coercion works as well. But the problem in Afghanistan is almost certainly the view that how many children a woman should have is a decision that should be made by men. Just talking to men about making that decision in a different way is unlikely to address the issue. Of course, sending girls to school is a controversial issue in Afghanistan, but if the Islamic Republic of Iran was capable of overseeing a massive increase in women’s educational opportunities, then such things can’t be inconsistent with culturally conservative Islamism in any particularly straightforward sense.

Like most progressives, I find it extremely annoying that Beltway conventional wisdom exempts military-related expenditures from the normal rules of budgeting.

At the same time, in these days of recession it does occur to me that to some extent this is a two-way street. I’ve been inclined to complain that most of these more ambitious visions for Afghanistan, for example, don’t seem to meet any kind of reasonable cost-benefit test. After all, they could use better security, a Provincial Reconstruction Team, and a “civilian surge” in Newark, New Jersey. But if you take the hypocrisy of the political system as a given, this looks a bit different. At the end of the day, war expenditures don’t trade off with domestic expenditures, they trade off with increased levels of public debt. Under normal circumstances, that still means that military operations should be (though they generally aren’t) subject to real cost-benefit scrutiny, since higher debt levels has real social costs. But the basic progressive analysis of the current economic situation is that higher short-term debt levels are socially beneficial, right? The story is that World War II—at least from the perspective of the American economy—wasn’t a huge economically wasteful use of resources. Sure it was more wasteful (in economic terms, obviously the “beating Hitler” benefits were quite real) than some other possible projects, but it still on balance was helpful in ending the Depression.

ADDITION! Just after I finished writing this post, but right before I put it up, I saw Christopher Drew’s NYT story “High Costs Weigh on Troop Debate for Afghan War”:

While President Obama’s decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan is primarily a military one, it also has substantial budget implications that are adding pressure to limit the commitment, senior administration officials say. [...] Senior members of the House Appropriations Committee have already expressed reservations about the potential long-term costs of expanding the war in Afghanistan. And Mr. Obama could find it difficult to win approval for the additional spending in Congress, where he would have to depend on Republicans to counter defections from liberal Democrats.

I think that to an extent invalidates my musings above. I assume the reference to “senior members of the House Appropriations Committee” refers primarily to David Obey who’s expressed concerns about this.

It’s worth noting that the question, as worded, specifically mentions that a 40,000 troop increase is what “the U.S. commanding general there has recommended” and that increasing troop levels still doesn’t secure majority support. Especially complicating the situation is the fact that the median position—keep things the way they are—actually has very little support. An overwhelming majority either want fewer troops or many more troops.

Meanwhile, support for escalating is heavily concentrated among self-IDed Republicans who are unlikely to back Obama’s re-election no matter what happens:

This strikes me as a notably high level of ideological polarization for a foreign policy issue that hasn’t emerged as a high-profile partisan fight.

When gaming this out politically, however, as is often the case I think it’s worth being somewhat skeptical about the significance of these kind of questions. If the military is really solidly behind the idea of sending more troops, the real political issue is how damaging would a prolonged fight with the military be? Or how likely would such a fight be to emerged? One assumes that doing something that prompts General McChrystal to resign would be a big political problem. At the same time, that would be an extreme step for McChrystal to take.

The basic strategy reads pretty clearly off the map. It’s easier to hold cities than the countryside. So you try to put together a string of urbanized areas that leaves you in control of the main ring road through the country, plus via Jalalabad and Kunduz some key routes to the border. But the Soviets couldn’t quite make this work, and some serious portions of the road network remained out of their grasp.

Before being appointed U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry was a Lieutenant-General in the Army. That gives him perhaps an unusual sense of his own ability to make recommendations about military policy in the country. Recommendations that Greg Jaffe, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung are at odds with the idea of sending more troops:

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until President Hamid Karzai’s government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban’s rise, senior U.S. officials said.

Spencer Ackerman reports that there’s considerable anger at the way this got leaked to the Washington Post but at the same time Eikenberry’s concerns are being taken seriously and the process seems to have been a bit derailed:

Despite the dissatisfaction with Eikenberry’s apparent leak, according to the staffer, Obama “demanded” an exit strategy for the war “after Eikenberry’s cables.” Certain members of the NSC dialed into the conference from the Fort Bragg, N.C. headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command, which is playing a large if underreported role in shaping Afghanistan strategy. It would appear that much remains fluid in the administration’s strategy debates.

Helene Cooper has a good piece in the New York Times on the related issue that unless the United States is prepared to withdraw under some circumstances we have little practical leverage over Hamid Karzai. I think you can make the case that the alleged need to have Karzai clean up his act is overstated, but I think it’s true that if it’s genuinely necessary to get him to clean up his act then an unconditional commitment to pour more resources into the country is a poor way to produce that outcome.

Joshua Partlow for The Washington Post reports on various indications that Mullah Omar and his Taliban are looking to distance themselves from al-Qaeda:

The shift appears to reflect Omar’s growing confidence that his group can operate on its own, without al-Qaeda as its patron. “The Taliban have got the expertise, they have got the resources, they have got the momentum,” said Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N. Taliban and al-Qaeda Monitoring Team. [...]

“We assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others,” Omar said in a written statement in September.

The messages from the Taliban leadership since the spring amount to something of a “revolution,” said Wahid Mujda, a political analyst who was a Foreign Ministry official under the Taliban government. “Al-Qaeda’s path is now different from the Taliban’s path, and they are growing more separated.”

Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman says that Leah Farrell, former al-Qaeda specialist for the Australian National Police, has a blog that’s “attracting ever-more attention in U.S. defense circles.” That said, I think we can predict here and now that she’s going to stop attracting attention in U.S. defense circles since she thinks we should withdraw from Afghanistan and that al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. forces are a deliberate ploy “forcing a surge in American troop numbers” and creating a situation in which “Mullah Omar’s legitimacy would be jeopardised were he to publicly disassociate from al-Qa’ida and guarantee he would not again provide it sanctuary.”

She’ll stop attracting attention because, as Spencer writes in that very same post, there’s absolutely no constituency for withdrawal of American forces inside the Obama administration. Instead, the debate among civilians runs from “we should stick with the increase in troop levels that Obama has already executed” to “we should engage in large additional increases in troop levels.” And within the uniformed military it seems that everyone wants large additional increases.

I think we really saw this movie in Iraq already. Clearly, there’s a lot of uncertainty endemic to thinking about this kind of issue. What’s not uncertain, however, is that as long as U.S. troops remain in theater, we haven’t “lost”. It’s also clear that you don’t achieve “victory” by withdrawing under fire. Consequently, those considerations will predominate. As I’ve said before, it would be very different if military planners were expected to come up with deficit neutral proposals capable of attracting 60 votes in the Senate—that would end the war in the blink of an eye.

Spencer Ackerman’s reporting on the role being played by Vice Admirals WilliamMcRaven and Robert Harward in the Afghanistan policy debate explains why Joe Biden wound up losing the argument over whether we should try to get by in Afghanistan with a “light footprint” and a narrow focus on counterterrorism. Basically, these are the guys who hold key special forces posts and would be largely responsible commanding counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. And they want to see such efforts embedded within a larger counterinsurgency strategy. Thus you end up with a fairly united front of relevant military players in favor of COIN approach and a substantial additional deployment of forces.

One thing I think this highlights is the limits of conducting this kind of debate more-or-less entirely within the four walls of the military. After all, why wouldn’t the special ops guys want to see as much resources as possible put into Afghanistan? At the end of the day to get a real debate going about the wisdom of going big you need someone in the room who represents a competing claim on the resources at hand. Does it make sense to sustain tens of thousands of soldiers in Afghanistan at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year in order to protect America from a group with “several hundred to several thousand members” and no heavy weapons? Well, I think that depends on what alternative uses of the resources are available. If the meeting also includes someone who needs to worry about the budget deficit, or about health care, or about child nutrition, or preventing bridges from collapsing then maybe this doesn’t look like such a great deal. But if it’s a meeting of uniformed military officers to talk about what’s the best way to handle the situation in Afghanistan, then even the guys who do counterterrorism still see the benefits of a broader approach.

Atta Mohammad Noor, governor of Balkh province in Northern Afghanistan says:

“Karzai is a thief of people’s votes. Democracy has been buried in Afghanistan. He’s not a lawful president,” Mr. Atta said in an interview in his vast rococo-styled office, as turbaned supplicants lined up to petition for his help in resolving court cases and disputes with local authorities.

At the moment, the mainstays of the Karzai government in Afghanistan are the non-Pashto areas of Afghanistan where there’s a great deal of popular hostility to the Taliban. But its precisely for that reason that Karzai, a Pashto, was picked to lead Afghanistan. The view was that such a person would have the most legitimacy in the most contested areas. The risk with what’s now happened in the election is that Karzai will either start to lose his Tajik support and his government will become untenable, or else that to prevent that from happening the government will need to shift all the way in the direction of him basically being a frontman for a Fahim/Dostum Tajik/Uzbek warlord coalition that has no support in Pashto areas.

To a great degree, this is what I find to be the most troubling thing about the counterinsurgency approach to Afghanistan. It strikes me as something that’s driven at least as much by a desire to win an argument in Washington, DC about the workability of counterinsurgency as by a thoughtful analysis about the costs and benefits of adopting such an approach. Precisely because of COIN’s ascendant-but-still-uncertain status in the American military toolkit, it’s very difficult for a COIN advocate to say “eh? this would be costly at best and it’s not clear it’s worthwhile.” Ultimately, I’d say I’m more sympathetic to the COIN crowd’s view of the world than to enthusiasts about air power or the need to prepare for naval battles with China. But these kind of intra-military disputes inevitably wind up creating a somewhat warped view of what’s going on in the world.

With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that. Which makes one wonder: where are all the economists, wringing their hands over cost-benefit analyses of these defense expenditures? Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense? Have a look at this if you’re unsure.

And while the gains to new investments in infrastructure (and not just in transportation) would be large, it isn’t as though we lack critical needs. What was the cost, human and economic, of the I-35 bridge collapse? Of the Metro crash and resulting limitations on service? Of the Bay Bridge shutdown? And of course, investments in infrastructure constitute positive contributions to the economy, which ultimately strengthen our ability to direct resources toward defense. Aimless defense spending, on the other hand, may well make us poorer and less secure.

Ryan’s link was to my post comparing America’s 2007 defense spending to other countries:

Under the circumstances, I think it’s clear that the marginal dollar spent on defense has a very low value. And of course though Ryan’s thought-experiment is a fun exercise, you couldn’t build out a national HSR network in one year no much how much money you spent. So the real point would be something like if we took 10 percent of the defense budget and re-allocated that to infrastructure, we could have a national HSR network in ten years. And we’d still be spending over triple what our nearest rival spends.

Something worth noting is that for a hegemonic power suffering from slow-but-steady (but very slow) relative decline, wasting money on national security expenditures actually erodes our hegemony. Meaningful U.S.-Chinese security competition is a generation or two away. By that time, money that was spent in 2009 on fighter planes or nuclear submarines or transportation infrastructure in Afghanistan isn’t going to be doing us any good. By contrast, spending money on preschool in 2009 does improve the U.S.-Chinese balance of power in 2049—investment in early childhood education pays enormous dividends, but it takes a long time to turn tiny babies into productive adults. And transportation is just the same. The construction of heavy rail mass transit in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Washington was extremely expensive but has paid consistent dividends for decades and if properly maintained will continue to do so forever.

I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the quote, but someone told me he heard a Chinese official tell him “over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China.” I don’t really think we should view that contrast in a paranoid light, but if you do want to take a paranoid view of the American national security situation it makes a lot more sense to worry about that than to worry that someone in a cave might build a bomb.

But according to an official at the State Department’s Bureau of Human Resources, the United States has turned out a total of only 18 Foreign Service officers who can speak Pashto, and only two of them are now serving in Afghanistan – both apparently in Kabul.

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California trains roughly 30 to 40 military personnel in Pashto each year, according to media relations officer Brian Lamar, most of whom are enlisted men in military intelligence.

I don’t think this necessarily needs 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 leaders understand how to manipulate their domestic politics. We have a lot of strengths as a nation, but that sort of thing is not one of them.

The leading contender that’s been suggested to me is Puneet Talwar, who does Iran-Iraq issues at the NSC and I’m led to believe knows Persian which (going under the name Dari) is used as a lingua franca in Afghanistan. But he works at a different desk. Spencer thinks Vikram Singh, who works for Holbrooke, may be the person I’m looking for.

At any rate, Americans are famously poorly endowed with foreign language ability, and the issue becomes especially acute as our national security policy becomes more-and-more focused on places like Afghanistan and Somalia rather than France and Germany.

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?