The Backbone's Connected to the ... What?

Six days ago, I suggested that President Karzai's ability to connect with the Afghan people -- a compassion and charisma evidenced in his visits with army casualties and police cadets -- could be an important source of the government's public rehabilitation. After the government's reaction to allegations of civilian casualties in Konar Province, it is clear that another important source must be political backbone.

Among the early reports of the incident, the only one that touched on the true significance of the government's reaction was the New York Times. The others played a game of follow-the-bouncing demagogue.

The first reports by Afghan radio, TV and print outlets on Sunday paired statements from local officials that 10 "militants" were killed with Taliban propaganda claims that said 10 members of the coalition force were killed (although not before the coalition apparently had managed to kill an unspecified number of civilians with an air strike that, according to all other sources, never occurred). After representatives from Konar and other eastern provinces walked out of a parliamentary session in protest of alleged civilian deaths, President Karzai announced an investigation into the death of 10 "civilians," including 8 "students" or "schoolchildren" (depending on the translation). In the Western reports that followed the President's announcement (including the inevitable burial procession on Al Jazeera), the police chief and governor of Konar -- early proponents of the 10 "militants" line -- reversed themselves, although other Afghan officials insisted that the casualties were militants.

Of course, public officials have the right to change their minds, and "civilian" casualties in counterinsurgency operations are notoriously hard to categorize. In the end, every insurgent is someone's angelic son or neighbor. But if the Western reaction to this ambiguity is obsessed with procedural detail ("we cannot comment until we investigate"), the Afghan reaction -- at least of late -- is obsessed with political denunciation ("we feel the foreigners have done a horrible thing, so we must investigate"). This is not a good foundation for a partnership.

No one should envy President Karzai's position or belittle his instinct for compromise, but political opportunism is virtue that falls easily into vice. ISAF forces have made mistakes that have earned them the presumption of guilt in some quarters, but the Afghan government cannot be one of those quarters. Unless those supporting the allegations of civilian casualties in this case possess more evidence than has surfaced to date, government officials seem to be pushing an anti-coalition line to curry short-term favor with local interests that ultimately seek their demise. That seems unwise. Leaders know when not to be led.

Christmas in Kabul

Every morning while I'm shaving, there's a ritual sideways glance and a muttered "Good morning" to the other NATO officers shuffling up to the sinks in our latrine. This morning, the guy beside me turned to look me in the eye and boomed, in heavily accented English, "No 'good morning.' Merry Christmas!"

Well, yes and no. The military certainly does its best to make holidays away from home special. Dinner last night and lunch today was like a supermarket ad for Christmas: a long table of decoratively arranged fruit, another of assorted breads, carved meats, pies served up with generous dollops of whipped cream. Whitney Houston glissandoed her way through "Do You Hear What I Hear?" from speakers everywhere. The gym hosted an oxymoronic 5K fun run at 8:30 a.m., which featured lots of Santa hats. Smiles and jokes were more frequent, and most of them weren't forced.

But still. Last night, I talked to my seven-year-old son. He launched into an excited description of everything he'd been doing with the extra three days off from school that the recent snowstorm had given him. Then he remembered why I was calling. "I miss you, Daddy," he said. "I won't like Christmas that much without you." As tough as the rest of that conversation was with him, my daughter and my wife, they will probably have me home for Christmas next year. Other wives, husbands, sons, daughters, mothers and fathers won't be so fortunate.

Those of us working in Afghanistan have disembodied relationships with our loved ones -- the stuff of phone, email and Skype -- but there are high times and low times when we can feel their faith and support. Because of our parents, we know what the world is, that goodness grows in the soil of difficult and sometimes dangerous things. Because of our children, we have confidence in what the world can become, if enough of us will make the choice to do those things. We fight because we live in a world where we have to. With care and luck, we rush home to the world we've created because we want to. It's not always easy to live with these contradictions, but even on a Christmas far away from home it's tougher to think of a better way to live.

Santa is tougher than IEDs

Local Boy Makes Good

Observing President Karzai's visit to wounded Afghan soldiers and the national police's training center in Kabul today, I was reminded of a passage in Bing West's The Village, the story of a small group of Marines who lived and fought among the people in a group of villages along the Tra Bong River in Vietnam.

In the scene, the Marines are denounced by a visiting group of South Vietnamese university students, who cite Martin Luther King and Senator James Fulbright's opposition to the war, as well as General Westmoreland's controversial support of Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky. One of the Marines responds:

Look...you want to know what we're doing here? Ask Suong. Ask Khoi. Ask anyone. Ask the [Viet Cong]. We're here to fight VC. We're here to help people who seem to be friends of yours. If you don't like what I've done here, or what my men are doing, O.K., let's have it. But don't yell at me about General Westmoreland or Senator Fulbright. My job is in this village. I'm not a general, and I'm not a politician.

The point of this passage is that great men and movements are what the newspapers and the history books (and the intelligentsia who read both) care about the most, but ultimately the politics of counterinsurgency are local.

Unlike the agitated Marine in West's book, President Karzai is a politician -- one who has drawn the wrath of the commentariat for the questionable circumstances of his re-election, the rampant cronyism of his government, and the shady-to-deadly doings of his family and political appointees. Although it's fashionable to chatter disapprovingly beside the graveside of Afghan political leadership, the President still could manage a resurrection, in part by adopting and fostering a local approach.

Today, President Karzai left his palace. He talked to men who have made enormous sacrifices in defense of Afghanistan, and those who are about to. He shook their hands -- every hand, in fact. He consoled them, amused them, and inspired them. Even after the armored convoys had rolled away, a lot of Afghans kept talking with tears and smiles about what it meant to meet their President.

Whether Karzai's sins have been venal or the price of what little stability Afghanistan has managed so far, they clearly have alienated many would-be successors of King and Fulbright. What matters most to the future of Afghanistan, though, is not the moral approval of the West but the connection of the President, his ministers, and government officials at every level to the people. By continuing to set the example he set today, President Karzai makes it just a little more likely that when the international community asks what he's doing here, he can answer "Ask Farshad. Ask Zarmina. Ask anyone."

Smoke 'Em If You've Got 'Em (Bad Guys, That Is)

I put off reading Noah Shachtman 's recent story for Wired, "How the Afghanistan Air War Got Stuck in the Sky" (now rewritten for today's New York Post), because I suspected that as an Airman in Afghanistan it would pull me in contradictory directions. I was right, but if you want insight into how our troops wrestle with the idea of using lethal force you should read the piece. Sean Naylor's recent Army Times article on the trials of a Stryker Brigade in the Arghandab River Valley is another important variation on this theme.

Both articles, however, perpetuate a false dichotomy common to the debate over General McChrystal's tactical directive. Commentators tend to contrast what they see as the ISAF Commander's Afghan-hugging, nation-building counterinsurgency agenda with the proud American tradition of being able to create smoking holes in the ground where our enemies once stood.

In reality, General McChrystal's directive does not stand in opposition to killing the enemy. The rules don't deny soldiers the lethal force necessary for self-defense. Targeted special operations against insurgent networks are up. For better and worse, contact between friendly forces and insurgents have and will increase as Coalition and Afghan forces push to establish their control of contested areas. In the short term, Afghanistan is getting more violent in key areas under the current strategy, but for the right reason. Coalition forces are cutting a metastasizing insurgency out of the body of the Afghan public, providing time and space for Afghanistan to develop security forces, local governance and other ways to fight possible remissions.

Yes, the directive does seek restraint and precision in the use of violence to limit the kind of popular anger that feeds the insurgency. But such constraints are a common feature of most modern wars, and unlike other conflicts fought in the past four decades the constraints in Afghanistan have the virtue of being enforced primarily through the judgment of local commanders.

What we see in Schatchman and Naylor's articles, then, is not so much the tension between commander's intent and the need to apply violence as it is the tension between commander's intent and the ability of subordinates to translate that guidance in their daily operations. Schatchman's sources seem to think that counterinsurgency means no (or at least insufficient) air or artillery support. The commanders criticized by Naylor seem to think that protecting the population roughly equates to killing the enemy that threatens them. Both positions find some support in the language and experience of COIN, but not enough to be valid interpretations of the current strategy.

Although they arrive at different conclusion, Schatchman and Naylor both address the most common question about the tactical directive: whether it is appropriate to handcuff (to use the critics' formulation) our troops. A better question in the months ahead is whether -- in the way ISAF communicates and applies COIN guidance -- our troops are doing too little or too much to handcuff themselves.

Contracting Expectations

It is perhaps no coincidence that contracting scandals in Afghanistan have emerged during the holiday season. At least since 1843 (the year Charles Dicken published A Christmas Carol), the holidays are the time when we can most clearly compare and contrast the material and moral forces of Western civilization, one Band-Aid music video at a time. Likewise, military contracting is a subject that tends to accentuate the sometimes productive and sometimes destructive tension between commerce and camaraderie in war. We want Scrooge and military contractors to do the Lord's work with the Devil's lucre, but up until the end it remains a close-run thing.

I don't know if international contractors are paying protection money directly or indirectly to the Taliban (the subject of the latest investigation) in addition to the cases of graft that surface every few months. What I do know is that contracting an operational function cheapens it with respect to the honor and sacrifice inherent in military service. This is not the same thing as saying that contractors lack personal integrity or courage. On the contrary, many of them are former military members and equal the personal integrity and courage displayed by the finest military forces. My point is merely that putting the material incentive for service in a conflict zone on the surface, as contracting does, facilitates misunderstanding of the motives behind the money. The recent, rampant rumors in Pakistan regarding Blackwater/Xe are a case in point.

We're probably past the point where an all-volunteer force and casualty-averse population with global national security interests can do without contracting. But we can do a better job of minimizing our contract requirements, exercising effective oversight and integrating military forces and contractors in a way that maintains high standards of mission performance and moral perspective. The strategy behind the surge in Afghanistan is that the short-term size of the force is important, but long-term success rests in what that force does and how it is perceived by the Afghan people. Contract operations are an important part of that calculus that cannot be forgotten.

Returning to Normal

They taught us in little officers' school not to make excuses, so I won't attempt to explain away the past month of bloglessness.

My writing hiatus -- prompted by General McChrystal's long-awaited (and thus inevitably anticlimatic) Congressional testimony -- has given me some opportunity to be a little less reflexive about the latest media obsessions vis-a-vis Afghanistan and a little more reflective on the communication environment for Afghanistan policy as a whole.

It may be true, as peace activist Jo An Gaines argued in a recent op-ed, that "no one is representing peace in the way McChrystal represents war." That's a debate on the relative power and pragmatism of America's defense and diplomacy establishments and the interests supporting them that's best reserved for another time. What I observed over the past few weeks, though, is that no one is representing the war particularly well, either.

It isn't so much that substantive discussions aren't out there. General McChrystal's recent appearances with Christiane Amanpour and Charlie Rose, for example, were fairly meaty, even without artificially lowering the bar for television. Instead, what's worrying is that substance is crowded out by ideology and trivia. With the possible exceptions of 60 Minutes and NPR, can we imagine a McChrystal interview on an American news program reaching several million people that wouldn't devolve into partisan or populist banalities? How can we expect policymakers to care much about tough policy choices in Afghanistan when the health care debate or the exploding hot mess of Tiger Woods is so much more attractive to constituents, or at least the information sources that ostensibly serve them?

To be clear, this isn't a case of exclusively American ignorance. A recent Der Spiegel review of German coverage of the ongoing Kunduz bombing scandal, for example, demonstrates that the political drama of "who knew what when" is a far more attractive storyline than the central issue of whether German pacifism, rooted in the legacy of the 20th Century, is prepared to come to terms with the kinds of conflicts Western military forces will face in the 21st. And don't even get me started on what otherwise rational, intelligent Afghan and Pakistani journalists choose to peddle to their audiences. Too few people of any nationality are getting good information about the war in Afghanistan.

In this sense, Afghanistan is a postmodern war. Discussion doesn't lead to the construction of a political reality, good or bad, as much as it leads to more discussion that further deconstructs that reality, despite some of the most unambiguous political and military rhetoric that we've seen in decades. McChrystal's assessment begets the leak-ridden U.S. strategy review, which begets President Obama's West Point address, which begets the further parsing of the strategy and associated timelines, and so on.

Afghanistan thus becomes a cipher which can be decoded to represent anyone's hopes or fears. The conflict is about nation building, or the aversion to nation building. It is about a violent, militarized, imperial foreign policy, or about undue deference to political, diplomatic and moral niceties. Among these and many other contradictions that characterize the Afghanistan debate, the most relevant may be the one that generated the only hint of controversy during General McChrystal's testimony: is it reasonable to predict victory?

The answer, of course, depends on a definition of victory in Afghanistan, which itself is probably best defined as re-establishing norms of security, governance and (to a lesser extent) development within the country. But in true postmodern fashion, the definition of those norms are not absolute but competitive. Is Kandahar secure if it looks like Kabul, Cairo or Kansas City? How far can or should President Karzai carry anti-corruption reforms? What degree of freedom of movement, rule of law, women's rights or dozens of other indicators of a stable society are good enough for Afghanistan?

Although it was maligned at the time, Richard Holbrooke's invocation of Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography to describe success in Afghanistan ("We'll know it when we see it.") is about right. More precisely, we'll know it when we know the Afghans see it. There are many indications that with a short, strong push from Coalition nations, Afghans are ready to see a practical solution to ending 30 years of conflict: a rejection of the most violent brands of extremism, reconciliation with insurgents, and stable political accommodations. Victory in those terms, viewed from an Afghan perspective, could be in sight within the next 12 to 18 months.

What remains to be seen is whether our efforts to write our conflicted selves into the Afghan narrative -- or our frustration at our inability to do so -- will arrest the potentially decisive momentum gained by the first focused international effort in Afghanistan since 2002. For the sake of the Afghan people and the citizens of 44 nations who have invested blood and treasure in securing the region, let's hope that good enough for Afghans is good enough for us.