How can we snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in Afghanistan? There's one solution that has attracted analysts of all stripes: a "civilian surge," where development and political advisers working for (or contracted by) the State department and the U.S. Agency for International Development flood the country and turn the tide against the insurgents.
The logic, at least, is sound: It takes more than military success to defeat insurgents. Insurgency grows where a corrupt and weak government does not provide security, justice, and opportunity. Unless these underlying problems are resolved, the military can kill insurgents forever, and more will emerge. Insurgency is a symptom of deeper ills. The rub is that these deeper ills are not military, but political, economic, and social--things that armed forces are not prepared to fix.
The Obama administration certainly understands this. In July 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama said, "We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded." Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has long trumpeted the need for more civilian capacity for counterinsurgency and stabilization. In a November 2007 lecture at Kansas State University--a year after taking over the Pentagon--he said:
One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win: Economic development, institution-building and the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation good governance, providing basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic communications, and more--these, along with security, are essential ingredients for long-term success … The Department of Defense has taken on many of these burdens that might have been assumed by civilian agencies in the past … But it is no replacement for the real thing--civilian involvement and expertise.
No one welcomes this more than the military. In the absence of civilian capacity, soldiers end up managing public services like trash collection, or trying to teach democracy and good governance. At a major conference on irregular conflicts last month, I listened as a decorated Marine colonel heading for command in Afghanistan talked of how that conflict would unfold when the civilian surge was in place. As a Pentagon official heard this, he told me, "The military is looking to off-load nation building; they are so desperate to do that--and so eager to enshrine the lessons from the Iraq counterinsurgency--that they have convinced themselves of the necessity and plausibility of a civilian surge."
There is consensus on the problem and general agreement on the solution, but absolutely no sense of how to make it happen. There is little chance that the United States will mobilize enough civilian capability to re-engineer backward states and keep it in the field during a protracted insurgency. It is, as the Pentagon official told me, "a pipe dream."
