This is Not an Achievable Metric

BruceR, responding to a question about Afghan army training from Matt Yglesias:

Building anew is harder than renovating. In Afghanistan as in Iraq we really are doing our best to junk the old system, recognizing correctly that it was part of the problem in the first place. Building another Afghan army like all other previous Afghan armies, one that splits on ethnic lines, that oppresses the people it’s supposed to protect, that can’t fight its own insurgencies, would be entirely pointless. So our ambitions have to be rather large here. There are lots of old soldiers in the Afghan senior leadership. At least twice I have been present when one of them was talked out of what they saw as the correct response to insurgents in a village: that being to shell the village with howitzers. Principles of counterinsurgency and effects-based operations are things we’re struggling with, having already figured out industrial total war… they don’t have any secret knowledge that allows them to jump that progression in military capability.

I don’t think that this represents a sensible way to approach the construction of an Afghan Army. In particular, I think that this vision depends on some serious misunderstandings of the relationship between state, society, and military organization. My objections:

• Detachment from society: Military organizations can, to some degree, be detached from the societies that support them, but the vision of an Afghan Army that doesn’t split along ethnic lines is simply implausible. The Afghan Army will be made up of Afghans; the expectation that a national or organizational identity could replace tribal and ethnic identities is not reasonable within a conventional time frame. Moreover, the effort to create an organization distinct from society creates its own problems. Organizations which have strong, distinct identities that make them less susceptible to societal pressures can also be harder for civilian political authorities to control.
• Building Anew IS Harder, but there are tradeoffs: It’s true enough that building an Army from scratch is an exceptionally difficult task. Most military organizations have precursors, even in revolutionary situations. The Bundeswehr and the JSDF both included veterans of WWII service, albeit in much different organizational configurations. At the same time, building anew means that you can break some institutional bad habits, get rid of dead wood, and pursue appropriate organizational structures. While there was never any possibility of disbanding the Red Army, I don’t doubt that current Russian military reformers sometimes wish that the entire organization could have been torn down and rebuilt from scratch. I think that the disbanding of the Iraqi Army was a mistake, but I can understand why Bremer thought that it would be a good idea; the new army was likely to have much different missions than the old, and in any case the old army wasn’t a strong performer. If it hadn’t been for the pesky details of throwing thousands of armed, unemployed young men on the streets of Iraq…
• “Oppressing the people” is what an army does: It is a peculiar conceit of modern Westerners that we don’t think of our armies as the core violent capability of the state. Historically, armies have served a “protection” function, in that they have geared much of their effort toward potential foreign enemies. However, armies also fulfill the critical function of maintaining the authority of the state over its own people. We can forget this in the United States and Europe because of successful state building and identity creation, and also because we have an overlapping network of paramilitary organizations that perform the most basic “maintenance of order” functions. A successful Afghan army, from a US perspective, is one that can perform these maintenance of order functions with the least amount of bloodshed. In a counter-insurgency situation when even a relatively small proportion of the populations supports the insurgents (and I think this applies to Afghanistan), protecting some people involves “oppressing” others. For example, suppressing the opium trade will involve a great deal of activity that looks a lot like conventional military repression. Furthermore, there’s a category error; armies don’t oppress/manage populations for their health, but rather because they are directed so by political authorities. Which leads to…
• There is a confusion of the military and the political: Bruce’s argument assumes that a political settlement exists, and that this political settlement can be secured through the organizational constellation of the national army. The idea that a national army can avoid ethnic rifts assumes that major ethnic and religious groups have reached political accomodation; otherwise, the national army simply serves to the de facto advantage of whatever ethnic groups hold power. The idea that an army can be built that will not oppress the people assumes either that the political authorities who control the army are uninterested in political oppression, or that the army will refuse civilian orders to engage in repressive activities. Military organizations can be infused with certain conceptions of professionalism, and can be constructed such that they support a particular vision of the political order. There’s a tradeoff, however; an organization that focuses on subordination to civilian authority does not necessarily perform well as a guarantor of the political order. It’s not quite either/or, but armies that act as the guarantor of political order often find it necessary to disobey or remove “disorderly” civilian leadership.

What you can build, I think, is an Army with certain skills, including skills associated with the kind of counter-insurgency that Western democracies practice. You can hope to produce organizational allegiance, and a vision of military professionalism that includes subordination to civilian authority. You cannot, however, detach an organization wholly from the society that supports it. More importantly, it’s usually a bad idea to rely on a military organization to enforce a particular political settlement. To some limited extent this model has worked in Turkey, but that’s a unusual case, and exposes the limitations as well as the virtues of the model.

All that said, I think that construction of an Afghan Army that is capable of maintaining order and preventing Taliban territorial control is possible. The Taliban have no more claim on “authentic” Afghan nationalism than the central government does; even as the popularity of the Kabul government has declined, it remains significantly higher than that of the Taliban. Moreover, the Taliban is, like the Kabul government, a foreign creation, alien to many Afghan traditions and hostile to many Afghan ethnic and religious groups. The point, however, is to concentrate of what is institutionally achievable, which in this case does not involve creating a Huntington-esque ideal type military organization. I also think that this point (highlighted in Matt’s second post on the subject) may well be correct; the Afghan Army that exists today may already be capable of preventing large scale Taliban control of Afghan territory, or at least of helping to enforce a favorable political settlement with assorted Taliban groups.