All the recent Afghanistan-centric talk has gotten me thinking: why haven't we won this war yet? Seriously - the fact that its been nearly a decade and we still haven't managed to install a credible, self supporting government is almost as embarrassing a loss for America as Team USA's underwhelming performance against Ghana in their first and only game in the knockout round. Like all tragedies, this one in the middle east begs the question: why? What can we do to fix it?
The current insurgency need only do the same thing every other insurgency facing a first world enemy fighting in the traditional post modern manner - hold out, and try to debase public opinion of the current government. As long as the Taliban can remain a bigger force in the minds of the Afghani people when compared to any other alternative - like the puppet government the US is propping up - they will have won. To put it in perspective, imagine that war is a business - insurgencies are like startups, while the US Military is a like much much bigger, fatter, slower, more bloated company - I'm thinking something like Ford or BP here. Moreover, the scrappy guys aren't just competing for a chance at some IPO payday money shot - they're literally fighting for their continued political survival, and this amplifies the incentives to stay alive by orders of magnitudes. Basically, our enemies want the W more than we do right now, and they're going to be working damn hard and doing some very innovative things to get it.
Now, the crux of the problem seems to be the lack of credibility of the puppet government the US is installing. Its not even about a complete inability of Karzai to gain credibility - its more about the greatly lopsided difficulties that Karzai experiences as compared to the Taliban in terms of gaining credibility. From a dynamic systems perspective, it's as though the system currently has only one fixed point or outcome, namely the US withdrawing and essentially conceding defeat to the Taliban. From a human perspective, this only makes sense: as previously argued, the Taliban's incentive to win is their very survival, while for the US "winning" means spending disproportionate lives, money, and time on a hot, sandy, opium and terrorist filled quagmire with little hope of ever recouping the investment in the form of political capital with the rest of the Middle East. Especially given the Summer Recessioganza, its clear the US wants to start cutting costs, so how soon until we cut the obvious trillion dollar cost that's really (supposedly) sapping our economy? Any Afghani citizen can see the complete lack of American salience here when compared with the Taliban, and as any game theorist will tell you, salience is a dominant variable when determining the outcome of such political negotiations. Given the massive inequality in salience for the two competing sides, it's clear who won't win this game in Afghanistan: the US.
So, counter insurgence is borked just from a basic incentive perspective - it stands absolutely no hope of succeeding. But now, before we get all doom and gloom here by giving up on Afghanistan completely (and thus dooming to the country and its people to an even more fucked up future than we found it), let's think for a second. How can we change the incentive structures here so that a pro-American Afghani government gains sustainable authority over the country? Essentially, we're trying to engineer a plan that will produce an incentive scheme that ensures our desired outcome is the only fixed point; or, if that's not possible, ensures that it's at least the most likely fixed point. Fortunately, we're playing the role of the US government, which allows us to simplify a lot of the complicated engineering maths - essentially, we the US can do whatever the fuck we want in Afghanistan except force the people to support us. This gives us quite a bit of leeway in our politictioneering, aka the art of engineering political incentive structures to produce desired social and political effects.
As a slight interjection, I'd like to point out that we Americans have a wonderful history of incredible politictioneering, namely the US Constitution. I find it utterly amazing how one single document managed to create, from nearly nothing, a set of political rules and incentive structures (aka a government) that would be able to grow seamlessly along with its nation all the way from backwater third world country to world geo-political and economic leader over the course of nearly three centuries. Whereas most young democracies fuck up their constitutions or their implementations and leave themselves susceptible to overthrow by various petty dictators within a few decades, America actually managed to produce a system of checks and balances that kept the country alive and dictator free for over 200 years. Go US.
So what to do in Afghanistan? My answer is simple: let the Afghani people fight the Taliban itself. Don't coddle the Afghani police or military forces, either - offer them good wages, train them with the best the US Military can provide, equip them with the most modern counter-insurgency hardware like UAVs. Do similar things for the political side of the sphere - make the best political consultants available to the Afghani parties so they can learn how to operate in the context of a modern democracy, but let the Afghanis elect the consultants: all the US has to do is foot the bill. The US can offer the equipment, training, consulting as part of a lend-lease program - perhaps one where the amount lent is (at first) proportional to the reduction in insurgent activity and other measurements of desirable progress in Afghanistan. By holding the purse strings, the US can maintain its dominant negotiating position and continue to call the shots and determine the overarching goals; however, by allowing the Afghani people to decide how the funds, equipment, and training get allocated to achieve those goals, all sorts of good things happen psychologically that would incentivize realistic, achievement-oriented parties to emerge from the political chaos that is Afghanistan. But from a purely incentive based perspective, by offering the power to control the distribution of funds and other war and country building materiel to the Afghani elite in exchange for goal achievement, we incentivize them to start swinging their sizeable political clout around the country in our favor - a vital component of any successful rebuilding of Afghanistan.
However, without even checking, I have a feeling that what I described above sounds an awful lot like McChrystal's counter insurgency surge whatever - help build the country and victory will follow, or some bullshit. I want to point out though that there's a key difference in my plan that's necessary to make it work: its presentation and delivery. Essentially, the Afghani people can't see the US funding as a control mechanism used to achieve US ends. Instead, we must offer these as a gift to the Afghani people. It is our forgiveness gift, or perhaps more appropriately our fine, for invading, royally fucking up their country and then having the gall to insult them with a weak puppet government. However we spin it, we must get the Afghani people to see the incentive-based reality of it: that ultimately its cheaper for us to trust the Afghani people to know best how to rebuild their own country, and moreover we're so sure of it we're willing to provide them the resources to do it.
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