I thought JWN readers might want to check out some of the more interesting things I’ve been following on my Google Reader recently. So GR highlight #1 today is Registan, sub-title: “Central Asia News– All Central Asia, All The Time.”
Special kudos to their contributor Joshua Foust, who brings a wise and well-informed eye to this crucial region.
Up on Registan today (though posted yesterday) we have this brilliant take-down of a recent Council on Foreign Relations study group report on Pakistan. It’s titled “Wishing for Ponies”.
Foust writes:
- I want a pony, too. Well, I don’t—the Ironman suit would suffice. But you get what I mean. This kind of report is the essence of Yglesias’ Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics: if only we try hard enough, we can achieve perfect U.S. goals and never face any trade-offs! Let’s put these goals up side-by-side, and see how they really stack up…
(Of course, as the current economic crisis continues to play out, the CFR will become considerably more marginal to the real world of global politics and diplomacy.)
Foust’s colleague Michael Hancock has a broad round-up of reports of recent meteorological and political events in Kyrgyzstan.
And Foust penned a brief but very thought-provoking critique of this recent op-ed on Afghanistan by Nathaniel Fick and Vikram Singh. Fick and Singh are affiliated with the generally liberal-hawkish “Center for a New American Security.”
Foust’s post is titled “How COIN Generalists Fail Afghanistan.” He writes that Fick and Sin gh’s op-ed
- reveals some interesting thinking from establishment counterinsurgency theorists [that] I think helps to explain why we seem to be understanding Afghanistan so poorly.
It’s not that the op-ed is necessarily bad or deficient in any way (though it is in many), but rather where they make leaps of imagination…
He concludes his more detailed critique with this:
- unless there was a serious word-count limitation, they don’t seem to understand the fundamental forces driving conflict in Afghanistan. It isn’t government legitimacy, and it’s not even necessarily corruption (though anti-corruption is a highly effective COIN tool): the problem, the big problem they did not mention once, is security.
Oh sure, like all Americans writing about Afghanistan, they mentioned the 280 soldiers we’ve lost this year. They didn’t mention the (approximately) 720 policemen, or the (approximately) 680 ANA troops Afghanistan has lost (we don’t really know how many died because as best I can tell there is no official monitoring system for local counterinsurgent losses). While losing 280 soldiers is indeed tragic, many thousand civilians have died this year—and a not-insignificant number of those have been at U.S. or ISAF hands. The biggest reason more villages and villagers don’t support Karzai or the U.S. is fear, plain and simple. And Singh and Fick don’t seem to consider that an issue because, it seems, to them, and to far too many Big Thinkers in DC, it’s all about us—and not them. The “them” is the critical missing piece of the fight, and until we start to learn how we can help “them,” we won’t win.
Anyway, Registan: definitely worth putting on your feed reader if you’re interested in Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia.