What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction
nonameiguess 2021-08-18 18:00:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]
1) The failure to accomplish anything lasting thanks to a focus on short-term thinking and easily measurable results.
> The U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan could be described as 20 one-year reconstruction efforts, rather than one 20-year effort. U.S. officials often underestimated the time and resources needed to rebuild Afghanistan, leading to short-term solutions like the surge of troops, money, and resources from 2009–2011. U.S. officials also prioritized their own political preferences for what they wanted reconstruction to look like, rather than what they could realistically achieve, given the constraints and conditions on the ground. Early in the war, U.S. officials denied the mission resources necessary to have an impact, and implicit deadlines made the task even harder. As security deteriorated and demands on donors increased, so did pressure to demonstrate progress. U.S. officials created explicit timelines in the mistaken belief that a decision in Washington could transform the calculus of complex Afghan institutions, powerbrokers, and communities contested by the Taliban.
This sort of disconnect that shows up between high-level strategic decision makers who see the world through slide decks and ground-level implementation details is strikingly reminiscent of issues I've seen in the government trying to apply agile software development techniques to national-scale interconnected programs involving cooperation between hardware and software, specifically in my case the fielding of new geointelligence capabilities.
It's a bigger principle/agent problem everywhere, though. We no longer have kings trying to build 1000 year dynasties. Incentives at all levels of the hierarchy are to make some amount of measurable progress you can put in a bullet point on an annual review. Get promoted and get out before what you put in place has a chance to collapse. It reminds me of the chronic syndrome in the Army of hairstyle policies changing every time a new Sergeant Major of the Army is appointed, seemingly for no reason except he can have a policy associated with him and not the last guy. It also reminds me of a policy at Raytheon where above a certain labor grade you were expected to produce X patent submissions per year, and it resulted in a senior guy on my team submitting an extremely stupid system we set up for deploying artifacts built out of one code repo into separate runtime environments with separate dependencies, that introduced a ton of unnecessary extra code and extra repos consisting purely of build files that confused everyone due to version proliferation. It ended up being my personal favorite accomplishment while there to get rid of that system and replace it with something simpler, because it three consecutive people appointed as "branching czar" to quit because it was so tedious to maintain and not real engineering work. But someone in HR just sees a patent submission and checks a box.
2) The point of "next war-itis." That is particularly interesting because it is the opposite of the prescription you usually see, which is that we're always fighting the last war. But they're right that counterinsurgency isn't new. We just didn't fail to learn from Vietnam while abandoning all of the people and processes built up to focus on the Cold War at the exclusion to all else. The canonical example of success we get taught in ROTC and academy military history courses is of the Phillippines after the Spanish American War, and the canonical failure is the British failure in the American Revolutionary War. These are hundreds of years in the past, and everyone who ever pins a gold bar learns them. Yet we seemingly ignored both, and even while fighting in Afghanistan, one of the standout experiences of being in the Army to me was how we kept deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet in garrison all of our training continued to focus on large-scale conventional warfare. This wasn't the case at first, but it was a huge push around 2010 or so to return to basics, the concern being we'd lose the skills in heavy armored combat, and if push ever came to shove in Asia or Europe, China and Russia might eat our lunch.
How realistic of a concern is that, though? China and Russia both have expansionist policies, but they certainly don't have globally expansionist policies. And they may even be near-peers, but they aren't right now. Meanwhile, we were in the middle of fighting a losing counterintersurgency against an asymmetric force but no longer training to do that out of concern we'd lose the next war, seemingly no longer even trying to win the current war.
hnbad 2021-08-18 19:06:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]
He says the biggest problem was that they were not politically allowed to acknowledge the rampant corruption, which the locals pointed out as the most important problem preventing them from "rebuilding". Not just bribes but it seems in some ways the entire country just consisted of small gangs uninterested in what the Western appointed government had to say.
He also says almost 80% of these contractors are being left behind by the German government and have targets on their backs because their collaboration makes them "infidels" in the eyes of the Taliban, though they seem to be allowing those with non-Afghan passports to leave, at the moment.