Matt Schmidt, PhD

(Originally Published at Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on July 26, 2012)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai made a little-noticed but remarkable statement a few days ago. He admitted his administration was largely unable to operate an effective system of courts throughout the country.

“The reason that the people of Afghanistan in the villages and across the countryside, (even) in the cities, still seek justice through the traditional method is because the government neither has the ability to provide that justice nor can it be addressed on time.

He went on to add, candidly:

“And sometimes — I hope it’s only sometimes, not most of the times [sic] — instead of getting justice, they are getting injustice.”

This is remarkable for two reasons. First, the fact that Karzai would speak this candidly about the corruption in what court system does exist is quite positive. Recognizing the extent of the outright injustice in the system signals that he is potentially quite serious about reform. Another indicator of this seriousness is his recent dissolution of the Special Election Tribunal he set up last year to investigate claims of widespread fraud in the 2010 elections. By returning authority to the Independent Election Commission (IEC) he seems to be rebutting charges of intransparency and corruption in the Tribunal’s work. Of course only time will tell how independent the IEC remains.

The second reason Karzai’s admission is worth taking note of is that at face-value it indicates the very serious challenge the government continues to face. A colleague working on Rule of Law initiatives there recently emailed to describe some of the issues the country faces. Here’s some of what he told me:

• Only 10% of districts have functioning courts. The need for trained judges and lawyers is acute. In addition, simply finding space to hold trials is hard. There are few ‘courthouses’.

• Where trials do happen, the judges and lawyers are in fact well-trained. They know the Afghan legal-code and conduct evidence-based trials, and he quoted one judge as saying, “Since the time of Allah, all men have been given their own fingerprints. No two sets are the same.”

• Rudimentary logistical problems remain. Getting supplies to the central crime lab in Kabul depends on DHL and FedEx deliveries going first to US bases. And the actual lab work still relies on sending samples to labs outside of Afghanistan in many cases. But there is a crime-lab academy training people.

In the end my friend expects there to be more or less a functioning Western-style justice system in the cities and a reliance on shuras or traditional tribal courts in the countryside.

This seems to be the pattern with most of Karzai’s government. The central government has effective jurisdiction in Kabul, Khandar, Mazar-e-Sharif, etc., but far less to no control in areas away from population centers. To give a sense of what this means on the ground, you have to realize that the ten largest cities in Afghanistan combined account for only a little over 16% of the population.

What this highlights is just how hard it remains for the government in Kabul to assert both its writ and its legitimacy over the population. NATO has committed to staying in the country in one form or another until 2024. The mission over that period will largely come down to establishing the legitimacy of the central government.

Of course, as Gen. John Allen acknowledged around the time of the big NATO conference in Chicago this spring, “All insurgencies are ended by police.” Not soldiers. “If there isn’t a rule of law then you can never re-establish order.” Order. Which is it what societies actually experience when there is legitimacy in government – a legitimacy that depends in large part on there being courts and lawyers and judges and cops and labs to adjudicate disputes.

The Western model of a high-tech adversarial courtroom is just one way of setting up a system of justice that is actually just. Shuras can be just, too. The question is whose sense of justice do they operate by? Ultimately any government’s sense of justice has to come from the people and be reflected back to them through its system of justice. That’s how legitimacy – of elections and courts both – is achieved.

It’s worth remembering that defeating the Taliban isn’t the same as establishing the legitimacy of the government in Kabul. To the extent that NATO and the US see establishing the central government’s legitimacy as a key strategic goal, the hard work is quickly shifting from battlefields to courts and crime-labs and Shura’s and election commissions and (maybe most crucially) to the classrooms that will produce the post-war generation of leaders that will really determine the legitimacy of the government.

But the words are important. They are a necessary start to the long process of healing that has, hopefully, finally begun.

(Originally Published at Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on May 1, 2012)

So what will the next phase of the war look like? Beginning this summer the focus of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission will shift from partnering Afghan military and police units with coalition troops to putting Afghan units in the lead, with coalition troops advising but taking a smaller and smaller role in day-to-day operations. In some ways this will look like Vietnam in the early 1970s when the issue was how to develop more and more capable, local forces while at the same time withdrawing the US forces needed to do the training. As a math problem alone it’s ugly. But in at least one area, Kandahar, the US commander should be familiar with the calculus.General Robert ‘Abe’ Abrams is the son of Creighton Abrams, who commanded coalition forces in Vietnam during the drawdown phase there.

Beneath General Abrams are a host of smart, capable men and women trying to puzzle out the details of fighting a war that’s more about building social institutions than bullets at this point. At the School for Advanced Military Studies, where I teach, there’s Major Schmedlap (all names changed to protect the idealistic) who’s writing a masters’ thesis onPashtunwali, the tribal code of norms and customs, in order to suggest better ways to build and sustain effective governing institutions. And Major Klinkfoot is writing his thesis on how theories explaining the adoption of technological innovations might be used to understand why some aid projects succeed and others fail. Yes, the iPad frenzy meets Three Cups of Tea.

In the end, much of this war, maybe most, is as banal and mind-numbing as a city-council meeting. But success probably lies in being able to suffer through the boredom in order to maintain a focus on the details of schools, roads, sewers and electricity. The problem is that the real war is less between us and the Taliban or al Qaeda, as it is between the tribes that have power in the regions and the weak and corrupt central government in Kabul. It’s about who gets to run the schools and toll the roads. At this point NATO seems mostly caught in between.

So how will the war likely end up in 2014? My guess: The government in Kabul will control the major roads and urban centers where the population hates the Taliban and sees the coalition as a bulwark against rural extremists with the rest of the country only nominally under Kabul’s control.

Think about it this way: it’s a fight between anti-federal, states’ rights, largely rural religious extremists and a more secular, urban, professional class trying to push an agenda of job creation and women’s rights. In its way, it’s a blue state vs. red state war with gun owners on both sides who really mean it.

And the military? Well, it’s worth remembering that regardless of which side most service members might be on in the culture wars here, in Afghanistan they’re on the side of the blue states.

To read Part I of the Afghanistan War Report by Matt Schmidt, click here.

(Originally Published at Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on April 24, 2012)

The war in Afghanistan approaches its 11th full year in October. It’s worth pausing to reflect on the full course of the war before the 2012-13 fighting season begins.

To put 11 years in perspective, the American Civil War lasted 4 years, World War II just over 3.5.  Significant American involvement in Vietnam, the third or fourth longest war in our history after the Iraq and Revolutionary Wars (depending on how you count) slogged on for about 8.5 years.  Eleven years starts to sound archaic, like the way we say “The Thirty-Years War.”  Eleven years is a long, long time to be at war in any era.

Yet in many ways it’s misleading to think of the war in Afghanistan as a single, 11-year-long fight.  There have arguably been 3 distinct phases to the conflict.  The initial invasion marked a watershed moment for the US military, a moment not many in the general public appreciate.  After the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, at a point when US public opinion across the political spectrum was uniformly pushing for a military response, the Pentagon was unable to deliver one.  When President Bush asked for options, the Joint Chiefs were able to offer up a ground invasion that would take, at best, 6 months to prepare, or a missile strike that would in essence be a multi-hundred-million dollar symbolic expression of national outrage.

It was the CIA who offered a third-way, one that would make use of a very small number of clandestine services personnel and US troops, mostly (but not exclusively) from the Special Forces community. Air-dropped into the country in the weeks immediately after 9/11, they directed the group of anti-Taliban tribes known as the Northern Alliance.  The Alliance, with US forces acting largely as advanced spotters for aerial gunships and bombers, drove the Taliban from power.

But the controversy inside the military community over what came to be known as the ‘Afghan Model‘ of war-making didn’t end there.  Contrary to the ‘Rambo’ myth, most Special Forces units are tasked with taking on long-term training programs of local forces.  These units learn the titular languages of a region and live in small groups inside local communities.  Started under President Kennedy, the Special Forces were conceived of (pardon the apparent paradox) as a kind of Peace Corps with guns.  There were some places too dangerous to be in without the ability to provide self-security.  They were ‘special’ because they didn’t just do basic shoot-and-scoot warfare.  Training and liaison, with both military and civilian figures, remains the foundation of the USSOCOM approach.

Special Operations Forces (SOF) fights wars at the most basic level—at the level of broken or non-existent societies.  But in 2001 the Special Forces were used like conventional troops.  They fought what was essentially a conventional war with Northern Alliance members as massed infantry, not the guerrilla-style war it has been labeled as.  Training and liaison work will be the central focus of the last phase of the war in Afghanistan.

The second phase of the war covers the period from 2002 to 2009, when US attention was largely focused on Iraq.  One measure of the caretaker nature of the war in this period is reflected in the fact that Department of Defense funding for Iraq exceeded that for Afghanistan in every year from FY 02-10, with Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) spending exceeding Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) funding by 5 times in 2006.  Finally in 2009 the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command (IJC) was founded to coordinate efforts in Afghanistan among different commands.  The IJC marked a return to a focus on Afghanistan.  But it also reflected the deeply broken nature of the effort there.

What kind of problems?  To be blunt, the war was failing because the mission was succumbing to ‘death by powerpoint’.  The mission to Afghanistan consists of 50 troop-contributing nations with nearly as many different Rules of Engagement and reasons for being there. Often the biggest struggle is just clarifying exactly who’s in charge of what in order to clearly communicate to the soldiers and diplomats from around the world what the plan is for a given place and time.  When this isn’t done well, jurisdictional confusion leaves seams where there is no clear sense of authority or clear plan.  In a war zone, unclear planning has consequences. Death. By powerpoint.

In the interim the ‘enemy’ in all its ugly guises of corruption, discrimination and brutality re-asserts itself.

Has the US and the coalition caused a lot of suffering?  Yes.  But the reality is that even under the trauma of the last 11 years, most Afghans (53 percent) feel their country is moving in the right direction.  Significantly, only 13 percent have a favorable opinion of the Taliban. In part this explains the muted response of the populace to the horrendous killing of 17 civilians in recent days.  After 30-plus years of fighting, the capriciousness of war’s violence is well known.  What seems to be new is that the population holds at least some kind of hope that it’s not all in vain this time around.

The truth is that the absolute number of deaths, on all sides, is relatively low.  Relatively.  Total civilian deaths are estimated to number 12,800 since 2007, 70 percent of which the United Nations attributes to the Taliban and other anti-government forces.  Total coalition forces deaths stand at about 3,000 out of some 700,000 to 1 million troops who have rotated in and out of country since 2001.  In contrast there are over 5 million boys and 3 million Afghan girls in school now—a phenomenal rise over even just the last 3 years (click here for a discussion of these stats).  What is often not talked about is that those schools, especially for girls, have to have their own guard force (trained by the US and even sometimes drawn from the ranks of the nominal Taliban).

This is part of waging war at the community level.

For more on what lies ahead in the Afghanistan War, look for Part II of the Afghanistan War Report in the Georgetown Journal next week.

(Originally Published at Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on January 10, 2012)

President Obama announced the new Defense Strategic Guidance last week. In follow-up remarks Secretary Panetta outlined a much smaller ground force (an Army of some 490,000 troops and Marine Corps of 175,000) but argued that under this new strategy the military would “surge, regenerate, or reverse” troop strength to meet any contingencies. Can the Pentagon really do this? It would require successfully turning what are still effectively strategic reserves into operational reserves. Turning around the “force generation” system to meet these contingencies is a big task. The other question is whether large land forces are even likely to be called on. The premise of the strategic guidance is that they won’t.

A lot of people believe that kind of thinking is dead wrong. They expect a major conflict will quickly force the reversal of cuts called for in the guidance, and they’re in good company. A year ago Robert Kagan noted that US troops have been engaged in combat in 16 of the last 22 years. The general belief among the defense intelligentsia is that the early top contender for a fight is Iran. But even if an Iran scenario came true would it really require a large US ground force? In other words, is the risk that the answer is ‘no’ a good risk to take?

Let’s look at Iran. Why even expect war? For hawks it boils down to ‘crazy theocrats can’t be reasoned with’ so either they’ll start it or we will preemptively. (For a fun exercise google “war with Iran” and count how many years experts of all stripes have been declaring it imminent.) Of course if you were to read any serious academic or journalistic book on the country you’d know that the ‘crazy Ayatollah’ trope bears little resemblance to reality. Read almost any book (to start I recommend Robin Wright’s The Iran Primer) and the take is that there’s a lot more to the Iranian regime than the Ayatollah or Ahmadinejad. In other words, there’s a broader political context surrounding the admittedly wacky and aggressive rantings of Ahmadinejad that needs to be considered.

I bring this up not to discuss Iran, per se, (I’ll save that for a later expert interview) but to highlight what I see as a remarkable inability to perceive international relations from anything other than an American perspective. [Robert Wight beat me to this conclusion with a great piece on Ron Paul of all people.] First, Iran is more than the mullahs. Blithely presuming the inevitable outbreak of a religious war displays a serious lack of understanding about the domestic reality of Iran.

Second, the larger problem with the general view of future wars is that too many civilian and military experts seem to forget that foreign policy is intimately connected to domestic policy. No serious scholar argues that Iran is an autocratic state. “Politics” happens, even in Iran; a structure of competing constituencies and institutions attempt to check each other. So knowing something about a state’s domestic policy is vitally important to understanding what it might or might not do in the foreign policy realm. On this point I’m truly mystified because I daily read complaints about how US domestic politics is affecting our own foreign and military policy. What’s so hard about recognizing that if it works this way here it does elsewhere?

Which brings me to my third point: the significance of seeing the world this way is that it blinds you to the messy reality of actual armed conflict. The future threats the US faces, the ones outlined in the new strategic guidance, are not old-fashioned clean-cut bad-state vs. good state fights. They’re not even really between states, but between state proxies (e.g. Hezbollah), other non-state actors and maybe the US. And why is that? Because the sheer cost of a state-on-state war, economic and moral, is too high for anyone but the truly insane to contemplate. Even in the two cases where the possibility most strongly exists, between Israel and Iran or on the Korean peninsula, the concept of the military campaigns on either side would be to keep it from escalating into a full-out ground war. And while Iran may be capable of vaporizing Tel Aviv, they know they’d lose their entire country in the process and still not occupy Jerusalem.

How does all this relate to the new strategic guidance? Probable conflicts likely won’t require large ground forces designed to occupy chunks of Asia. (Remember, land wars in Asia are bad ideas.) Instead, defiant states will use special forces, by which I mean a whole range of non-general purpose forces. It’s not just the US that’s beefing up the role of special forces. The largest such force is in North Korea, and the part of the Iranian regime the US rightly worries about the most is the Revolutionary Guard. And state-sponsored, but non-uniformed groups can be best understood for what they are: another kind of specialized force, often specializing in terror tactics.

At least on the ground, the next war will be a special forces war, on all sides – because political logic demands it.

(Originally Published at Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on November 22, 2011)

The failure of the budget Supercommittee this week means the uniformed services are gearing up for a possible sequestration of another $500 billion in defense funds beginning in 2013. And though Sen. McCain and others have promised to kill any additional cuts beyond what’s already been agreed to, it’s clear to the top brass that future budget outlays will be a lot smaller. As the Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno, put it, the reality will be “doing less with less.” Accepting potential limits like this isn’t easy for a ‘can do’ culture.

Historically the Army has borne the brunt of American peace dividends. At present it accounts for some 32 percent of the defense budget, and has seen its personnel costs balloon 91 percent since 2002. [The Navy and Marines account for 27 percent and the Air Force 22 percent. The remainder of the budget is taken up by intelligence and joint force activities. For a neat visual chart of US budget priorities see here.] When the accountants look for places to cut, the personnel column makes a fat target. And if you’re a cynic the problem for the Army gets even worse when you add in the calculus of domestic politics. Unlike the Navy and Air Force, the Army (and Marines) are not platform-centric forces (try as they might to appear so). The standard unit of force delivery is not a ship or a plane but the soldier or marine. Cutting even a few ships and planes can arguably (emphasis on arguably) cause a significant loss of combat effectiveness to a platform-centric service. But cutting a soldier, or even tens of thousands, is not likely to meaningfully affect the Army’s capabilities. That is, so long as its future missions will not require hundreds of thousands of troops.

Which brings us to “Doctrine 2015.” In October the Army released Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 3-0, Unified Land Operations. ADP 3-0, is the vanguard publication of Doctrine 2015. In great part it is the Army’s effort to re-imagine its future. [Click here to see the a chart of publications in the Doctrine 2015 project.] Why 2015? By 2015 U.S. combat forces will have been out of Iraq for two years, and (in theory) out of Afghanistan for one. When almost everybody’s home for New Year’s 2015, it will feel sort of like an awkward holiday morning: the whole family’s back under the same roof for the first time in years and no one quite knows what to do after breakfast. “Doctrine 2015” is about figuring out the ‘what now’ moment on that awkward morning when the whole family’s home and milling about for something to do. It’s about the problem of the transition from war to “peace.”

In the context of the budget battle, 2015 scares the Army. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared flat-out that any successor would have to be crazy to even think about putting a “big American land army” into Asia or the Middle East. Not just wrong, but ought to “have his head examined” crazy. Cutting out Asia and the Middle East is a big swath of global real-estate for the Army to cede to its sister services. Gates’ particular cache on the Hill makes this wink and nod to current Secretary Leon Panetta and the Hill all the more significant. If Gates is saying the need for heavy brigades and an occupation-size force is ebbing, then what’s the future Army for?

Gates genuflects at the holy grail of the heavy force saying the examples of Sadr City and Fallujah show the need for big guns will remain. But in actuality those cases reinforce the relative unimportance of heavy units. As Gates knows, the need for big-armored, big-gunned units is likely to be the exception rather than the rule.

Losing its heavy unit focus is like waking up the morning of January 1, 2015 and heading out to play mini-golf instead of football. The Army fears becoming a militarized police force, or worse, being split into two distinct “specialist” armies – one for fighting heavy conventional wars, one for policing and everything else (e.g. disaster relief) the Army does. Making sure this doesn’t happen is in large part what Doctrine 2015 is about.