Pull Out Now! The UN Says The War Is Lost

The UN has taken a look at the security situation in Afghanistan. The worthies and experts at that strategic think tank didn't like what they saw.

But, being willing to look defeat square in the face without blanching, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon who is, as everybody knows, the finest military theorist since Karl von Clausewitz as well as an operational level commander on a par with George Patton, has informed the Security Council that Afghanistan is going to hell in a high speed, low drag wheelbarrow. Using the ever reliable indicators of roadside bombs, assassinations of low to mid-level government personnel in the provinces, and "complex" attacks, the SecGen all but declared the Taliban to have won.

The SecGen is not alone in his dismal appraisal of American and allied fortunes in Afghanistan. Over the past few weeks, those two pillars of independent, disinterested, and agenda-free impartial assessment of American success or failure in both war and diplomacy, the WaPo and the NYT, have made reached the same conclusion, at least by implication. The only feature lacking in either outlet is an editorial demanding a prompt American surrender to the Mighty and Pure Defenders of the One Truth Faith.

Admittedly, there are a number of good reasons to feel both gloom and doom hovering over the valleys of Afghanistan. The Afghan National Forces are far more a myth than a substantial reality capable of effective action in the field. The Karzai regime is corrupt, inefficient, self-serving, and far more interested in continuing its hold on power than seeing hostilities termination leading to long term conflict resolution. Mr Karzai himself is an excellent Afghan politician but a very infuriating partner with whom to engage.

At the same time Taliban deserves credit. It is comprised of tough, resilient fighters led by reasonably competent commanders. It has a set of clear goals. A very definite agenda well founded on religion. Beyond that Taliban has the support and assistance of the Pakistani Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence and, thus, constitutes a branch of the armed forces of Pakistan. As if that were not sufficient, Taliban receives support from Iran. Training camps are located convenient to the Afghan border in the wastes of rural Iran while the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps provides instructors. In a gesture of religious fraternity, the Iranians also provide explosively formed penetrators and other useful gadgets.

Even with the augmentation of American combat forces, the manpower available to the US and ISAF for combat missions is minimal (to put it charitably.) The correct decision by General McChrystal to limit the use of indirect and air delivered fire places more of a burden on the ground pounders, thus making the war even more manpower intensive. In order to assure that few (preferably no) Afghan non-combatants are killed by the "infidels," it is necessary to conduct each and every operation no matter how large or small on a retail basis, up close and personal.

Longer term this self-imposed constraint on the lethality of the battlefield is not only good, it is absolutely necessary. McChrystal understands perfectly that if civilians are to be killed, it is essential that they be killed by the insurgents. Insofar as Taliban et al kill civilians, non-combatants, women, children, and old men, whether by a roadside bomb, a suicide IED, or a "complex" attack, the resulting body count strengthens the counterinsurgent while weakening the insurgent.

That consideration constitutes a critical nuance unnoticed by either Generalissimo Ban Ki-Moon or the Deep Strategic Thinkers at the WaPo and NYT. The primary victims of the increased usage of roadside bombs and similar IEDs have been Afghan civilians. The same is true of attacks carried out by "martyrdom seekers" whether using suicide vests or vehicle borne IEDs. Even many of the larger attacks, characterized in the UN report as "complex" have resulted in more civilian than foreign combatant deaths.

The roadside bombs, the assassinations of minor government, police, and military personnel, even the majority of the "complex" attacks such as the strikes on foreign occupied guesthouses have not only resulted in an increased loathing for Taliban on the part of Afghans but show a high measure of desperation driving Taliban.

In previous insurgencies, assassination of local personnel have been a prominent feature either of the beginning of the insurgency or as a strong indicator of its being defeated. The same applies to indiscriminate attacks resulting in a high level of casualties among the uncommitted majority of the civilian population.

Previously in Iraq, in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan, when the insurgents have started killing civilians in large numbers, there has been an immediate push-back on the part of the threatened civilians. This is being seen again in Afghanistan in the past few months--the same period employed by Feldherr Ban Ki-Moon as a base for his prognostication of impending defeat.

Increasingly, local villagers equipped with (to use the term employed by US military sources) "personal assault weapons" have joined Afghan, US, and ISAF units to engage and destroy Taliban cells. The same upward trend is seen in the flow of unsolicited and actionable intelligence from locals who have had it up to their beards with Taliban.

Afghans, not unlike most people everywhere, are not strong on the idea of getting killed. They don't even appreciate the fine theological distinction between being killed by an "infidel" or an "apostate" rather than a good Muslim, a jihadi. Not surprisingly, the Afghans are ready, willing, and eager to seize the moment and abate the Taliban nuisance.

Rather than being indicators of near-term defeat, the increased Taliban reliance upon IEDs, assassination, and the odd media spectacular points to a loss of confidence within the command echelons of the insurgents. Taliban has lost the initiative in the quotidian conduct of operations; as a comparison between friendly initiated, hostile initiated, and meeting engagements shows, the capacity to control the pace and direction of operations has shifted increasingly in favor of the US and ISAF.

This pleasant reality in no way lessens the underlying reality that the war is not over. The US and its allies are not yet sure of achieving the minimum strategic goal of "not-losing," but the vectors have shifted in that direction. The next six to twelve months will be a long, hard pull in Afghanistan. Marja is not yet fully secured. The Kandahar operation has been delayed. Most importantly, the Afghan national government and forces have not yet shown either the will or the ability to carry their share of the freight.

Right now the major lost opportunity is not military but falls rather in the area of governance. The US and its allies have fallen too far into the trap of believing that the central government of Afghanistan is just that--a government. The US has also allowed itself to believe that success in Afghanistan cannot occur without the existence of a strong, credible, and effective central government.

These twin notions are bogus. For much of its existence, Afghanistan has gotten along quite well without a strong, credible, and effective central government. The Afghan culture states that a person's primary loyalty is to the extended family, secondary loyalty is to the clan, and the tertiary loyalty is to the tribe. This hierarchy allows but does not compel a loyalty to the central regime in Kabul.

This situation implies that Afghans have a high propensity toward and a good capacity for self-organizing. The self-organizing process moves from the most local to the more distant and has the automatic advantage of assuring high group coherence through the necessity for voluntary collaboration in the search for mutual self-interest.

The operational consequence of this orientation within the human terrain of Afghanistan is obvious. The US and its allies should--must, perhaps--put Kabul to the side and deal with the local power structure. The winning political approach is that of empowering the self-organizing capacities of the Afghan villages, the neighborhoods of Marja or Kandahar. Working with and backing the needs of the locals in all aspects of security, governance, and economic development would allow the effective circumvention of the obstructionists of Kabul. Doing things this way would have the additional advantage of cutting off Taliban from any pretense of legitimacy, by denying it the large target of central government corruption, cronyism , and flat out inefficiency.

There is a very high probability that General McChrystal is as aware of the self-organizing and provincial orientation of the Afghan human terrain as he is of the grave inadequacies of the central regime. If his lords and masters inside the Beltway can be brought to see the light, there is a better than good chance that the next few months will see a political success parallel the probable military defeat of Taliban.

There is, of course, only the slimmest of chances that the Obama administration can wake up to the tribal and family realities of Afghanistan so as to give a green light to adding the final ingredient which would well neigh onto guarantee success of an acceptable sort in Afghanistan. And, there is absolutely no chance in hell that the WaPo-NYT Strategic Studies Academy or Geo-Political Genus Ban Ki-Moon will ever get it.

(Illegal) Drugs And Insurgency

Hang on, bucko, the Geek is not going to do a replay of all the bloviation on the relation between the opium trade in Afghanistan and Taliban's financial base. Nor is he going to blather on about how FARC is really a narco-trafficking protection racketeer or the similar joining of the renewed Shining Path and the cocaine trade in Peru.

No, siree. Not a chance. Been there; done that.

Today, kids, the focus is on the identity of dynamics between the emergence and development of drug distribution networks and that of insurgent groups and the movements which arise from these. The point of commonality between these two disparate, equally illegal, types of entity is that both are self-organizing, dynamically stable, and far more inherently flexible and adaptive than the social, political, and legal structures which seek to confront and defeat them.

The Geek first noticed the commonalities when he came back to the world after a fun filled multi-year tour in a far away country experiencing armed political turbulence. He had the chance to live for some time in a small city in southern New Mexico which was not only convenient to the international border but possessed a moderately large university with a diverse student body including a number of people from Mideast countries.

As was (and is) so often the case, New Mexico lagged behind the rest of the country in social trends. The Summer of Love had long since come and gone. The "Hashbury" out in San Francisco was overrun by Gray Line buses filled with camera toting tourists, and the hippies had departed for other pastures of plenty. Only then when even Fargo, ND had experienced an influx of drug use did the town where the Geek temporarily lived find the joys of LSD, pot, hash, and other such substances.

Where a demand exists, a supply will surely follow. Adam Smith's "hidden hand" exists to assure that. The Geek watched as the HH went to work.

Several distribution networks emerged in the Fall and Winter of 1968. Of the "big five", three developed among locals, two of these were of middle class Anglo nature with one forming in the Mexican-American contingent. The other two emerged from out-of-state students at the university.

Importantly, all of the "big five" self-organized within social groups comprising people who either had or wished to have psychedelic experiences. The first stage of self-organizing was simply the sharing of stashes and expressing a desire for more of whatever, usually pot, 'shroom, LSD, or, less frequently, speed.

Within each group--groups which were united primarily by a taste for drug use and place of primary residence and little else--one or more individuals showed themselves willing to acquire more for the benefit of the group. It was really rather like the tune done by New Riders of the Purple Sage--the one where Henry goes down south of the border to meet the man "who has it growing from the ground."

After the preliminary couple of trips down south or out to Los Angeles, the intrepid specialists in procurement self-organized into a loosely coordinated "importers association." This allowed for both economies of scale and specialization in procurement. For example, one person ran the speed connection out of LA. Another was oriented toward the acquisition of hash from North Africa coming through Lebanon. Yet others worked the rat line into the interior of Mexico for both weed and 'shroom. Yet another couple of individuals had firm contacts for acid made in labs both in Arizona and California. (For the sake of being complete, peyote was available locally. All one had to do was go out in the desert southwest of the valley and take a look--and harvest.)

The import association assured there was little chance of the "whole town is dry." It also made certain that profits were equitable and greed was restrained for mutual advantage.

Importantly there were no guns involved. (OK, one dude liked to go around strapped, because he had a real macho thing, but his piece was always unloaded.) Neither was there any aggressive marketing. No one hung around the local high schools or middle schools saying, "the first one is free. Heh, Heh. Prices on the street were low, lower than in larger cities such as Albuquerque, Tucson, or El Paso.

The reason for the low prices was quite simply the lack of risk. The movers and shakers of this town had no clue that there was an emergent system in their midst. The low profile, self-organizing nature of the drug distribution network coupled with the absence of violence or spikes in crimes against property as well as the lack of aggressive marketing assured that the emergent system flew below the local radar.

Law enforcement had no priority on counter-drug efforts. The city, for example, had but one drug cop. This man was unambitious and liked to sit in his unmarked car eating Cracker Jacks to an extent that the back seat was so overflowing with the empties that it would have been impossible to put a prisoner in it. Anyway, everyone knew who he was, where he was, and saw no reason to worry.

After a year of development, the multi-group, two tiered network was well developed. Everyone involved seemed quite happy with the arrangement. Well, they went around with quiet, knowing, and pleased smiles on their faces. It looked as if a satisfactory stasis had been achieved.

To the Geek it was all quite similar to the opening phases of the multi-stage process by which latent political discontent slowly evolved toward a political movement with vague goals and hazy leadership. In the area of political discontent and the progress of self-organization toward insurgency, the initiative always rests with the status quo. The Geek suspected it was the same in the evolution of drug distribution networks.

So events of Spring 1969 proved. The precipitating incident was small, even trivial. The results were totally non-linear. That is the output was disproportionate and unpredictable on the basis of the input.

The precipitating event was the discovery by a parent of some pot in the possession of her high school age son. The kid had taken some from the stash of his elder sister as he admitted to dear old mom.

Mom was an activist in the local Democratic Party. She went to a man who was not only a state senator but the president of the biggest bank in town and a genuine heavy hitter in state Democratic circles.

This man saw an opportunity. And he took it. The banker was one of those people who wondered often, loudly, and boorishly about "what the hell is wrong with the kids these days?" Tossing his considerable political weight around, the banker forced the formation of a multi-agency task force to end the drug menace in the county.

The country sheriff as well as the county district attorney was a man with lofty political ambitions. Both had watched enough TV to know that an anti-drug crusade would be beaucoup important to their futures. So they joined the banker with a will, a whoop, and a holler.

Because the banker was head of the relevant Senate committee, the state police joined the effort. Not to be outdone and suspecting an "international" connection, both the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (as DEA was known back then) and the Border Patrol/ Customs joined the wolf pack.

In no time at all an inter-agency task group deployed a flood of undercover officers and sought to recruit informers by the bus load. The banker was pleased. His efforts had created a coalition of city, country, state, and federal lawmen which had a total roster of over sixty sworn personnel and, ultimately, over seventy-five informants. The law enforcers outnumbered the aggregate import association and local dealer assemblage by nearly ten to one.

The high point of the state's reaction to the self-organizing system was a pre-dawn raid conducted by more than two hundred badge wearing men. Over a dozen (fourteen to be precise) dangerous drug dealers and narco-traffickers were arrested. The front page of the local newspaper was filled with pictures under the screaming end-of-the-world size type headline "Handcuffed and Waiting!"

The status quo's exercise in coercion resulted finally in either acquittal or overturning on appeal of all but two of those arrested. More embarrassing to the status quo was the simple fact that virtually all of those arrested were good products of good homes of a solidly middle class and primarily Democratic families. None were the scourge of humanity criminals TV convinced many were at the root of America's drug crisis.

It deserves mentioning that the state's mis-fired attempt to end the drug "menace" only had an impact on two of the "big five" groups and then only in part. The day after the big raid, those who wished to purchase a no-no substance had no difficulty doing so.

In the years following the Great Drug Bust the nature of the drug distribution networks changed. Prices went up. Aggressive marketing tactics were employed. Turf battles occurred. Opiates and cocaine replaced lower profit items. Guns were carried. And used. The new self-organizing systems became more structured, more hierarchical, more, in a real sense, professional, more businesslike, more Mafia like.

Over the next thirty years or so the Geek spent a fair amount of spare time beavering away in archives, old police records, and other documentary sources to get a handle on whether or not what he had observed in the small New Mexico city was standard. He found out that it was.

Starting in the Fifties and ranging forward in time to the Nineties, the pattern was repeated in town after town, city after city, even those cities with pre-existing criminal syndicates. The pattern was simple.

All drug distribution networks are self-organizing. All start at the bottom and organize upwards. Where law enforcement is lax, prices are low, violence is absent, secondary crime (crime committed to obtain habit maintenance resources) low, aggressive marketing nonexistent, as are turf battles. Enhanced law enforcement measures drive evolution of the networks in the direction of greater structure, more aggressive recruitment of new customers, more violence, and all the the other high profile consequences.

At the same time, the enhanced law enforcement is ineffective because the networks never lose the self-organizing capacity with its inherent flexibility. At bottom, enhanced law enforcement is an evolutionary challenge. The new stresses, the increased risks, drive a process of adaptation in which the initially self-organizing dynamic of the network gives it an advantage so that the law enforcers can never, have never, gained and retained the initiative.

In a race between the ponderous structures of the state and the bottom up, self-organized networks, the latter always have the advantage. Indeed, the record suggest that the networks have such an inherent advantage that while some are caught, some are killed, the network will continue--and expand. The proof of this contention rests in the constant dollar cost of an effective dose of whatever illegal drug. Because of improvements in technology which have resulted in ever increasing potency and purity, the average cost of a user's "effective" dose of drugs as disparate as pot and smack have dropped consistently over time.

It is fair to conclude that the state's attempts at coercion have not only failed, they have been counterproductive. As the price of drugs has dropped and availability increased, the consequences of increased pressures such as greater violence and more aggressive recruitment of new customers have grown. From the perspective of the law enforcers it has been a lose-lose situation--for them.

The Mexican government has been learning this lesson in a particularly bloody way in the past two years. So are others albeit in less sanguinary fashion.

Now, bucko, you might have the question, "What has this got to do with insurgency?"

Well, the Geek suggests that you look in tomorrow or the next day. Thunderstorms make the Geek's postings a bit unpredictable right now.

It's Our Space! Get Out Of It!

A corespondent who is unwilling to post comments has requested the Geek to dilate upon the role of self-organisation. The Geek is happy to oblige, hoping he is usefully elucidating rather than merely bloviating.

Political science has a very useful concept: The division between public and private space. Public space is open to intervention and regulation by the state through law and regulation. Private space exists for the self-organizing social and political groups of both formal and informal nature. The blunt (and brutal) reality is that public space--the space in social, political and economic activities liable to regulatory control by the bureaucratic state--has expanded at the expense of the private. The proponents of government owned (or at least regulated, policed, and controlled) public space argue that such is necessary for the accomplishment of the commonweal.

There is a powerful irony at work in the seeming triumph of public space. In the pursuit of lofty and seemingly utterly necessary goals such as assuring that no group is "victimized" and no group "privileged," the expansion of the public space has resulted in a private space push-back through the formation of self-organizing groups.

Self-organizing social, political, and economic groups are an ancient and honorable tradition in human experience. Their formation and dynamic stability as well as capacity for evolution, flexibility, and long duration are and have been universal--even in the most centralized examples of the bureaucratic state. Indeed, history demonstrates that in any tightly controlled venue, unless the organs of repression are highly effective, every increase in public space is countered by evasion and resistance oriented self-organizing groups.

Of course, not everyone living in a public space dominated environment will be part of evasion or resistance oriented self-organized groups. Some will collaborate as is the case with populations in territories occupied by a foreign enemy. Others, perhaps the majority, will duck and cover hoping to stay invisible to those who control the expansionist public space. Some few, again as is the case when the outsider conquers and occupies land, will self-organize so as to evade the regulated public space and resist its further expansion.

Regulatory, bureaucratic states practicing centrally controlled public space predominate in Europe, particularly in the West. Evasion and resistance are and have been commonplace. Consider, for example, the wide spread tax avoidance and flat out cheating which is of legendary proportions in Italy and France but far from absent elsewhere.

Admittedly, centralized bureaucratic states can extend public space to the extent that virtually no private space remains. Further, some such states can possess internal police mechanisms of very high efficiency. But, as the example of the former German Democratic Republic shows, the slightest weakening of either resolve or capacity to efficiently repress results in the very rapid implosion of the state. The same may be seen in the former Soviet Union, which quickly dissolved into a vast array of self-organizing entities of sizes ranging from the microscopic to full fledged states.

In short, the human impetus to self-organizing can be delayed but it cannot be denied. It is so deeply rooted in our very nature that it cannot be expunged, it cannot be extinguished, it cannot be conquered by threats, coercion, force, or violence. It is the basis of all our resistance movements of whatever size, nature, or opponent.

In the US ever since the emergence of the progressive movement and agenda over a century ago, both major political parties have shared a progressive belief in the supreme efficacy of the bureaucratic, regulatory, and centralized state. The two parties may disagree on the goals of the ever expanded public space, but they subscribe to the notion that the extension of public space at the expense of the private is both desirable and necessary for the benefit of all Americans.

For the majority of the past half-century and more, the available private space has steadily contracted as have the number of established but initially self-organized groups both formal and informal which mediated between the individual and the public space. Much of this dynamic occurred for reasons which may be seen (and were) as laudable: economic justice, equality of opportunity (and, in many cases, outcome,) internal security, and so forth.

While many, if not all, the posited goals would have been achieved through the interplay of the mediating groups of private space, it is important to recognize that the expansion of public space was brought about from the top down. It was an imposed expansion, imposed often not by political processes but by judicial fiat. Legions of litigators not precinct captains, squads of judges not divisions of citizens, decreed the public space with its regulations, controls, and dictates must supersede the messy, inherently chaotic emergent systems of the private space.

It is and has been argued that the very nature of the United States, its large and quite heterogeneous population, its mixed economy, its complexly organised structures and institutions, demand the expanded public space. It is and has been argued that without the regulated and controlled public space the people of the US would be at the mercy of the darkest emotions--greed, fear, exploitation, inequity.

Proponents of the ever larger public space view human nature with the most dour of Calvinist eyes. To them the individual and his private space is the residence of evil. This evil must be both exposed and constrained by the ever vigilant government operating bureaucratically in the public space.

Of course, being True Believers, these proponents are indifferent to the base desire for power, even total authority, which their agenda brings with it. These proponents of the expanded public space always understand their motives and goals to be of the highest, purist, and most lofty sort.

It doesn't matter if the motives and goals are secular (from neocon to Marxist) or religious (from Evangelical Christian to Islamist Muslim), the True Believers are always morally certain of the correctness of their intents. They impose from on high as did Calvin in Geneva with the sureness of the saved working to save all others from their own evil.

This delusion is powerful and pervasive. It might even be seen as universal. It is also wrong. That is why it is ultimately doomed to fail just as certainly as the Soviet Union and the DDR collapsed.

Humans will and always have evaded and resisted the imposition of public space upon them. They have evaded and resisted the reduction of their private space, the creation and operation of their self-organizing groups.

It is also why "nation-building" in Iraq or Afghanistan will fail. The well meaning outsiders including those from the US all represent states with expanded public space and a deficiency of self-organizing groups. They are in the process of attempting to impose these views on people who have no desire to give up the messy, chaotic dynamics of self-organization and the emergent systems which the interplay between self-organized groups must produce.

The dour view of human nature held by the advocates of an all-inclusive public space, their sincere belief that such will protect people from their own worst aspects, is not generally shared in non-Western cultures. While the Islamist may have an expansive understanding of evil, it is not the same as the Western proponent of the centralized, bureaucratic state. Nor is the bleak view of the Islamist or the Western state-lover shared by the vast mass of people in the world.

Europe and later the US have been on a century long voyage into the world of all-inclusive public space. The faults, the weaknesses, the failures of the public space orientation have already made themselves evident. Nonetheless, we press on both in our homelands and in our foreign adventures.

Perhaps the clear failure of "nation-building" which is unfolding in both Iraq and Afghanistan will give impetus to reexamine what we are all about in our well-intended effort to defeat the deep rooted human need to self-organize, to tell the powers that be, the powers on high, to get the hell out of our lives.

Well, one can hope. Can't one?