Читать книгу Counterinsurgency In Eastern Afghanistan 2004-2008: A Civilian Perspective - Robert Kemp - Страница 3

America was attacked from and went to war in Afghanistan in the first year of the twenty-first century. Nearly midway into the second decade Americans are winding down only their own participation; the war continues. With but a few exceptions, writings about the war have focused either at the policy level or on aspects of combat and the military. Americans are vaguely aware that civilians also served; particularly diplomats, aid workers, contractors, and civil servants from numerous cabinet departments, including Agriculture, Justice, Homeland Security, State, and others. But as to what these many civilians did, risked, and tried to accomplish few in the general public could say. When journalists or inspectors occasionally criticize, they often do so with no discussion of why decisions were made or with any understanding of either the challenges or reasons for action. This is not to argue against the view that many mistakes were made; they were. In general that is the story of all wars, particularly irregular wars fought in strange surroundings that need to be learned even as events demand decisions before learning can take root.

Against that background Robert Kemp’s work fills in many blank spots about the civilian side of civil-military cooperation in counterinsurgency. It is the personal account of a Foreign Service officer who was prepared to return several times to Afghanistan to serve his country. That in itself is a story of service that exemplifies many American diplomats and their civilian colleagues and is much too little appreciated by those who still hold a striped pants and teacup view of what it means to be a diplomat.

Kemp’s work focuses on Eastern Afghanistan in the period 2004 to 2008, part of which occurred during my time as US ambassador to Afghanistan. It was a period generally marked by under-resourcing, particularly in civilian personnel, some of which resulted from the flow of resources to Iraq. Much of it however, derived from the hollowing out of American diplomacy during the previous twenty years, when administrations of both parties thought they could do with either less diplomacy or fewer people to carry it out. The frequent reference in the book to staffing gaps and responsibilities that exceeded any reasonable grasp were a direct result of the massive personnel shortages that the American Academy of Diplomacy documented in 2008.1 Our war efforts paid the price for this neglect. We should not repeat the experience.

The reader will find certain themes recur through the book. Progress early on was strong; but as the insurgency picked up speed, much of the progress was reversed. In examining this trend in Eastern Afghanistan, the area covered by Kemp, two facts are particularly important. One was that much of the impetus for the increase in fighting came from across the Pakistani border. The other was that American inputs did not keep pace with the change. In April 2007, in my last major report before leaving post, I noted that while we were not losing then, we could be in a year, and we had no margin for surprise.2 This book deals with parts of the field-level work that gave rise to that analysis.

Another recurring theme is that of the harmful results of our short-tour policies. Military and civilian personnel come for a year or so and depart. Knowledge is lost, plans are changed (often to the confusion of Afghans who remain), focus is shifted before efforts have put down solid roots, and the increasingly disgusted locals have to reeducate the foreigners every few months. Until we are prepared to keep senior personnel in place for considerably longer tours we will not succeed in building a learning organization to deal with complex local realities.

Lack of sufficient, trained Afghan bureaucratic personnel was a continual roadblock. That was simply a fact of life. It needed longterm training over many years to reverse the effects of twenty-five years of war and the near-total destruction of Afghanistan’s educational system. Some of that training is now happening; but those like Robert Kemp who worked in the early years simply had to live with the problem. No amount of concepts and coordinating structures could wholly make up for the absence of people––something to remember when evaluating the results of that period.

As the insurgency worsened, we increased our security––”force protection,” in the jargon. The result, as Kemp notes, was to reduce the mobility of our personnel and their interaction with Afghans, which in turn, reduced our local knowledge and ability to refine our actions. Clearly, the result was lost effectiveness. More recently, after the politicization of the losses in Benghazi, this trend has considerably worsened. We have not always been this risk-averse. We operated on quite different principles in Vietnam. If the current trend continues, so will the reductions in knowledge essential for intelligent policy.

A particularly interesting development in the later part of Robert Kemp’s time was the effort to shift the focus of aid and governance from a provincial to a district level, at least for districts deemed key to the war effort. Kemp’s description of that shift is a usefully detailed account of the enormous resources in time, people, and money that were required to move from concept to effective implementation. This is an important lesson for those who think success is just about getting the policy right.

In war, as my military colleagues used to remind me, “the enemy gets a vote.” That is particularly apparent in the many cyclical developments recorded here––areas where there was considerable progress that then slipped for various reasons. In some cases progress was restored. In others the task will now be up to the Afghan government. Kemp’s discussion of Nangarhar is telling. It was one of the brighter provinces for a time. Much of that progress has been lost; local power brokers are challenging the once powerful but now ailing governor, crime is on the upswing, as are opium poppy production and insurgency. Some of the problems stemmed from the lack of follow-through on aid promises. Many are purely local issues. All is not lost, but the swings remind one that in a counterinsurgency progress is rarely linear and needs constant reinforcement.

It is clear that some efforts failed during the period of this work. Others succeeded only in part. And some made a real difference. While judging the results is important, it is important also to understand how new, complicated, and difficult the times and circumstances were. Much had to be learned the hard way, by trial and error, when time precluded lengthy study and knowledge was slight. We should not lose either the knowledge gained of how to operate in such circumstances or our understanding of how difficult it was to acquire that knowledge. To both those ends this work makes a real contribution.

Ronald E. Neumann

U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan 2005-2007