Korengal as a template
The Washington Post has a long article on the retreat of US forces from the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan this weekend. There were many things that were worth reading, but a few lines really stood out to me:
For U.S. commanders, the Korengal Valley offers a hard lesson in the limits of American power and goodwill in Afghanistan. The valley’s extreme isolation, its axle-breaking terrain and its inhabitants’ suspicion of outsiders made it a perfect spot to wage an insurgency against a Western army.
U.S. troops arrived here in 2005 to flush out al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. They stayed on the theory that their presence drew insurgents away from areas where the U.S. role is more tolerated and there is a greater desire for development. The troops were, in essence, bullet magnets.
In 2010, a new set of commanders concluded that the United States had blundered into a blood feud with fierce and clannish villagers who wanted, above all, to be left alone. By this logic, subduing the Korengal wasn’t worth the cost in American blood.
The US Army is finally recognizing what its intel folks and outside analysts have been saying for years; the vast majority of the fighters and their support system are shooting at the US because of local concerns. Those local concerns of who controls timber and gem smuggling route, who has power in a village, what set of rules are enforced for purdah aren’t our concern or our national interest to change.
The primary interest that the US may be able to achieve in Afghanistan is to prune back the capacity of far enemy terrorist groups to organize past the squad/cellular level. Anything beyond that is a maximal goal of system transformation that guarantees another generation of a corps or more fighting in Afghanistan to determine who controls timber smuggling routes.
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“Prune back” is a good choice of words. There comes a time as a gardener that one faces an enemy that cannot be defeated. No amount of potent herbicide, no smothering, no pulling will eradicate the weed completely. At such points, the gardener can only hope to control the flora invader to a point where it never gains the upper hand.
You can’t remove a stand of bamboo forever. Try killing an established, wild grape vine. Snow on the Mountain will appear eradicated until it isn’t.
There are things you just have to live with, even if you don’t like them much.
what set of rules are enforced for purdah aren’t our concern or our national interest to change
I was nodding along until I reached that. That’s wrong. It is in everybody’s enlightened national self-interest for women to have a voice. If they did, we’d see a lot less Talibaning and terrorizing. (I don’t mean that as some immutable natural law. Only that in current societies that would be true.)
The problem is that everyone’s national self-interest is so far from enlightened that the proposition is purely theoretical in any case.
Quixote — in the long run I agree, but in the short run, anti-purdah and pro-woman’s rights campaigns run by the US Army tend to be counterproductive on multiple domains. They don’t advance women’s rights (see Iraq for best example), and they don’t get local buy-in for whatever mission the US is attempting to accomplish. In the long run, I completely agree with you, but if the mission is population centric COIN then getitng into a cultural pissing match with the local elites who are critical to success of pop-centric COIN is really dumb and counter-productive.