AFG: The CRC Pad

So, for whatever reason, I decided to go to a warzone generally and Afghanistan specifically. The journey began in Georgia at what's affectionately called the CRC or CONUS Replacement Center -- note that "CONUS" is Department of Defense (DoD) terminology for "The Continental United States." The journey begins at a large cement pad with a roof to protect people from the sun and other elements. Note that while I was there, in July and August, there were no other elements. I had this fleeting idea that rain might also bring some much needed cooler air, but all it did was increase the humidity, if that was possible. 

We mustered there on our first day to check our paperwork because without proper paperwork, nobody was going anywhere. I had procured our paperwork only a few hours before heading down Georgia, which was a minor miracle. I wonder what would have happened had I not got the paperwork finalized, but luckily I didn't have to find out. I also wondered how many of the guys there didn't have their paperwork in order, but I didn't really care. I just wanted to ensure my situation was squared away, and it was. 

I was there with equal parts contractors and military, but the military had little love for the contractors and there was good reason for that -- we were a pretty slovenly bunch. I was there as an international relations scholar (call me a "recovering academic") who had done some analysis work for DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), but most were mechanics and workers who had other skills necessary to the US military war effort. Being "the DARPA guy" had the advantage of being interestingly different but the military guys figured that I was smart but overpaid and of dubious utility. Perhaps they were right. 

Tradition, Complexity, and Social Value

I confess that I find modern politics confusing. However, there are a few theories that I find helpful to explain political dynamics. I find that whenever a liberal – which is basically a Democrat, or a progressive, or a socialist – gets angry about a subject, I take that as an invitation to think more seriously, deeply, and logically about the topic. So when Joshua Cohen – the Martha Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society at Stanford University, though when I knew him he was at MIT – took offense at my referring to his philosophy of law class as “radical,” Joshua’s anger presents an invitation for further inquiry in hopes of revealing political insights.

The inquiry begins with a simple review of the definition of the word “radical,” which means, “very new and different from what is traditional or ordinary.” My working definition becomes, “seeking or favoring fundamental change.” So the question then becomes, why might changing the political order be fundamentally problematic? Or conversely, what value is there in social arrangements that are ‘traditional’ or ‘ordinary’?  

The observation that provides insight into this question derives from complexity theory generally and software engineering specifically. When I was a computer science student, I spent a summer creating 10,000 lines of computer code – object-oriented C specifically. It was hard, and so it’s worth considering how I treated that code. Did I “seek or favor fundamental change,” or did I pursue a more conservative course of action? I pursued the second course because, even though I created all 10,000 lines of code, and I new that code better than anybody on the planet, I didn’t know was going to happen when I changed that code. I changed the code with a plan about what I thought was going to happen, but I was frequently surprised and needed to go back. There were times that I would implement two or three changes together, which would end up breaking what was already working, and then I would have undo my changes and then test each one carefully and individually. Consequently, I undertook changes to this system very carefully. This is actually a key engineering lesson: build on what’s known because radical changes tend not to work.

There is a lesson to be learned here for politics. That is, if you treat social systems as complex systems, and there are good reasons for doing so, then this argues against making fundamental changes. Why? Because those implementing the changes DO NOT KNOW what is going to happen. People generally are bad at predicting and confirming that promised changes actually occur. This is why science – predicting what will happen, creating an experiment, and then confirming the prediction – is so important and so hard. The fundamental insight then is this: social systems are even more complex than the software I built that summer, so these so-called experts have even less of an idea of what will happen with their policy changes than I did changing my software because they didn’t create the system, they have only studied it.

Logically then, it would make sense to study social system significantly before attempting to change them. I have studied complex social systems significantly in my monograph, Environmental Impacts of Globalization and Trade, but most policies are not subject to that level of rigor. In fact, I would say that most are not given the level of study that they deserve. And why is that? It’s because these so-called experts are not experts at social systems and their analysis, which would be logical, but they’re expert at self-promotion and seeming like experts. Moreover, the consideration of policy consequences is anathema. Finally, people who are capable of actual analysis would be demonized because they are capable of revealing the charlatanism of the pseudo-experts, who revel in the make-believe world of the media. These charlatans are expert at crafting and selling compelling stories, but the ultimate question is, “Do they work?” That is the value of proven technologies and tradition: they have been proven to work. These stories purveyed by the pseudo-experts? These innovations are designed to enrich the charlatans, not to work as advertised.  

This is a very old tension, which was explained in Plato’s Gorgias in his parable about the pilot. That is, Plato says there is a big difference between somebody who knows how to drive a ship and somebody who looks and talks like they know how to drive a ship. To conclude, let me review the MIT Seal, where Joshua Cohen was a professor and where I was a student. The seal features a both a scholar and an engineer with the phrase “mens et manus,” which is Latin for, “head and hand.” The way I interpret this is that there are lots of ideas from the head or “mens,” but very few that are proven workable over the long-term by experience, the hand, or “manus.” To conclude, there is a tension between our understanding and reality – we may want to believe in the possibility and benefits of radical change, but experience and reality show that most radical changes do not work and that tradition is undervalued and traditional solutions underappreciated. 

Complex Conservatism and its Consequences

I've been thinking more about complex conservatism -- what is means, if it's real, and why, if it is real, it's controversial. Previously, I wrote about the math behind it, which is fine, but doing so is limited because politically, there's a big difference between being correct and convincing. Being correct means getting the logic and data correct, while being convincing means getting the affect and rhetoric correct. These are not the same thing, as I learned in high school debate when I'd make these logical arguments that I knew were correct and would lose the debate. At the time I wondered, "How is that possible." In modern, media-dominated American politics, it's not just possible but probable. So rather than lay out the correct academic groundwork -- which Hayward Alker did for me in his complex social systems syllabus -- let me instead talk through the everyday consequences of why it matters and how complexity manifests itself.

First, complexity manifests itself in the form of counterintuitive results. That is, we do all these things for a reason -- like doing one's homework before watching pointless youtube videos -- or maybe no reason at all, and good things come about because of them. Conversely, we may do other things because we want to or they are fun -- like drugs or eating McDonalds -- and then are surprised when things don't work out well. Now this dynamic leads to all kinds of pointless arguments such as, "My friend did everything right and got cancer," or "My cousin dropped out of college and made a billion dollars," and maybe those stories are true, but that's not the way to bet.

Second, arguments divorced from political reality -- or more likely, from a carefully selected reality -- are the currency of today's politics, which explains why it is so impoverished. What is the antidote for this poverty? Jesus said that a tree is known by its fruits, which is so significant that this insight is developed twice in the New Testament:

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matthew 7:15–20 (KJV)

And

"For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh." Luke 6:43-45 (KJV)

This is a timeless truth, many of which abound in the Holy Bible, but they also exist in the secular world as well, three of which I will mention here. Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of John Locke (they were both born in 1632), wrote memorably sub specie aeternitatis, or "take the long-term view." Now there are some intellectuals who are dismissive of taking the Bible seriously, and to them I would direct them to Donald Knuth's Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, which is based on his lectures on his lectures on faith and science at MIT in 1999. Finally, I was talking with Jay Forrester about these topics and he told me to concentrate on the tension between the short and long-term, and many can appreciate the former but few the latter.

Third, the reality we all confront is sufficiently complex that it cannot be described in a few catch-phrases. In fact, when I see a car festooned with multiple bumper stickers, usually the advocate leftist causes because the driver believes reality is simple and can be captured by catchy phrases. I interpret the Bible as a collection of insights from parents who love their children and are trying their best to pass on cultural wisdom to prevent them from making catastrophic mistakes. The best way to do this is through stories that are retained by the human mind. Detractors call these stories "myths," but its their correspondence to timeless truths that determine their worth, and the fact that the Holy Bible has stood the test of time helps confirm their worth.

Finally, we have an opportunity to investigate these timeless truths with modern tools, as Knuth starts to do, though the average academic will find this idea ludicrous, so it's not clear who the audience would be for this work. However, the first-rank philosophers have been trying to answer these questions for century with unaided cognition and logic, so it makes sense to revisit these timeless topics with the more capable toolkit available today. This is the project and promise of complex conservatism.

Daniel Davis on AFG

There's an interesting guy, LTC Daniel Davis, who has been very critical of the way the war in Afghanistan has been fought. Now he's a smart, experienced, dedicated, and brave guy whose work has appeared in all kinds of interesting places including, Armed Forces Journal, New York Times, PBS, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Wired, Democracy Now, etc. Now when he was there, he observed all kinds of things that didn't make any sense to him, and I shared that same experience. Many people who have spent time in Afghanistan have come away less than satisfied with the war's progress.

What's interesting is how the system -- that is, the general officers and senior politicians defend themselves from these criticisms. For example, Joseph Collins, who is a colonel and holds a PhD from Colombia, criticized Davis for being insufficiently rigorous and coherent in his critiques. I get it -- Davis's prose is not always sparkling, his arguments are not always clear, and his methodology may be circumspect -- but that doesn't mean Davis is wrong. So the easy critique becomes, "His evidence is anecdotal." and "He doesn't have the big picture." Well maybe, but I don't think enough credibility is given by academic to on the ground reporting and observation.

Methodologically though, Davis does make some good points. Specifically, he argues that there have been no measures of performance identified that have been tracked against missions. That is, nobody has answered the question, "What are we doing there?" Now Anthony Cordesman has done excellent work defining measures and gathering empirical evidence about Afghanistan, but nobody yet has done the hard work of integrating these measures into a coherent policy analysis. I'm trying to do this, but it's hard to do in one's "free" time.

Afghan Elections

My second big analysis assignment in Afghanistan was to prepare an election report for the command, which I completed hours before I left in late February 2012. It wasn't a technical report, but I went through the available 2009 election documentation and pulled out some lessons learned which included the following. First, the command was not in the election business per se, but it was more in the business of providing security for elections. SOF didn't have enough people to provide security by themselves, so it was a matter of determining where their limited capabilities could best be used and how they could support other security forces including General Purpose Forces (GPF), the Afghan National Army (ANA), and Afghan National Police (ANP). In fact, due to the cultural sensitivities displayed by Afghans, it was determined that the best course of action was to be as invisible as possible on election day. Second, there is the matter of logistics, getting all the election officials and ballots transported to where they need to be is difficult in a country as large as Afghanistan. It was likely that there would be fewer ISAF planes and helicopters available in 2014 than in 2009, so that would need to be taken into consideration. Third, there was the matter of the larger context of the election. Would Karzai try to remain in office? What would the ISAF policy goals be in 2014? And what would the international aid situation be?

But a bigger question concerned what was hoped to be gained by the election. One of the phrases bandied about said that this was the international community's last, best chance to influence Afghanistan. My boss, COL Pat, placed a great deal of faith in the election, saying that it was going to bring about change for the better and get everybody in the country excited and moving in the right direction. Being a political economist, I was skeptical that mere elections could be that beneficial. This skepticism derived from the failure of Bush's Middle East democracy doctrine, which drew heavily on the work of Natan Sharansky generally and The Case for Democracy specifically, in which Sharansky argues that the primary goal of US foreign policy is to expand democracy. After having studied with Joshua Cohen, the co-author of On Democracy along with Joel Rogers, I was highly skeptical of democracy because most of his arguments seemed driven by affect, were historically unsupported, and did not take theoretical critiques seriously. Specifically, I'm thinking of Tocqueville's Democracy in America that I studied with Harvey Mansfield, which I found much more grounded, plausible, and convincing. Specifically, I felt more needed to be done with security, institutions, and development (as Mansfield and Tocqueville would argue) and less that elections would prove a singular palliative (as Cohen and Rogers would argue). I predicted that the 2014 elections would not go well.

Peter Bergen, however, has written an intriguing piece, "What if the Afghan Elections Actually Work?" that has me rethinking my position. Bergen tells the story how three internationally-trained doctors have emerged as the front-runners aided by their more domestically and militarily oriented Afghan "politicians" who some may call "warlords" (I'm not judging because Afghanistan is a rough place). Moreover, the Taliban are not as powerful as once thought, and the voter turnout is much larger than previously thought, all of which -- indeed! -- is cause for hope and optimism in a place that badly need it. Another consideration is that ISAF forces have decreased from more than 100,000 when I was there to less than 40,000 now, which may have a beneficial effect because international forces tended to do too much and would not let the Afghans learn through doing because that inevitably involved failing, which is something that SOF doesn't handle well. So for today let's celebrate the successful elections, but I'll be very interested to see what tomorrow brings.

Leaving Khayr Kot Castle

November 2011

I'm in a Blackhawk UH-60 helicopter sitting across from our interpreter, wearing body armor and a helmet, and we're taking off from Khayr Kot Castle in Paktika, Afghanistan, which is almost within sight of Pakistan. It's just a few months after the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which I spent in Kabul. I was in DC on 9/11 ten years earlier and had to spend a few more days waiting for air traffic to return. It never did, so I took my rental car and drove it past New York City on the way home. I remember seeing fire trucks driving from more rural areas of New York towards the city, and I remember returning my rental car to the airport where no planes were taking off or moving for that matter. One short decade later, there I was, in Afghanistan where the whole saga began.

Leaving Khayr Kot Castle, November 2011

I was in Paktika to observe a Shura, a meeting between officials from the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from Kabul, and the local leaders of Yahya Khel District who were being asked to support VSO/ALP (Village Stability Operations/Afghan Local Police) in their district. I was with the group from Kabul who had flown down for the Shura, which involved having the local leaders from Yahya Khel stand up and say they were ready to support VSO/ALP by identifying and vouching for local military age males who would be trained to be ALP, with the idea being that even though they wouldn't be able to fight as well, they could tell who belonged from who didn't belong, something with which international forces had a tougher time. VSO/ALP is an implementation of the Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission in Afghanistan, which is the specialty of US Army Special Forces (SF), otherwise known as "Green Berets." Within the Special Operations Forces (SOF) community, SF differs from Navy SEALS in that SF works closely with the locals while SEALS are more, "pure shooters." So if SF are the good cops, then SEALs are the bad cops. From the perspective of a political economist, SF are the more interesting group because they address the full range of security, governance, and development activities required by counterinsurgency (COIN) as opposed to purely putting rounds downrange.

My colleague MAJ Erik had put me on this mission to help me better understand VSO/ALP and to help tell the story of what the special operation command was trying to accomplish. After the Shura, the senior personnel shared some meat and bread to celebrate the event. I followed my boss, COL Pat, and found myself in the middle of thing, there on the right in the black fleece. This photograph forms the centerpiece of my time in Afghanistan, around which all the other experiences revolve.

Sharing meat and bread after the Yahya Khel District Shura

Afghanistan and Hotel Rouge

I was in Washington, DC for a computational social science conference, SBP2014, and stayed at the Hotel Rouge, which features numerous Venus statues (Veni?), cheetah and zebra robes, and a very cool restaurant, the “Bar Rouge.” I spent the week having friends and colleagues over for dinner at “The Rouge,” which is only two doors down from the Kazakhstan embassy, and generally having a great time on Embassy Row.

On Thursday night, I invited Frank Ritter of Penn State over, who I had only talked to a few times while he was on sabbatical, but we had never really had the chance to hang out and talk. On a wonderful spring evening, we settled into Bar Rouge, ordered some Stella Artois Cidre, which in my opinion is surprisingly good, and started chatting. Frank had given a great talk on the use of computerized moving targets for shooting instruction, so we talked about that for a while, and then he asked me about Afghanistan.

Two years ago I had gone to Kabul to work as a quantitative counterinsurgency (COIN) analyst for the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) based on some work I did for DARPA, which some people find sort interesting. Professionally, I’m a recovering academic because after having published my political economy thesis with a semi-reputable press, I couldn’t get a job as a professor. In the late 1990s, applying computational techniques to political problems was viewed skeptically, though now they have conferences on it. In 2011 though, SOCOM thought I could help blend politics and economics with security within a single analytic framework as required by COIN theory. After having earned two degrees in international relations, which primarily concerns the study of war, the idea of actually going to a warzone and applying what I had learned and hopefully making a difference to the war effort was exciting. People asked how I could go, but I wondered how I could not go. I have always been interested in the special operations community, so the opportunity to observe it up close was one to be taken seriously. I left for Afghanistan in August 2011 and returned in March 2012.

Fueled by Stella Cidre, I told Frank about my adventures in Afghanistan. I had become reluctant to talk about my time there not because of any trauma that occurred but because when I got back I had to perform immediately on a DARPA program and most people don’t really want to hear about what happened because it’s just so foreign and remote from their day-to-day interests and experiences. Frank though was very polite, listened, seemed genuinely interested, and he even asked questions from time to time. His encouragement and a few Cidres were all I need to tell stories for hours.  When I was done – or more accurately, when they closed the bar – Frank suggested that I write these stories down. I remember a cartoon from the ‘70s showing a self-involved and pretentious guy deep in thought with the caption, “After sailing across the Atlantic, Bill decides not to write about it,” and that’s the way I felt about my time Afghanistan. That is, everybody who comes back from war has a story, and after having read many of them, I’m not sure the world needed mine. But Frank’s enthusiasm was infectious, and he convinced me to write some of them down, at least enough to see if there’s some “there” there.