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.