$1 trillion USD of.......oh, screw it.

ISAF military operations, corruption in the government, strategic planning by the Obama administration, the weaknesses of current counter-insurgency theory, and all sorts of other Afghanistan-centered topics generate a predictable response in the blogosphere. Often the commentary is juvenile, hyperbolic or just plain wrong, but generally it barely rises beyond the level of nitpicking among COIN specialists or partisan hackery. There's often an undertone of negativity and defeatism, as the old saying about "bad news selling more papers" applies just as accurately to blog traffic, but no single article usually creates quite the firestorm that seems to have ignited over this article in the NY Times.

Maybe it's the overwhelming eminence of The Grey Lady, or perhaps their oft-perceived liberal bias or maybe simply the fact that the headline seemed custom-made to demand investigation and counter-point.*

*Here's a fun mental exercise: skim any major US paper (or British for that matter), reading only the headlines. Formulate in your head your own perception of the days events, and then go back and actually read the articles. I'm betting that the headline-induced perception is significantly different than the reality described in the articles.

To summarize, underneath a headline that read, "U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan," the text of the article went on to say:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

That's a pretty shocking headline, and an exceptionally bold opening paragraph. The rest of the article includes phrases like "the vast scale of Afghanistan's mineral wealth," "stunning potential" and (my personal favorite) "the Saudi Arabia of lithium."*

*Afghanistan is probably one of the few countries that aspires to be the "Saudi Arabia" of anything. Personally, I'll take decadent poverty over the Vice and Virtue Police.

Apparently, there are potentially significant deposits of iron, copper, cobolt, gold, lithium and something called niobium.*

*So who gets to name these things anyway? Is "niobium" really the best name we could come up with for a mineral? Sounds like a particularly unimportant part of a dog's salivary system. "Well, if you ever want Sparky to lick his own ass again, we'll have to remove his infected niobium."

As the article goes to great lengths to emphasize, all of this is potentially hugely beneficial for Afghanistan. Mining, especially for iron and copper, is largely low-skilled industry, which suits Afghanistan's total lack skills rather nicely. I assume that lithium, cobolt and niobium require a bit more technology and know-how to extract, but still the revenue would be nice for a cash-strapped government. Someday, in the distant future, maybe these deposits will generate some revenue for the government. It will take billions of dollars of foreign investment, not to mention replacing a tenacious insurgency with a functioning government, but at least it's possible.

I'm no optimist when it comes to the eventual fate of this 12th century shithole, and the article didn't sufficiently address the difficulties and dangers of this possible bonanza. It also fails to clarify where the $1 trillion USD figure came from, or when this "discovery" was actually made (Hint: the guys who originally stumbled on this had the hammer and sickle on their passports). But even I was a little put off by the exceedingly negative "gotcha" reaction of the blogosphere.

A sampling:

• The normally restrained Blake Houshell at Foreign Policy: Say What?
• The (almost) always reliable Andrew Exum at CNAS (who actually cites Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion in his analysis. Seriously?)
• The not-entertainingly snarky Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic.
• Conor's lazy comrade-in-arms, Andrew Sullivan, who doesn't even bother to offer his own analysis and would rather just jump up and shout, "Ooooh, me too, me too!", and then throw around phrases like "imperial temptation" and "US exploitation."
• The ever-cranky Steven Walt (also at FP), who does Sullivan one better by citing Jack Snyder's El Dorado myth, and finally
• the perennial FP doomsayer Tom Ricks*, who also outsources his response to a "old Afghan hand," a guy who was a Director of USAID in Afghanistan. In the 1970s. Well, he's certainly "old."

*Is it just me, or is Ricks' constant harping on the supposed "unraveling" in Iraq starting to sound like a guy hoping for a predicition to come true, regardless of the consequences? Things in Iraq are not good, but are ever so slowly getting better, but sometimes I think Ricks would prefer that the country falls apart so he can stand up and say "I told you so!"

Tomorrow, a sampling of some reactions from actual Afghans to the supposed news that their country holds impressive mineral wealth, along with a few thoughts of my own. In the meantime, there are plenty of more relevant, interesting and important articles in the NY Times recently. For examples, see here and here.

N.B. Apologies for the "wall of text" but I couldn't find a way to communicate the salient points in more concise language. Verbosity was always one of my faults.

Op-Eds

I generally refrain from citing other posts and articles here, since I figure my loyal readers (all three of you) don't actually come here for political commentary and strategic/tactical analysis. However, I do read a lot of that stuff, mostly online or downloaded academic papers and articles.

The stuff generated by the various professional COIN-theorists (and their antithesis, the anti-COIN crowd) is often unreadable, but occasionally contains a few nuggets of truth, or at least of useful analysis.* While I disagree with some of what the military types have to say (especially if they have no operational experience here), it's usually worth listening to their perspective.

*Apparently, a career spent in any modern Western military does not endow one with the ability to read or write effectively. Methinks it has something to do with the dominance of PowerPoint as an information-sharing technique.

By contrast, much of what is available out there in the popular press is pretty weak on Afghanistan, demonstrating a total lack of understanding of either local conditions or the peculiar tactical problems of this campaign. There are a few reporters, mostly for the NYTimes, who make an honest effort to get the story right, and often go above and beyond what most reporters would endure. But overall, newspaper reporters simply don't get this place, probably because it's hard to understand the complex problems facing Afghanistan if one spends all their time in the garden bar at The Gandamack Lounge.*

*Not that I dislike the Gandamack. It's a venerable Kabul institution. The food is even halfway decent, although they do water down the whiskey. As if I wouldn't know.

And with apologies to anyone with a fondness for the UK papers, a quick review of the last twelve months will conclusively demonstrate that none of them rise even to the level of the Miami Herald when covering Afghanistan. They're too busy trying to score political points for their respective parties to actually worry about getting the story. Fortunately, the BBC at least partially makes up for their utter failings.

But by far the worst transgressors in the realm of public commentary are the various pundits, talking heads and think-tank types who populate the OpEd pages of the major newspapers.* These largely self-appointed experts feel compelled to spout off about anything that remotely enters into their supposed sphere of knowledge. And given the depth of their hubris, there's not much that falls outside that sphere.

*You thought I was going to say "bloggers" didn't you? Well, some of them do suck, for a variety of reasons. I'll get to them later.

And by far the worst of these are the political science/international relations/international security academics who have spent their entire careers writing voluminously about security and defense issues without ever having gained first-hand experience on the topic. Some of you may know the type. The publish articles, in various prestigous journals, with titles like "Tribalism, Marxism and Feminism: Three Social Movements in Contemporary Insurgencies" and "Comparative Social Dynamics of the Role of Non-State Actors in Civil Strife." I usually can't even decipher the titles, much less the text of the articles.

So, all of that, by way of introduction, brings us to the point of this post, which is to highlight one of the more recent efforts by our distinguished ivory-tower dwellers, specifically this piece published yesterday on the New York Times OpEd page.

The author, one Dr. Kimberly Martin of Columbia University, discusses the nascent plans to fund and equip a "tribal militia" in Afghanistan. The purpose of this militia* is to provide local defense against Taliban reprisals, while at the same time providing some jobs in every community. The hope is that the combinaton of economic development, employment and some limited defensive capabilities will allow remote rural villages to begin to develop economically and socially.

*Militia is not really the right word here, since it generally has connotations of minutemen and brave American revolutionaries. The concept is really more akin to the CIDGs, or Civilian Irregular Defense Groups, that were created in South Vietnam in the late 1960s.

Dr. Martin apparently takes exception to this approach, and there are several reasons to be sceptical of the whole idea. However, either for reasons of space or simply general ignorance, Dr. Martin rolls out all the old tropes rather than discuss the actual pros and cons of the program.

For instance, she opens with the indispensible comparison to British colonial practice in Central Asia:

Almost point for point, this plan repeats the terrible mistake that the British colonial army made in the Pashtun tribal areas in what would become Pakistan, in the late 19th century.

Bravo Doctor! In only the second paragraph, you've managed to connect the whole scheme not only to a failed program from a previous campaign, but also imply that the whole concept is "colonial" in nature. Hmm, let me guess. Your favorite courses in undergrad poli sci were on Marxist theory?

The problem here is that this is not the 19th century, Afghanistan is not Pakistan, and the U.S. Army is slightly better at this whole counter-insurgency thing than some heavy-handed redcoats 150 years ago. At the very least, we have a lot more money to spread around this time.

But the real problem with the article is that the elements of the plan which she says failed so badly are actually the exact same elements that we need more of in Afghanistan today. She condemns the previous effort in part by writing, "British intelligence officers created charts of which sub-tribes and leaders (or maliks) had the most influence...." Yeah? And? That's a good thing. Detailed, accurate information about who the local power-brokers are is one of the key elements that is most lacking in our current efforts in Afghanistan. Any plan that creates a greater awareness of the intricacies of the tribal structure can only help in the long-run.

Or where she writes, "This system violated the tribal code of equality among all Pashtun men, but the official maliks accepted it with enthusiasm." Well of course they accepted it with enthusiasm. I haven't met an Afghan yet who wouldn't pledge his undying loyalty in exchange for $50 bucks. Even the vaunted fanatics of the Taliban fight and die for $10 a day. Cash is king, especially in A-stan.

And what's the bit about the "tribal code of equality" among Pashtun men? Notice how she limits that statement to the male half of the population. No need to dirty up a nice pretty argument with the ugly reality of female suppression. Besides, despite whatever Western-trained sociologists will tell you, there is no equality in Afghan culture, male or otherwise. This is a traditional (i.e. primitive) tribal structure, with deference to chief or clan-head (or whoever happens to be in charge), enforced by violence and backed up by familial ties. Equality in the Western sense of the word is a foreign concept.

If Dr. Martin's fear is that the tribal militia program will somehow undermine the traditional power structures here, well then I'm all for it. What she fails to understand is that it is exactly those traditional social constructs that are directly responsible for the shit-hole that this country has become. Afghans like to blame everyone for their problems, the Russians, the Pakistanis, the Arabs, the Iranians and the West. Fact is, this place is a mess because the Afghans have made it that way.

As so often happens after reading an article like that, I'm left wondering. Dr. Martin, have you even been to Afghanistan?

Thieves and Morons

As everyone knows, Afghanistan has gone through a tough few decades. From a moderately low starting point in the 1970s, this country has had:

• military coup by an allegedly democratic usurper
• a counter-coup by the communists
• a counter-revolution by monarchists and tribesmen
• an invasion by the Red Army to support the government
• a nasty civil war
• the collapse and defeat of both the communist government
• the ignominious retreat of the Red Army
• another nasty civil war
• the rise of the Taliban
• a third civil war, just for fun
• a lightning invasion by foreigners
• a prolonged occupation by said foreigners
• and, just to top it all off, a nasty (and worsening) insurgency against the new government and their international backers

No wonder this country is accurately described as the 12th century.....with cellphones.

Anyone who survived all that (much less prospered during it) is probably a consumate chameleon, adjusting their personal politics and preferences to match whomever happens to be running the show at the moment. You don't adjust, somebody with a Kalashnikov comes after you. This ability to shift allegiances and loyalties as fast as you or I would change our socks in the single most frustrating thing for NATO/ISAF forces to deal with, raised as they were in a culture of unbending devotion to the state and the army.

But all that is not the point of this post. The point is actually that this history of violence, collaboration and survival has created two types of Afghans that thrive in the upper levels of government and society: thieves and morons.

The corruption and thievery in this country is well-documented. By Western standards, it is shockingly bold and completely pervasive.*

*And this is coming from a guy who has years of experience dealing with the Cook County Recorder's Office, the penultimate expression of Chicago-style greed and bribery. More than once I have enclosed $20 in an application for a tax-sale register, just to speed the process. Twenty bucks will buy you a bodyguard for a day here, but it doesn't even register on the scale of typical government corruption.

These thieves permeate all levels of society here. They range from the 8-year old kid who will swipe your mobile phone faster than you can blink, to the cabinet minister who expects a villa in Abu Dhabi in exchange for a government contract. In between are all of the petty police officials or crooked construction workers, not to mention the minor bureaucrats and village chiefs who will sell their loyalty to the last bidder.*

*Note that it's the "last" bidder, which is not the same thing as the "highest" bidder. To a typical Afghan, $100 today is much more persuasive than $200 tomorrow. Whomever shows up with cash in hand is the winner, regardless of what promises or commitments are made for the future.

Certainly, thievery and corruption are endemic here, for a variety of reasons, but an equally large number of people have survived through sheer incompetence. These we call the morons. Now this fact is slightly counterintuitive, so let me explain. In a high-risk atmosphere like Afghanistan, competence can actually be a negative. Think of it this way: if you're a highly-effective district administrator (and loyal to the monarchy) when the communists come to power, they'll see you as a threat. You're out, and maybe buried in a ditch somewhere. If, on the other hand, you're a barely competent adminstrator, knowing just enough to keep your head out of the line of fire, you probably keep your job, regardless of prior loyalties. Now imagine that the Soviets withdraw and the mujaheddin come to power. Anyone of any skill in the previous government is immediately associated with reactionary elements and targeted for dismissal.*

*"Dismissal" in the Afghan sense usually means a bullet to the back of the head and an unmarked grave out on the Shomali plain. No severance packages here. If you're lucky, they let your extended family flee to a refugee camp in Pakistan.

Conversely, the morons simply keep on doing what they've been doing, which is largely nothing, attracting no attention and making no enemies. As a result of this process, over four or five iterations of Afghan society since the 1970s, the morons and their progeny have come to dominate the ranks of government, the military and business. As they say, the cream rises to the top. Except that in Afghanistan, the cream is then rounded up and taken out and shot, leaving whatever is left (milk? butter?)* to run the show.

*What exactly is left after the cream rises to the top? The top of what? Some sort of barrel I guess, but I'm a little unclear on the primitive agricultural basis for the analogy.

Unfortunately, these two classes are not mutually exclusive. Many of the thieves are surprisingly moronic (hence the "$100 is better today than $200 tomorrow" mentality), and a high percentage of the morons are on the take. Nevertheless, it is rare to find any Afghan in a senior position who does not exhibit some of the characteristics of one or both of these groups.

Or maybe I'm just bitter and judgmental. Nah.