[This and other posts reporting on the Conference
appear to have been removed from the Internet]

Registan.net | By Joshua Foust | 7-8 June 2010

Dispatches from the CENTCOM Afpak Conference

Jump to:
1. The Art of the Implausible | 2. Assertions, or Arguments?
3. A Problem of Implementation | 4. Extremely Extremist Extremism
5. Opinion Polls Make You Dumb

This week, the United States Central Command, CENTCOM, is holding a conference at it’s Afghanistan/Pakistan Center of Excellence, about how the U.S. military and civilian agencies can “move forward” in the region. A group of attendees, called “The Conference Guys” to protect their identities for fear of retribution by their employers, will be submitting reports of the various panels and their thoughts on it.

Choice Quotes from the Distinguished Speakers:
“The conventional battle space is as much a battle over narratives as over territory.”
“The failure in Marjeh was predicable.”
“The process [of ensuring accountability] requires some kind of mechanism that provides that mechanism.”
“…there are extremists in the sense of people who actually pick up guns and then there are extremists in the sense of people who sympathize with, support, and enable the people who actually pick up guns.”

1. The Art of the Impossible

So I’m here at CENTCOM’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence (COE) conference in Tampa. This whole conference is not-for attribution (hey, it’s the military), and I’m going to respect that. I won’t name names or differentiated between speakers. Enjoy.

I just listened to the opening speaker say he hoped the participants would forego stale reporting of current/past events and get to honest dialogue about what coalition forces in Afghanistan are/could be/should be doing. He specifically said he wanted to go beyond simple knowledge-building to instead focus on actual arguments and analysis.

To be honest, just the initial comments I have heard here so far make my brain want to throw up. The speakers seem to have a whole lot more confidence in their assertions than is warranted by the evidence and arguments they present. I’m going to ignore all of the evidence against their arguments, and just look at what evidence they provide for their assertions.

No one here is explicitly stating his or her assumptions about how Afghanistan works, but here’s what I can infer:

1. Afghanistan and Pakistan are made up of many different groups (tribal, ethnic, political, religious, etc.) that are internally homogenous enough to justify treating those groups as comparable to formal organizations with leaders and structural divisions and things like that.
2. The complex “mosaic” (in one speaker’s terms) of these groups makes it incredibly difficult to understand the region at all.
3. If we can somehow understand the mosaic, our next task is to talk in ways that will make the different groups behave how we want.

Assumption #1. As far as I can tell, the only reason to believe that Afghans’ various tribal, ethnic, and other group affiliations correspond to differences and similarities in their actual behavior with any degree of consistency is the observation that people in Afghanistan often talk about those groups. Now, that’s not a bad reason to believe the assumption, but it certainly isn’t a good reason, either. People talk about all kinds of things that have little-to-no real-world consequences. The fact that people talk about stuff isn’t a good enough reason to believe the assumption.

Assumption #2. I’m sure the weather would be incredibly difficult to understand if we assumed at the outset that the bunny-shaped clouds led to rain and the boat-shaped clouds led to sunshine. That’s because the cloud shapes are irrelevant–the product of the atmospheric conditions that actually affect the weather. If we assume at the outset that group affiliations are the key components of a country, and then have a ridiculously hard time understanding what the local people do and why they do it, it’s plausible that the country is just ridiculously complex, but it’s equally plausible that we’re carving up our view of the country in a way that doesn’t correspond to any of the factors that actually matter.

Assumption #3. If Afghan’s group affiliations are what matters–because we assume they matter–and those affiliations overlap in complex ways–because we assume that complexity–then our only real option for engaging the population is to talk them out of the conflict. Talk doesn’t have to be targeted. You just put it out there, make sure everyone hears it, and the people who can be convinced by your talk will be. I find this assumptions fascinating. What in all of our experience of political upsets and marketing disappointments leads us to believe that the world actually works that way?

That last assumption is a huge part of how military planners seem to think about places like Afghanistan. A (rough) quote from one of the speakers: “The conventional battle space is as much a battle over narratives as over territory.” In other words, we win wars by saying things that convince people to like us and to not like our enemies. That way of thinking springs directly from a series of assumptions in which we have very little reason to believe. The premises are bad–or at least, they have yet to be shown to be good–so how is it ok to accept the conclusion?

The theme of the conference is “The Art of the Possible in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” I wish they had called it the Art of the Plausible. That would have been more useful. I’m trying to stay hopeful here, but so far I’m not hearing much beyond warrantless assertions.

Jump to:
1. The Art of the Implausible | 2. Assertions, or Arguments?
3. A Problem of Implementation | 4. Extremely Extremist Extremism
5. Opinion Polls Make You Dumb