Ann Marlowe

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/supply-side-foreign-policy_541156.html

1:15 PM, Feb 7, 2011 • By ANN MARLOWE

Here’s an idea: Let’s try reducing the supply of insurgency in Afghanistan rather than reducing the demand for it. This notion—potentially as important an insight as the Laffer curve—comes from a 41-year-old book by a retired RAND Corporation scholar now entering his ninth decade, Charles Wolf Jr.

Supply-side economics focuses on increasing the supply of goods and services, famously by lowering tax rates, rather than the often-impossible task of moving the demand curve. But looking at supply rather than demand management may be worth applying in our counterinsurgency in Afghanistan as well. The current policy debate is stuck among a few old ideas—negotiating with the Taliban, more “counterinsurgency,” more drone strikes—so a fresh approach is worth considering.

The supply-side approach to COIN, as in economics, dates to the 1970s. A distinguished economist and public policy theorist, Wolf articulated it in a slim 1970 volume, Rebellion and Authority: An Analytic Essay on Insurgent Conflict, co-authored with Nathan Leites, sponsored by RAND and published by Markham. (Wolf is still serving on hedge fund boards and playing tennis in Santa Monica; Leites, a Soviet expert, died in 1987.) The authors are opposed to the so-called hearts-and-minds school of counterinsurgency, which looks at the demand for insurgency in the population: “Attitudes, in the sense of preferences, affect behavior but are not identical with it; nor, in most cases are they the primary influence on it.” And supply for rebellion is probably more elastic than demand. Instead, they argue that counterinsurgents ought to focus on reducing the supply of insurgency: Cut the inputs that allow rebels to act, rather than focusing on the much harder task of changing the preferences of the population.

Wolf/Leites point out that rebellions can spread even if the rebel cause is unpopular. This seems to be what is happening in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have never scored above 10 percent approval in polling but are gaining ground in many areas of the country. The population—which the authors take to be rational economic actors—makes a calculation of the costs and benefits of supporting one side or another, and decides accordingly. Wolf/Leites emphasize something I have seen in Afghanistan: that the population will often make its decision on an extremely short-term basis, essentially sacrificing a good long-term future in favor of short-term threat relief. Making a government lovable—a hard task in Afghanistan, among other places—will not necessarily affect that calculus. But reducing the supply of insurgents may do so because the less effective the insurgents are at enforcing their threats, the less the population will obey them.

Some of Wolf/Leites’s ideas for reducing the supply of rebellion are raising the costs of necessary inputs like food and weapons, degrading the efficiency of the insurgents’ production process, destroying the insurgency’s outputs, and increasing the population’s capacity to absorb the insurgents’ onslaughts. So what would a Wolfian approach mean for our Afghan strategy?

· It would have elements of Joe Biden’s counter-terrorism plan, reducing the supply of insurgents by killing them. Since insurgents generally don’t control territory, the way to hit them is by destroying their organization. This is something General Petraeus is already doing.

· It would get very, very tough with Pakistan, which has done little to reduce the supply of terrorists emanating from its lawless border areas or using them for rest and re-supply. Our $2 billion a year in aid to Pakistan has to offer more leverage than this: “Successful counter-rebellion has always required either the absence of significant external support (for example, the Philippines and Malaya) or the shutting off of such support (Greece and Algeria).”

· It would shut off the American aid spigot and spend money on population control instead. Rather than spending money on public works projects to bribe the Afghans to support their government and our forces—an approach which seems to stop working the moment the money stops flowing—a new method would focus on making it much more difficult for the insurgents to resupply, to purchase food and fuel, to communicate with each other, and to communicate with the population.

Yes, it’s hard for big-hearted Americans to see poverty in Afghanistan. But poverty doesn’t cause rebellion, and Wolf/Leites argue that increasing the disposable income of the population may just enable them to buy protection from the insurgents. (Some American aid in Vietnam “almost certainly helped the Viet Cong.”) There will be plenty of time to improve the living situation of the Afghans once they are living in peace.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal has embraced Hamid Karzai as part of the Obama administration’s startling about-face on the Afghan president. Until recently, the Obama team seemed to understand that Mr. Karzai was “not an adequate strategic partner,” in the well-chosen words of our ambassador (and former general) Karl Eikenberry. Mr. Karzai’s refusal to name cabinet ministers in the wake of the August 2009 election (as required by the constitution) so angered his own parliament that for several days last month they refused to conduct any business, instead sitting silent in protest.

Mr. Karzai and the American commander are both following what Col. Gian Gentile, head of military history at West Point, has called “a strategy of tactics”—by which he means ground-level measures pursued on an ad hoc basis without an overall objective.

Mr. Karzai has no vision of his country’s future. But he’s adept at playing off all the actors, including the U.S., against each other in the hope he will be the only one left standing. His strange lack of urgency about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, according to Abdullah Abdullah, the leader of the Afghan democratic opposition, stems from his underlying belief that the U.S. decision to gradually withdraw next summer is a bluff. Many Afghans think the U.S. is there for ulterior motives (Afghanistan’s small oil and gas reserves, coal, taking Afghan farmland) and will stay forever.

Gen. McChrystal of course wants the best for his country and for Afghanistan. But he has a constituency in the military to serve as well. To avoid being tagged as a “knuckledragger” (the military’s term for an unreconstructed commander who “doesn’t get it” about counterinsurgency), he constantly states that we’re fighting a “war of perceptions” and that winning over the Afghan population is the key to victory. His tactics are those enshrined in his boss Gen. David Petraeus’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

The manual, which draws upon French counterinsurgency theorist David Galula and other military thinkers of the 1950s and ’60s, urges stationing troops in small outposts close to the people, using the military to do armed social work, and measuring success in perceptions. The idea is that if you execute process correctly at the local level, you create spots of security that eventually grow to cover the disputed area. The population refuses to help the insurgents and allies itself with the government.

The press has bought Gen. McChrystal’s line that now, finally, the American military will follow best-practice counterinsurgency and that now, finally, we will see good results.

I’ve seen our military do what the Field Manual says is right over the course of six embeds from the summer of 2007 onward, long before Gen. McChrystal took command on June 15, 2009. I’ve seen successes at the local and even provincial level—but nothing that has lasted even a year. In nearly every province and district of Regional Command East and Regional Command South, the security situation is either the same as it was in 2007 or significantly worse. The reason is that counterinsurgency is a set of tactics, not a strategy. It tells you how to persuade the population to embrace a good government, but it can’t make a government acceptable to the people.

Anywhere counterinsurgency has worked there has been a good government in place. The Karzai government has become more egregiously corrupt and incompetent in the last three or four years. Fraud in the Aug. 20, 2009, election soured large segments of the population on the government and even the democratic process. Cynicism has replaced hope among young people, and conspiracy theories about American motives have gained ground.

Now Mr. Karzai and American leaders are pushing negotiations with the Taliban, a terrible idea for many reasons, practical and moral. It’s part of the same confusion of process with vision that we’re seeing from American leaders. Mr. Karzai and the Taliban aren’t the only alternatives in Afghanistan. We have stupidly refused to show the Afghans that we take good governance seriously. Talking about the “war of perceptions” is not enough. We need a political strategy before we, and the Afghan people, lose.