Brinkmanship,not COIN,in Pakistan’s post-9/11 Internal War

Politics is critical to making sense of Pakistani successes and failures in dealing with non-state armed groups. This includes domestic political currents; regional political currents; and the global impetus of the post-9/11 era. How these currents overlap renders to any reading of insurgency in Pakistan real complexity. This article engages with this complexity rather than shirking from it. Its hypothesis is that while the insurgency bordering Afghanistan has been an epicentre of Pakistani military efforts to fight the Taliban, this theatre is in of itself insufficiently inclusive to grasp the nature of Pakistan’s security challenges and its consequent responses.     

Can Afghanistan avoid the Natural Resource Curse?

Recent discoveries of significant mineral deposits offer Afghanistan the opportunity to attain a level of economic development sufficient to stabilize that country's volatile security situation while providing Afghans with a reasonable standard of living. Much, however, depends on whether Afghanistan can avoid the “Natural Resource Curse,” an inter-related set of economic and social pathologies that often bedevil resource-endowed countries. In this article, the authors describe the Natural Resource Curse, evaluate the obstacles it raises for Afghan economic development, and offer a strategy to minimize the risks Afghanistan faces in its efforts to exploit its mineral wealth for the benefit of the population.     

Challenges of measuring progress in Afghanistan using violence trends: the effects of aggregation,military operations,seasonality, weather,and other causal factors

Measuring nationwide progress of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan using violence trends is difficult due to several factors: aggregation of data to the national level may obfuscate disparate local trends; the observed seasonality in violence makes comparisons difficult and may obscure progress; and short-term spikes or troughs – attributable to weather, military operations and tempo, or holiday periods – heavily influence simple averaging schemes. Despite these challenges, proper understanding of violence statistics is critical to estimating the effectiveness of military forces added during a surge or redeployed as part of transition. This article explores methods for analyzing observed violence trends to identify causal factors, to provide a comparable baseline, and to inform assessments at appropriate levels of aggregation. One methodology for seasonal adjustment of violence data is discussed and shown to provide a logical baseline for examining trends. An ordinary least squares regression model is developed and implemented using time-series violence data.     

Close Encounters of the Tribal Kind: the Implementation of Co-option as a Tool for De-escalation of Conflict – The Case of the Netherlands in Afghanistan's Uruzgan Province

Abstract

In contemporary counter-insurgency campaigns de-escalation is typically achieved by obtaining the local population's collaboration. The rationale underlying this approach is that such collaboration spawns control over the population and therefore weakens the insurgent's position. This article seeks to understand how this approach is practised in the reality of contemporary counter-insurgency warfare. In Iraq as well as Afghanistan counter-insurgents were confronted with fragmented indigenous societies in which the various local segments were dominated by local power-holders. Consequently, obtaining the local population's collaboration required co-option of these agents. As such a strategy of co-option is a highly localized approach, this article focuses on Afghanistan's Uruzgan province and analyzes the implementation of co-option by the Netherlands' Task Force Uruzgan (TFU), which operated there from 2006 to 2010. The analysis discusses how the counter-insurgents obtained a profound understanding of Uruzgan's societal landscape and how co-option of local power-holders became part of the counter-insurgency routine. In the end, co-option was successfully implemented as TFU even succeeded in obtaining the collaboration of previously marginalized elements of the population. However, as the methods employed for co-option were mainly of a persuasive nature, the TFU co-option strategy was less effective in containing the influence of notorious spoilers. Thus this case study provides an insight into the dynamics and limitations of co-option as a tool for de-escalation in contemporary counter-insurgency warfare.     

Reopen a joint school of military government and administration?

Today there are many calls for other elements of the government to do more to ‘do their part’, assist the military to restore order and stability and ‘win the peace’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, and prepare for similar roles in future conflicts. The authors here instead briefly review the history of US armed forces’ involvement in military governance operations from the Mexican War through World War II, and recommend the re-establishment of a School of Military Government similar to that created during the latter conflict.     

The Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (1996–2001): ‘War-Making and State-Making’ as an Insurgency Strategy

This paper examines the institutional and functional aspects of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA). The Taliban’s coercive approach and its entire reliance on “war-making” to “state-making” shows the difficulty of the transformation of an insurgent group into a state structure. The Taliban was primarily capable of establishing a two-track system of governance. However, the assessment of the IEA’s institutional and functional capabilities shows that the military–political organization formed by the Taliban lacked statehood in all three areas of legitimacy, authority and capacity.