- “Afghanistan: The Death of a Strategy”. Center for Strategic and International Studies, February 2012 by Anthony Cordesman. It is always tempting to ride the headlines and focus on events like the marines urinating on a Taliban corpse, the burning of the Qur’ans, and the attacks on U.S. and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) personnel that have followed in even the most secure and best-vetted facilities. It has been a truly grim week and one where these events raise questions about U.S. strategy and the value of continuing with the current approach to the war.
This analysis covers the critical weaknesses that have left the United States without an effective strategy in Afghanistan. It has been revised to provide specific force numbers and spending data and to cite additional studies that show the different estimates of military progress and the problems in creating an effective transition strategy. http://csis.org/publication/afghanistan-death-strategy
- Achieving Unity of Effort“, InterAgency Journal, Vol. 3, Issue 1, Winter 2012, by Matthew K. Wilder. It has been well established by the nation’s leadership and current experience that military conflict has evolved in response to the increasingly complex realities of the global war on terrorism. Part of this reality is the introduction of a whole-of-government strategy as a key enabler to operations that were once the exclusive purview of military units. An example of this strategy is the introduction of interagency civilian intelligence and cultural advisors at all levels of military command, from joint task force to battalion. An examination of future threats and potential areas of operation, such as other nations in the Middle East and Africa, indicate that this trend toward greater interagency integration will not only continue, but will likely increase.
Despite a strong commitment from both military and civilian leadership and significant efforts on the part of their agencies to make these partnerships meaningful and productive, the integration of military and civilian professionals into cross-functional interagency teams could be made much more effective. An effective interagency team achieves unity of effort in its activities irrespective of unity of command. From the interagency perspective, achieving unity of command is relatively easy for interagency teams led by a member of the military and incorporated into a military organization because the rank structure is more rigid and transparent. However, true unity of effort as expressed as horizontal (inclusive of all team members and agencies) instead of vertical (along stove-piped chains of command) integration has proven much more elusive, regardless of the composition of the interagency team.. The purpose of this article is to highlight the role of the mid- to senior-level leader (either civilian or military) tasked with leading an interagency team comprised of both military and civilian members in achieving unity of effort. To address some of the challenges and opportunities posed in the leadership of such a team, it is useful to explore an interagency case study involving provincial reconstruction teams (PRT) and then expand on the common problems of integration and the education, training, and selection of successful interagency team leaders and members. http://thesimonscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/IAJ-3-1-pg40-46.pdf
- “The Politics of Water Security between Afghanistan and Iran”, Future Directions International, March 2012, by Paula Hanasz.
Disagreements between Afghanistan and Iran over the sharing of the Helmand River have been brewing since the ‘Great Game’ of the 19th century. Back then the problem was considered dual – that of border delineation and the respective shares of the two countries in the waters of the Helmandi. Today the problem of transboundary water management festers beneath the otherwise cordial relationship between Afghanistan and Iran. The points of friction now also encompass the other shared water resource, the Harirod-Murghab basin. At stake are the livelihoods of the inhabitants of both basins, the environmental integrity of the region, especially the volatile Sistan wetlands, and the development of hydro-electric power from these shared rivers. http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/The%20Politics%20of%20Water%20Security%20between%20Afghanistan%20and%20Iran%20-%20March%201%202012.pdf
- “Afghanistan’s Conflict Minerals: The Crime-State-Insurgent Nexus”, CTC Sentinel, Combatting Terrorism Center, United States Military Academy, 15 February 2012, by Matthew DuPee.
Afghanistan is most notoriously recognized for its cultivation and production of illegal narcotics, recently galvanizing its position as the world’s number one producer of illicit opium and cannabis resin (hashish). Yet there exists an equally thriving shadow economy revolving around precious stones such as emeralds, lapis lazuli, and increasingly from minerals and ores such as chromite, coal, gold and iron.
In 2010, the U.S. Department of Defense released its findings from a geological survey that confirmed Afghanistan’s untapped mineral reserves are worth an astounding $1 trillion.[2] Wahidullah Shahrani, the current Afghan minister for mines, claimed that other geological assessments and industry reports place Afghanistan’s mineral wealth at $3 trillion or more.[3] Past wars, contemporary conflict and the subsequent influx of international assistance, however, has forced all development and reconstruction efforts to unfold in a highly criminalized political and economic space—including Afghanistan’s immature yet promising mining sector.
This article examines the evolution of natural resource exploitation by various violent entrepreneurs—such as local kachakbarari (smuggling) networks, corrupt powerbrokers, and insurgent groups such as the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and their Pakistani counterparts—in the period before and during Afghanistan’s contemporary conflict. Understanding this connection is important since state, criminal and insurgent elements on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border continue to reap profits from illegal excavations, protection rackets, informal taxation, and cross-border trafficking. This nexus is helping create new forms of state and private patronage systems as the realms of business, crime, conflict and corruption intersect in the already convoluted war economy of Afghanistan. http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/afghanistans-conflict-minerals-the-crime-state-insurgent-nexus
- “Strategic Support to Security Sector Reform in Afghanistan, 2001–2010”, Centre for International Governance Innovation, January 2012, by Christian Dennys and Tom Hamilton-Baillie.
Since the overthrow of the Taliban government in 2001, the international community and the Afghan government have made numerous attempts to address the strategic and operational issues surrounding the country’s security sector. The 2001 Bonn Conference, the most significant of these initiatives, dealt almost exclusively with strategic issues, particularly with establishing a new Afghan state and political process. By the time of the next major international conference in Berlin in 2004, the focus of international attention had shifted to operational issues, as had many of the United Nations (UN) mandates. The change was driven (in part) by the recognition that efforts to reconstitute the Afghan state were stagnating, and led to ever more intrusive intervention by the international community.
Berlin and subsequent conferences4 focused on operationalconcerns, but without addressing the underlying strategicfailure of the Bonn Agreement: it does not represent a peace process, but rather the continuation of a civil war by other means, and it does not represent a vision that is shared strongly enough by the Afghan state and the main international actors. Instead of addressing the deep-seated strategic issues, the conferences focused on achieving reforms in areas such as disarmament and development. Such operational activities represent discrete practical programs of action that are carried out on the ground, but lacking strategic planning, may becompleted without supporting the overarching goals of peace, security and stability in Afghanistan. The divergent aims of Bonn and Berlin highlight the main argument of this paper: the operational programming of the latter will fail in the absence of the coherent strategic vision that the former aspired to, but ultimately did not produce. http://www.operationspaix.net/DATA/DOCUMENT/6732~v~Strategic_Support_to_Security_Sector_Reform_in_Afghanistan_20012010.pdf
- “Fragile States Resource Center” [website], by Seth Kaplan. http://www.fragilestates.org/tag/libya/
- “Negotiating Peace in Afghanistan Without Repeating Vietnam”, RAND Corporation, January 2012, by James Dobbins. http://www.rand.org/commentary/2012/01/13/WP.html
8. “22 Results in Afghanistan”, United Nations Development Programme, December 2011. http://www.undp.org.af/fnews/22%20Results%20in%20Afghanistan%20-%20final%2011%20Dec%202011.pdf
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