Military Review English Edition January-February 2014

T H E A F G H A N S TAT E “We’re bringing the government of Afghanistan back here,” Lt. Col. Cal Worth explained to a resident of Marja in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.3 He was explaining not just his immediate objective, but also the underlying logic of NATO’s counterinsurgency campaign. This logic is found in U.S. Army Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency, which was written as the U.S. military fought insurgencies in Iraq. The logic holds that insurgencies require support from the population, and if the state reaches the people, popular support for the insurgency withers away. While insurgencies require support from populations because insurgents cannot draw on state resources, the idea that “more government” will attenuate this support is not necessarily true. This idea is based on a Western-centric deﬁnition of the state as a sovereign, autonomous entity that determines social relations throughout its territory. Yet, this Western-ideal type of state has never existed in Afghanistan. Those who have tried to build such a state have incited violent resistance and either chose an alternative model of governance or were deposed. When the U.S. military and civilian agencies endorsed the Western-ideal type of state, they too encountered violence. This was not because the insurgency felt threatened by the state, but because Afghan society rejected the Western-idealtype model of state-society relations. As a result, the U.S. national security apparatus—from the White House to civilian and military organizations in the ﬁeld—could not develop an effective stabilization strategy. This is not to say that Afghanistan has never been stable; rather, that stability has been closely associated with a minimalist state that is distinct from the Western model. Going forward, this means that NATO should be prepared to accept, if not encourage, the government of Afghanistan to seek a political solution that decentralizes political authority. This would center around reducing responsibilities of the central Afghan state and enforcing particular “redlines” for its subnational components, such as prohibiting threats to the state or launching attacks on other countries. Peripheral governing authorities would determine other issues for themselves. This could leave room for a Taliban-afﬁliated political party to assume some authority, the promise of which could be part of a negotiated settlement to the conﬂict. MILITARY REVIEW January-February 2014 This analysis is also relevant for Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. In these unstable places, the time and resources required to build a Western-type state are simply not available and the appropriateness of the Western model varies widely. The U.S. national security apparatus will need to deal directly with nonstate actors, tribal leaders, religious ﬁgures, warlords, militias, etc.—not only as conduits of information and temporary leaders, but as primary actors in a complex but stable political tapestry. This approach is not without risks, but after more than ten years, trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives, the United States cannot afford to approach the rest of the world like it has Afghanistan. Understanding the Westernideal-type State The Western-ideal-type state is a product of a speciﬁc political and intellectual history, and for many people around the world, its benevolence is not self-evident. Starting with Hobbes’ conception of the state as a “leviathan” that provided individuals security from “a war of all against all” in exchange for submission, the Western intellectual tradition has conceived of the state as the single dominant social actor within its territory and the primary agent of social organization. More speciﬁcally, the state has been assumed to have a monopoly over violence in its territory, be autonomous from other social actors, have differentiated components to enable specialization in speciﬁc tasks, and coordinate among its components.4 Today, although Western states may seem drastically different to those who live within their territories, they all—North America to Scandinavia to continental Europe—conform to this model. International norms and institutions have reinforced this ideal. The Treaty of Westphalia codiﬁed the supremacy of the state within its internationally recognized borders. Three hundred years later the founding charter of the United Nations, as an organization comprised of states, institutionalized state sovereignty and articulated a set of expectations for state-driven economic and social change.5 In this conception, outside the realm of the state lay disorder, barbarism, and danger: unacceptable conditions that required redress. Throughout the 1950s 33

Military Review English Edition January-February 2014 | Page 35