Military Review English Edition January-February 2014

T H E A F G H A N S TAT E monopolizes these functions, in many places other social organizations perform them as well. Migdal suggests a model of a “mélange of social organizations” as opposed to a “dichotomous structure” of a state ruling over the people in its territory. In the mélange model, the state is one of a variety of potentially autonomous groups, including families, religious structures, or tribes, that exercises social control. The exact characteristics of social control in turn depend on the group exerting it.10 In what we now call developing countries, this is common: a “strong society” performs many of the functions Westerners associate with the state, while a “weak state” is one of a number of agents of social control. The point is not to identify a model that precisely reﬂects Afghanistan’s political and social landscape, but rather to show that “the state is,” in Nettl’s terms, “a conceptual variable.” As such, the form and function of a state is a question to be studied: it is not a given and deviations from the Western-ideal type may not be deﬁciencies. FM 3-24: State Building and Counterinsurgency The counterinsurgency ﬁeld manual advances the Western-ideal type. The manual explains that insurgents do not need to control territory, as in a conventional war. Instead, insurgents need support from the population, which is easiest to obtain in the absence of state authority. The task for the counterinsurgent is to reduce support for the insurgency and increase support for itself. Counterinsurgents therefore face a state-building imperative in which success is reached when “the government secures its citizens continuously, sustains and builds legitimacy through effective governance, has effectively isolated the insurgency, and can manage and meet the expectations of the nation’s entire population.”11 This concept of the state is distinctly Western: sovereign, autonomous, and responsible for regulating social relationships and resources. Because the Western state is responsible for economic and social development, service delivery is also an essential characteristic of a successful end state and a technique to win popular support.12 The counterinsurgent operationalizes the statebuilding imperative through a process of “clearhold-build,” such that “government presence is established to replace the insurgents’ presence.”13 MILITARY REVIEW January-February 2014 In the clear phase, the counterinsurgent removes insurgents from an area. Then in the hold phase, the counterinsurgent establishes state presence and security. In the build phase, the counterinsurgent develops popular support through providing services. This process usually begins in population centers and is repeated in adjacent areas, and thus, like an “ink blot,” the state becomes dominant throughout its territory. The “logical lines of operation” concept groups the types of operations that comprise this process. The concept model shows the state expanding its authority and subjecting the population to its rule, which includes service delivery and economic growth—explicit missions of the Western state. In turn, the population’s support for insurgents decreases, and its support for the state increases. Field Manual 3-24 concludes that, “in the end, victory comes in large measure by convincing the populace their life will be better under the host nation government than under an insurgent regime.”14 The “clear-hold-build” operational sequence and the logical lines of operation framework require the state to be the single dominant actor in the environment, and neither leaves room for nonstate social actors. These frameworks assume a binary conﬂict between the counterinsurgent state-builders and insurgents. They do not recognize local interests as sources of conﬂict, nor do they permit nonstate actors to manage social relations and resources, as, for example, Migdal’s mélange model does. Field Manual 3-24 only ﬂeetingly mentions “community leaders.” While they may be good sources of intelligence, conduits for spreading information to the public, or even worth empowering temporarily, ultimately, “increasing the number of people who feel they have a stake in the success of the state and its government is a key to successful COIN operations.”15 Consistent with this approach, FM 3-24 deﬁnes legitimacy in terms of state approval: “Illegitimate actions are those involving the u

Military Review English Edition January-February 2014 | Page 37