Garbage, gaffes and decision loops

By Dave Anderson:

Everyone involved in the US debate over Afghanistan fundamentally agrees that the Karzai government has serious problems. It is corrupt. It is weak. It is propped up by 100,000 heavily armed foreigners. It is a black-hole of competency. It includes various warlords and their militias that have minimal allegiance to the concept of a post-Westphalian Afghan state. No one involved in the US debate on Afghanistan policy will strongly dispute any of those declarative sentences; there may be quibbles around the edges and over the strength of certain phrases and definitions, but everyone in the US, including the bloggers in the peanut gallery, are in broad agreement that the Karzai government is severely limited and corrupt.

Making good, well informed decisions is a tough task. The task is much more difficult when stating the obvious and the truth is not allowed. It does not matter if the decision is in favor of esclated COIN or a timetable to leave. If anything, the timetable to leave Afghanistan is slightly less dependent on acknowledging corruption than COIN as COIN as a prerequisite to operational success much less strategic success relies on the host nation government not being run by a bunch of corrupt, ineffective bastards that have blown through whatever non-primary loyalties that were held by their soft supporters.

Andrew Exum at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) writes that we should ignore the obvious in order to facilitate kabuki theatre and thus corrupt our OODA loops which leads to poorer decisions:

All of that, though, is minor compared with the problems EIkenberry now faces with the Karzai regime. Last week Michael Semple bluntly stated that the most important dynamic in Afghanistan was the relationship between the "international community" (for which we should read, he said: "United States of America") and the government of Afghanistan. Well how is that going to work now? It's now common knowledge that Karl Eikenberry -- the U.S. ambassador -- thinks you, Hamid Karzai, lead a collection of corrupt and ineffective goons unworthy of further U.S. investment! Whoever leaked these classified cables has cut the knees out from underneath the most important U.S. representative in Kabul!

The debate in Washington is not whether the Karzai government is composed of a group of "corrupt and ineffective goons" --- that is acknowledged by everyone to be the case. The debate is whether or not propping up those corrupt and ineffective goons is in the American national interest or not; and if so, how to do so effectively. Exum's argument of revealing the thinnest of pretenses is critically damaging to US national interests in Afghanistan is loaded with numerous unstated assumptions (which is fine, as he is a blogger and his archives contain his assumptions) as well as an argument to throw garbage into our information loops at a strategic level.