USIP’s Beth Cole presents ideas for military and civilian cooperation to increase security and stability in Afghanistan and Iraq to a House Armed Services subcommittee.

 

On October 2, 2009, USIP's Beth Ellen Cole testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee for Oversight and Investigations on ideas for military and civilian cooperation to increase security and stability in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The following is her full statement:

*The views expressed here are my own and not those of the United States Institute of Peace.

Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member and Members of the Committee.

I want to thank the members of the committee for giving me the opportunity to offer my personal views today.  I am Beth Cole, a senior program officer in the Center for Peace and Stability Operations at the U.S. Institute of Peace.  In that capacity, I have directed a multi-year effort to produce “doctrine” for the civilian side of the U.S. government for stabilization and reconstruction missions.  I have been working on these complex operations for more than fifteen years – before U.S. troops crossed the River Sava to help stabilize Bosnia. 

The Military Advantage

As you know well, the military is equipped with doctrine to guide its actions, a “lessons learned” system to refresh its doctrine, a planning apparatus to turn doctrine into concrete objectives, an education and training system that prepares each soldier and a web of support that sees each member of the service through from deployment to return to home soil.  This well–honed, time-tested, continually updated complex system is what gives the President the confidence to time and time again look to his military commanders for guidance on what to do in the most challenging environments known to humankind.

The Civilian Imperative

In a stabilization and reconstruction environment, we need more than this military contribution, as amazing as it may be.  We need to let soldiers be soldiers and help secure the population.  We need the unique skills and knowledge that civilians bring to help the host nation government and its population build rule of law, stable governance, a sustainable economy and the fundamental conditions for social well-being which are also essential to securing stability.   We should be oriented toward realistic definitions of these end states rather than exit or withdrawal dates in Afghanistan if we are to create, at a minimum, a stable bulwark against forces of extremism that seek our destruction.  This is mainly a civilian, not a military responsibility. 

Plugging the Civilian Gap

For the past six years or more, the United States Institute of Peace has been helping to build a foundation for civilian doctrine, planning, lessons learned, training, education and exercises for the multiplicity of civilian agencies trying to achieve success on the ground.  The civilian contribution has become less ad hoc and more organized. 

Federal departments, including Treasury, Justice, Commerce, Agriculture, Homeland Security and the U.S. Agency for International Development, have come together under an interagency coordination “cell” (known as the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (SCRS)) located at the State Department to replace ad-hocery with deliberative planning and execution.  The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols effort to unify the armed services was a long and rough road.  Uniting civilian assets from disparate agencies with varying authorities, numerous appropriation accounts and their own agency missions is also a herculean task.  But time is not on our side and we need these assets now in Afghanistan. 

Uniting civilian assets should start with strategic doctrine that lays out what we are trying to achieve. This doctrine has to be based on experience. We have at least five decades of experience in places such as El Salvador, Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda, Haiti and Liberia, to name a few.  When we lay out what experience has shown us, we can start to unite disparate actors behind a common framework.  We can then pick mission-specific priorities and elevate the game-changers that are required in Afghanistan today.

Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction

To take that broad look, we learned about doctrine from an extraordinary place that produces it on a regular basis - the U.S. Army and its Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  Lt. General William Caldwell IV, commander of the Combined Arms Center, now nominated to a new assignment as Commander, NATO Training Mission, Afghanistan, worked with us for over a year to produce what is now the first civilian doctrine anywhere in the world for these missions:  Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction.[1]  It follows on the revolutionary doctrine produced under his command, FM 3-07, the U.S. Army Stability Operations Field Manual, just a year ago.  There is no accident that these documents share a common face – they are meant to be companions – with Guiding Principles filling the civilian gap to which the military has long called attention.

Over a period of twelve months, a USIP team gathered and then read more than five hundred “doctrinal” documents, given to us by military, diplomatic and development agencies from nations with broad experience in these missions, the United Nations, other intergovernmental organizations (IGO) and non-governmental organizations (NGO) with a long history of both muddy combat boots and plain old shoes on the ground and country plans from the war-torn states themselves.   The list of these resources, contained in Appendix A in the manual, is among the richest for these missions at this time.  We then elevated what was common and arrayed these shared goals around a set of core end states, necessary conditions and common approaches that have been utilized to achieve stability and set the foundation for development. 

At the end of the day, in every society emerging from conflict, and Afghanistan is no exception, the concert of external and host nation actors has reached for five core end states:  a safe and secure environment, the rule of law, stable governance, a sustainable economy and social well-being.  This is not some idealistic dream born of some unrealistic vision of utopia:  it is contained in every doctrinal document of every major military, diplomatic and development agency and every host country plan for stabilization and reconstruction. 

Underneath the interdependent core set of goals, there are a set of necessary conditions that must be met to achieve them.  In 1997, the largest humanitarian NGOs established minimum standards for water, food, health, sanitation and shelter following the disorganized delivery of aid in Rwanda in a ground-breaking document called Sphere.  After five to six decades of conducting stabilization and reconstruction missions, it is time that all actors had a set of shared minimum standards.  These minimum standards are the necessary conditions that I will speak about in the context of Afghanistan.  Out of 22 conditions that have been identified for these missions in the civilian doctrine, I suggest that we focus on eight as priorities in Afghanistan.

Priorities for Afghanistan

1)    Political Primacy

This is about the need to reach political settlements.  At this very moment, we have an obvious need for a political settlement at the highest level of government on the future leadership of Afghanistan.  Violent conflict occurs when nonviolent processes break down and when authority structures are no longer viewed as legitimate by some or all of the population.  We risk a return to full scale violent conflict if this national problem is not solved. 

We also need many additional political settlements with reconcilable insurgents and spoilers at all levels – regional, national and local – that result in the separation of them from the Taliban and others who will not forsake violence.  Some settlements may result in reintegration into standing security forces while others may help transform reconcilable insurgents into productive participants in governance, economic and social life.  We have done this before in equally challenging places and we can succeed again.  But at this time we lack a strategic approach to fostering and sustaining these negotiations.

2)    Physical Security

We cannot achieve success anywhere in Afghanistan without first establishing a safe and secure environment.  Physical security for the population and key government, cultural, religious, and economic centers will require that international forces work closely with the Afghanistan National Security Forces to provide protection.  We cannot shirk this responsibility.  The light footprint we began with in Afghanistan resulted in the failure to establish a safe and secure environment and allowed the Taliban to re-emerge—that is not a strategy we can return to.  We know what that produces.  The calculation of the number of forces needed to stabilize the situation has been determined by our military leaders.  Knowing their planning process, I respect that determination.  Ultimately, the Afghans themselves must be able to provide for their own security.

3)    Territorial Security

We must prioritize the condition of territorial security by mitigating the threats over the long and treacherous Afghanistan-Pakistan border from which many of the greatest insurgent challenges emanate. Increasingly, insurgent leaders and other extremist Islamist groups operate from Pakistan, enjoying the support and protection of one another, as well as some elements of the Pakistani government. From its base in Pakistan, Al Qaeda continues to provide the Afghan insurgency with fighters, suicide bombers and technical assistance, along with training and financial support for their operations. The presence of these threats in the border regions also threatens major supply routes used by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).  Resolving the border issue will require a higher level of engagement between the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan.   Ultimately Afghanistan and Pakistan will have to forge sustainable agreements for security, trade and routine travel that ensure stability.

4)    Legitimate Monopoly Over the Means of Violence

We must redouble our efforts to achieve the condition of a legitimate monopoly over the means of violence by Afghans for Afghans.  This is the mission that General Caldwell has been asked to assume.  It is a mission that requires the skills of the Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security as well.  The objective is not only the training and equipping of legions of police and soldiers in the Afghanistan National Police (ANP) and ANSF, but providing those responsible for managing these forces with the necessary mentoring, infrastructure, personnel and administrative support needed to do their job. Supporting the managerial aspects of the security forces is just as important as boosting their operational capacity. Oversight of the forces involves managing the district, provincial and national institutions and ministries with responsibilities for budget execution, personnel decisions, professional development of the force and ultimate accountability for actions taken.

Control Over Illicit Economy and Economic-Based Threats to Peace

Even with professional Afghan forces and a robust ISAF presence protecting the population, if we do not disrupt, curtail and try to extinguish the sources of economic support for insurgents, violence will continue.  We need to continue to prioritize the identification and disruption of finance networks of local power brokers, insurgent groups, transnational organized crime and terrorist organizations supporting violence in Afghanistan.  This means shutting down foreign financing that remains a major source of funding and disrupting the reliance on a growing narcotics trade. Severing this flow of illicit resources also helps limit the culture of impunity that results from the entrenchment of criminal networks throughout the economy and within the government.

Access to Justice

If we have better security forces that are protecting the population by removing threats; if we have investigators that are going after financiers of the insurgents and anti-narcotics police that are destroying opium processing facilities; if we are offering the population a means to address grievances that the Taliban is now providing through their own justice system, then we must have some form of accessible justice system.   This means bolstering or rebuilding the informal mechanisms for community-level dispute resolution that the Taliban and other insurgents are now influencing or replacing and rapidly resourcing the emerging traditional justice system that provides the critical continuum from police to defense attorney to prosecutor to judge to corrections. 

Provision of Essential Services

The first responsibility of government is to provide essential services, which include security, rule of law and basic human needs.  We must help build the capacity of the Afghan government to deliver these services and be seen as the deliverers to move the population off the fence or away from the insurgents.   In Afghanistan, improvements in the provision of basic health care, education, sanitation, food security and other core services have been made but are at risk of being compromised.  This is because the Taliban and other insurgents are providing them, and in the process, delegitimizing the government of Afghanistan and curtailing services to women and other vulnerable groups in a return to discriminatory and repressive rule.  Or, in some cases, pervasive insecurity is endangering the delivery of essential services.  With winter approaching, there are no short cuts to meeting basic human needs.  If the Afghan government does not deliver services, the insurgents will.

8)    Stewardship of State Resources

Essential services need to be provided within a construct of institutions of governance.  With many Afghans on the fence and a national crisis over leadership of the Afghan state, prioritizing support for sub-national institutions of governance, state and non-state, that provide the entry point for services and boost the confidence of the population in the idea of an accountable and legitimate government is paramount.  We have to enlarge our view of acceptable forms of governance and turn to traditional, informal, tribal, community and local structures.  We should provide political, financial and technical assistance to help them serve their communities.

 

National ministries that have been the focus of attention still require support and enhanced accountability and transparency measures to win back trust of the population.  Improvement of financial management, procurement and concessions practices, controls to mitigate against corruption, development of capacity within the civil service and better donor coordination to achieve all of these is a pressing requirement and overdue.  Petty corruption is not the issue; it is the corruption that enables the dangerous nexus of officials, drug lords, criminal organizations and insurgents that must be halted immediately. 

U.S. Civilian-Military Plan in Afghanistan

There is cause for optimism.  In Afghanistan, U.S. agencies are on the right path.  During the past year, the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan conducted a civilian-led process, integrated with ISAF and US Forces, to develop the Integrated Civil-Military Campaign Plan[2]. The Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (SCRS) at the Department of State applied planning expertise forged in the past four years of bringing US federal agencies together in an organized system.  The Civil-Military plan, and more importantly the ongoing process which supports it, provides an actionable way forward towards tangible stabilization progress in the next year.

The Embassy, ISAF and United States Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A) have organized into teams to execute this plan and the military campaign plan which underpins Gen. McChrystal’s assessment. They are putting in place the long-awaited mechanisms to measure progress quickly so corrective action can be taken.

And most importantly, we now have the civil-military structure that we have needed for years, being formed as we speak here today in Regional Command-East and Regional Command-South – the two regions of greatest insurgent activity. Appointment of senior civilian representatives as counterparts to the regional military commanders mark a significant step.  This structure is the essential ingredient, with a well-focused strategy, to get civilian resources paired with the military in the Afghan communities where it really matters.

We have spent the last months getting the right foundation in place to be able to finally use our tools effectively for stabilization.  By the end of the year, we will have hundreds of civilians on the ground with our troops to actually bring “all elements of national power” to the fight. They are currently being trained for this job. We have the chance to put to work the best practices that have been learned over the last 8 difficult years and can now be shaped by the Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction.   

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