The MFKAM
(media formerly known as mainstream) is aflutter
over Petraeus moving toward local
self-defense councils. And rightly so. This is big stuff.
I see two
things going on here.
First is
David Kilcullen's observation that the best security is provided locally by
locals. If they can do that, all your worries about gathering good intelligence
and such go out the window. They know where the
bad actors are. They know how things work. They know the trails and hidey holes.
If you feel able to arm the villagers, they often will be able to take care of
business themselves. As Tip O'Neill famously said, all politics is local. And
so is security.
Second is
that one of the lessons of Iraq (and a bunch of other places) is that you can't
impose security from above. It has to grow locally. The job of the
counterinsurgent commander is to try to nurture and then knit together those
local areas -- from neighborhoods and towns to districts, then into provinces, and
finally, after a long time,
nationally. From this also will emerge a new national politics, or so the
theory goes. The upside is that if this works, it will provide sustainable
security. The downside is that it takes years to develop.
An ancillary
lesson is that you don't hold national elections first. You hold local
elections as each area becomes secure. Then district, provincial and regional
elections as they are peaceful. Eventually the abusive, corrupt old regime gets
voted out and a new generation of political leaders take over. Karzai is a
clever guy so he probably knows what
Petraeus is doing, but he probably also thinks that the Americans,
beginning with President Obama, don't have the patience to see it through.
I remember Kilcullen explaining a version
of all this to me a few years ago in Baghdad, in an Iraqi context, so I was
impressed to see NPR get him to discuss
the current initiative in Afghanistan.
"It's pretty rare to find a counterinsurgency campaign where
you didn't end up with some kind of local village self-defense force," he told
the radio. "The reason for that is very
simple. It's much easier to convince somebody who's under threat to pick up a
weapon and protect their own community than it is to convince them to go and
serve in the national army in some district somewhere else or put their weapon
down and expect the government to protect them. It's kind of an intermediate
step."
I've
always liked Kilcullen's clarity of expression.
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