End states in Afghanistan: A strong central government, or not?

... the Anbar Awakening's loyalties to the government in 2006 through 2009 were somewhere on the spectrum between dubious to nonexistent. Political participation in the 2009 provincial elections combined with consistent U.S. pressure to integrate Awakening fighters and include them on the payroll mitigated what was a mutually acrimonious relationship. But the fissures remain.

The feeling of mistrust is mutual, too. The central government sees strong tribal institutions as a threat. That's why Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has tried to take such strong control over the Sons of Iraq payroll and integration initiatives. Both sides put aside their mistrust to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq -- but their common enemy is largely defeated, and tensions are starting to rise again, for a whole host of reasons (slow integration, the de-Ba'athification controversy, etc.).

So Foust's specific argument is wrong -- though there are still plenty of other significant differences between the two conflicts which augur against an Anbaresque tribal strategy in Afghanistan. There's the weaker nature of tribal identity in Afghanistan, for example, and the fact that AQI was a foreign-led movement, while the Taliban is homegrown.

And the issue of trust between the central government and the tribes does raise an important point about the danger of pursuing strategies that operate at cross-purposes. If the desired end-state in Afghanistan is a strong central government -- one that fulfills the basic responsibility of a state, which is exercising a monopoly on the use of violence -- then it makes little sense to elevate and equip subnational groups with divergent interests from, and a history of rebellion against, that central government.

What if that isn't the desired end-state? British foreign secretary David Miliband said as much during a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing last month, while he was discussing tribal militia programs:

The state is not going to have a monopoly of force in a country like Afghanistan... the equilibrium will not only be between the insurgency and security forces... it will also be within communities... the truthful answer is that those things need to be supported, not neglected.

Miliband seems to be saying, whenever a local group says it wants to fight the Taliban, we should encourage that. We'll put aside the fact that previous "community defense" and tribal initiatives have failed, as Foust notes in his article. Even if that wasn't the case -- this is an unacceptably ad hoc strategy.

Why is the U.S. throwing money at the Shinwari tribe? The answer cannot simply be, "because they offered to help." If the desired end-state is a blend of national and subnational security forces, then NATO needs to clearly define which of the latter groups it will support and how they will relate to Kabul.

It needs to base those definitions on a clear reading of Afghan history and culture -- not a shoddily-written think piece by a Green Beret who may have committed war crimes. Otherwise it is blindly picking winners and losers, and creating the potential for long-term discord to achieve short-term security.

And since most of the serious scholarship on Afghanistan suggests that empowering tribal militias is a disastrous idea...