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What's Wrong With Weak States?

By Phillip Carter

By Janine Davidson Tom Johnson and M. Chris Mason have an excellent short piece, "All Counterinsurgency Is Local," in the latest Atlantic magazine. They critique the NATO counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan for its ill-conceived emphasis on strengthening national-level governance and its disregard for the smaller districts, where the real center of gravity is for Afghan society. Politically and strategically, the most important level of governance in Afghanistan is neither national nor regional nor provincial. Afghan identity is rooted in the woleswali: the districts within each province that are typically home to a single clan or tribe. Historically, unrest has always bubbled up from this stratum-whether against Alexander, the Victorian British, or the Soviet Union. Yet the woleswali are last, not first, in U.S. military and political strategy. This is a simple, yet not-so-obvious observation. Despite headlines that emphasize military operations and chasing bad guys in Afghanistan and Iraq, at the

Full post as published by Intel Dump on September 24, 2008 (boomark / email).