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Conferencing in Halifax while Rome Burns?

Cross-posted on CIC Dispatch Blog

Billed as the Davos for Security, the Halifax International Security Forum – funded by the Department of National Defence (DND) – sought and accomplished to court the security elite. Last weekend’s lavish affair was attended by nearly 20 defence ministers, top global security analysts, beltway security consultants, international affairs journalists, and a handful of security academics. As at Davos, it’s hard to fault the execution, and the host, Peter Mackay, deserves a lot of credit.

Throughout the event, though, I couldn’t help asking whether this was the right group of people having the right conversation at the right time. With deeply troubled military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, attention increasingly turning to Asia and the BRICs, and much of the world embroiled in an uprising against concentrated political and financial power, what is the value proposition of a largely Euro-Atlantic, NATO-focused confab of security-sector leaders?

This feeling was magnified by the subject matter on the agenda. For two days, debate swirled around the purchasing of F35s, the potential invasion of Syria and bombing of Iran, and the western security implications of Arab revolutions. Throughout, military actions were discussed in an unproblematic way, as part of a natural escalation of engagement.

This was not entirely surprising, as the event was, for all intents and purposes, a military conference. But even for a military conference, this discourse seemed limited. There was no discussion of the abyss of the war in Afghanistan, the very real problems with the Libya mission (beyond the easy success of bombing fixed, undefended targets), or the dilemma that no one wants to put troops on the ground in NATO missions.

Talking about this with a sage colleague, I was reminded that the Security and Defence Forum (SDF) program, also funded by the DND, was recently cut. Over four decades, the SDF program financed a wide range of Canadian academic work on security. There are rumours that the program was cut not just for budgetary reasons, but because its policy utility was questioned – what use is critical academic work to the running of a defence policy? Interestingly, the budget of the SDF was similar to the rumoured budget of the Halifax forum – around two million dollars.

There is, of course, no reason to suggest a direct connection between the two programs, but it is worth discussing what we are losing and acquiring with this amount of money. Is it more valuable to fund an academic program on security or a two-day event that brings together the global power brokers? What are the trade-offs between a conversation you cannot control and one you diligently curate?

The SDF program, for all its faults, funded a wide range of security thinking and conversation. While some of this was classical defence studies, it also involved theoretical, practical, and political critiques of security policy. In so doing, the SDF fostered a community of academics engaged in the Canadian security discussion, and the openness of the program supported a very diverse range of security perspectives.

It is a trope in international relations to say that the world of security changed “after the end of the cold war.” The Economist magazine even bans articles that start with those words. But it is certainly true: The security conversation now rightly involves any number of auxiliaries to military affairs, including development, human rights, the environment, public health, local violence, and so on. The SDF program encouraged this broad view of security.

This critical perspective was virtually nowhere to be seen in Halifax. Save for regular interventions from Anne-Marie Slaughter and Ambassador Swanee Hunt, the discussion was almost exclusively centred on the military and global economic sides of security. Participants and speakers often came across as too aligned – too in agreement about the primary security threats and the necessary responses. The downside of controlled discourse, of course, is groupthink. And groupthink can be dangerous.

If there is one lesson we learned from the financial crisis, it’s that those in charge were not as smart as they thought they were. Left unchecked, the financial elite put a global system at risk by seeking, at every step, to maximize their interests. There was no balance at the global decision-making table, so one perspective – one worldview and set of interests – ran amok.

Such can also be the case with security policy. Does talk among decision-makers of bombing Iran, left unchecked by criticism, make bombing more likely to occur? Quite possibly. Do self-oriented discussions among militaries perpetuate the failures of Afghanistan, in which militaries sought and got “quick victories” but completely missed the larger purposes and goals involved? Probably. Does glorifying the John McCain approach to U.S. foreign policy make Canada more likely to act in this mould? Maybe. Does having a security conversation dominated by the military, with little engagement from diplomatic and development departments, lead to a more militarized foreign policy? Almost certainly.

With Canada and NATO continuing to sing the praises of whole-of-government and comprehensive approaches to intervention and nation-building, surely the conversation in Halifax should have been broader.

On the economic front, the discussion was tainted by a notable condescension towards the Occupy movement – condescension that betrayed detachment to the security concerns raised by the increasing disconnect between a rising popular concern about inequality, and the political and financial elite’s focus on debt-cutting and austerity. Surely, a security discussion should have shown more awareness of the potential for increasingly exacerbated social divides to lead to animosity and instability, both within countries and between them.

We need to recognize that controlled conversations, if they are not broadened to include critical, uncomfortable, and diverse views, risk perpetuating siloed solutions. The military is almost always more likely to advocate military solutions over development, humanitarian, and diplomatic ones – which is why the military doesn’t control foreign policy.

I am not suggesting that the Halifax forum should be cancelled. In fact, I personally found it stimulating and engaging. The format of the conference, based around interview-style plenaries, was perhaps the best I have ever seen, and the calibre of participants and speakers was exceptionally high. I was glad that Canada put on an event of this scale. But when discussing and debating war, in which the costs are so immensely high, we have to be incredibly careful not to fall into groupthink and the prescribed policies of self-reinforcing communities. Doing so invariably leads to the type of path dependency that we saw in the lead-up to the Iraq war and financial crisis.

Herein lies the value of the SDF program and the academic discourse it enabled: It fostered engagement and critical thinking in a space prone to secrecy and control. The direct benefit of this kind of discourse to policy-making is difficult to calculate, but it is nevertheless a benefit.

In the end, foreign and security policy is about balancing worldviews. The field of security studies, once the purview of the military, has moved on to include many more perspectives and actors. So, too, must the elite debate.

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The Risks of Building the Afghan Army

Below is an oped that appeared in the Globe and Mail.

The regional military training centre in Herat is a desolate and harsh place. On the outskirts of an Afghan city bustling with commerce and construction, the vast training grounds extend out into the desert and high into the mountains.

We were at this training facility to see a live-fire exercise, intended as a demonstration of what is now the primary pillar of the International Security Assistance Force mission: forging the Afghan army into a force capable of securing the country and keeping the national government together as NATO draws down.

After winding through dozens of marching drills and shooting ranges, we arrived at the edge of the facility and a line of six young Afghan soldiers, each with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on their shoulder. They were aiming at three burned-out Russian tanks. One by one, they fired at the tanks, most missing wildly.

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After this somewhat chilling demonstration, we were taken to meet the commander of Regional Command West; he will ultimately take control of one of five regional armies. His message was blunt: He had fought for themujahedeen, the Russians, the Taliban and now for NATO. While he appreciated our support, he had no doubt it would be fleeting.

It would be difficult to find a better distillation of the challenges NATO faces in Afghanistan than what we saw at this training facility. But such is the current state of the mission. With eight years of fighting having mostly failed, the NATO mission is in a process of transition, with security being transferred to Afghan forces between now and 2014. Training, which began in earnest only in November of 2009, is at the centre of this strategy.

Canada may no longer be fighting in Kandahar, but this new mission is nonetheless a daunting and risky task.

The police training process, for example, involves only three weeks of very basic security and language training (85 per cent of the recruits are illiterate). As one German colonel who is part of the mentoring program put it, we are training them to be checkpoint guards, not police officers.

This has real consequence for our counterinsurgency strategy. In the north, the Afghan National Police has proved incapable of patrolling and securing villages; immediately after NATO soldiers leave, the insurgents simply return. The village is then taken again and those who assisted NATO are punished. Each time this happens, more civilians are killed. The villagers then stop pointing out the whereabouts of IEDs, thereby increasing NATO casualties.

In the past year, there hasn’t been a single village held by the Afghan National Police in the north. The insurgents always come back.

Also of concern is the fact that the departing Americans are meant to be replaced by these new Afghan recruits. For example, the 30,000 U.S. soldiers who are being withdrawn over the next 18 months are supposed to be replaced by 50,000 to 70,000 new Afghan National Army troops. While there’s something to be said for the argument that an Afghan soldier can be more effective than a Western one, the lack of training, organization, leadership and equipment, combined with corruption, make one seriously question NATO’s math.

Training is also incredibly expensive. NATO support for training now costs $11-billion a year, mostly paid by the Americans. After 2014, the security sector is expected to require a continual $4-billion a year of external financial assistance, in a country with a GDP of $15-billon. It’s extremely unlikely that this level of financial and logistical assistance will be politically and economically sustainable by Western countries tired of war and teetering on the edge of yet another recession.

Ultimately, the questionable quality of the forces being trained, combined with the unsustainability of NATO support, presents potential strategic peril. As we put $11-billion a year of arms and training into the security sector, the civilian governance structures continue to falter amidst corruption and diminishing authority. Are we paving the way for a military-run Afghanistan?

One thing is clear: Our participation in this training process, while likely the best course of action in a very challenging situation, simply adds to both the moral responsibility we owe Afghanistan and the strategic corner we have backed ourselves into. If we build this army, we had better be willing to fund it and support it long into the future. This will be added to the long-term development and humanitarian engagement we also have rightly committed to and have the obligation to maintain. Afghans, of course, have been taught to shoot RPGs before.

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How the New Yorker Goes Viral

Crossposted at opencanada.org’s Dispatch blog

For years I have read The New Yorker as a non-US print subscriber. This meant that somewhere between a few days and a week after an issue was published, it arrived in the mail. The uncertainty of its arrival is fun, and the novelty of flipping through the Goings on About Town to find the Tables for Two has never really worn off. Every once in a while a story would reach me in a different way – a Hirsch piece during the Bush administration, for example, would get wide engagement online. But for me, The New Yorker was principally a solitary print experience.  Such was its charm.  So the online transition path for the magazine has never been obvious.  Recently though, I have been engaging with the magazine in two new ways – on Twitter, and using their exceptional iPad app. The ways in which the magazine has transitioned to both are a model for a struggling form and fit into a wider shift in the international affairs conversation that the CIC site seeks to engage.

Take last weekend, for example. Over the weekend, a pre-release of Nicholas Schmidle’s expose of the Bin Laden raid went viral on Twitter. Virtually all of the 100 or so foreign policy specific handles I follow posted it immediately, and it then crossed into most other online conversations. Instead of reading it online, I checked the New Yorker iPad app, and there was Monday’s issue ready to be downloaded. The New Yorker’s iPad app does something quite remarkable.  Leveraging the iPad’s elegance and engagement features, the app perfectly balances its focus on writing, journalism and style in a way that lets the magazine breathe. Each week, a new issue pops up in the app, and it takes a satisfying minute or two for the whole 140mb of issue to download. Last week, the New York Times outlined the success of the app in a piece that also got a lot of attention.

So on a lazy Sunday morning, I tucked into Schmidle’s article in this great reader-centric format. The piece itself was astounding in both its detail and style. A decision had clearly been made in the Pentagon or White House to provide the definitive account of the raid to The New Yorker, and that account will surely become the basis for movies and books.

But because The New Yorker pushes content aggressively and effectively online, the reach and life of the piece extended far beyond a limited number of solitary reading indulgences. The New Yorker has now, somewhat unexpectedly, become a hub in the international affairs conversation and can position pieces cleanly and effectively in the international debate.  It is no longer simply the rag of the elite and well-bred. It is fuel in a community of international affairs journalism, being spread and multiplied by innovative websites, Twitter and diverse networks of engaged readers.

Take two examples. Foreign Policy Magazine has in the past few years transformed itself from an austere print publication skimmed in airports, to a leader in pushing diverse content online. This has meant changing both how they write, who writes for them, and where and by whom the content is seen. I would argue they are significantly more influential now than they ever were in their limited and isolated print days. They are certainly more interesting.

Second, consider three emergent international affairs leaders on Twitter. Covering the Arab uprisings for the New York Times, Chris Chivers (@cjchivers) has demonstrated a best in practice use of Twitter for the foreign correspondent.  At times, when connections were poor, he would literally file in real time via Twitter. But he goes further. Because Twitter is a two way conversation, followers can pose a question to him, about a particular rebel group he was embedded with, for example, and often get replies. If blogs personalized the journalist and author and allowed readers to comment, Twitter has moved engagement into real time.  Again, this is a case of an at times austere publication, the New York Times, becoming more influential not by isolating itself in hallowed halls but by experimenting and engaging.

Andy Carvin (@acarvin), a reporter with NPR, has literally created his job description – Twitter curator for international affairs. When the uprisings were breaking in Egypt, there was a flood of tweets documenting the events on the ground. Carvin filled a need for a filter and served as the go-to hub to make sense of this massive flow of information.

Finally, Anne-Marie Slaughter (@SlaughterAM), back at Princeton after time as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, where she led the Obama Administration’s social media outreach to the middle eastern uprisings, has become a figure head of sorts for the emergent online international affairs community. She mentored and enabled two young social media leaders at State, @JaredCohen (now at Google Ideas) and @AlecJRoss, has begun a new project with the Atlantic Monthly to capture the paradigm shifts happening in the practice, scholarship and communication of international affairs, and has become a champion and curator of these conversations on Twitter.

These examples are simply to point out that the conversation has moved online, and that the organizations and publications that are currently the most effective, influential and interesting are those making innovative use of the medium.

So back to The New Yorker and the “Getting Bin Laden” story. Over the course of the week, the article was built on, added to, debated, challenged, promoted and celebrated in countless online spaces. It became the focus of an international conversation in a manner that would have proved impossible with a New Yorker piece even five years ago. Because the magazine has pushed content online, via the web, Twitter and a brilliantly conceived app, it remains at the center of the journalism game.

I take a number of lessons from this. As a neophyte professor in a school of journalism, it provides a shining success story of leveraging one’s assets into the online space. It is of course idiosyncratic – it’s The New Yorker after all. As the Financial Times’ and the New York Times’ pay walls are ill-suited to most papers, the particular New Yorker model will not be the solution for most magazines. But it is nonetheless well-conceived, and shows that no one online model will work for all.

As the editor of the CIC site, the lesson I take is that constant innovation from day one, is the only viable model. This means, as Emily Bell, formerly of the Guardian, now at Columbia Journalism, has said, being first and foremost “of the web, not on the web”. It means rethinking the site, and evolving constantly – we are, for example, re-launching in September with new features, adjusting what hasn’t worked, building on what has. Finally, it means thinking of the site as part of an emerging and rapidly changing international discourse , one which includes the top policy makers, journalists and academics in the world, and is radically democratized by the form it is taking. It has never been a more exciting time to be in this business.

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Have the Taliban Changed their Tune on Women’s Rights?

Crossposted at opencanada.org’s Dispatch blog

I find that the subject of women’s rights in Afghanistan is a difficult one to engage with. To some, the shocking standard to which women were treated under the Taliban represents a key reason for our presence there. To others, the goal of gender equality is a PR front for the actual reasons we intervened. To still others, modest improvements are a positive bi-product of a complex mission.

While on my trip in Afghanistan, we had five briefings that focused on women and gender issues. Each left me with a different feeling, from disgust to frustration to awe. There is no doubt that the lives of many have been improved by our presence. And as I felt in Northern Iraq several years ago, it is tremendously difficult to argue with the logic of someone who has been liberated. But the fact that one group in one region has been freed, should not blind us to the consequences of this liberation for others. With this in mind, these were my five encounters.

First, one evening we had a formal dinner at the Serena hotel, one of the few international hotels in Kabul. Our group was seated along one side of a long table, and a delegation of various Afghan think tankers and university professors were on the other. Seated across from me were an Afghan woman and a young male Afghan, who worked for NATO HQ. For the first half hour or so, the woman was very quiet. Her English was not very good, and the men around her, particularly one who was a cousin of Karzai, were dominating. But when we figured out a way for the young Afghan man beside her to translate, she opened up, and her story was incredible. She was 20 when Taliban fell. Until then, she had spent her teenage years being taught in secret schools for girls. One of her teachers had been killed by the Taliban. In 2001, she went to law school, got the best marks in the school and now is a law professor at Kabul University. I’m sure there are many women with similar stories, and I feel somewhat hesitant recalling it, as if I’ve been had by NATO TOLA planners, but she really was nothing short of remarkable. Watching and listening to her and the young guy both helping to translate and telling his own story, which was impressive in its own right, I saw pretty clearly that there is a new generation waiting in the wings in Afghanistan. They are frustrated, impatient and when they get a chance, it’s hard to see how they will not do better than the current crowd in charge. I only wish we could empower them sooner.

Second, when we were in Mazar e Sharif, we had a meeting with the Gender Engagement Team. Led by a young female Swedish soldier, the team was made up of three Afghan women in their twenties. It’s hard to overstate how courageous these women were. They are essentially conducting psi-ops for RC-N, coming in and out of the base on a daily basis and reporting on what people think about ISAF. What is particularly amazing is that their friends and family now know that they work for ISAF. As insurgent violence picks up in the north, they are at significant risk. At one point during our two hours with them, they got very angry with the German and American commanders in the room over the night raids. I will post on this issue separately, but the strength with which they rebuked the ISAF line that night raids are essential because they reduce civilian casualties was remarkable. Even if the raids do reduce casualties, the team argued, they also are a humiliating experience. Men descend on their villages at night, breaking down doors, and see them, particularly the women, at their most vulnerable. The disconnect between the cold rationalism of the ISAF argument and the aggressive push back from those actually affected was bracing.

Third, in Herat, we met with two Provincial Councilors, both of whom were female. The meeting was clearly intended to demonstrate the progress being made in local governance, in particular the mandated 50% female quota. What we got was both tragically and wonderfully different. With the Italian PRT contingent watching on, and the more jingoistic members of our party somewhat disgruntled, the two women clearly and articulately disagreed with virtual every assessment we had heard of Herat to date. For two hours they made it abundantly clear that, while considered the most secure and developed region of the country by ISAF, the west has a very long way to go. They spoke of villages that support the insurgents in order to get NATO aid (if considered safe, they are ignored), of the problems with narcotics trafficking, particularly the widows created by arrested or killed husbands who took up trafficking to make a living, of the rising violence levels, of how even elected women remain shut out, and of the power of the mullahs. They were confident and impressive. I was left hoping but doubting that the rest of the councilors compared.

Fourth, immediately following the meeting with the councilors, we were escorted to the Italian PRT’s signature project in Herat, a women’s center. When we pulled up to the modern three story building, we were greeted by a shocking display of Italian military force (I know there is a joke here). There were three armored trucks each with a high caliber gunner on top, a couple of dozen fully kitted out soldiers, and our escorts, another half dozen men. They had closed part of the street, the heavy guns were pointed at the neighbouring buildings, and there were soldiers guarding the door of the center. We were rushed into the building to find 20 or so visibly stunned Afghan women. For the next hour, we were paraded around what can only be called a model of tokenism. The women were selling textiles and saffron in a series of brand new shops. It was entirely unclear who might shop there, other than PRT guests, as there are few tourists in Herat, and surely locals don’t need a gift mall to buy Afghan textiles. In fairness, the center does function as a community center of sorts for women, with a gym, and classrooms. But there was no mistaking the reason we were there, and it made me sick.

Finally, on our last day in Kabul, we had a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with a senior UNAMA official. When asked about the status of women in the country, he got visibly frustrated. The idea that women lead significantly better lives in most of the country, he said, needs to be dismissed. Afghanistan remains a deeply conservative Islamic state. It has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. And in wide swaths of the country, women are treated in a brutally oppressive fashion. The Taliban, he argued, were particularly appalling, because they codified this treatment, but it is still occurring on a widespread scale.

Coming back to the future, and to the Taliban, the same UN official made an interesting point, which I hadn’t heard before. The Taliban, he stated, have recently softened their position on women. More politically savvy than when they were in power, many Taliban leaders now recognize the political importance the international community places on the rights of women, and wanting to be part of the political process, their views are evolving. This is a fascinating quirk in what is too often portrayed in a simplistic narrative – the Taliban are bad because of their treatment of women. Now this softening of doctrine may not be true, but if we are welcoming them back into positions of power, as our reconciliation policy would suggest, then let’s hope the Taliban find it politically expedient to treat women in a less brutal fashion. In many ways, these small victories may become big markers of the mission’s lasting impacts.

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More on the Integrity of the Comprehensive Approach

Crossposted at opencanada.org’s Dispatch blog

I just had a conversation regarding my last post with a NATO Public Diplomacy official. In short, my argument was that in RC-N the ANP appear incapable of holding villages so that the building can take place, and that there are vastly more resources focused on the military component on the mission.

The response I received was that NATO itself is neither nation-building nor implementing all aspects of the comprehensive approach. What is really meant by the comprehensive approach, I was told, is that NATO is a participant in the comprehensive approach with other organizations who are doing the governance and development components. As an example of this, the point was rightly made that NATO countries have refused to task the alliance with a rule of law mandate, as member states feel that this would go beyond their military focus.

This, however, is simply not how we have been briefed over the past week, nor how the mission is explained to domestic publics, at least in Canada. Some of the PRTs are clearly part of the NATO mandate, while others are member country run, and at virtually every briefing we have received, we have been told of the importance and details of governance and development projects. Indeed, the briefings we have received from Senior Civilian Representatives (SCRs) at all levels, have focused exclusively on non military NATO tasks. Here is where I agree, though. I don’t think NATO should be doing all of these tasks, but as states participating in this conflict we have not properly equipped and funded the orgs that should be– i.e., the IOs, NGOs and local groups who should be doing way, way more.

Perhaps the military should be doing the initial targeted tactical assistance during the hold phase of COIN, but this absolutely must transition to a civilian project almost immediately. This civilian operation would need security, but this should likely be done by Afghan and/or private security. If civilian orgs as currently constituted aren’t willing to take this risk, then I think we may need not rethink either the rules governing government civilian orgs, or whether we should be attempting these tasks at all.

I suppose I don’t blame NATO, they have come a long way since McChrystal dragged them into a COIN strategy. And in the absence of other major actors able or willing to do the development, they are stepping up to some degree. Instead I blame NATO member states who have failed to adequately fund the orgs that they should know full well should be doing the governance and development. For example, we met a WFP official who said they are $220 million short to fulfill basic food needs this year. This is in a country in which the US alone is spending a $100 billion a year.

Until we are honest about these parts of the project – parts wee claim are required for success – then we are not being serious about the comprehensive approach.

There is of course another very simple potential explanation for this, one being pushed by one of my trip mates – viz, the comprehensive approach is not actually required to meet our objectives, because our objectives are are actually far more modest than we are politically willing to admit.

It is quite likely that we are hoping to at best leave an Afghan state structure that is capable of staying roughly together, in which case, we need to secure as many villages as possible in the two and a half years remaining, hope that Karzai’s governors can hold their provinces together and leave some special forces, trainers and operational support here for a decade after. Our mission is then not one of nation building, but of basic nation stabilization. Needless to say, I am increasingly skeptical. But I’m meeting with both Petraeus and Gass in the next couple days, so maybe they will make it all make sense.

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