This article was downloaded by: [California State University of Fresno]On: 18 May 2013, At: 18:37Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Journal of Strategic StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjss20

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing:US Performance and theInstitutional Dimension ofStrategy in AfghanistanTodd Greentree aa The Changing Character of War Programme, OxfordUniversityPublished online: 26 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Todd Greentree (2013): Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: US Performanceand the Institutional Dimension of Strategy in Afghanistan, Journal of Strategic Studies,DOI:10.1080/01402390.2013.764518

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2013.764518

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make anyrepresentation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up todate. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should beindependently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liablefor any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages

whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith or arising out of the use of this material.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing:US Performance and the

Institutional Dimension of Strategyin Afghanistan

TODD GREENTREE

The Changing Character of War Programme, Oxford University

ABSTRACT It is not too soon to draw cautionary lessons from the inconclusiveresults of US performance during more than 11 years of Operation ‘EnduringFreedom’ in Afghanistan. As in Vietnam, fundamental difficulties persist inadapting enduring institutions to the requirements of strategy. At the heart ofthe matter is tension between the assumptions that underlie counterinsurgency aspracticed in Afghanistan and organization of the US Armed Forces, StateDepartment, and Agency for International Development. Knowledge of basicprinciples and necessary changes is available to answer the question, could theUS have done better?

KEY WORDS: Strategy, Irregular Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Civil-MilitaryRelations, Organizations, Afghanistan, Vietnam

We have met the enemy and he is us.1

Introduction: Performance vs. Policy and The Other War

While the urgent counterterrorist mission that drove the invasion ofAfghanistan following 9/11 is long-past, it is still too soon to knowwhetherthe ongoing United States leadership of Operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ willultimately be judged a success. However, it is not too soon to recognizethat having spent over 11 years of hard sacrifice and enormous cost toachieve such inconclusive results raises serious issues of performance.This was not the first time the US has found itself fatigued with a protractedmilitary intervention, confronting the ambiguous results of combatinga virulent insurgency while supporting a deeply troubled government.

1Walt Kelly, ‘Pogo, 1970’. Cited in Mrs Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr (eds), TheSource: The Best of Pogo (New York: Simon & Schuster 1982), 224.

The Journal of Strategic Studies, 2013http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2013.764518

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

Because it is unlikely to be the last, there seems an obligation to grasp thecautionary implications and draw lessons from them.‘As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not

the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.’, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously replied to a soldierwho complained about a lack of properly armored vehicles in 2004.2

The SecDef perhaps said more than he meant; not only do you go towar with the military equipment and technology you have, but with thegovernment that you have at the time as well. Nor do you get to fightthe war that you might wish to have. And therein lies a fundamentaltension, between the requirements of strategy that inevitably demandrapid adaptation and the enduring institutions of government – the‘instruments of power’ – that turn foreign and national security policiesfrom declaration to execution. Governed by an underlying system ofauthorities, doctrines, practices, cultures, and relationships the keys toeffective performance lie in the dynamics within and amongorganizations.During my involvement with Afghanistan between 2008 and 2012,

including two deployments as a political-military advisor in RegionalCommands-East and -South, each day brought new experience withhow, despite our military proficiency, our vast capabilities, and ourwealth, US institutions too often proved dysfunctional when it cameto conducting the ‘other war’.3 Just as good operations cannot com-pensate for a poor strategy, even the best strategy cannot prevail withinadequate organizations. Nowhere is the difficulty of making necessarychanges greater than in the complex circumstances of intervention andirregular warfare, as the evidence from Afghanistan demonstrates:

(1) The amount of time it took for governments to understand andadapt to circumstances on the ground, along with the discontinu-ities between initial approaches taken to the conflicts and thestrategies that eventually emerged;

(2) The overwhelming militarization of responses, despite thoroughunderstanding of the importance of non-military dimensions,along with the persistent use of existing capabilities, even whentheir effects were less than optimal;

2Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, ‘Town Hall Meeting in Kuwait, 8 Dec. 2004’,US Department of Defense News Transcript, <www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1980>.3During the Vietnam War, the ‘other war’ referred to what were then called pacificationoperations, to differentiate them from the ‘real war’of conventional search-and-destroyoperations. Austin Long, On ‘Other War’: Lessons from Five Decades of RANDCounterinsurgency Research (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2006), 2.

2 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

(3) Attempts to mold a foreign government and its security forces inthe image of modern nation-states without taking into sufficientaccount vast differences in political and economic development, orthe limits of power to compel change;

(4) How traditional approaches to civil-military relations and resourcemanagement, institutional inertia, organizational friction, anddivided authorities across multiple autonomous organizations hin-der unity of effort and command.

To further set the stage:In analyzing the long and costly US entanglement in Afghanistan,

with its many consequences, some of them tragic, it is important to lookat performance as well as policy. Whatever the wisdom of US interven-tion, the immense disparity in strength and resources between theantagonists would have suggested a more favorable and conclusiveoutcome. Yet why has a cumulatively enormous US contribution hadsuch a limited impact for so long? Why, almost regardless of theultimate outcome, has US intervention entailed such disproportionatecosts and side effects?The reasons are many, complex, and interrelated. They include the

unique and unfamiliar conflict environment in which we becameenmeshed. Particularly constraining has been the sharp contrast betweenthe adversary we combat and the ally we back – a motivated ideologicalinsurgency supported by Pakistan, and a half-formed and seriouslyflawed regime in Kabul. Another constraint was implicit in the incre-mental nature of our response, for the most part doing only what webelieved was minimally necessary at each stage.But even these reasons are insufficient to explain why we did so

poorly for so long. The record shows that we thought we recognizedthe nature of the operational problems we confronted in Afghanistan,and that our policy was designed to overcome them. And whatever thegradualism of our response, we and our coalition partners ended upmaking a cumulatively massive investment of blood and treasure in theattempt to achieve a satisfactory outcome. Yet the US grossly misjudgedwhat it could actually accomplish with the effort it eventually made. Inthis sense at least, the US did stumble into a ‘quagmire’ in Afghanistan.What must be added is how another set of real-life constraints –

largely inherent in the typical behavior patterns of US institutionsinvolved in the conflict – made it difficult to cope with an unfamiliarconflict environment and greatly influenced what we could and couldnot, or would and would not, do in Afghanistan.Tobe frank andavoid plagiarism, the preceding four paragraphs are taken

froman earlier versionofBureaucracyDoes Its Thing, RobertKomer’s 1972assessment of the US failure in Vietnam, and applied to Afghanistan with

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 3

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

minor edits.4 Komer, a key figure in the pacification effort throughout theVietnamWar, headed the Civil Operations andRevolutionaryDevelopmentSupport (CORDS) program at its inception in 1966. Institutional problemsformed the heart of his frank and often polemical analysis.5

Of course, there are enormous differences between the wars inAfghanistan and Vietnam, including the magnitude of disaster thatresulted. When President Barack Obama announced the much-deliber-ated and time-bound surge of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, he expli-citly rejected the idea that it was another Vietnam. It made sense toseparate the 40 years since the last US troops departed from justificationfor prolonging their presence in Afghanistan by claiming that the com-parison ‘depends upon a false reading of history’.6 Just the same, thelitany of parallels is a compelling application of the ‘know yourself’ halfof Sun Tzu’s formula for strategic success, uncovering a counter-truthto the myth of Afghanistan as the inevitable graveyard of empires.7

Studies of Afghanistan and chronologies of the war are abundantlyavailable.8 It is important to note, however, that most of this huge

4Robert Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on US-GVNPerformance (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 1972), v–vi.5Originally designated the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Supportprogram, CORDS was rebranded as Civil Operations and Rural Development Supportdue to Cold War political sensibilities. In addition to Komer, other first person accountsof counterinsurgency and CORDS in Vietnam can be found in William Colby, LostVictory (New York: Contemporary Books 1989); and Rufus Phillips, Why VietnamMatters (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press 2008). Among the many current com-parative references to the CORDS programs, influential commentary that focuses onorganizational issues can be found in John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife:Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Univ. of Chicago Press 2005).6President Barack Obama, ‘Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistanand Pakistan’, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, 1 Dec. 2009, TheWhite House, <www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-address-nation-way-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan>.7Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Samuel B. Griffith (trans.), (Oxford: OUP 1963), 84. Thefull quotation is more than a slogan:– Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in

peril.– When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning

or losing are equal.– If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to

be in peril.8For example, see Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History(Princeton UP 2010); and Daniel Marston, ‘Realizing the Extent of Our Errors andForging the Road Ahead: Afghanistan 2001–2010’, in Daniel Marston and CarterMalkasian (eds), Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (Oxford: Osprey Publishing2010), 151–286.

4 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

and ever-expanding literature is dedicated to tactical and operationalmatters, and much of what is presented as strategy is actually not.9 Totouch briefly on a widely held Afghan perspective, the US and asso-ciated foreign presence is widely tolerated as a source of largesse anda bulwark against the prospect of a resurgent Taliban or anotherchaotic descent into disorder. With the short-lived surge havinggiven way to drawdown, the recent completion of a bilateralStrategic Partnership Agreement along with associated efforts todemonstrate commitment have not altogether dispelled latent fear ofanother US abandonment once transition to Afghan authority iscomplete in 2014.Prognosis aside, there are reasons why the same questions about US

performance in Vietnam that troubled Komer apply in Afghanistan.At the general level are the political and military challenges inherentto internal conflict, made all the more complicated by the incompat-ibilities that arise when a democracy engages in protracted foreignintervention. Other problems, though, are errors of conception andexecution. These are grounded in the fact that US foreign policy andnational security institutions, as historical products of World War IIand the Cold War, were designed for other purposes.10 In particular,this applies to the Armed Forces, the State Department, and the USAgency for International Development (USAID), which, excluding theCentral Intelligence Agency, are the main organizations at work inAfghanistan.

The US Military in Afghanistan: Organizing to Adapt

Military power requires organizational competence. Since it com-menced in 2001, and especially since 2009, Operation ‘EnduringFreedom’ has required an increasingly sophisticated ability to managelarge and complex systems and to adapt them, not only to the demandsof warfighting, but across the counterinsurgency (COIN) spectrum.Over time, commanders and their staffs at all levels have developed

9For tactical state of the art see David Kilcullen, ‘Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentalsof Company-level Counterinsurgency’, Military Review 86/3 (May–June 2006), 103–8.The US Army–Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency, published in2006, established basic operational doctrine, and it will be interesting to see whetherthe revision to 3-24, due in 2013, amends the original version’s gaps in strategicfoundation. US Army Combined Arms Center, Ft Leavenworth, KS, <http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/coin/FM3-24Revision.asp>.10Brian M. Linn and Russell F. Weigley, ‘“The American Way of War” Revisited’,Journal of Military History 66/2 (April 2002), 501–33; and Samuel Huntington, TheSoldier and The State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1957).

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 5

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

increasing capability to plan, synchronize, direct, and maintain conti-nuity among subordinate units, special operations, enablers, sustain-ment, and so forth, while cooperating with coalition and Afghanpartners and carrying out joint military and non-military missionsamong the population. The logistics of OEF alone are astounding.The ability to transport, supply, and sustain on the order of 100,000troops on the opposite side of the globe in one of the world’s mostrugged and least developed countries demonstrates unsurpassed man-agement prowess. That Afghanistan happens to be landlocked, withtreacherous Pakistan and remote Central Asia as the two suboptimalchoices of land routes, magnifies every aspect of the support effortinto a contest of geography and politics. Under such conditions, thefrequently cited cost of $1 million per soldier per year does not seemfar off.This unquestionably superior US ability to deliver warfighting cap-

ability nevertheless is subject to organizational paradoxes that are at thecenter of the challenge to adapt. This was evident at the inceptionof OEF:In some circumstances, action that demands relatively little effort

delivers great effect. This was decisively the case with the launch ofOperation ‘Enduring Freedom’ on 7 October 2001, when use of SpecialOperations Forces (SOF), precision guided munitions, and indigenousallies defeated quickly the Taliban and its Al- Qa’eda allies, resulting incollapse of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The rapid overthrow ofthe Taliban was a conventional aim, achieved through the ability ofSOF and the CIA Special Activities Division to combine critical advan-tages of firepower maneuver, and precision with the additional attri-butes of being low profile, small in size, flexible in organization, andprepared to work closely with foreign militaries. From an institutionalperspective, the method used in this initial phase may not be the futureof war, but it does point to some key features for successful interventionin ‘small wars’ of the future.11

In other circumstances, great effort can result in comparatively lim-ited effect. Operation ‘Anaconda’, which took place in March 2002,was the first combat in Afghanistan involving conventional forces.Planned as a decisive battle to unfold over two or three days,‘Anaconda’ eventually succeeded in routing Al-Qa’eda and Talibanforces from the Shah-i-Kot Mountains of Eastern Afghanistan withheavy casualties, but only after an exhausting 14 days. Elusive insur-gents, along with heat and extremely rough terrain, made for

11Henry Crumpton, The Art of Intelligence (New York: The Penguin Press 2012).Stephen Biddle, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army andDefense Policy (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College 2002).

6 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

challenging conditions. But organizational friction was the crucial pro-blem, characterized by serious issues of command and control, air-ground coordination, and disconnects among SOF and brigade-sizeconventional forces, as well as with coalition partners.12 Perhaps thisexperience was not a surprise given the complexity of the operation andthe fact that the US 10th Mountain Division was thrown into battlewith little preparation.13

Another pervasive challenge to performance in Afghanistan stemsfrom what happens when the effects of military action contradict thepolitical purpose they are intended to achieve. This is the paradoxicallogic of counterinsurgency.14 Tactical force protection measures, suchas travel in protected vehicles and wearing body armor, separate sol-diers from the people they are supposed to protect without necessarilyseparating insurgents from the population. Unit rotations of one-year orless allow the force to sustain itself, but sacrifice operational continuityand essential knowledge. The vast ground transport chains that runfrom the port of Karachi through Pakistan into Afghanistan at theKhyber Pass and Chaman border crossings rely on corruption andprotection rackets. Strategically, a few dozen CIA and SOF operativesin support of several thousand Afghan allies were able to overthrow theTaliban in a matter of weeks, but at their peak ten years later, over130,000 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and nearly300,000 Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) troops were strugglingto prevail over perhaps 30,000 insurgents.An even more fundamental issue in the relationship of institutions to

strategy lies in applying unsurpassed US military proficiency to achieveCOIN aims in Afghanistan.So difficult was the fighting in the six-mile long, insurgent-infested

mountain corridor in north-eastern Afghanistan called the Korengalthat to the US military it became known as ‘The Valley of Death’. Itwas for his heroic actions here on 28 June 2005 that the first Medal ofHonor during OEF was awarded to US Navy Lieutenant MichaelMurphy. Murphy died on a mission to kill or capture a Taliban

12L. Kugler, Michael Baranick, and Hans Binnendijk, Operation Anaconda: Lessonsfor Joint Operations (Center for Technology and National Security Policy, NationalDefense Univ. March 2009). Lester W. Grau and Dodge Billingsley, OperationAnaconda: The United States’s First Major Battle in Afghanistan (Lawrence, KS:Univ. of Kansas Press 2011).1310th Mountain would prove much more capable at employing the advantages ofsuperior force levels and organization when it took over the COIN campaign inRegional Command-South during Oct. 2010, more than 8 and a half years later.14Although he does not deal specifically with COIN, the concept of paradoxical logic isfrom Edward Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, MA:Harvard UP 1987).

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 7

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

commander that went bad, along with three of his four SEAL teammembers and 16 Special Operations Forces whose helicopter was shotdown when they came to rescue them.By the time US forces yielded the Korengal back to the insurgents in

April 2010, 42 soldiers had been killed in action and hundreds morewounded. No one recorded the number of Afghan casualties. Thetroops who saw combat in the outposts along the Korengal ‘knewhow to fight’, as Sebastian Junger put it in his 2010 book WAR,which, along with the documentary film Restrepo and extensive report-ing in the media, made the Korengal Valley into a public emblem of thewar in Afghanistan.15

As compelling as the tactical story of the Korengal is, its greatersignificance as a microcosm of the US experience in Afghanistan liesin what it tells us of the institutional dimension of strategy. The movieRestrepo follows one platoon from the 173rd Airborne Brigade CombatTeam during their 2008 deployment to a Combat Outpost (COP) in theKorengal named after Private First Class Juan Restrepo, a comrade whofell there in 2007. As the soldiers assigned to COP Restrepo patrol arange limited to the vicinity of their base, they fight inconclusively withlargely unseen adversaries and interact with the local population with-out comprehending them. That they diligently attempt to fulfill theirmission to block insurgent infiltration and secure the Korengal provesto be entirely beside the point, because it is not military performancethat matters, but rather the political, economic, social, cultural, reli-gious, and psychological realities of the other war. The Pashai clans thatinhabit the isolated valley are implacable and independent, and nopromise of protection, enticement of projects, or threat of retributionwould bring them to yield their hearts or their minds to the UnitedStates troops who had interposed themselves among them. Althoughthe Korengalis share conservative Islamic beliefs with the Taliban andregard the presence of infidel soldiers as an insult, they are largelyuninterested in the higher purposes of the insurgency. Of more materialimportance, the troops in their valley interfere with the timber smug-gling to Pakistan that is a principal source of their livelihood. US effortsto ‘connect the people to their government’ unwittingly added resent-ment, because the Pashtun authorities who represent the Afghan gov-ernment and inhabit the relatively richer land below the KorengalValley discriminate against the lower status Pashai, and are interestedprimarily in collecting revenue and bribes from the timber trade. Even ifit there had been enough troops to plug up the Korengal, the version ofCOIN on offer never really stood a chance.

15Sebastian Junger, WAR (New York: Twelve 2010), and Restrepo, Dir. by SebastianJunger and Tim Hetherington (National Geographic Dogwoof Pictures 2010).

8 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

The decision to withdraw from the Korengal Valley after five yearswas based on a realization that it simply did not matter for the overallprosecution of the war. The issue is not so much the correctness of thecommand decision, but rather why it took so long to make it. The samequestion applies to OEF as a whole. COIN in Afghanistan beginning in2002 incorporated innovations like Provincial Reconstruction Teamsand intelligence-driven special operations, but they were applied hap-hazardly. The essence of ISAF commander General Stanley McChystal’sCounterinsurgency Guidance in 2009 was to take seriously the need to‘… do much more than kill or capture insurgents’.16 There was nothingnew about the concept. What it required, though, was reversing theconventional version of the so-called American way of war. It meantrelinquishing linear logic, applying tactical patience and moderating theuse of firepower, accepting responsibility for priorities other than war-fighting such as Afghan force development, and involving militaryleaders at all levels in politics from the most remote village to thenational palace. This challenge of balancing constructive as well asdestructive missions is the central paradox of conducting war amongthe people.For Komer, adapting a military organized for other purposes was not

so much a problem of grasping the character of the war in Vietnam as itwas the extreme difficulty of bringing about necessary changes.17 If theUS arguably has done a better although belated job in Afghanistan,basic institutional issues persist. For example, favored weapons systemssuch as M777 howitzers and M1-A1 tanks are still deployed in theater,even though their firepower has limited utility fighting guerrillas orprotecting the population. It can be hard for units like the airborne thatare organized and trained to wield the ‘battlesword’ of combat to pickup the ‘rapier’ of counterinsurgency.18 Some adapt better than othersto tactical directives and rules of engagement that moderate the use ofkinetic power, task organization that sees armor battalions employedin light infantry roles and artillery officers assigned to informationoperations rather than fire support coordination, and operations

16ISAF Commander’s Counterinsurgency Guidance, Aug. 2009, <www.nato.int/isaf/docu/official_texts/counterinsurgency_guidance.pdf>. For the difference between strate-gies focused on battles vs. winning see Antulio Echeverria, ‘ American Strategic Culture:Problems and Prospects’, in Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (eds), The ChangingCharacter of War (Oxford: OUP 2011), 434.17In addition to Komer, see Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: TheSystem Worked (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution 1979).18Joseph L. Harsh, ‘Battlesword and Rapier: Clausewitz, Jomini, and the AmericanCivil War’, Military Affairs 38/4 (Dec. 1974) 133–8.

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 9

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

planned around clear-hold-build phases that make force employmentdemands well outside of the conventional repertoire.Organization to command and manage the US and coalition mili-

tary presence in Afghanistan is enormously complex. The wiringdiagram of Kabul headquarters alone is confounding. ISAF, theNATO-led command under a 2001 United Nations mandate, isresponsible for overall direction and management of relations withmore than 45 international coalition force members, each with itsown set of guidelines and caveats. ISAF Joint Command (IJC) isresponsible for operational planning, resource allocation, and main-taining unity of effort. There are separate major commands for specialoperations, force development, and support, each with parallel USheadquarters. With, for example, well more than a dozen generalofficers in IJC alone, redundancies, overlaps, and clashes are inevita-ble. The large staffs assigned to coordinate every aspect of complexoperations create multiple self-contained circles and are a constantorganizational work in progress.The original division of ISAF into five Regional Commands

(RC) – North, East, South, and West, along with RC Capital forKabul – structure the basic international division of labor, and moreimportantly corresponded roughly to Afghanistan’s traditional politico-geographic organization. A similar logic applies to the distribution ofresponsibilities by nation, with nations more ready to fight takingconflictive provinces, such as the French in Kapisa and the Australiansin Uruzgan, and heavily caveated nations taking relatively stable areas,like Spain in Baghdis and New Zealand in Bamyan. Friction and lapseswere inevitable in such a complex battle space as Afghanistan. Forexample, the seam between the US-Romanian presence in ZabulProvince which belongs to RC-South and the Polish in neighboringGhazni, part of RC-East, left the Taliban with a relatively undisruptedcorridor from the Pakistan border in the South. US ‘ownership’ ofRegional Command-East has had an even greater impact. RC-Eastanchors OEF for half the country out of Bagram Air Field and helpskeep Kabul fewer than 50 miles to the south protected. However, USorientation to the East also meant that less attention went into thecritical South, which left the Canadians in Kandahar and the Britishin neighboring Helmand fighting heroically but undermanned until thesurge commenced in summer 2009.At the tactical level, designation of Army Brigade Combat Teams

(BCTs) as battlespace owners organized into Task Forces with well-defined areas of operation and corresponding roles for subordinatebattalions was well-suited to both the military and political roles ofthe COIN campaign. BCTs that adapted quickly to their areas ofoperation, that synchronized well with Special Operations Forces,

10 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

partnered with Afghan elements, and took on the full range of COINtasks were poised to succeed, at least tactically. For example, assign-ment of the work horse First Maneuver Enhancement Brigade (MEB)to Task Force Warrior in RC-East, where I served as political-militaryadvisor, was entirely appropriate for its area of operations. Heavy withengineers and military police, the brigade was well-suited for operationsin the less conflictive provinces of Bamyan, Parwan, and Panjshir, whilesecuring Bagram Air Field, directing combat operations conducted byFrench troops in Kapisa Province, and overseeing four PRTs. In con-trast, despite its reputation for being over-focused on a counter-guerrillamission, 5/2 Stryker BCT, when I served with it, had no option but tofight its way through improvised explosive device (IED)-strewn lanesand heavy Taliban resistance along the Arghandab River when itinitiated clearing operations as the first surge brigade to arrive inKandahar at the height of the summer fighting season in 2009.Security assistance has been a part of the coalition mission since the

beginning of OEF, and it has long been generally understood thatplacing responsibility for security in the hands of the government isindispensible to success. Implementation is another matter. It was notuntil 2009 that Force Development became a universal ISAF priorityrather than the separate responsibility of NATO Training Mission –Afghanistan (NTMA).19 Granted, the deep divides in cultures andcapabilities between Afghan and coalition militaries turn training,advising, partnering, and mentoring into daunting obligations. Therecent spate of green-on-blue killings has provoked serious pause inthe rush to pump the ANSF up to 350,000 and make it capable offighting on its own by 2014, an uncertain proposition at best. As awarfighting organization above all, the US military has been inconsis-tent with the ANSF and by inclination regards assisting foreign mili-taries as a second class mission. Not all Task Forces took theresponsibility to work with their Afghan partners seriously, and muchof the responsibility was initially delegated to National Guard andreserve troops that were not always prepared or well-suited for thejob. With most of the effort directed to the Afghan National Army(ANA), the highly corrupt but critical Afghan National Police receivedshort shrift. Although military police have been reasonably effective inmentoring police paramilitary operations and population control, lawenforcement and internal security policing are gaps in US militarycapabilities that other nations and contracting through civilian agencies

19For a more complete assessment of ISAF force development and other securityassistance see for example, David Barno (Lt. Gen. US Army, ret.) and Andrew Exum,Responsible Transition: Securing US Interests in Afghanistan beyond 2014(Washington DC: Center for a New American Security Dec. 2010).

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

have only partially closed. Mirroring is a related and more systemicissue. As was the case with the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam(ARVN), the ANA is basically being built to a modernized, Westernmodel that is in many respects not only unsuited to Afghanistan, butlikely to prove unsustainable. The problem is well-recognized, but it ishard to get around the fact that militaries can only attempt to transferwhat they know.On the plus side, if imparting organizational integrity is taken into

account, sustained partnering between senior Afghan and US comman-ders may prove to be the most influential factor in professionalizing theANSF and building an enduring relationship between US and Afghanforces independent of quantitative commitment. Even as SpecialOperations Forces have become highly proficient at intelligence-drivendirect action to hunt down insurgent commanders and terrorist rem-nants, the Special Forces (SF) sub-tribe has rediscovered its core missionof working with and building regular and irregular indigenous forcesthrough the village-based Afghan Local Police (ALP) program, alongwith its continued building of the Afghan Commandos. Consistentrotation of SF groups and personnel through Afghanistan over thepast decade has also given them a critical if less tangible role in main-taining continuity between US forces and a wide range of Afghancounterparts. Authenticity, knowledge, and commitment are amongthe most valuable attributes the SF brings to security force development,but they are spread too thin to handle the entire job.20 Others who havetaken up the mission include small GPF units paired with SF, and NavySEALs who in 2010 took command of Special Operations Task ForceSoutheast and the ALP program in Uruzgan and Zabul Provinces.Marine four-man Embedded Training Teams (ETTs) more than provedtheir worth as combat field advisors until they were withdrawn when theMarines established Task Force Helmand as the surge began in 2009.Nothing illustrates the tension between institutions and strategy bet-

ter than the contribution of the Marines to the surge. From the per-spective of RC-South headquarters during the surge’s high point in2011, it was evident that dedicating a Marine division level combatcommand, Task Force Leatherneck, to Helmand Province where theBritish had been outmanned and outgunned carried three principalconsequences for the conduct of the war. First, splitting the provinceoff from RC-South to create RC-Southwest as a separate ISAF regionalcommand resulted in an organizational and operational seam that hadno corresponding distinction geographically, ethnically, or for the insur-gency in its Southern Pashtun heartland. Second, however aggressively

20Hy Rothstein, Afghanistan and the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press 2006).

12 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

the Marines fought to rout the Taliban from their strongholds inHelmand, the province was home to only three per cent of Afghansand while important, was secondary to the insurgent center of gravity inneighboring Kandahar. Finally, spreading 20,000 Marines among iso-lated outposts, including deep into Helmand’s isolated and sparselypopulated ‘Desert of Death’, seriously distorted the distribution ofprecious forces allocated to Afghanistan for the surge.21 It was evidentthat the reason for this posture was not principally related to strategy –in fact it was counter-strategic – but had everything to do with theoperational independence that has been a Marine organizing principlesince Guadalcanal in World War II. Whatever the assessment of theircombat performance and COIN proficiency within Helmand, evalua-tion of the Marine deployment needs to weigh this service preoccupa-tion against its strategic contribution to the war.By consequence of brevity, the surge itself was inconclusive. Lasting

from the summer of 2009 and at full strength for only about ninemonths between October 2010 and July 2011, it did have counter-insurgency effects, especially in securing Kandahar City and drivingthe Taliban from their core areas in the South. With drawdown (officialterm ‘surge recovery’) complete and the US (and with it the ISAFcoalition) already shifting further toward retrograde, the enduringimpact depends on the success of transition to the ANSF by 2014. Inthe absence of a corresponding insurgent drawdown, post-surge strat-egy amounts to a gamble on organizational hand-off.Finally, there is issue of organization across time to sustain the force

in Afghanistan for over a decade. One-year and often shorter rotationsrevived John Paul Vann’s famous saying, ‘We don't have 12 years’ ofexperience in Vietnam. We have one year's experience 12 times over.’22

In Vietnam, conscription filled Army ranks while the reserves andNational Guard remained at home; in Afghanistan, by contrast theall-volunteer active duty force supplemented by the National Guardand Reserves serves in cycles of multiple rotations. The entire institu-tional process is set to a repetitive, short-term rhythm: soldiers withattention fixed on their one-year deployments; commanders whoseperformance during that single year is all-important; brigades thatlabor for months to flow in and to flow out; the air, sea, and ground

21Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan(New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2012), 138–40.22Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, 67. Also quoted in D. Michael Schaefer, TheLegacy: The Vietnam War in the American Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press1990), 100. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie (New York: Random House 1988) isthe Pulitzer Prize winning account of John Paul Vann as hero and metaphor for the UStragedy in Vietnam.

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 13

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

logistics that support these movements; and the incredibly complicatedpatch charts that regulate the entire military’s capacity to sustain theprotracted process across time.23 This Groundhog Day syndrome,which manifests itself in countless ways at all levels, culminates in thesame cycle of learning and forgetfulness that Vann lamented inVietnam.24

Civilians (Not) at War: The ‘Civilian Surge’ and Civil-MilitaryRelations

Counterinsurgency offers no strategic shortcuts, and a first order ofbusiness should be getting the organizations right. As General DavidPetraeus said a year after assuming command of ISAF, in 2011:

You don’t kill or capture your way out of an industrial-strengthinsurgency, which is what faces Afghanistan. … It takes a com-prehensive approach, and not just military but civil-military.25

Despite the claims of success attributed to the ‘whole of government’approach, the reality of bringing the military and civilian sides of thehouse together in Afghanistan has been a saga of organizational fric-tion. What Komer found in Vietnam was that the military concentratedon combat while counterinsurgency, ‘… was everybody’s business andnobody’s’.26 In Afghanistan, the case has been somewhat different:counterinsurgency has been the military’s business and everybody elsehas been a subordinate player, while continuing more or less to playtheir own game. If the standard formula is that COIN is supposed to be20 per cent military and 80 per cent political, in Afghanistan by anymeasure that ratio is more than reversed.27

In the first instance the problem was attributed to lack of resources,to the extent that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates placed himself

23See for example, Timothy M. Bonds, Dave Baiocchi, and Laurie L. McDonald, ‘ArmyDeployments to OIF and OEF’, RAND Corporation Briefing (Santa Monica, CA:RAND Corporation 2010).24Groundhog Day, Dir. by Harold Ramis (Columbia Pictures 1993). In this film, BillMurray plays Phil Conners, a disgruntled weatherman who finds himself condemned tolive the same dreary 2 February. Groundhog Day in Punxatawney, PA over and overagain until he gains enlightenment.25Interview with Gen. David Petraeus, PBS Frontline, 14 June 2011, <www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/afghanistan-pakistan/kill-capture/interview-general-david-petraeus>.26Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, 79–84.27David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (London: Pall Mall1964), 89.

14 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

in the forefront of a campaign to convince Congress to support greaterfunding for civilian agencies. The Pentagon won authorization to use itsfunds for non-military programs and set up its own Defense CivilianExpeditionary Workforce. It was equally clear that the key foreignaffairs agencies, the State Department and USAID, as well as agencieswith specific roles to play such as the Departments of Justice andAgriculture, lacked the capacity to carry out missions that fell intotheir areas of expertise and authority. The solution was to accompanythe military surge in 2009 with a $2 billion ‘civilian surge’(AKA civilian uplift).28 The much-vaunted increase did manage tobring the number of civilians in Afghanistan up to just over 1,200,but this was well short of what was promised. As one military com-mander observed in 2011 when told the civilian surge was at its highwater mark, he said he could feel it, ‘... lapping at my ankles’. 29

Built around calls for volunteers among the Foreign Service andCivil Service throughout the federal government, in the end many ifnot most of the recruits for the civilian surge came from outside the USGovernment and consisted of individuals hired on short-term con-tracts. Despite some innovations, the recruiting process has remainedsaddled with laborious administrative requirements and it inevitablytook many months to get individuals into the field. This was certainlymy experience with the State Department on two deployments, eventhough I was a former Foreign Service Officer with a security clearancebeing recommissioned for Afghanistan. As might be expected, therange among civilian recruits of skills, experience, and ability towork in a conflict environment like Afghanistan varied greatly. Therewere outstanding individuals, but many had never worked for the USGovernment and faced the additional handicap of being rookies in anew organization. Urgency did take hold for training. Standardizedfamiliarization consisted of a 30-day course at the Training Center forComplex Operations at National Guard Camp Atterbury-Muscatatuck, Indiana, with area studies and related subjects offeredat the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), as well as a mandatory four-day‘crash and bang’ security course. As a comparative measure of

28Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Departmentof State Office of Inspector General, ‘The US Civilian Uplift in Afghanistan Has CostNearly $2 Billion, and State Should Continue to Strengthen Its Management andOversight of the Funds Transferred to Other Agencies’ (8 Sept. 2011), <www.sigar.mil/pdf/audits/2011-09-08audit-11-17.pdf>.29Chandrasekaran, Little America, 308. For a thorough assessment of the issues relatedto civilian recruitment, training, and organization, see Terrance Kelly et al.,Stabilization and Reconstruction Staffing: Developing US Personnel Capabilities(Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2008).

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 15

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

seriousness, the basic FSI course for civilian and military officersassigned to CORDS in Vietnam lasted six months, with up to 24months for language qualification. With up to 60 days of leaveadded to at least 30 days of training, plus time for in-processing,many individuals experienced substantial subtractions from time in-country. It should be no wonder that the result of the civilian surge wassomething of a hodgepodge.This is not to say that the civilian effort in Afghanistan has been

negligible. Many dedicated officers representing more than two dozenagencies from the State Department to specialized agencies suchas US Customs and Border Protection are serving diligently inAfghanistan and working pragmatically with the situation as itexists, meaning often in spite of the system. One of the virtues ofhaving worked side-by-side for the past decade in Afghanistan, Iraq,and elsewhere is the mutual understanding a new generation ofmilitary and civilian officers now have for their respective roles andmissions.Following the logic of the 80:20 rule it would seem sensible enough

to allocate authority over non-military activities in Afghanistanto civilians. This is certainly the expectation of doctrine, as reflectedthroughout the Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency ManualFM 3–24.30 Instead, it has become commonplace among the militaryto blame the State Department and USAID in particular for failing tofulfill their responsibilities. Frustration derives from more than unful-filled expectations about numbers; a general impression has persistedamong the military that the civilian side is simply not up to it. Asformer Ambassador and Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelmanput it:

There was an emphasis on whole of government because it meantother departments of the government needed to be ‘in the fight’and if the US wasn’t winning it was because other parts of thegovernment ‘were not at war’.31

Unfortunately, the awkwardness in the term ‘whole of government’also reflects its awkwardness as an organizing principle. Komer’s

30The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Univ. of Chicago Press2007). James Dobbins, After The Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan (WashingtonDC: Potomac Books 2008).31Eric Edelman, ‘Ground Hog Day: Reflections on the Fall and Rise of COIN inAmerican Defense and Foreign Policy’, remarks to the International StabilityOperations Association, 25 Oct. 2011.

16 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

assessment of the problem in Vietnam also applies in large measure toAfghanistan:

On the civilian side in Vietnam, the tendency exists for US agenciesto focus primarily on that with which they are most familiar. TheState Department does not often deviate from its concept of diplo-matic dealings with a sovereign allied government, not even whenthat government is at its most dysfunctional. Similarly, State clingsto a traditionalist view of civil-military relationships, and hasmade little effort to assert control over the military effort onpolitical grounds. State’s concept of institution-building inVietnam turns largely on encouragement of formal governmentand American democratic forms, a kind of mirror-imaging whichhas proved hard to apply to the conditions of Vietnam. As for theAgency for International Development, its operations are for themost part also quite conventional.32

It is not clear that the State Department has freed itself of Komer’scharacterization. The 2010 Quadrennial Diplomacy and DevelopmentReview, modeled on the Defense Department QDDR, and relatedefforts brought needed initiative.33 When it comes to conflict, though,the institutional approach has been incremental and shied away fromembracing civil-military integration. By executive order, the Bureau ofConflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO, formerly the Coordinatorfor Reconstruction and Stabilization) has nominal responsibility forleading the US Government response in situations such asAfghanistan. But resistance has been strong, particularly from regionalbureaus that resent the threat to prerogatives, and USAID, whichpromptly set up a separate Civilian Response Corps in defense of itsown autonomy. CSO does serve as a clearing house for other agencies,and its officers in Afghanistan provide niche expertise in planning andcoordination, but its interagency role has remained marginal ratherthan central. What is lacking is more critical, for example, officersknowledgeable in military and security issues as well as governance,authorized and resourced to conduct political action in conflicts. Whilethe Foreign Service is a diplomatic organization second to none, itcannot yet claim to be truly expeditionary.34

32Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, viii.33Hillary Clinton, ‘Leading Through Civilian Power’, Foreign Affairs 89/6 (Nov./Dec.2010), 13–24; and US Department of State, Quadrennial Diplomacy and DevelopmentReview 2010, <www.state.gov/s/dmr/qddr/>.34Nina Serafino, In Brief: The State Department Bureau of Conflict and StabilizationOperations (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service Oct. 2012).

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 17

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

Within the US mission in Afghanistan, several organizational innova-tions have produced a mixed record. The Integrated Civil MilitaryAction Group (ICMAG) achieved reasonable success as an executivebody for managing complex decision-making and linking to the fieldthrough a sophisticated planning process. However, new Embassy lea-dership in 2010 demoted ICMAG to the Civilian-Military Planning andAssessment Section (CMPASS). Its primary responsibility has been tocoordinate the US Government Integrated Civil-Military CampaignPlan for Afghanistan.35 As is so often the case with such exercises, thePlan proved more suitable as a reference document than a road map.Even though few within the US Embassy would disagree that what

happens outside of the capital is crucial to success in Afghanistan, aninward focus on the ‘Kabubble’ is pervasive and self-absorbing. This iscustomary – evident also in Vietnam (and Iraq) – reflecting the corebusiness of conducting relations between governments along with thetendency of the bureaucracy to spend much of its time and energyinteracting with itself. Within the US mission, the Office ofInteragency Provincial Affairs (IPA) strives among intense interagencycompetition to control what are termed ‘subnational’ issues and opera-tions. Originally set up with a flat structure to support a few dozen fieldofficers, IPA necessarily ballooned with the surge, and became morelayered but less operational as a result. Most staff Embassy-wide havelimited connection, not only with Afghans, but with field officers whothey outnumber by a significant margin.During 2009, US civilian ‘Platforms’ consisting of a dozen or more

officers were set up in the four much larger Regional Commands. Eachis headed by a Senior Civilian Representative (SCR) who is nominallyequivalent to the two-star military commander and ostensibly in chargeof US civilian agencies and resources in their region, but in practice, theSCRs have limited authority and Platform staffs serve principally asadvisors and program coordinators. Initiatives such as the RegionSouth Stabilization Annex (RSSA), which helps set governance anddevelopment priorities in RC-South, have made inroads. In the absenceof an over-arching process, civil-military synchronization too oftenremains ad hoc. The drive for autonomy also persists, as in the sus-tained effort of Regional Platform-South to resist participating in RC-South operational planning for 2011 by aspiring to, in the words of onesenior Platform officer, ‘Just come up with something different.’Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), which date to 2002, are

present in Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals to carry out governanceand development. The 17 US PRTS in key provinces like Kandahar,

35United States Government Integrated Civil-Military Plan for Support to Afghanistan,Feb. 2011, <www.ccoportal.org/sites/ccoportal.org/files/icmcp_feb_2011final.pdf>.

18 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

Nangarhar, and Paktika are for the most part commanded and domi-nated by the military. Individual civilian officers, principally from theState Department, USAID, and the US Department of Agriculture domake valuable contributions as advisors and program managers. Thesum, though, tends to be less than the whole of its parts, and a dilemmais on the near horizon.36 While civilians are expected to take on greaterresponsibilities as the military withdraws from the field, the civilianpresence and its subnational mission is also slated to shrink.

The Program Approach to COIN: A Source of Instability?

Another way that organization can be seen driving performance is theprogram approach to COIN. As in Afghanistan, so it was in Vietnam.Komer again:

One consequence of US attempts to deal with the unusual require-ments of counterinsurgency war through the existing bureaucraticstructure was a plethora of programs conducted by different agen-cies, each jealously guarding its prerogatives and insistent onits own procedures.37

The USG Integrated Civil-Military Plan for Support to Afghanistanconsists of dozens of programs separated into security, governance,and development ‘lines of effort’. Budgeted in the billions of dollars,these programs are intended to achieve all-encompassing goals thatrange from border security to electoral reform to women’s rights.There is no question that massive international investment in theAfghan enterprise over the past decade-plus has yielded benefits.38

Roads are being built, millions of children are in school, health clinicsare open, NGOs are flourishing, the security forces are expanding, thegovernment is growing. Nevertheless, as what some Afghans have takento calling ‘the golden time’ of US profligacy comes to an end,Afghanistan will remain saddled with corruption and criminality, as

36Henry Nuzum, ‘CORDS in the Kush’, Masters Thesis, Johns Hopkins Univ. School ofAdvanced International Studies, 2009. Francis Fukuyama (ed.), Nation-Buildingbeyond Afghanistan and Iraq (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP 2006).37Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, 77.38US non-defense foreign aid from the Function 150 International Affairs budget totalsabout $20 billion, out of an estimated $500 billion in non-operational expenditures onAfghanistan. Majority Staff Report for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,Evaluating US Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan (Washington DC: U.S. GovernmentPrinting Office 2011) and The World Bank, Transition in Afghanistan: LookingBeyond 2014 (21 Feb. 2011).

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 19

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

the world’s largest producer of opium, with a marginally functionalgovernment dependent on declining international aid, still facing adetermined insurgency. Not only would the gap between the march ofliberal progress envisioned in the Integrated Plan and the dauntingrealities of Afghanistan be difficult enough to bridge at any level ofcost on an open-ended timeline. This stark deficit of results for invest-ment raises a basic question about the relationship between develop-ment, security, and state-building: Are the assumptions underlyingCOIN as practiced in Afghanistan in fact correct?39

Rufus Phillips, whose experience in Vietnam dates to 1954 and theorigins of counterinsurgency there, finds that the program approach inAfghanistan misses the point altogether:

Many of our stabilization efforts so far give the impression that wedo not comprehend the political, confused and often unhingednature of the internal struggles for stability in fragile states. Ourassistance tends to be programmatic and technical and is mainlydirected at improving the performance of existing host governmentinstitutions, including the security forces.40

As the organization with responsibility for managing the bulk of UScivilian assistance to Afghanistan, USAID is at the center of a relatedinstitutional problem. As is well-known, the agency has yet to recoverfrom two decades of staff reductions, and its business model, whichrelies on competitive bidding for projects, has turned its dedicated cadreof development experts into contract managers instead of implementers.Although many outside ‘implementing partners’ are well-equipped toexecute their respective activities, projects with lead times of six monthsor more and end dates determined by the annual budget cycle tend tobecome inflexible once funded and in execution, regardless of condi-tions on the ground. The bureaucratic and unwieldy process wasdesigned to manage long-term development projects, and is preciselythe opposite of what the constantly changing risks and opportunities ofAfghanistan at war demand. There are some positive notes. ManyUSAID and military officers have learned to work well together, puttingresources at many PRTs to better use as a result; tools such as theRegional South Stabilization Approach (RSSA) facilitate integratedcivil-military planning; and USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives

39Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder, Winning Hearts and Minds? Examining theRelationship between Aid and Security in Afghanistan (Boston, MA: Tufts Univ.Feinstein International Center 2012).40Rufus Phillips, ‘Fostering Positive Political Change’ (Washington DC: NationalStrategy Information Center Oct. 2012). Draft working paper cited with permission.

20 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

(OTI), with an operational mandate designed for conflict stabilization,demonstrated its worth in the hold phase of COIN operations when itfinally began working in Afghanistan during 2009.Still, it is hard to avoid the judgment that USAID has by and large

served US performance in Afghanistan poorly. As critical as projectfunding can be to effective COIN, coordination with the military hastoo often tended to be both painstaking and painful at tactical, opera-tional, and strategic levels:

● In RC-East during early 2009, combat operations by Task ForceWarrior cleared insurgents from the Alasay Valley in KapisaProvince for the first time in over two years. Unfortunately,USAID was missing in action, because its one implementing partnerin the area had unilaterally withdrawn from the district severalmonths earlier. As a result, assistance following the operation waslimited to delivery of humanitarian aid and a few short-term activ-ities, such as cleaning up the local bazaar, carried out by the PRT. Acoordinated hold and build effort never did take place.

● Just prior to the start of the summer fighting season in 2011, the USTask Force commander in Zabul alerted RC-South headquartersthat USAID had without notice decided to divert cash-for-workfunds to other unspecified priorities. Because cash-for-work is con-sidered a critical tool for keeping fighting age males from joining theTaliban by employing them on civil works projects, the commandwas forced to divert military civic action funds from other projectswhile resorting to concerted high level intervention to reverse thedecision. As USAID managers scrambled to defend their actions,some commanders, resentful at being caught unawares, began refer-ring to USAID as ‘a source of instability’.

Such chronic difficulties with synchronization and reliability are whathave led to the pervasive sense that the Agency for InternationalDevelopment, along with other civilian agencies, were ‘not at war’ inAfghanistan. In consequence, the military wasted no time building itsown capabilities. National Guard Agricultural Development Teams(ADTs) have established a strong reputation for relating to farmers;Special Forces Village Stability Operations (VSO) have proven adept atmaking provision of assistance contingent on local cooperation in settingup the Afghan Local Police (ALP); military engineers and civil affairspersonnel are good at building things under difficult circumstances.41

41The July–Sept. 2011 issue of the JFK Special Warfare Center and School journalSpecial Warfare, 24/3, is dedicated to Village Stability Operations.

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 21

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

As might be expected, some of the same difficulties that afflict USAIDhave also cropped up. The notion of using ‘money as a weapons system’introduced additional issues, including more-is-better pressure to keepspending on an open-ended budget.42 This is especially the case with theCommander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), which grew froma tactical tool to make repairs and pay compensation in the immediateaftermath of operations into a parallel economic development fund.Kandahar Province, where CERP funding surged alongside the troopsin 2009–11, offers multiple cases in point:

● One battalion commander in water-scarce Spin Boldak District,eager to demonstrate the he ‘got’ COIN, contracted for a third setof well drilling projects to address the ‘sources of conflict’ amongneighboring Achekzai and Noorzai tribes. When a USDA represen-tative visited the site, he concluded that villagers were fighting to getmore wells, because the two previous projects had lowered the watertable.

● A brigade commander justified using CERP to build a ‘farm-to-market’ road across barren desert in Arghandab District – inciden-tally sparking competition among tribal leaders eager for financialreward. The actual reason was to allow military vehicles to bypassan existing road nearby that ran through congested villages and wasIED-prone.

● The pinnacle of the program approach to COIN was a commitmenton the order of $200 million in CERP to bring electricity toKandahar City by installing diesel generators. CERP funding wasto have bridged a long-delayed and controversial USAID project tobring power to Southern Afghanistan from the Kajaki Dam in aninsurgent-infested district of Northern Helmand. With funding forthe USAID project now in doubt, the $100 million annual cost ofsupplying fuel to the generators is proving unsustainable. Althoughthe relationship between long-term economic development andpower generation is well-established, the COIN logic that bringingelectricity to the urban population of Kandahar City would some-how help combat the rural Taliban insurgency was highly dubiousin the first place.43

42US Army Financial Manager’s School, Handbook 09-27: The Commander’s Guide toMoney as a Weapons System (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: Center for Army Lessons Learned2009).43See for example, Yaroslav Trofimov, ‘Afghans Fear U.S. Pullout Will Unplug KeyProjects’, The Wall Street Journal, 11 Aug. 2012.

22 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

The Security Bureaucracy and Separate Civilians

At the risk of committing heresy, civilian security is another source oftension between organization and operations with a critical impact onUS performance in Afghanistan. Just as force protection is an impera-tive of military command, the same is true of protecting civilians, butwith two consequential distinctions. The first is a matter of priorities.Whereas measures to avoid casualties and protect troops are intendedto enable them to carry out their missions, the opposite is the case onthe civilian side. Instead, carrying out the mission is routinely subordi-nate to keeping out of harm’s way (certain law enforcement and intelli-gence personnel excepted). The second distinction is operational.Whereas all soldiers are prepared to participate in their own protectionand that of their units, civilians are generally expected to be passiverecipients of protection provided by a large security bureaucracy. Noneof this is to suggest that safety and security is inessential for soldiers andcivilians alike. And while prudence makes minimization of risk impera-tive under regular conditions, there is a high cost to insulating civiliansto such an extreme degree from the inherent dangers of war. Not onlydo they become isolated from Afghans and Afghanistan, restrictionsthat prevent taking responsibility for their own protection inhibits fieldofficers from doing their jobs. This security posture in turn feedsunhealthy separation where the military is at war while the civiliansare not.

Unity of Command vs. Unity of Effort: The Komer-HolbrookeParadox

Leaving aside how and under what circumstances prudent changes tosecurity procedures would improve civilian performance, this separa-tion of civilian and military realms in war reflects a deeper institu-tional dysfunction that helps explain why, even at its peak of effort,the US has continued to skirt misfortune in Afghanistan. Failure inthe Korengal Valley was not for lack of prowess or proficiency, butrather from attempting to use military means to attack complexissues that were fundamentally not military in nature. The fact thatfew other means were available matters, but even if State Departmentand USAID officers had been available to deploy on a COIN expedi-tion to the Korengal, there is a good chance their solution wouldhave been to offer the Pashai villagers programs. Some might havebeen useful, except that in the absence of a means to integrate andsustain the effort the result would have amounted to costly wishfulthinking.

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

Komer, who thought pragmatically about the much larger tragedy ofUS performance in Vietnam, came up with the following summarizationof such organizational confusion:

If it is understandable why our initial Vietnam responses were soill-suited to the atypical problems we confronted, why have theychanged so little over years of bitter experience? It seems thatinstitutional factors play a major role. Especially significant hasbeen institutional inertia – the built-in reluctance of organizationsto change preferred ways of functioning except slowly and incre-mentally. Another such factor has been the shocking lack ofinstitutional memory, largely because of short tours for US per-sonnel. Skewed incentive patterns also increase the pressure forconformity and tend to penalize adaptive response. And there hasbeen a notable dearth of systematic analysis of performance, againmainly because of the inherent reluctance of organizations toindulge in self-examination.44

Despite the distance from Vietnam in era and circumstance, anyonewho has served in Afghanistan for any length of time will feel thespark of recognition in this commentary. Komer was confident theCORDS program that he designed and ran was an effective adapta-tion to fight ‘the other war’, even though in Vietnam it came toolate.45 The organizational key to overcoming the central problem ofdivided civil and military authorities was to have personnel assignedto CORDS serve within a single chain of command regardless ofwhether they were military officers or civilians from the StateDepartment, USAID, or other agencies. All came under directionof the Deputy Commander of Military Assistance CommandVietnam (MACV), who was a civilian. Without offering furtherjudgment about how well CORDS as a whole might have workedunder better conditions, this solution to balancing unity ofcommand and effort under civilian authority has compellingappeal.So far, for several reasons, I have focused on organization while

avoiding issues of leadership. At this point, however, RichardHolbrooke’s tenure as Special Representative for Afghanistan andPakistan (SRAP) from January 2009 until his sudden death in December

44Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, 64–74.45There were other adaptations, including the Special Group (Counterinsurgency) in theKennedy White House, employment of the Green Berets in unconventional warfare, andthe CIA’s even earlier role in ‘political action’. Thomas Ahern, Vietnam Declassified:CIA and Counterinsurgency in Vietnam (Lexington, KY: The UP of Kentucky 2009).

24 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

2010 casts unique illumination. Holbrooke bridged Vietnam andAfghanistan like no other US official. Attributing the creation ofSRAP solely to Holbrooke’s ego stops short of grasping how fullyhis experience of the institutional problems that infected the effort inVietnam framed his solution to the same problems in Afghanistan, andultimately encountered similar shortcomings.46 Holbrooke’s Vietnamservice between 1963 and 1969 was comprehensive, including a turnas provincial affairs representative in the Mekong Delta province of BaXuyen, work on civil-military integration as an Embassy staff assistantto Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge, helpingassemble a living history of the war that later became leaked as thePentagon Papers, and not coincidentally working in the NationalSecurity Council for Robert Komer, who was at the time preparingto start up CORDS as Special Assistant to the President for VietnamPacification. The two of them shared an appreciation for the damagethat the sometimes bruising conflicts among civilian and militaryorganizations did in Vietnam.47

Once confirmed as SRAP, Holbrooke wasted no time remedyingwhat Komer had considered to be a major flaw in the organizationof CORDS, the absence of a corresponding organization inWashington DC. Holbrooke used his extensive power to assemble astaff of outside experts and representatives from across the USGovernment into an interagency body tailored specifically forAfghanistan and Pakistan. In doing so, he amassed nearly unprece-dented influence over multiple civilian agencies and their resources.Unfortunately, SRAP’s location in the State Department guaranteedthat, even though State has a convening mandate to coordinate theinternational affairs of the US Government, it remained a struggle tosustain unity of effort, while unity of command was never feasible.Ultimately, authorities remained divided and jealously guarded fromSRAP, by civilian agencies, especially USAID, by the military servicesand the Pentagon, and most importantly by the Office of the SpecialAssistant to the President for Afghanistan and Pakistan. As the USeffort in Afghanistan peaked, this was the best that bureaucracywould do.

46Amb. Richard Holbrooke, Keynote Address: ‘The American Experience in Vietnam,1946–75’, Department of State, Washington, DC , 29 Sept. 2010, <http://history.state.gov/conferences/2010-southeast-asia>; George Packer, ‘The Last Mission: RichardHolbrooke’s Plan to Avoid the Mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan’, New Yorker, 28Sept. 2009; and Nicholas Kristoff, ‘What Holbrooke Knew’, New York Times, 14 May2011.47Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters, 61–2 and 278.

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 25

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

Separated by four decades and very different conditions, CORDS andSRAP ran afoul of the same constraints and were ultimately unable toconsolidate unity of command or effort. Comparison also reveals anorganizational paradox. Where Vietnam-based CORDS lacked a corre-sponding structure in Washington, Washington-based SRAP converselylacked a corresponding structure in Kabul.

The Interagency Phalanx and the Whole of Government Fallacy

What was attempted within Afghanistan demonstrates the limits oftraditional approaches to grapple with the sheer complexity of func-tioning effectively as the central intervening power in a complicatedand deeply corroded nation at war. Like other US Embassies world-wide, the mission in Kabul is organized around the Country Team inwhich agency representatives serve under the authority of the Chiefof Mission, while reporting simultaneously to their own headquar-ters. Elaborating on this basic structure, with over 1,000 officersfrom a dozen agencies present in Afghanistan, there were at onepoint 15 interagency working groups to coordinate the multifacetedcivilian presence and work with the separate ISAF and multiple othermilitary commands, along with four, and sometimes five,Ambassadors to oversee them. The Regional Platforms, PRTs, andother civilian agencies in the field, such as the Drug EnforcementAgency, also report separately to Kabul. It should be no surprisethat, even with great determination, such adhockery grafted onto theCountry Team model, with or without an executive secretariat likeICMAG, lacked the organizational integrity to handle such complex-ity. To reprise Clausewitz:

Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. Thedifficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction thatis inconceivable unless one has experienced war.48

Ultimately, failure to ‘break the interagency phalanx’ in Washingtonand Kabul exposes a fallacy in the notion of ‘whole of government’.49

As a general rule, where competent performance is subject to the

48Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Peter Paret and Michael Howard (eds & trans.),(Princeton UP 1976), Book One: 7, 119.49Long, On ‘Other War’, 58. Also see Richard Weitz, ‘CORDS and the Whole ofGovernment Approach: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Beyond’, Small Wars Journal 6/1(Feb. 2010), <www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/RichardWeitz_SWJ.pdf>;and Ethan Kapstein, ‘Do Three D’s Make an F? The Limits of Defense, Diplomacy,and Development,’ Prism 1/3 (July 2010), 21–6.

26 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

dynamics among multiple organizations, resistance to any real realign-ment of the distribution of power becomes a critical constraint.50 Thisleads to the conclusion that where unity of command is not possible,unity of effort is often a distinctly second best solution.At the core of this problem lie perennial tensions in civil–military

relations in their Afghanistan variant. In the first instance, formal Chiefof Mission authority ‘… over every executive branch employee in thehost country, except those under the command of a US area militarycommander ….’ in practice makes effective coordination dependent inlarge measure on the informal abilities of the US Ambassador toAfghanistan and the Commander of the International SecurityAssistance Force to get along with each other.51 To a degree thissuffices, but any discomfort at the top makes it universally evidenthow crucial personal relations are at all levels, while revealing howinsufficient they are for resolving underlying issues.This is more than a matter of differing perspectives on whether

there is a problem to manage or a war to win. Perhaps the mostserious institutional problem is the difficulty of achieving civil-militarybalance in a context of overwhelming military predominance. Over-militarization refers not only to the resource disparity that reversesthe 80:20 COIN rule, but also to the associated one-way facility withwhich military officers assume non-military competencies, whether ornot there are civilians at hand. The ingrained reaction among manyseasoned civilians wary of being outgunned by the military is to adopta posture of willful separatism. If such a borderline anti-militaryattitude seems misplaced in a theater like Afghanistan, it reflectssomething more profound in the prevailing model of institutionalculture.52 As a 2011 study by the National Defense UniversityCenter for Complex Operations found, civilian and military opera-tions in Afghanistan have remained, ‘... two separate efforts built onopposing institutions and organizational models’.53 This is the heartof the matter.

50Lt. Col. Jan Gleiman, The Organizational Imperative: Theory and History on Unityof Effort in Counterinsurgency Campaigns (Fort Leavenworth, KS: CGSC FoundationPress 2011).51This authority is specified in the President’s letter of instruction to each Chief ofMission and by regulation in the U S Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual, Vol.2, Section 2 FAH-2 H-110.52Huntington, The Soldier and The State, 317–19.53Center for Complex Operations, ‘Initial Impressions Report (IIR) on the state ofintegrated civilian-military operations between the ISAF Regional Command South(RC-S) and the US Regional Platform South (RP-S)’, Draft (Washington DC NationalDefense Univ. Aug. 2011).

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 27

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

A Problem to Manage or a War to Win: Could the US HaveDone Better?

After more than a decade in Afghanistan it is not too early to ask, couldthe United States have done better? The unequivocal answer is yes,certainly at lower cost and shorter duration. This examination of theinstitutional dimension does not discount the broader implications ofpolicy and strategy in Afghanistan of, for example, the decisions toinvade Iraq in 2003 or to limit the surge in 2009 to 30,000 troops and24 months. Yet, measuring US performance against the myth ofAfghanistan as the graveyard of empires, brings up the same questionthat Komer found himself asking about Vietnam as a quagmire: ‘Howmuch of the yawning gap between policy and execution ... was owing tothe intractable nature of the problem, and how much to the way wewent about it’?54

The rapid overthrow of the Taliban in late-2001 resulted from effec-tive innovation in the use of force, and the succeeding Bonn Conferenceestablished the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan through a successfuldiplomatic initiative. Essential knowledge about what should havecome next was available, but was neither considered nor attempted.Following Vietnam, understanding of the strategic requirements ofirregular warfare, counterinsurgency, and intervention reverted to theSpecial Forces, along with a few corners of the State Department andCIA. Revived from time-to-time to varying degrees to serve as a guidingframework in places like El Salvador, the Philippines, and the Balkans,responsibility for it has resided nowhere.55 With explicit echoes inKomer’s recommendations, there is nothing mysterious about thebasic organizational principles. For example:

(1) Prepare above all to assist a government through political actionand economic development while helping it protect its populationfrom security threats, without taking the job over.

(2) Commit early and decisively, but for the long-term, with clearpolitical and military aims; trying to combat an industrial strengthinsurgency is much harder, takes longer, and is likely to beunsustainable.

(3) Create organizational arrangements tailored to the specific situa-tion and scale of threat, and are capable of adapting rapidly.

54Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, 7–8 and 21.55John Waghelstein, ‘Ruminations of a Pachyderm or What I learned in theCounterinsurgency Business’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 5/3 (Winter 1994), 360–78.

28 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

(4) Establish clear lines of authority sufficient to achieve unity ofeffort, while maximizing unity of command the closer the situationis to war.

(5) Integrate civilian and military efforts at all levels.(6) In pursuing campaign plans and programs maintain focus on

political purpose.(7) Educate a cadre of civilian and military officials from multiple

organizations and elaborate a shared civil-military doctrine.56

Of course, the difficulty does not lie in conceiving what is to be done,but in the difficulty of execution. There is a long list of recent studiesthat identify comparable problems, make similar recommendations,and argue that the incremental approach is not enough.57

To have performed better in Afghanistan would have required muchmore rapid organizational adaptation than what took place. For exam-ple, without even considering the political dimension, it would haverequired mobilizing immediately in 2001–02 to develop the Afghansecurity forces with the same intensity and innovation brought to over-throwing the Taliban and hunting Al-Qa’eda. Trying to catch up in ahurry nearly ten years later against a rising insurgency was a strategymuch-burdened by an accumulation of preceding errors. Lookingahead, it may well be that the necessary institutional changes aredestined to remain unattainable. If true, the prudent choice will be toavoid costly interventions in protracted conflicts altogether.Unfortunately, if history is a guide, what is perceived as a choice, as itdid on 10 September 2001, is more likely to become a necessity. Again,the difficulty is not to conceive of the contingencies, but to replacecomplacency with a will to overcome the inevitability that bureaucracywill merely do its thing.

56See for example, Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Joint Publication 3-22: Foreign InternalDefense, 12 July 2010, <www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp3_22.pdf>. There are twokey differences between the current version of JP 3–22 and the doctrine as originallyconceived post-Vietnam: First, Internal Defense and Development should be the higheraim and FID is its handmaiden, but JP 3–22 reverses the order. Second, JP3-22 shiesaway from unity of command, instead advocating interagency unity of effort to ensure‘minimum disruption of existing agency structures’.57Nina Serafino, Building Civilian Interagency Capacity for Missions Abroad(Washington DC: Congressional Research Service 2012). This report refers to dozensof studies undertaken in the last decade that recommend improvements to the USnational security system. It concludes: ‘…There is no consensus on how to fix theperceived problems. Nor … whether interagency reform is necessary for missionsabroad, which proposals are considered highest priority, whether reforms would savemoney, and whether reform of congressional organization and procedures must accom-pany other national security reform measures.’

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 29

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

Acknowledgements

The Center for Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups at the US NavalWar College supported the initial work for this article. I benefittedgreatly from a review by members of the Oxford UniversityProgramme in the Changing Character of War led by Professors HewStrachan and Robert Johnson. The views expressed in this paper arethose of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position ofthe US Government.

Note on Contributor

Todd Greentree is a member of the Changing Character of WarProgramme at Oxford University. A former US Foreign ServiceOfficer, his political-military experience in five conflicts began in ElSalvador during the early 1980's. Most recently, he served as Directorof the Initiatives Group in Regional Command-South, Kandahar,Afghanistan during 2010-11.

Bibliography

Ahern, Thomas, Vietnam Declassified: CIA and Counterinsurgency in Vietnam (Lexington: UP ofKentucky 2009).

Barfield, Thomas, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton UP 2010).Barno, David and Andrew Exum, Responsible Transition: Securing US Interests in Afghanistan

beyond 2014 (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security 2010).Biddle, Stephen, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy

(Carlisle, PA: US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute 2002).Bonds, Timothy M., Dave Baiocchi and Laurie L. McDonald, Army Deployments to OIF and OEF

(Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2010).Chandrasekaran, Rajiv, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf 2012).Clausewitz, Carl von, OnWar, Peter Paret and Michael Howard, eds & trans. (Princeton UP 1976).Clinton, Hillary, ‘Leading Through Civilian Power’, Foreign Affairs 89/6 (Nov./Dec. 2010),

13–24.Colby, William, Lost Victory (New York: Contemporary Books 1989).Crumpton, Henry, The Art of Intelligence (New York: The Penguin Press 2012).Dobbins, James F., After The Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan (Washington DC: Potomac

Books 2008).Echeverria, Antulio, ‘American Strategic Culture: Problems and Prospects’, in The Changing

Character of War, edited by Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers. (Oxford: OUP 2011), 431–45.Fishstein, Paul and Andrew Wilder, Winning Hearts and Minds? Examining the Relationship

between Aid and Security in Afghanistan (Boston, MA: Tufts Univ. Feinstein InternationalCenter 2012).

Fukuyama, Francis (ed.), Nation-Building beyond Afghanistan and Iraq (Baltimore, MD: JohnsHopkins UP 2006).

Galula, David, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (London: Pall Mall 1964).Gelb, Leslie and Richard Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington DC: The

Brookings Institution 1979).

30 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

Gleiman, Jan, The Organizational Imperative: Theory and History on Unity of Effort inCounterinsurgency Campaigns (Fort Leavenworth, KS: CGSC Foundation Press 2011).

Grau, Lester W. and Dodge Billingsley,Operation Anaconda: The United States’ First Major Battlein Afghanistan (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press 2011).

Harsh, Joseph L., ‘Battlesword and Rapier: Clausewitz, Jomini, and the American Civil War’,Military Affairs 38/4 (Dec. 1974), 133–8.

Headquarters, Department of the Army, FM 3–24 Counterinsurgency (Washington DC: UnitedStates Government 2006).

Huntington, Samuel P., The Soldier and The State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1957).Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 3-22: Foreign Internal Defense (Washington DC: US Dept.

of Defense 2010).Junger, Sebastian, WAR (New York: Twelve 2010).Kapstein, Ethan, ‘Do Three Ds Make an F? The Limits of Defense, Diplomacy, and Development’,

Prism 1/3 (July 2010), 21–6.Kelly,MrsWalt and Bill Crouch Jr (eds), The Source: The Best of Pogo (New York: Simon& Schuster

1982).Kelly, Terrance et al., Stabilization and Reconstruction Staffing: Developing US Personnel

Capabilities (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2008).Kilcullen, David, ‘Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency’,

Military Review 86/3 (May–June 2006), 103–8.Komer, Robert, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on US-GVN Performance

(Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 1972).Kristoff, Nicholas, ‘What Holbrooke Knew’, New York Times, 14 May 2011.Kugler, L., Michael Baranick, and Hans Binnendijk, Operation Anaconda: Lessons for Joint

Operations (National Defense Univ. Center for Technology and National Security Policy 2009).Linn, Brian M. and Russell F. Weigley, ‘The American Way of War Revisited’, Journal of Military

History 66/2 (April 2002), 501–33.Long, Austin, On ‘Other War’: Lessons from Five Decades of RAND Counterinsurgency Research

(Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2006).Luttwak, Edward, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1987).Marston, Daniel and Carter Malkasian (eds), Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (Oxford:

Osprey Publishing 2010).Nagl, John, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and

Vietnam (Univ. of Chicago Press 2005).Nuzum, Henry, ‘CORDS in the Kush’, Masters Thesis, Johns Hopkins Univ. School of Advanced

International Studies 2009.Packer, George, ‘The Last Mission: Richard Holbrooke’s Plan to Avoid the Mistakes of Vietnam in

Afghanistan’, New Yorker, 28 Sept. 2009.Phillips, Rufus, Why Vietnam Matters (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press 2008).Rothstein, Hy, Afghanistan and The Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare (Annapolis,

MD: Naval Institute Press 2006).Schaefer, D. Michael, The Legacy: The Vietnam War in the American Imagination (Boston, MA:

Beacon Press 1990).Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Majority Staff Report: Evaluating US Foreign Assistance

to Afghanistan (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office 2011).Serafino, Nina, Building Civilian Interagency Capacity for Missions Abroad (Washington DC:

Congressional Research Service 2012).Serafino, Nina, In Brief: The State Department Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations

(Washington DC: Congressional Research Service 2012).Sheehan, Neil, A Bright Shining Lie (New York: Random House 1988).Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Samuel B. Griffith, trans. (Oxford: OUP 1963).

Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 31

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3

Trofimov, Yaroslav, ‘Afghans Fear US Pullout Will Unplug Key Projects’, Wall Street Journal, 11Aug. 2012.

The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Univ. of Chicago Press 2007).US Army Financial Manager’s School, Handbook 09-27: The Commander’s Guide to Money as a

Weapons System (Ft Leavenworth, KS: Center for Army Lessons Learned 2009).US Department of State, Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review 2010.Waghelstein, John D., ‘Ruminations of a Pachyderm or What I learned in the Counterinsurgency

Business’. Small Wars and Insurgencies 5/3 (Winter 1994), 360–78.Weitz, Richard, ‘CORDS and the Whole of Government Approach: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and

Beyond’, Small Wars Journal 6/1 (Feb. 2010).World Bank, Transition in Afghanistan: Looking Beyond 2014 (Washington DC:World Bank 2011).

32 Todd Greentree

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Cal

ifor

nia

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

of

Fres

no]

at 1

8:37

18

May

201

3