Pigeonholes are for birdbrains

Some people have called General Rick Hillier a "cowboy" and denigrated the ability of trained military personnel to do much more than kill people and blow things up (read the comments to the linked post if you have the stomach for it - or Google "General Hillier cowboy" and watch the roaches scurry as you overturn their rock). Well, Gen Hillier certainly has the audacity of a cowboy, and the CF is undisputably good at killing people and blowing things up, but further to my comments yesterday, that's not all they do.

Hillier commanded the ISAF mission - concentrated in and around Kabul at that time - for six month in 2004. During that time, he not only performed traditional military duties, he also responded to a need within the civil administration of Afghanistan for strategic planning with military personnel (pdf file, ht:DA).

During his tenure in command of ISAF, General Hillier identified that Afghanistan had visionary leadership but that, at the same time, the machinery of government and the human capacity of the civil service had been decimated by three decades of conflict. To partially fill this critical gap, he provided military planners to the Afghan Minister of Finance to assist in the development of a both a long-term framework for development and the first post-Taliban national budget. This highly successful experiment was dropped by his more conventional successors in command and only rejuvenated after the now CDS visited Afghanistan and President Karzai in the Spring of 2005. During that visit, General Hillier committed to provide a small team for a year.

That was the genesis of Strategic Advisory Team - Afghanistan (SAT-A) deployed under Operation Argus. As I recall the story being told, Hillier tasked Col Mike Capstick, author of the piece above, in the drive-through line at a Timmy's, to set up a "Strategic Advisory Team" to assist the Afghan government (my details on the story might be faulty, but there's no doubt a Tim Horton's drive-through was integral).

Colonel Capstick set up and commanded SAT-A for its first year, which has now been extended into a second term under a bilateral agreement with the Afghans themselves (the mission doesn't fall under either the NATO-commanded ISAF mission or the American-led Op Enduring Freedom). How does SAT-A function?

Our basic concept of operations is to embed planners with Afghan staff with a view to passing on our basic military staff planning skills. The team made an important contribution to the 2006 London Conference on the Future of Afghanistan by assisting the Afghan led team charged with the development of a comprehensive five-year strategy that covers every aspect of the reconstruction effort. To be clear, we are the “mechanics” who help put together the substantive ideas of the Afghan leadership and the international experts. We used the same approach to assist with the strategy for Public Administrative Reform and with the Ministry of Rural Reconstruction and Development. In addition, the team’s integral strategic communications specialist helped develop communications strategies for all of these activities.

Col Capstick also takes issue with those who say military personnel should stick to killing people and blowing things up, since that's all they're really qualified to do anyhow.

Although the team does include a senior Defence Scientist as our analyst and a capacity development expert contracted by CIDA, it is essentially staffed by the Canadian Forces. Some have questioned the legitimacy of using military planners in this role, and there have been suggestions that other agencies would be better suited to the task. Although this concern is understandable, there are practical advantages to using the CF as the basis of the SAT. In addition to the obvious education, training and experience in disciplined and rigorous strategic planning techniques that military officers bring to the table, the CF is really the only arm of the Canadian government that can quickly and continually generate the requisite numbers of people with the training and will to work in an austere and, at times, unstable environment. Most importantly, the SAT-A initiative is explicit recognition that the character of armed conflict has undergone a major transformation since the end of the Cold War and that traditional concepts for the use of armed force are insufficient to establish a lasting peace.

The team includes both military and civilian personnel. The CF members on this rotation were a mix of Regulars and Reservists from all three components. The planning team members brought a very wide range of training, education and experience to the operation and quickly demonstrated the intellectual agility and adaptability demanded by today’s operations.

While higher education as an ideal has lagged within the CF until recently, strategic planning is a fairly specific skill set, and one which the military takes great pains to develop in a staff officer. Not only do many of the senior officers (and I mean that precisely: Major through Colonel and their naval equivalents) I know personally have post-grad degrees, they have real-life experience applying the academic to the practical in some of the most rigourous circumstances imaginable. They don't set up shop in the ivory towers of academia, they learn for the express purpose of applying their knowledge.

Obviously, this expertise is needed in Afghanistan, as evidenced by the success of and enthusiasm for SAT-A by the Afghan national government. From a Canadian standpoint, not only is SAT-A moving our nation's strategic interests forward by helping the nascent Afghan government stand up, it is also providing a detailed, in-depth, and first-hand perspective to Canadian decision-makers into the political, military, and administrative climate in the country.

A number of commentators and critics in Canada clearly misunderstand the objectives of the “whole of government” mission in Afghanistan. They have erroneously concluded that operations in Kandahar represent a shift in strategy away from nation building towards a purely military counterinsurgency role. This conclusion can only result from a fundamentally flawed understanding of the insurgency itself.

...

The Taliban’s objective is not mere territorial control or political power – it is control of the population and the re-establishment of the perverse feudal theocracy that ruled until late 2001. Alliances of convenience between the Taliban and the opium “mafias” have been formed with one simple objective – deny the extension of Government authority, an authority that threatens their unfettered ability to make huge amounts of money on the backs of some of the worlds poorest farmers. To that end, they seek to erode the population’s confidence in the Government and the international community by attacking vulnerable development projects and those working on them. In short, development without security is impossible, and those that argue that the presence of international military forces impedes development are, at best, naïve.

...

Two elections and extensive social science research provide ample evidence that the majority of Afghans categorically reject the insurgents’ world-view. Recognizing the true nature of the insurgency, the UN Security Council endorsement of the Compact (including the Security Pillar) represents explicit approval of both the ongoing American-led counter-insurgency operations and the ISAF transition concept. In short, the international community has deliberately chosen to support the Afghan government and eliminated any question of neutrality in respect to the battle that continues to put the future of the country in jeopardy. This is a serious commitment that is viewed very seriously by the Afghan population and it must now be adequately resourced.

The central issue in respect to the perceived lack of progress in Afghanistan is not insurgency, nor is it opium, corruption or the weakness of the Government. Although these are huge impediments to progress, the central issue is the parsimony of the international community. In the early days of the Bosnian intervention the per capita aid expenditure was $649 USD while in Afghanistan, left in a far worse post-conflict situation, it is $57 USD per capita. At the same time, troop levels in Afghanistan – a larger landmass than Bosnia, with a far more complex security problem – are only about one-third of those in Bosnia immediately after the Dayton Accord was implemented. These resources are clearly inadequate.

So much for the myth of the unlettered grunt.

As a former commanding officer of 3RCHA, Col Capstick is obviously capable of killing people and blowing things up. General Hillier can do the same. So can the entire cadre of uniformed CF personnel. But to assume that this capability somehow disqualifies them from more cerebral tasks says more about the bias of the person working from the wrong premises than it does about the abilities of the men and women of the Canadian Forces.