This chapter, titled "Afghanistan and the Changing Regional Environment," is perhaps the most important of Mr. Goodson's book since a comprehensive understanding of the Central Asia region and beyond is a requirement for related strategy and policies to be achievable and effective. Mr. Goodson summarizes Afghanistan's unique position as follows:
"Despite its devastated infrastructure and economy and its limited natural resources... Afghanistan's geographical location and cross-border ethnic ties position it to play a critical role in trade between South Asia, Southwest Asia, and Central Asia. This is a novel situation for Afghanistan in the modern era, when it has more often served as a buffer state between empires or, as it has most recently, fought to avoid absorption into an encroaching superpower."
Of course, we know that up until this point in 2001, the Taliban within Afghanistan had been primarily growing and exporting the product of its opium crops, while using those funds, and the funds from other outside actors, to import the tools--people, weapons, equipment and hard currency--required to wage war against minority ethnic groups, which also had their own cross-border channels for the procurement of weapons and hard currency. Then, with 9/11, we came to the public understanding that locations in Afghanistan acted as critical nodes, or hubs, in the global supply chain of terrorist activities. From the writing of experts such as Douglas Farrah, we also know that terrorists and their facilitators gravitate to, or are often part of, cross-border criminal organizations and activities:
"At the root of many of the reasons for this is the absence (of), ineffectiveness (of) or grossly corrupt governments in the regions where these pipelines operate. Without some ability of the government-usually after decades or centuries of absence-to convince people there is a reason to support it, the insurgencies/drug traffickers/non-state actors win by default."
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan found to its north a new collection of proxy, or "seam," states forming a weaker constitution than that provided previously by the Soviets--Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazahkstan. As Mr. Goodson details, the influence of Communism thus subsided and a resurgence of Islam rose to threaten the pre-existing stability in the region. Ethnic, linguistic and cultural ties between these states also rose from the fall of Soviet domination to take a more prominent role in regional interaction. Together with the fragile constitution of Pakistan and Iran, these states form the first ring of instability with which must be dealt with as part of any strategy and policy for Afghanistan.
Mr. Goodson makes an important point that, with the relatively weakened state of North-Central Asia, the states surrounding Afghanistan in this first ring are on a more level playing field in terms of projecting power in the region. Where these states lack their own natural and economic resources--such as oil, gas, or raw minerals and established industries--they will more likely end up as proxies via which larger, stronger and more distant states will project power in the region. This alignment and influence may be channeled through political connections, such as old Soviet hands in the former Soviet republics, ethnocentric connections, such as between Turkey and Turkmenistan, religious connections, such as between Pakistan and Sunni-dominated countries in the Middle East, and opportunistic connections, such as between Pakistan and the United States where the relationship provides sustainability and leverage against regional, and even internal, actors in opposition. Understanding and addressing these "relationships by extension" must also be included in the formation of strategy and policy directed at Afghanistan.
In my previous post, I highlighted that the foundation for the Taliban's strength originated in and rests with Pakistan's western tribal regions. As Mr. Goodson notes, the regular turnover and integration of refugees from Afghanistan within these western tribal areas was fed by the Soviet Union's harsh, counterinsurgency tactics. This in turn, however, fed a new insurgency rooted in Pakistan that the Soviets "could not defeat...The increased efforts of the Soviet-Kabul forces to interdict supply routes and strike across the border into Pakistan after 1985 demonstrates their understanding of the problem."
Sound familiar? Almost 15 years later, the United States has also significantly ramped up its efforts to do the same, as analyzed and reported by Bill Roggio at Long War Journal:
These strikes are only effective if Pakistan turns up the heat from the other side. I call this the "hammer and anvil" approach to dealing with the enemy at Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. Essentially, the goal of the U.S./NATO is to strengthen Afghanistan to the point its constitution is strong like an anvil up against the states that border it. Simultaneously, our expectation is that Pakistan will apply the hammer to its western tribal provinces, thus crushing the terrorist and supporting criminal elements based there, and that support the weakening and continued instability of the Afghan state:
In addition, the strategy in Afghanistan must include tactics geared to strengthen this anvil on the borders with the North-Central Asian states and Iran. As Mr. Goodson notes, "just as permeable borders make possible the easy flow of people and economic goods throughout the region, they also make possible the spillover of conflict from one country to another, as from Afghanistan to Pakistan during the mid-1980's and from Tajikistan into Afghanistan and Uzbekistan in the early 1990's."
Logically, our strategy for the region should be most difficult to execute beyond Afghanistan in the direction where states are weakest and most prone to failure, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and Egypt, and which form the second and third rings of instability for Afghanistan. At the same time, any strategy deployed in the region should be drawing strength and cooperation from those states most integrated with the global economy and security rule-sets established by various international bodies and organizations, such as Turkey, China, India and Russia.
I would like to finish with this from Mr. Goodson:
"If geoeconomics increasingly pushes geopolitics off the stage, then growing pressure from outside actors to end the Afghan conflict may allow trade to replace war as the primary way in which Afghanistan interacts with its neighbors."
It is this endgame that our strategy and policies towards Afghanistan should be cultivating and encouraging in skilled coordination with countries such as Turkey, China, Russia and India, in the least. Unfortunately, there seems to be little evidence that this is currently the case beyond ad hoc activities. As long as this remains so, we will be unable to both strengthen the Afghan state to a point it can stand on its own while, at the same time, also bring about the economic connectivity in the region required to drown out the current architectures that give life and resilience to terrorist and criminal organizations and activities.
Looking to the future, I will review Mr. Goodson's conclusions in Chapter 6, "The Future of Afghanistan," in my next and final review post on Afghanistan's Endless War.
A recent article in the Financial Times by Jonathan Birchall titled "Walmart looks to cut billions from supply costs" has spurred a few connected posts by some of my favorite bloggers: Bob at Supply Chain Matters, Steve at Enterprise Resilience Management, and Tom at his personal weblog.
Most people are familiar with Wal-Mart in one way or another, and from different perspectives and experiences. For management professionals, Wal-Mart has been under constant study for its supply chain prowess, analysed backwards and forwards to understand what works and what doesn't. However, few would argue that Wal-Mart does not possess tremendous strength in high-performance supply chain management. Due to its size and incredibly large financial turnover, when Wal-Mart launches new supply chain initiatives and / or programs, people from a wide range of disciplines and interests take instant notice.
Mr. Birchall outlines the program Wal-Mart is launching and the opportunity at hand:
"Walmart intends a drive this year to cut billions of dollars of costs from its supply chain by combining its store purchasing across national frontiers in a fresh stage of the globalisation of its business. The effort forms part of plans by the world's largest retailer to increase the proportion of goods that it buys directly from manufacturers, rather than by third-party procurement companies or suppliers.
"Eduardo Castro-Wright, head of Walmart's US stores, has said the retailer sees the opportunity to consolidate global sourcing as "a major source of leverage for the company in years to come."
"With annual sales of more than $400bn (£247bn), Walmart is famously tough in negotiating with its suppliers, exploiting the scale of its buying to gain discounts.
"It spends about $100bn on purchasing private label products such as its Faded Glory and George brand clothing, or its Great Value food and home products. But it acquires less than a fifth of these goods directly from the manufacturers, and has generally made its purchases on a country-by-country basis. Mr Castro-Wright has estimated that a shift to direct purchasing could reduce costs by 5-15 per cent across the supply chain within five years - suggesting potential savings of $4bn-$12bn if the retailer were to meet its long-term goal of shifting to sourcing about 80 per cent of purchases directly."
This type of program is launched based on a large amount of supply chain analysis targeting both internal and external aspects of Wal-Marts extended supply chains across the world. It likely involves a coordinated use of information technology deployed to enable greater purchasing capabilities against data collected on SKU volume and velocity across all of its global hubs and distribution centers.
Stepping back into a strategic viewpoint, executives like Mr. Castro-Wright have the ability to leverage the full breadth of supply chain architectures that make up a high-performance supply chain:
Due to the sophisticated level to which Wal-Mart has built its architectures, it has a greater ability to execute the strategies and programs deployed across its supply chains, as well as spur innovation in the development of new initiatives. Of course, when drilling down regionally and locally, it is likely that some of these architectures start to break down and face challenges that Wal-Mart has yet to solve (the Seiyu venture in Japan over the past few years comes to mind). For this exact reason, this move by Wal-Mart could help reduce the breadth of focus locally and regionally and allow on-the-ground managers to concentrate on the procurement of those goods that bring the most value to local consumers and communities. Overall, as Dr. Barnett notes, "Locals will naturally decry the death of middlemen, who add nothing but cost and waste and complexity, but this sort of manufacturer-to-retailer bonding will define the next great wave of globalization's tightening up."
Steve DeAngelis makes some additional comments around the increasingly dynamic compliance systems that will be required, while Bob Ferrari poses questions about supply chain risk, especially in regards to fresh food procurement. I encourage everyone to read their full posts.
In my review of Chapter 3, I summarized the series of stages in Afghanistan's experience with modern war as described by author Larry Goodson. Chapter 4, titled "Impact of the War on Afghan State and Society," focuses on the impact of this experience on the entire architecture of the Afghan nation. So to frame and organize the thoughts of Mr. Goodson in this chapter, I would like to use the supply chain architectures I have discussed in relation to Afghanistan previously. These architectures can be viewed as comprising a pyramid within which the base architectures are most critical and without which the entire pyramid would crumble:
Throughout the stages of modern war experienced by Afghanistan, the base architectures that been built over time with the help of foreign nations, such as the Soviet Union, were systematically destroyed and / or degraded to a point of deep distress.
Impact on Human Architecture
The toll the war has taken on human life across a broad spectrum of the Afghan population cannot be underestimated when taking assessment of Afghanistan's conditions. At the time of Mr. Goodson's book in 2001, he writes that "recent reports suggest that from 1.5 million to more than 2 million war deaths" had occured in Afghanistan "since 1978." This was approximately 10% of the population at that time. Furthermore, 500 thousand to 1 million Afghans had been wounded and injured. Another 6.2 million refugees existed outside of Afghanistan at the peak in 1990, in addition to which 2 million were internally displaced. Throughout 1996 and 1997, a stable 2.7 million refugees lived beyond the borders of their homelands.
Impact on Physical Architecture
As Mr. Goodson states, "at one point or another since 1978, virtually everything in Afghanistan has been a target. Cities, towns, villages, houses, mosques and minarets, schools, hospitals, industrial structures, other buildings, roads, bridges, orchards, and fields have all been damaged or destroyed during combat." Mr. Goodson continues that "as of early 2001, Afghanistan was a country reduced by the technology of modern war to a premodern level of existence."
Impact on Financial Architecture
Due to the destruction and degradation of the above architectures upon which the Afghan nation state was built, "its formal economy had essentially collapsed. Virtually no industry functioned, and the most vibrant economic activities were transit trade, opium growing, heroin manufacturing and smuggling, and other small-scale agriculture." The mechanisms, tools, and vehicles that existed to support and enable the Afghan people to deploy their goods and services to market no longer existed. In the ensuing chaos, the rise of the Taliban from out of Western Pakistan eventually led to the "Kalishnikovization" of the nation, facilitated by the illicit weapons and drug trade that extended beyond Afghanistan's borders.
The Rise and Role of the Taliban
As is detailed by Mr. Goodson, the Taliban was born solely out of the madrassas located in Pakistan's western provinces in the mid-1990s, and encouraged by Pakistan covertly, and later more overtly, as an effort to fill the vacuum left by the Soviet Union. In entering Afghanistan, the Taliban leveraged Pakistan-based support to maintain military prowess, channels of financing and overall logistical strength while taking advantage of the Pushtun population in Afghanistan to build a foundation of support from which to attack and degrade the positions of non-Pushtun minorities.
The source of Taliban strength is illustrated above. In essence, movement into Afghanistan is supported by a combination of leadership and students from the madrassas and logistical, financial and military support based in and / or routed through Pakistan. The extremely large Afghani refugee population in Pakistan has also contributed resources, human and otherwise, to the Taliban movement.
To complete the loop, Taliban hardened by the experience of fighting and living in Afghanistan return to Pakistan for rest and to train the next round of fresh recruits brought into the Pakistan madrassas and Pakistan-based Taliban militia. Up until 2001, this regular and for so long unimpeded movement allowed the Taliban to put down deep roots across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. However, up until 2001, the Taliban mostly reinforced the current state of Afghanistan's base architectures more than they had acted to rebuild them towards reconstructing the nation state.
This was evident in how they tightened the vice on both men and women, massacred and forcefully migrated minorities, and further degrading all of the elements of culture and society upon which communities, and in aggregate a nation, would be re-founded.
The majority of the struggle in Afghanistan faced today is the difficulty in "unwinding" this deeply rooted Taliban entrenchment and cross-border intertwinement with Pakistan, including all the negative elements of criminal trade, while at the same time trying to establish the foundation for the legitimate and pro-development trade that is desired between Pakistan and Afghanistan for the benefit of progress in Central Asia.In review of Chapter 5: The Changing Regional Environment I will discuss Mr. Goodson's take on the actions and interests of the various external actors that have had an impact on Afghanistan's state of affairs up until 2001.
As Michael Yon recently posted on Facebook, there are many groups and organizations besides NATO and the U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan working in parallel and coordination to bring the country from the brink of collapse:
The CIA is an organization that is well known for the work its agents do across borders, around the world and in some of the most hostile and dangerous environments, even though we may not be aware of what the work entails. The recent killing of CIA officers in Afghanistan, however, highlights for us the role in which the organization has placed itself within the Central Asia theater and beyond. The New York Times recently wrote about this on December 31st, in the article titled "C.I.A. Takes on Bigger and Riskier Role on Front Lines:"
"The deaths of seven Central Intelligence Agency operatives at a remote base in the mountains of Afghanistan are a pointed example of the civilian spy agency’s transformation in recent years into a paramilitary organization at the vanguard of America’s far-flung wars.
"Even as the C.I.A. expands its role in Afghanistan, it is also playing a greater role in quasi-military operations elsewhere, using drone aircraft to launch a steady barrage of missile strikes in Pakistan and sending more operatives to Yemen to assist local officials in their attempts to roll back Al Qaeda’s momentum in that country.
"The C.I.A. operatives stationed at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province, where Wednesday’s suicide bombing occurred, were responsible for collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders. In recent months, American officials said, C.I.A. officers at the base had begun an aggressive campaign against a radical group run by Sirajuddin Haqqani, which has claimed responsibility for the deaths of dozens of American troops."
The C.I.A. has often been criticized for its retreat from the above mentioned lands, amongst others, leading up to 9/11, so as it attempts to rebuild its on-the-ground network of in-house and outsourced agents and informant networks, there will undoubtedly be setbacks such as this horrible event:
"The C.I.A. has always had a paramilitary branch known as the Special Activities Division, which secretly engaged in the kinds of operations more routinely carried out by Special Operations troops. But the branch was a small — and seldom used — part of its operations.
"That changed after Sept. 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush gave the agency expanded authority to capture or kill Qaeda operatives around the world. Since then, Washington has relied much more on the Special Activities Division because battling suspected terrorists does not involve fighting other armies. Rather, it involves secretly moving in and out of countries like Pakistan and Somalia where the American military is not legally allowed to operate.
"The fact that the agency is in effect running a war in Pakistan is the culmination of one of the most significant shifts in the C.I.A.’s history..."
If we briefly recall my recent post on the history of modern war in Afghanistan leading up to 9/11, the last time the C.I.A. was this deeply involved in the region is now about 20-25 years ago. The agency is most likely now trying to develop a new generation of agents with expertise on Central Asia, and this is a horrific blow to the effort of establishing the underlying human architecture for successful counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. The question now is: what is the impact on the counterterrosim and counterinsurgency program being deployed as we speak? Does this severely degrade the strategy driving these programs?
The Wall Street Journal, in an article from today titled "Killings Rock Afghan Strategy" seems to think there is a decidedly negative impact at the strategic level:
"The attack that killed seven Central Intelligence Agency officers on a U.S. base in Afghanistan appears to stem from a strategy of calculated risk in running the spy agency's informant network, posing a sharp challenge as operations ramp up for the Obama troop surge...
"...Such risks will be amplified as the CIA ramps up its operations in Afghanistan to accompany the military surge President Barack Obama has ordered. The CIA expects to increase its own forces by 20% to 25% in the next 18 months, said one U.S. intelligence official.
"The death toll is the largest suffered by the spy agency in three decades and has wiped out decades of experience in counterterrorism, current and former officials say. One former CIA official said the base chief, a mother of three, had counterterrorism experience dating to the agency's Alec Station, created to monitor Osama bin Laden years before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."
I don't personally believe that this event by itself should detrimentally impact the overall strategy for operations in and around Afghanistan; however, the coming months will demonstrate whether the C.I.A. will continue to take such risks and aggresively pursue its strategy. The temptation to step back and restrict further actions will undoubtedly hang in the air. But as Michael Yon states, "it is important that they mourn their losses, stay hard in the fight, and continue with their important contributions" in such a challenging and dangerous cross border environment.
