Remarkably ambitious in its audacity and scope, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization's (NATO) irregular warfare and
"nation-building" mission in Afghanistan has struggled to meet its
nonmilitary objectives by most tangible measures. Put directly, the
alliance and its partners have fallen short of achieving the
results needed to create a stable, secure, democratic, and
self-sustaining Afghan nation, a particularly daunting proposition
given Afghanistan's history and culture, the region's contemporary
circumstances, and the fact that no such country has existed there
before. Furthermore, given the central nature of U.S. contributions
to this NATO mission, these shortfalls also serve as an indicator
of a serious American problem as well. Specifically,
inconsistencies and a lack of coherence in U.S. Government
strategic planning processes and products, as well as fundamental
flaws in U.S. Government structures and systems for coordinating
and integrating the efforts of its various agencies, are largely
responsible for this adverse and dangerous situation. As a
rationally ordered expression of the ways and means to be applied
in the protection of vital national security interests, strategy is
supposed to represent a careful analysis and prioritization of the
particular interests at stake. In turn, these interests are linked
to feasible methods and the resources that are available for their
protection, all placed within the context of competing global
security demands and a serious consideration of risk. In the case
of Afghanistan, however, U.S. Government strategic guidance has
been disjointed-- or inconsistent and lacking coherence--while
interagency efforts have been "disunified," with agency outputs too
often fragmented, inadequate, or internally at odds with one
another. As a result, U.S. strategic supervision of the Afghan
operation has been muddled and shifting at best, even as our
government's interagency processes and available agency
capabilities have fallen far short of what is needed to carry out
the complex and broad requirements of irregular warfare and
"nation-building." Given the breadth, length, and expense of the
U.S. commitment in Afghanistan, these strategic and operational
shortfalls also carry with them potentially dire consequences for
U.S. national security interests around the globe, considering
potential first- and second-order effects and other associated
risks. U.S. Government disjointed ways, coupled with a
corresponding disunity of means, represent the proximate cause of
our struggles in Afghanistan, and these deficiencies must be
addressed if this mission and other similar future endeavors are to
succeed.
General
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