We don’t have large numbers of people who speak their language, understand their customs, have a sense of what makes the local political system tick, or have the resources to conduct the kind of mass, grassroots ideology building campaign before trying to change people’s ways that the Taliban did. We also have very few people with any clue how a third world economy works or can be developed. Soldiers aren’t hired for their cultural sensitivity, experience managing corrupt political systems, Pashtun language expertise, or economic development credentials. In fact, if someone with that skill set showed up at our door, we’d probably refuse to grant the top secret security clearance necessary to do the relevant jobs or sit on it indefinitely. This is a job that requires as many people with a Peace Corps or third world lawyer/businessman skill set as it does with a military skill set.

At first, when we were successful, with a small number of special ops and CIA agents with more of a sense for what they were dealing with, we had no choice but to outsource jobs. Now we are doing them ourselves, even though we aren’t well suited to it (and neither are the Canadians or the British).

If we want to get a good result we need to stop trying to do the parts of the job we aren’t well suited to do as a military force, and hire a lot of people who we can half way trust, en masse, to do it for us. To the extent that the skills aren’t available in the Afghan population, we need to go recruiting in Muslim countries with similar issues but more success, give them crash courses in the local language, and hand over the job. Places like Turkey, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia would be some natural places to start hiring. We also ought to be beating the bushes to find people in areas like immigrant communities in places like Detroit and London and Bonn. The bureaucracy that would supervise them all probably needs to be outside the DOD and NIA, with a very different culture. This bureaucracy would need to coordinate with the military, but the military should be supporting a nation building agency rather than trying to do it itself.