Axel Magnuson

If the United States and its allies are unable to halt the downward trajectory of the war in Afghanistan over the next year, then public support for the war effort in the United States will surely ebb. That decline in popular support for the war is likely to be even sharper in allied nations. Regaining momentum will allow the United States and its allies to sustain public support both in Afghanistan and at home, prerequisites to defeating the Taliban.

Triage: The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan
By Andrew M. Exum, Nathaniel C. Fick, Ahmed A. Humayun, David J. Kilcullen

I’ve been in Kabul Afghanistan for the last two weeks, scanning the scene for constructive work for when we return in September for a year. I mentioned to a friend that I was thinking about helping some nice quiet non-governmental organization -NGO- do some writing for its various publics: contributors, staff, governments, other non-governmental groups. That led us to talking about why development work in general, and work in Afghanistan in particular, doesn’t get much ink, liquid or digital. It led to some interesting points.
We all know there is a lack of coverage of development themes, something that’s hardly a novel observation, but one that has perhaps more import in the case of Afghanistan than say, Senegal or Mali, because the support for the huge amount of money spent on security and development is so tenuous in the donor countries, particularly Europe.
I believe that there are prospects for increased efforts in communicating the development efforts in Afghanistan, the positive side of the surge, largely because development will be what ultimately brings peace and stability and because a bigger, extended dose of military action is becoming less palatable to the US and European publics.

Why no attention to “positivity” in Afghanistan?

Why doesn’t anything positive about the Middle East or Afghanistan come to the newspapers or television in the US? This is part of the larger theme of neglect for issues other than the war in Iraq and occasional flare-ups in the Levant. A review of Robin Wright’s “Dreams and Shadows” notes that:

Though the Middle East may be shaking under the impact of the war in Iraq, most countries have been getting less rather than more attention from Western news media and governments. Almost all the focus has been on Iraq. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Cockburn-t.html)

But from a longer-term perspective, development has never been a mainstay of press coverage on any continent at any time. The communications people I’ve talked to have always attributed this to development being too complicated, requiring too much mental agility to comprehend, or not having enough soul-wrenching grit.

I suppose that the last time that something akin to development was press worthy was in the Vietnam era when McNamara tried to quantify the efforts to win hearts and minds through various “aid” projects. In this era, news coverage of “security” efforts rather than straight combat reporting edges toward discussion of development at times, but only by a bit.

Security and development

But now the reconsideration of “counter-terrorism strategy* to include more development-and its shadow, “communications”- may be a precursor to more emphasis on development by government and military spokespeople and hence to more coverage by the various media.

The Dutch work here in “Defense, development and diplomacy”, an initiative that was highly promoted by the Dutch Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense is representative of the shift in emphasis here because it puts the emphasis on positive development, moving towards some desirable end-state, rather than destroying a very fluid enemy. The somewhat opaque dialogue on security and counter-terrorism in the United State is also heavy with the question of how to integrate security and development, or rather how to make the place safe while people get on with improving their lives, economically, physically and psychologically disrupted as they have been for 31 years.

The line of logic is pretty straight: Development has to be done more effectively, and in close coordination with the creation of security if the re-Talibanization of the country is to be halted.

Whether reversing the success of the Taliban will reverse the growing unpopularity of the Afghan surge is an open proposition. Actually halting the downward trajectory is one thing, communicating it to their publics is another. This only works if the development surge is actually perceived, seen by the publics. Any success along those lines will have to be communicated to the various publics involved-including the Afghans themselves and the US public. And because the US public is cynical about the efficacy of further military surges – the public perception of the effort is probably that is primarily military in content and territorial in its aims – the approach will have to be seen as something radically different and its effects will have to be communicated – and heavy on facts, please. If development, as part of the new counter-terrorism doctrine, is not seen, the Afghanistan surge initiative may be perceived as more of the same; nothing new that would move public opinion in favor of continued presence in Afghanistan.

But the present US governmental efforts to communicate the intense development efforts already underway fall short of what is probably needed. Lots of development work is already being done here in Afghanistan, but if it’s not in your back yard in Massachusetts or Nebraska, you don’t hear about it because the news doesn’t really penetrate very far into the body politic. Neither has it really emerged in the mass-circulation blog side of news distribution, to my knowledge at least.  And I haven’t seen it reflected in US “strategic communications” nor in the civilian print press in the US to this point (July 2009).

So when the development surge happens, will development news finally get airtime in Pinewood Glen, Iowa?

The development surge

So where does this all go? I get a pretty clear idea that development may be co-equal to the security efforts in Afghanistan in the current surge. I think that what Holbrooke et al are doing is moving toward an approach that is much more like the Dutch model of civil/military coordination than the present US model, and that they’re going to be doing that right at the very edges of the more contended parts of the country.

But who’s going to tell the story, or more importantly, who’s going to publish it?

And the implications for work for me? Seems that someone’s going to want to read about it…don’t you think?