Inteligencia, Contrainsurgencia y Reconstrucción: Inteligencia y Cooperación Internacional en Afganistán
| Autor | Julián Richards |
| Páginas | 168-192 |
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As anticipated, 2011 has proved to be a highly significant year for Afghanistan. Aside from the symbolic importance of the ten-year mark being met since the post 9/11 invasión by forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisa-tion (NATO), which, for the allies battling against the Taliban only serves to reinforce an uncomfortable feeling that the conflict may be ultimately intrac-table, 2011 is due to be the year in which security starts to be handed over to the Afghan government in earnest. Immediately prior to his retirement from the Obama government in the US, the Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has rung a note of caution about the campaign. If, he observed, recent gains against the Taliban could be maintained until the end of the year, then "we can say we've turned the córner" (BBC NEWS, 2011). His statement was peppered with probabilistic language that stressed that the campaign of the International Security Assistance Forcé (ISAF) in Afghanistan to establish lasting security and place it in the hands of the local government was far from complete, and should not be assumed to be a permanent feature.
The thawing of snows and resumption of the insurgency will be a telling test of whether the Taliban have been as weakened as the NATO forces were saying was the case at the end of 2010. However, 2011 is the first year in which substantial departures of coalition forces are planned. President Obama has set July 2011 as the first period in which US forces will start to hand over to their Afghan counterparts in significant numbers. This year is also the year that Canadian, Dutch and Spanish forces will withdraw. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has said that an initial withdrawal of British troops in 2011 was "possible", depending on situations on the ground (BBC News, 2011b). Germany's parliament has also voted to start withdrawing its troops by the beginning of 2012 (Dempsey, 2011).
Afghanistan has proved to be the archetypal low-intensity conflict against a non-state, asymmetric target. The beginning of the twenty-first century
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has suggested that Western states will face potentially many years engaged in such conflicts with 'threats from below', and this has been reflected in na-tional security strategies and defence reviews across the West. Within this arena of conflict, Western governments have recognised that good intelli-gence on the ground is becoming more important than ever before. This ar-guably becomes even more the case as troops withdraw. Unlike the case of previous statist conflict, however, a situation such as the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan poses very particular difficulties and limitations. Chief among these is how to effectively deal with — and reform — an in-country intelligence partner in ways that do not compromise on the very valúes at the heart of the operation.
The plan that underpins the withdrawals is dependent on the appropriate establishment of Afghan National Army (ANA) and National Pólice (ANP) forces across the country. This is part of the Security Sector Reform pro-gramme (SSR) in Afghanistan, which also includes reform of the Afghan intelligence agency (the NDS). The programme is a large and substantial element of Afghanistan's rebirth, representing $30 billion in aid up to 2010 (Richards, 2011: 30). Afghan President Hamid Karzai has underlined its importance, noting that "Security Sector Reform, in short, is the basic pre-requisite to recreating the nation that today's parents hope to leave for fu-ture generations" (Sedra, 2003: 2).
Afghanistan's SSR process was formally agreed upon in Geneva in April 2002. Like many similar processes in post-conflict states, the programme is structured around five 'pillars', namely: military reform (led by the US); pólice reform (led by Germany); the disarmament, demobilisation and reinte-gration (DDR) of former militants and combatants (led by Japan); judicial reform (led by Italy) and reform of the counter-narcotics programme (led by the UK). Reform of the intelligence capability sits within the military and pólice strands.
Despite positive statements occasionally made by both the Afghan gov-ernment and its ISAF guests on the progress of the SSR agenda, however, Sedra has noted that conditions in Afghanistan fall somewhat short of those
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normally required for a successful SSR process, and notably the requirement for a "minimal degree of security and institutional capacity" on which to build the process (Sedra, 2006: 95). For Afghanistan, a long history of bitter conflict overlaid on a weak state has meant that security is heralded as the first and most important aspect needed to move the country forward. In this way, the SSR agenda has been seen as a potential "panacea" by many (Sedra, 2006: 95).
Exact details of the steps being undertaken in developing Afghanistan's intelligence structure are understandably less visible than is the case with the other sectors of the reform programme. Indeed, it could be argued that facts and figures about the expansión of the ANA and ANP have increasingly been used as benchmarks and barometers for the progress being made in the reconstruction of the country as a whole. These figures are often quoted in the press as a prelude to arguing that NATO forces can now move towards disengagement from the country. Before considering the intelligence dimensión of this process, it is worth considering the topic of SSR in more detail.
Hanggi (2004: 1) noted that SSR has become a subject of increasing debate and importance in the post-Cold War world, notably within the sepárate but overlapping circles of development, security, and democratisation. In the case of the latter, SSR has been seen as a central element not only to moving societies that have suffered internal conflicts into a situation of ro-bust and lasting peace, but specifically into a Weberian condition in which strong and legitímate security is at the centre of a democratic state. In the case of Afghanistan, we have seen that security and the SSR agenda have been second in importance after 2001 only to the process of establishing electoral democracy and the institutions that go with it, in accordance with the Bonn process initiated in December 2001. A situation whereby Afghans can go to the polis and vote in safety without coming under attack by insur-gents has become one of the emblematic aspects of the reconstruction of the country.
The linkage between security reform and democratic accountability is an important aspect at the centre of an analysis of intelligence cooperation with contemporary Afghanistan. As Edmunds noted, SSR should not only provide security effectively and efficiently, but do so within "the framework of democratic civilian control" (quoted in Hanggi, 2002: 4). The 5-pillar structure of the SSR programme in Afghanistan reflects at once the logical nature of the
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programme, and the extraordinary complexity of it. Hanggi (2002: 5) ob-served that the objectives of such a programme would be challenging for a Consolidated democracy with well-established institutions, but for transitional and post-conflict countries, it is doubly difficult. Aside from the physical and logistical issues of aspects such as the clearance of mines and demilitarisation of society, there is the core pillar activity of the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants. In a society as fundamentally lacking in economic, political and legitimatising social institutions (in the case of the latter albeit perhaps in a Western, Westphalian conception), it is a challenging notion indeed to suggest that such a programme can be achieved successfully in a relatively short number of years.
Indeed, Brzoska and Heinemann-Grüber (2004: 121) examine the particular challenges faced by post-conflict societies and observe that SSR in such environments is characterised by "politicisation, ethnicisation, and cor-ruption of the security services", among other problems. Added to this, there are usually "déficits in governance structures, including democratically legitimised institutions" (Brzoska/Heinemann-Grüber, 2004: 126). It is often not enough in such cases to work with existing agencies or structures, since the institutional wrappers that need to go around them to make the whole work, such as relatively corruption-free and legitimised government departments sitting above the security agencies, are often deeply flawed or indeed wholly or partially absent. Again, to solve all of these problems si-multaneously can be a tall order in such environments.
Holsti's detailed analysis of the relationship between conflict and state formation in the mid-1990s explored the differences between strong and weak states, with Afghanistan being a classic example of the latter. Writing at the time of the post-Soviet collapse into anarchy from which the Taliban were to emerge as the strongest player in Afghanistan, Holsti (1995: 332) noted that the country existed in a "Hobbesian state of nature", where the provisión of basic political, social and economic goods had completely bro-ken down. With the violent removal of the subsequent Taliban regime in 2001, which had itself barely re-established legitimising security institutions, Afghanistan again faces not just the need to establish basic security, but a more fundamental process of building the institutions and fabric of a state where barely any of these dimensions existed, and certainly not outside of the capital, Kabul.
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This leads on to the question of the scope of SSR As Brzoska and Heineman-Grüber have noted, the general trend in the field has been to widen the scope of actors and issues beyond just those pertaining to reform of the military, and into the full spectrum of...
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