Ineffective Engagement: The Afghan Debacle Exposes the Defects in American Security Aid Strategies
The collapse of the Afghan National Security Forces, despite receiving over $83 billion in aid from the United States over two decades, has raised questions about the effectiveness of Security Force Assistance (SFA). This failure is not an isolated incident, as similar challenges have been encountered in Vietnam and Iraq.
Historically, the US military has relied on rapport-based persuasion to coax and cajole recipient leaders to build better militaries. However, this approach has proven ineffective, as demonstrated by the results in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The ideology of persuasion that governs US military advising is characterized by several causal myths and a distaste for incentives.
In contrast, the US Eighth Army and the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) built the Republic of Korea (ROK) Army during the Korean War by combining rapport-building with direct command and control of supplies and personnel appointments. By 1952, they secured almost full cooperation of ROK leadership with respect to the development of the ROK Army, and the ROK Army transformed into an effective fighting force by the summer of 1953.
The fundamental barrier to effective SFA is insufficient local will to fight. If the US military is unwilling to incentivize recipients of security assistance to use that assistance well, it should reconsider its role in these partnerships. Incentives are a standard tool of alliance diplomacy, but in the context of SFA, the military has recoded conditionality as bullying.
The challenge of SFA is influence, and its effectiveness depends less on the amount of assistance the United States provides than on the decisions of recipient leaders. In some situations, Washington might focus on the development of small elite units that operate with US enablers, rather than entire militaries that are ostensibly designed to operate independently.
Washington needs to evaluate threats in the context of the United States' wider global priorities and develop realistic expectations about what different tools of power can accomplish in a given theater. Reserving military assistance for states with strong national institutions whose leaders are interested in building better militaries could be a more strategic approach.
The myth that an influence strategy combining persuasion with incentives won't work persists, with two main strands: one arguing the US lacks bargaining power, and the other arguing that the bureaucratic machinery of US military advising is too big and cumbersome for the use of incentives. However, the success of General David Petraeus in Iraq, who used threats to cut assistance and withhold logistical support to incentivize cooperation, challenges this narrative.
The results of US advising in Iraq illustrate the potential of combining persuasion with conditionality, but were too few and far between to have systematic, lasting effects on the Iraqi Security Forces. These small successes, along with the success of the US Eighth Army and the KMAG in Korea, underscore the need for a reevaluation of the US military's approach to SFA. If the United States is to effectively assist its allies in building capable, effective militaries, it must be willing to reconsider its traditional reliance on rapport-based persuasion and embrace a more strategic, results-oriented approach.
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