Aug
30
2011
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Breaking the System Justification Cycle in Afghanistan: A Radical Proposal for the Final Two Years |
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Written by JD Johannes
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Tuesday, 30 August 2011 |
The great mystery of the war in Afghanistan is not why the US led coalition has failed to permanently crush a group of illiterate, inbred, salafist rednecks--although that is a burning question. The real mystery is why a plurality of the Afghan people accept and even defend their totally dysfunctional system. They may verbally complain, but their actions and behaviours are the better measurment.
In Iraq during the Anbar Awakening the late Sheik Abu Risa Sittar, an opportunistic tribal leader as ever existed, supposedly said losing a war to the US is a good thing. As the stories go he would pose a rhetorical question, "would you rather be Germany and Japan, or Vietnam and North Korea?"
A plurality of sensible Iraqis opted for the former and joined with the US coalition to defeat the insurgency in hopes the security would lead to a result more like Japan than North Korea. At they did least for a period of time.
Only narrow slices of the Afghan population will even contemplate a hypothetical like Sittar's.
Many US officers cite apathy as barrier to progress and gaining the support of the population. They often link it to war fatigue, explained with some variation of a phrase starting with, "after 30 years of war..."
The war fatigue and resulting apathy are real, but a precise explanation of why Afghans accept and defend their dysfunctional country is offered by the social psychology concept of System Justification.
With roots in Social Identity Theory, Social Justice research, Social Dominance Theory and Marxist-Feminist Theories of Ideology, System Justification (SJ) can feel like a grand unification theory of social science dreamed up by vegan leftists after smoking an ounce of Humbolt County Chronic.
As a grand unification theory, System Justification's eighteen indivdual hypotheses make it impossible to disprove, thus failing Karl Popper's test of scientific validation. If you can't disprove a theory, reams of corroboration are meaningless. As a scientfic theory, SJ leaves a lot to be desired, but as framework for investigating certain attitudes and behaviours, SJ is an excellent tool.
One of the most well publicized SJ studies in the US used the theory to explain why political conservatives are happier than political liberals.
In a study published in the journal Psychological Science titled "Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?" Jaime Napier and John Jost concluded, "conservatives (more than liberals) possess an ideological buffer against the negative hedonic effects of economic inequality." In other words, conservatives around the world, not just in the US, are able to use their ideology to justify and rationalize income inequality.
Jost, in another paper, writes, "system justifying ideologies serve a palliative function in that they reduce anxiety, guilt, dissonance, discomfort and uncertainty for those who are advanaged and disadvantaged."
Another study by Jost asked Yale students to explain why Yale alumni were more successful or less successful than Stanford alumni. One group of Yale students was presented data showing Yale grads fared better than their west coast counterparts. Another group of read data showing Cardinals earned more.
This experiment was to test SJ's sixth hypothesis, "members of low-status groups will exhibit outgroup favoritism" and sort-of corroborated the hypothesis.
Yale students when asked to give open-ended answers to why they were more successful than Stanford students responded with statements like, "Yale admits students with better records who are innately more driven." The group with the opposite data on alumni success gave answers like "Stanford is a more selective school so it will have smarter people."
It is not important whether the experiment proves or disproves SJ. The results showing that Yale students will create and adapt explanations depending on the data presented them is what really counts.
Humans need explanations for why things are the way they are. Humans need a narrative sequence to explain things in a way that makes sense. The facts do not matter. Truth, being to many a malleable concept, does not matter. What counts is that the narrative make sense.
The Yale students were writing explanations that could have fit into a larger narrative if they were prompted to write a full essay off the cuff. The large narratives are stories and in every story there is a hero and a villain. In most there is some type of victim. Since few people willingly cast themselves as the villain, most people opt for hero or victim, but being a victim is not exactly fun. Conservatives are, as Jost and Napier point out, happier than liberals.
This effect on the narrative is where SJ is remarkably adept and one study offers a framework to understand Afghanistan and its narratives.
"When you're stuck with something, one tendency is to make peace with it and try to see it in as much of a positive light as you can," said University of Waterloo professor Kristin Laurin about the results of her study on restricted emigration policies.
The study found that when people were presented written materials pointing out inequalities in their country and that leaving their country, in this case Canada, would become more difficult in they future they were more likely to defend the system.
"Restricted freedom of movement can lead to increased system justification i.e., increased support of the status quo...we found that participants who read that their country was difficult to leave became stronger defenders of their system’s legitimacy," the study published in August 2010 reported.
Laurin took the findings and extrapolated them on to other reasons it could be difficult to leave a country or break out of system. "The very people who are put in the worst position by a particular system, might be the ones that are the most motivated to defend that system."
Most Afghans are trapped in the current system. Many farmers are actually share croppers trapped in a cycle of debt. Laborers are often little more than indentured servants and even shop keepers in rural areas are in locked into financing arragements they will never be able to overcome.
There are some that get out. In the rural areas, tens of thousands of Afghans work abroad in the Emirates or Saudi Arabia as laborers. Others pay thousands of dollars to smugglers and leave the country locked in a shipping container bound for Europe.
The laborers are trapped in an overseas extension of the system. The illegal immigrants are usually trapped in and underground limbo. Few who make the container journey actually succeed in obtaining asylum and a normalized immigration status.
If just the suggestion of restricted emigration, as in Larin's study, can make people justify a system, how much more can actually being trapped in the world's most dysfunctional and dangerous country make an Afghan justify and defend the status quo?
Afghans waxing nolstagic over their country is legendary. The British Diplomat Mounstuart Elphinstone wrote in 1815 about this attachment:
"A native of the wild valley of Speiga, north-east of Ghuznee, who was obliged to flee his country for some offense, was once giving me an account of his travels, he concluded by enumerating the countries he had visited, and by comparing them with his own; 'I have seen all Persia and India, Georgia, Tartary and Bolochestan, but I have seen no such place as Speiga in all my travels."
That attachment continues for some Afghan expats to this day. At a group lunch in Kabul a US aid worker of Afghan descent complained about all the American and British Afghans who write about Afghanistan on their Facebook pages. "I can tell they have never been here. I always comment back how much this place sucks but they don't want to know." The Western Afghans who find their way back to Kabul uniformly agree about how backward, corrupt and screwed up the country is. Most of the Afghans who are trapped will, like the traveller from Speiga, profess great love of country and engage in the most confounding form of blame shifting when confronted with the nation's ills.
A recurring theme in Afghan politics is to bemoan how much western aid money seems to vanish. Just driving around the country it is hard to detect evidence of the billions of dollars in aid money that has sloshed through the place. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other politicians have repeatedly called for more western aid to flow through the Afghan government because direct efforts supposedly undermine his government.
"Afghanistan belongs to Afghans. Afghans don't want government from abroad. Afghans don't want a European government. Afghans don't want an American government. Afghans don't want a Pakistan government. Afghans don't want an Iranian government." Karzai, was quoted as saying during a press conference in February of 2011.
It is effective political rhetoric.
Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies states that half of the aid money has been wasted and grossly distorted the Afghan economy. Where did all the money go? A significant sum is stolen by Afghans. A narrow bore example is common office supplies. Aid groups will send an Afghan employee out to buy printer cartridges. The shop keeper asks the employee how much he should write on the receipt. Usually it is 20% higher than the actual price and the employee pockets the difference between the actual price and receipt.
In reality, most things in Afghanistan are the same price or cheaper than in the west, but the rip-off is near universal. If the employee is actually honest, the shop keeper will look at him like he's an idiot.
As Elphinstone wrote, "the love of gain seems to be their ruling passion...the influence of money on the whole nation, is spoken of by those who know them best, as boundless, and it is not denied by themselves."
Afghans love money so much they named their unit of currency after themseleves--the Afghani.
The bribery is endemic. Just to complete what would be a very mundane filming assignment in the US I had to bribe two Afghan Army Majors, a General and the equivalent of an assistant secretary of defense. I, like some westerners, pulled the liquor arbitrage by smuggling in bottles of cheap vodka. The $9 dollar bottles were equal to $100 in bribes. Turnabout is fair play I guess.
The corruption is nothing new. Two hundred years ago British ethnographers wrote how Afghan officials were "maintained by bribes and perquisites." Appointments to official positions were sold then just as they are now and Elphintone found "the Haukim generally farms the revenue from his province." The sale of offices and farming of revenue was common in feudal Europe.
If a person is not on the take, he is considered stupid, not honest.
Sentient Afghans know the scams, but in pure System Justification do not blame their countrymen. They blame the westerners--for everything.
US Military officers and western diplomats look at the poverty, the violence, the corruption and dysfunction, they see all the things the west is willing to do if only the Afghans would cooperate. The officers and diplomats can grasp why high ranking Afghan officials on the take do not play ball--the status quo is very profitable. Why the hypothetical posed in Iraq by Sheik Sittar "would you rather be Germany and Japan, or Vietnam and North Korea?"
never seems to occur to lower tiers is maddening to the officers and diplomats. The first and eighteenth hypotheses of SJ provide, if not an explanation, at least a way to frame the behaviour of the average trapped Afghan.
"People will rationalise the status quo by judging likely events to be more desirable than unlikely events...whether those events are initially defined as attractive or unattractive..." reads the first hypothesis of SJ.
The bookend, hypothesis 18 states "system justification levels will be higher in societies in which social and economic inequality is more extreme rather than less extreme."
Hypotheses two through seventeen are every logical permutation in between.
During the 2009 Afghan elections I was hired to gather atmospherics of the electorate. Due to insurance policy restrictions, most of the groups working on the elections were cloistered in hotels and moved around in armored SUVs. As a consultant on contract I was not restricted and could free range conducting field interviews recorded on a Flip camera asking everyone from day laborers, and subsistance level shop keepers to bankers a series of questions.
The responses were nearly universal.
"Do you think your vote will be counted?" Yes
"Do you think your vote will matter?" No.
"Who will win the election?" Karzai.
These man on the street interviews are statistically invalid, but I never once heard anyone say they thought Abdullah Abdullah would win. Polling in July by the International Republican Institute asked "Regardless of who you support for president, who do you think will actually win the presidential election?". Forty-five percent indicated Karzai. In the same poll 44% said they planned on voting for Karzai with Abdullah 26%.
When the interviews devolved into a scrum a recurring theme was that their vote would not matter because nothing would really change. No matter who won, nothing would change.
As election day approached and it became more apparant that the election would be corrupted, many staffers were bracing for unrest. The former British paratroopers providing security made contingency plans. Some groups stockpiled supplies in their hotels.
When the rampant fraud was easily uncovered there were not riots in the street. There were no major protests. There were some grumbles of discontent from the opposition's campaign, but even Abdullah Abdullah quickly threw in the towel.
The parliamentary elections in 2010 produced identical results; rampant fraud followed by nary a shrug. A post election poll commisisoned by ABC News, the BBC and Washington Post found 58% were satisfied with the outcome.
How can people a majority be satisfied with fraud and the 41% disatisfied just accept it? System Justification provides an insight.
In the US a pre-election poll of voters guaged the desirability of Bush vs. Gore in relation to the likehood either candidate would win. When Democrats were given data showing Gore likely to win, the desirability of Gore scored high. The more likely Gore was to win, the higher Democrats ranked Gore. Data showing a likely Bush win caused the same reaction among Republicans.
Where things get interesting is flip side reaction. When Democrats were told Bush was likely to win, his desirability crept up. When Republicans were told Gore was likely to win, his desireability rating improved by more than 300%. Republicans are often political conservatives and as noted above, conservatives are thought to exhibit more System Justification than liberals. (It could be that liberals just exhibit an inability to accept reality. Most social scientists tilt liberal and therefore may see liberal behaviour as the norm, thus giving a label to conservative behaviour.)
If American voters will shift their views based on the likely outcome, how much more so are Afghans trapped in their system? Is it any wonder the only thing that can get Afghans worked up is when a vehicle driven by a westerner runs over an Afghan or night raids by US and Afghan special forces. Atrocities by the Taliban are all but accepted as the norm.
When there is unrest in the streets, the target is almost always ISAF or even Western Aid groups. Former Chicago Tribune reporter Kim Barker described the May/June 2006 anti-Western riots in Kabul as a watershed moment. Afghans were grumbling about the immense wealth accumulated by Afghan government officials, warlords who were also government officials and government officials who became drug lords. When an ISAF military vehicle crashed, killing three Afghans it provided the spark. Afghan men went door to door through Kabul neighborhoods like Wazir Akbar Khan looking for Westerners to kill.
When viewed through a macro-level prism of SJ, this all makes sense. The "palliative function" of SJ shifts a person from helpless victim to Afghan patriot by refusing to kow-tow to the foreigners. The legendary independence of the Afghans, which history shows to be more situational and malleable than the legend, can be reframed as psychological defense mechanism. The internal dialouge may go something like this 'I'm not a backward, illiterate hillbilly. I'm a proud defender of Afghanistan/Islam/Pashtunism.'
(The cognitive biases of the endowment effect and loss aversion and how they affect resistance to change is also in play, but that is the subject for another paper.)
Painting with a very broad brush here, the Afghan people live in a society where the extreme gaps in social and economic inequality are highly visible and viewed as extremely unlikely to change. It is a place where SJ can become rampant.
For the Western military officer and diplomat, the likely hood of change is the key factor. For the past five years the military effort against the Taliban has been a stalemate. Despite billions of dollars in aid, the country is in shambles. Aid projects that have been completed, like roads, are already falling apart. For the lower class Afghans life is not remarkably different than it was under the Taliban except for the guady displays of wealth by those who have siphoned off millions of dollars in aid money, government largess and are on the take in every other fashion.
To break out of a cycle of SJ requires the default result, the likely result to stop happening or at least not be so easily predicted. Most westerners rotate in and out of the country, the Afghans see the same actions taken by ISAF and the NGOs time and again with the same meaningless results. The first step would be to stop doing what has been done time and again because obviously what ISAF and the international community have been doing for the past years has not been working. The Afghan people see that it has not worked.
Case in point, since 2007 infantry units from platoon sized to reinforced companies have been stationed at COP Sabari in northern Khost province. For most of that time US units have been doing the exact same missions.
In 2010 Haji Doulat, a former district subgovernor in Sabari, told the Hudson Insitute's Ann Marlow US Forces 'spent too much time chasing insurgents in the mountains and too little securing the population.' Doulat was referring to the ramp up in operations by units of the 101st Airborne.
During my three weeks embedded with Bravo Company 1-26 Infantry at COP Sabari, half the time was spent on missions more than 20 kilometers from the main population center around the District Center. One them, an air assualt into the mountains. During my two months embedded with Task Force Duke in Khost, I spent as much time on what Army Field Manual FM-3-24.2 'Counter Insurgency Tactics' calls Seek and Attack missions than population centric patrols.
After three years of 'chasing insurgents in the mountains' there are still insurgents in the mountains and the security situation for the average resident of Khost province has not changed. If the colloquial definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result, Afghans have judged senior leadership of ISAF's Regional Command East as insane. An ISAF tracking poll running from September of 2009 through March of 2011 show only 5% of Afghans credit ISAF with bringing security to their area. Just 25% of Afghans think the ANA will be able to defeat the insurgents in the next few years.
There is still majority support among Afghans for a US presence, but confidence in the US' ability to provide security has dropped from 67% to 36% in the last two years.
(Why the US military at times seems locked into the doing the same types of missions over and over again is a whole other field of study.)
If US forces were to do a complete 180 from their current operations to localized population centric operations like census and ID card programs, the residents of Sabari would not be able to prejudge the likely outcome creating a gap in the SJ feedback loop and possibly altering their behaviour.
A template for radically different missions is Task Force Spartan west of Kandahar in the fertile farmland along the Argendahb river. Instead of walking through minefields every day to patrol the villages, they live in the villages. When they pushed south to establish outposts in distant villages, they cut brand new roads with bulldozers. The next step is to build a wall 15 mile-long wall along the river bank. Soon the only way in and out of the area will be through checkpoints manned by US and Afghan security forces.
The effect has been enough to shock a few local residents into creating the Weapons Shura--a militia of local men working with US soldiers.
Changing the tactics of the military is just one step. A recognition that business as usual across the whole spectrum of aid and development organizations has not worked is also required. Given the results of all the money that has been spent, it would probably have been better to dump bundles of cash out the back of helicopters.
At least some of those bundles would have landed in the hands of shop keepers who would finally pay off their debts and be able to move beyond subsistence level retail.
System Justification intensifies when there is gross economic inequality. In Afghanistan the spread between the haves and have nots is probably greater than in any other country. Programs that target the extreme poor with traditional aid have a horrible track record globally.
The economic and social inequality that intensifies SJ has been exacerbated by the inflationary effects of aid spending. In ISAF polls Afghans report high prices as being a bigger issue than security. The single biggest issue of concern to Afghans is unemployment. When the aid spigot slows down there will be a major recession.
The only lasting economic hope is private business investment, but that is a mirage given the current global economy. Even putting aside the global recession, the barriers of security and corruption remain. The corruption is fed by the lack of security so until there is security, everything else is meaningless.
When the aid money stops and ISAF forces pull out, Afghans will not look in the mirror and blame themselves for their role in squandering 12 years. They will blame the west. They will blame America. The opportunistic Mullahs, politicians and strong men who frame a System Justifying narrative will gain the passive support of the population.
The traditional way to gain control of the Afghan people has always been to unite them against an external enemy.
"An ordinary monarch might endeavour to reduce the tribes to obedience by force," Elphinstone wrote. "But one Afghan King [Ahmed Shah] has already had the penetration to discover that it would require less exertion to conquer all the neighbouring kingdoms, than to subdue his own countrymen."
Elphinstone, writing about the policies of Ahmed Shah, concluded, "for the consolidation of his power at home, he relied, in a great measure, on the effects of his foreign wars."
Karzai in railing against America, Europe, Pakistan and Iran is following established patterns of success.
As a palliative explanation and justification for failure, the combination of Islam and blaming the west is the narrative that has served opportunistic leaders in the region for decades and it seems almost custom tailored for Afghanistan. This narrative will shape what comes next in Afghanistan.
Before President Obama announced the end of the Afghan troop surge, Cordesman wrote, "No government has made a public effort to either estimate the future cost of the war in money and casualties, or to justify its strategic value relative to other uses of these resources. This is a critical failing, given the intense pressures on national security spending, shrinking forces in most countries, the risks in other regions of the world, and the severe limits to even US power projection capabilities."
Cordesman was a bit premature. The calculation has been made by the electorate and the war has not been judged to be worth it. This judgement is based on current expenditures and recent results. It has not been judged against potential worst case scenario outcomes--the Quetta Shura Taliban back in control of the country, combining forces with the Pakistan Taliban and pointing thousands of unemployed young men toward an external enemy.
This leaves the US led coalition with two years to break the SJ cycle and mitigate the worst case scenario.
Attempting to alleviate income inequality via the usual projects is not going to work. Even massive infusions of cash have not brought down unemployment in the US. The only way to reduce unemployment in Afghanistan will be outside investment and not even the Chinese are going to invest much until there is enough security to make mining profitable.
A radical idea would be to take as much aid funding as possible and redirect it toward the military effort. All the military provisional reconstruction teams, agricultural development teams and the manpower of every other program of the sort gets swapped for infantry. Instead of deploying more Brigade Combat Teams and Battalions, give the battalions more infantry companies. The goal is combat power on the street and nearly every Battalion Commander I have met could easily integrate four more maneuver companies into his formation.
Boots on the ground are not enough. The military tactics must be radically altered. As illustrated above, the Afghans have seen the same types of missions over and over. They can assess the likely outcome of an air assualt or 'Seek and Attack' mission and in true SJ fashion, see the US failure as a good thing.
The departure from the types of missions previously conducted in the area must be extreme enough that the residents cannot prejudge the outcome. The intent of the missions has to be to jolt the residents out of the SJ feedback loop opening up the window of opportunity to gain their passive support.
The US has announced a time frame for ending its involvement, but how it ends has not been decided. The current glide-path of transition reinforces SJ. Afghans only have to look back twenty years to see how the last departure of a major power turned out, judge that as the likely outcome, embrace it and justify it.
The best hope for a soft-landing for Afghanistan may not be an orderly transition and withdrawal but an all out final push.
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