Paparone argues that Operational Design rejects a positivist Parmenidian philosophy of science. Instead, Design is consistent with the pre-Socratic philosophy of Heraclitus, who emphasizes that the existence of the world is constantly in flux and that our knowledge of it is only transitory and can never be complete. Modern-day postpositivist followers of the Heraclitian tradition argue that the progress offered by Enlightenment science is impossible and that human reason can never reach an objective perspective of the entire world.

On this basis, Paparone suggests that the discussion of Operational Design in FM 5-0 is incorrect because it posits a Parmenidian goal similar to Enlightenment science. FM 5-0 and scholars at the School of Advanced Military Studies repeatedly state that ‘understanding’ is the purpose of Design.[1] However, Paparone argues that ‘understanding’ is the wrong way to think about Design because it violates Heraclitean assumptions about the nature of reality and our knowledge of it. ‘Understanding’ a complex reality is impossible in the Heraclitean tradition because it implies that we can overcome the perceptual limitations of subjectivity. He makes his objections most clear in a footnote in his latest SWJ piece:

Design makes no such assertion that [understanding] is even remotely possible when facing wicked, high VUCA situations. Hence, the designer may expose the fallacy of this assertion, for example, by asking complexity scientists or chaos theorists to enter the conversation in order to poke ontological and epistemological holes into the doctrinal assertion. (Paparone, p. 7, fn. 25)

Thus, Paparone is challenging the SAMS-based conception of Design by suggesting it falsely seeks a modern, positivist form of knowledge (epistemology) that is inconsistent with a postmodern and postpositivist view of reality (ontology). In philosophy of science terms, Paparone is critiquing Design for its inconsistent commitments to the Parmenidian tradition and ‘positivist’ philosophy of science. Instead, Design ought to fully embrace Heraclitian ‘postpositivist’ positions that recognize the limitations of human knowledge.

However, I want to argue that ‘understanding’ is actually consistent with Heraclitus and a postpositivist epistemology. In social science, ‘understanding’ is often contrasted with ‘explanation’, the scientific goal of positivist Enlightenment science. In striving for explanation, scholars seek to discover law-like generalizations that apply to all phenomenon. Deriving explanatory relationships between independent and dependent variables has been the hallmark of behavioralism in American social science, and was especially prevalent in American political science up until the 1980s. Thus, behavioralists assume that all human action is an unmediated response to external stimuli – scientific explanations identify which stimuli universally cause responses by human beings.

However, other scholars have rejected the behavioralist explanatory model of science in favor of interpretivism, which posits that social actors react differently to external observations depending on how they subjectively assign meaning to them. Because social actors interpret observations differently, they do not respond to external stimuli similarly. This means that the law-like generalizations of behavioralism and Enlightenment positivism are impossible to make about social behavior. Instead, interpretivists seek an understanding (verstehen) of the subjective perceptions of social actors that lead them to take intended actions. As a scientific purpose, understanding was pursued first by German sociologists such as Max Weber and Georg Simmel, who rejected positivist modernism’s faith in its ability to ‘objectively explain’ the real world. Thus, interpretivists begin from the assumption that their own knowledge is limited and cannot be complete – social scientific knowledge can only inform us as to how other actors interpret events around them.

If interpretivism is an idea of science that privileges ‘understanding’, then there is no reason why it cannot be the basis for critical thinking and reflective learning. Although Paparone says that ‘understanding’ lies in the Parmenidian tradition, its use by German sociologists who reject modern positivist science suggests its approach to knowledge and epistemology compatible with Heraclitus. Thus, when Paparone argues that commanders should foster a critical dialogue to appreciate reality, developing this ‘appropriate’ perception requires interaction with every other relevant operational actor to understand their perception of reality. Understanding is epistemologically consistent with appreciation, and both derive from a realization of the incompleteness of subjective human knowledge.

However, this does not mean that the Parmenidian tradition has no place in Design methodology. Military organizations still have to plan detailed actions to implement a concept of operations. Thus, there may still be a place for mission analysis in the later stages of the military planning process. And, military organizations must still recognize that there is an objective ‘real world’ separate from its corporate existence. In counterinsurgency, this refers to the population, its perceptions, and the coercive capabilities of local combatants. Therefore, Operational Design should not embrace a postpositivist ontology that assumes that existence itself is completely subjective, and that no objective reality exists outside our perceptions. Although perceptions of reality and the material objects within it may exist in constant flux, they still exist ‘outside’ of us when they are shared by many people. Perceptions can be an objective social fact, although one that can change rapidly with new events that radically alter relationships in a complex society.

On this basis, Operational Design adopts a mix of philosophy science assumptions. It begins with a positivist, Parmenidian ontology that recognizes the existence of ‘real’ things external to ourselves, things like ideas, perceptions, material objects, coercive force. We ‘positively’ have to interact with those things to change them to some desired outcome. However, we do not necessarily know the relationship between those things. We can never objectively see all of them and the totality to which they each contribute, preventing us from knowing how to precisely cause a desired outcome. Instead, we can only learn to view reality from the subjective perspectives of actors in those relationships through critical dialogue with them and act with those perspectives and the expectations held by other relevant actors in the world. This type of Design model represents a Heraclitian, or postpositivist epistemology, that accepts the limits of our knowledge and the need to reflexively and critically learn about the perspectives of others to improve it. We appreciate the world only by understanding different perspectives of it by others who live in it. And, because random events may alter the interpretive process of other actors, the commander must constantly learn about how the emergence of new events (including his own actions against them) alter and create new perceptions of reality. Thus, critical reflexivity functions as the concept that unites a positive ontology and a postpositivist epistemology and mediates our knowledge of the world and our actions within it.

Paparone’s four-part series is an excellent illustration of the philosophical basis of Operational Design, and he presciently holds much promise for a reinvigorated military profession that investigates the philosophical considerations of warfighting. But his criticism displays a postpositivist overreliance on Heraclitus and leaves no room for any sort of Parminidian recognition of reality, our social relationship to it, and our ability to continuously learn and adapt to it. A sociologically informed approach to Operational Art does incorporate Parmenides through ontology, and combined with Herclitian epistemology, it suggests all action into the world must be mediated through a critically reflexive of learning from those actions to make better future ones.

[1]Understanding is also prevalent in other military organizations such as Human Terrain System, whose mission statement is “[t]o provide deployed commanders with the relevant socio-cultural understanding necessary to meet their operational requirements.”

However, I realized last night that Robert Kaplan is indeed right and that geography does matter. Particularly when performing counterinsurgency operations in a landlocked country. This makes logistical capabilities dependent on a neighboring country, and pissing them off would probably be a bad idea.

This is precisely the situation we have in Afghanistan. And for all of the emphasis we have on changing Pakistani behavior to eliminate Taliban safe havens and support, counterterrorism air strikes across the border in Pakistan in pursuit of those same adversaries has severely jeopardized our relationship with them. Suddenly, the Pakistanis want to show how dependent we are on them to logistically supply manpower-intensive counterinsurgency operations. It is really any coincidence that tankers stuck at the border by the Pakistani state were hit by the Taliban?

Ruthlessly pursuing counterterrorism in one country to support counterinsurgency in a neighboring one means we should be willing to tolerate political blowback when our CT ops kill the wrong people. The more dependent we are on the former to supply operations in the latter, the greater the strategic contradiction in pursuing both politics.

Wednesday’s helicopter incursion appeared to have crossed a line for the Pakistanis that “could lead to some very serious consequences,” a senior Pakistani military officer said. The Americans, he said, “underestimate the reaction” to something that “amounts to no more and no less than attacking the Pakistani army.”

This has always been the strategic limitation of airpower counterterrorism, Exum and Kilcullen always warned against it.

The Pakistanis said that after U.S. helicopters “engaged through cannon fire” with the post, the soldiers fired warning shots with their rifles. The helicopters responded with two missiles that destroyed the post, killing three soldiers and wounding the rest.
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Within hours, Pakistan had ordered the nearby border crossing at Torkham closed and NATO supply trucks were idling there, according to transporters stuck at the pass and officials in the region. The pass, which lies north of Peshawar, is the main entry point for U.S. and NATO fuel and supplies transported from the Pakistani port of Karachi over land into Afghanistan.

Our problem is our inability to identify the enemy and thus confuse it with ‘allied’ troops. When insurgents are supported by government forces, we shouldn’t be surprised when we accidently kill the latter while pursuing the former.

*changed the original title because I forgot about Yemen.

This begs the obvious question about those institutions, their tendency for corruption and illegitimacy, and the strategic contradictions involved in supporting state institutions through counterinsurgency operations. As mentioned earlier, our relationship with the Afghans (to some degree) constitutes the ‘culture of corruption’ that appears to be embedded in their politics. Counterinsurgency is great operationally but won’t resolve the major strategic contradictions undermining the ‘space’ for the development of local institutions. As long as other power relationships continue, like those fostered by other agencies and NGOs through corruption and dependency, that political space remains limited.

Aspects of the Afghan war now resemble the Iraq war in summer 2007, when Operation Phantom Strike was launched to stability in the major population belts around Baghdad and across central Iraq (see Kim Kagan’s excellent book on this). Dragon Strike seems to be evidence that the campaign structure of full-spectrum operations has retained some consistency, with shaping and decisive operations that should be followed by sustaining operations. The length of time for deployment of all units into shaping operations determines the timetable to synchronize decisive clearing operations, and it has been much longer in southern Afghanistan in 2010 (11 months) compared to Iraq in 2007 (8 months).

However, in shifting to full-spectrum operations, the operational pattern of today’s counterinsurgency appears to have changed from its classical version: Instead of ‘clear, hold, and build’, modern COIN is ‘shape, clear decisively, and sustain’. The last step (if the counterinsurgents get there), seems to be when the political strategy will always be tested – and that’s when the model begins to fail. Absent a political settlement and no gradual improvement by institutions fostered by diplomatic and developmental support, then the new Operational Art can fail to be enough to achieve the strategic goal – the creation of local institutions that enforce legitimate order.

Little theory has been devoted to understanding how that happens, and as well as the limits of military action (counterinsurgency) on making possible institutional public space and socioeconomic development. This is where political operational and strategic art is lacking, and in its absence, the associated costs may be perceived to be higher than any military success. From a sociological perspective, the question becomes ‘how do we synthesize and share an understanding of social reality with local stakeholders that accounts for their own perceptions and ‘rational’ mindset’? Unless the strategic environment is framed in such a way to ensure that we all see strategic problems the same way, any attempt to transform the social and political environment from instability to stability through military operational solutions will not be sufficient. Operational successes are then not fulfilled by strategic ones, which currently explains the political impasse in Iraq. For all the Afghan Surge’s potential successes, it will likely suffer the same strategic pitfalls.

It’s time to move beyond operational art and begin thinking about state building and the constitution of bureaucratic identities as the new strategic art.

“The standing operating procedure (SOP) for the unit typically focused on: (1) Planning and establishing the COP; (2) Ensuring route security so each outpost could be kept resupplied; (3) Clearing operations after the COP had been stood up to clear IEDs and find weapons caches; and (4) Census patrols to follow after the clearing operations to consolidate the position and gradually work its way into the human terrain of the area – the real target of MacFarland’s campaign.” (609)

Not only does Russell illustrate how the military organically innovated new operational practices, he also throws cold water on Lyall and Wilson, who argue more mechanized counterinsurgency forces are more likely to be starved of information because of minimal social interaction with the people:

1–37 deployed into Ramadi as an armored battalion – a legacy unit organized and equipped for conventionally oriented fire-and-maneuver missions. The unit demonstrated significant adaptive flexibility and built what can only be described as sophisticated and systems-oriented COIN capacities in executing its part of MacFarland’s campaign to retake Ramadi. While the Army is particularly noted for a rigid command hierarchy and a campaign-style approach to warfare, this unit clearly demonstrated its capacity for learning and searched for optimal solutions, accepted disparate sources of information, and constantly sought to build its understanding of the operational
environment. (610)

However, Russell describe how innovation involves abandoning past operational practices and the realization that existing practices are not fulfilling strategic objectives. Learning occurs both inside and outside of military units – civilians have to also learn what interactive practices can lead to cooperation with counterinsurgents. In other words, Russell doesn’t explain how both counterinsurgents and civilians develop a common understanding and perspective of each other within the war. And: what about the elite level interaction between American forces and the Iraqis, particularly those who led Iraqi security forces and the Awakening. How did the operational and tactical innovations developed by the military contribute to making that cooperation possible? This is when our innovation creates symbiotic and cooperative innovation amongst them – how can we explain their collaborative innovation? And how did they develop an intersubjective understanding of the war at that moment? A social constructivist approach could answer all of these questions.

It’s not as if the Americans and their NATO partners don’t know who the corrupt Afghans are. American officers and anti-corruption teams have drawn up intricate charts outlining the criminal syndicates that entwine the Afghan business and political elites. They’ve even given the charts a name: “Malign Actor Networks.” A k a MAN.

Looking at some of these charts—with their crisscrossed lines connecting politicians, drug traffickers and insurgents — it’s easy to conclude that this country is ruled neither by the government, nor NATO, nor the Taliban, but by the MAN.

It turns out, of course, that some of the same “malign actors” the diplomats and officers are railing against are on the payroll of the C.I.A. At least until recently, American officials say, one of them was Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother. Mr. Karzai has long been suspected of facilitating the country’s booming drug trade.

I like this passage because it shows how Arquilla is both right and wrong: networks are the predominant actors in world politics and can undermine states, but they might also constitute states as well. Thus, by applying Arquilla’s logic to state building, networks can be affected to help produce states – relationships between state and non-state actors (religious, economic, social) and create political conditions conducive to rule by corporate bureaucratic organization. If true, two important questions follow: what are the characteristics of networks that span the boundaries of state authority? How do those relationships affect the internal components of the state, and how might change in those relationships change also change its internal composition?

To answer, we must first understand the relationships between inside and outside of the Afghan state that constitute it, and the roles of bureaucratic agents of the state. If roles are socially learned, those actors’ previous interactions provide experiences that guide future action and impact the possibility of system-wide change. Change is constrained by the previous choices of actors to make or break relationships that establish expectations -this is how some choices greatly affect the incentive structure in future choices and also the meaning we attribute to specific action that legitimates or delegitimates certain choices.

Thus, the weakness of the Afghan state (its security and collapsing financial institutions, its inability to claim soveriegnty by reducing violence against its citizens) is somewhat influenced by our relationship with it. While some components of the international community are actively striving to improve governance and build empowering relationships with local institutional partners, others form relationships with both state and non-state actors for ‘efficiency’ that solve problems in the short-term but create long-term contradictions. This is the ultimate effect of agencies like the CIA empowering Afghan warlords and power brokers for the first years of the war.

As the war would down, th Bush administration was faced with two policy choices. IT was clear by the summer of 2002 that the warlords were becoming stronger while the Karzai regime lacked the resources to complete. The unstated U.S. strategy was the leave Karzai ineffectual in the capital, protected by foreign forces, while relying on the warlords to keep Pax Americana in the countryside and the U.S. SOF forces to hunt down al Qaeda. It was a minimialist, military intelligence – driven strategy that ignored nation building, creating state institutions, or rebuilding the country’s shattered infrastructure. By following such a strategy, the United States left everything in place from the Taliban era except for the fact of regime change. (Rashid, p. 133)

What remained were petty warlords whose approach to power was formed during the Soviet invasion, whose strategy for power involved attracting wealthy patrons (the Soviets, Pakistan, America, Iran) and plundering enemies. The U.S. empowered the actors that created popular grievances amongst the people once addressed only by the Taliban. Absent any support to deepen the Afghan government’s capacity, Karzai no choice but to appease and accomodate former warlords by including them in the state.

These exchange relationships and the normative beliefs that legitimate them (essentially patronage) are still in place and create incentive structures that do not fulfill our original goal – creating the conditions for the emergence of a legitimate bureaucratic and corporate institution that supports socioeconomic stability. Given Karzai’s lack of state capacity, he could not challenge the warlords and had to co-opt them, bring them into the ‘patronage’ of state institutions and tolerate their own enrichment and clientelism. The idea that the U.S. and NATO would assist the Afghanis in ‘building’ a legitimate Afghan state (and establishing social relationships and institutions that undermined warlords and promoted traditional and modern forms of civil society) wasn’t ever thoroughly operationalized until 2009 (for example: Seth Jones reports both Western governments and contractors launched multiple failed attempts to strengthen the Interior Ministry, pp.164-176). Despite all the the work of Petraeus, patronage relationships continue that exist that still undermine his counterinsurgency and state-building strategy.

So, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Malign Actor Network underneath the Afghan government doesn’t understand what we want from it (in terms of good governance and anti-corruption) when we engage in patronage at the same time. Even if the CIA gets great information from Afghan gov’t officials, pursuing that short-term goal reinforces relationships that compromise our long-term strategic goal. This produces a policy failure, and it results from multiple agencies operating under alternative strategic agendas. Regarding Karzai’s tolerance of corruption, we have gone from confrontation to accommodation to confrontation and back to accomodation because we still haven’t addressed our own implicit support of it. And we have yet to support Afghan state building because we have never organized all our agencies around a common state building policy. Lacking such strategic clarity, the initial strategy and operationalization of the war – buying influence and empowering local warlords and power brokers – still continues today and reinforces the expectations and incentive structures that allow corruption and patronage to persistently undermine the Afghan state.

Update: more evidence of no ability to translate strategic intention into new modes of interaction.

The issue, the senior official said, is determining “what amount and what type of corruption feeds the Taliban and undercuts our capacity and any Afghan government’s capacity to govern” versus what is culturally “endemic” in Afghan society. Senior officials, including Obama, have publicly insisted the United States is not trying to create “Shangri-la” or “Switzerland” in Afghanistan. The goal, they say, is a stable society that will not permit al-Qaeda to reestablish its presence there.

But military commanders have expressed confusion in recent interviews about what that means on the ground, particularly in terms of where to draw the line in their relationships with Afghan power brokers at all levels.

Our review raises concerns about a concept of operation premised on identifying root causes of conflict. The premise that we can know root causes is necessary for social science, but it may not be useful in the real world. Identification and mitigation of root causes that drive conflict may not be reliably attainable. Therefore, basing policy on such a premise may be ineffective and result in confusion and disunity of effort.

And, an upside-down view of governance suggests taking a step back for conceptualization:

This way of thinking about governance and development implies that
donors need to reassess their own role in the process, and their traditional
approaches to managing ‘donor-recipient’ relationships. But the first step
is for them to change their mental models, and to stop viewing the world
through an OECD lens. Without this they will not make the necessary
investment in understanding local political dynamics, or make the (often
uncomfortable) changes needed to their own organisation, values,
practices and behaviour.

It seems the development world has discovered postpositivism and doubt the traditional approach toward development grounded in the Western experience and ‘scientific’ knowledge, and it’s about time. If you take a recent history of USAID management, development firms and agency appear to be overly bureaucratic. Yet, many USAID projects are contracted out to profit and non-profit firms that operate without the same level of organizational discipline. The disorganization goes both ways: field agencies lack coordination with their principals in national capitals and are unable to connect with and empower local institutions. Switching to a network-mode of organization isn’t just about privatizing state functions, but also improving the ability of nodes to connect with each other – both inside, outside, and between national governments. Approaching development problems without understanding the perspectives of those other actors decreases the ability of development agencies to form relationships that lead to the fulfillment of strategic outcomes (the military has offered a solution to this problem in Operational Design). Thinking about development from a postpositivist epistemology stresses an understanding of a society’s unique existing socioeconomic structure and not by applying abstract theory.

The information revolution’s supposed great successes are really a new form of technological slavery for Virilio, one that communicatively unites the entire world and atomizes it simultaneously. The dissolution of time and spatial distance made possible by ‘telepresence’ (I can talk to my girlfriend in Albany from Kansas City using Skype as if we were physically together) effectively destroys the concept of spatial and temporal separation. Everyone armed with an internet connection shares the same global and virtual space-time, united by information exchanged at the speed of light. All spaces become ‘interfaces’, here and there dissolve into a continuous journey, past and future become an ‘eternal present’. Since we culturally travel together at a virtual light speed, we can remain separate and physically sedentary.

‘Cybernetics’ is a curse in Virilio’s writing – it signifies the subordination of human perception to mechanical enhancement that accelerates the transmission of information and resultant actions, yet mediates interaction between the real world and human beings through the cinematic image and the technological transfer of information. In seeking a more ‘objective’ view of the world, we actually create an artificial one whose mechanically accelerated speed prevents us from viewing it in a subjectively direct way unmediated by any perceptual filter. The lack of reflexivity inherent in our cybernetic understanding of the world allows its contradictions to fester – we produce and pursue the immediate objects of our desire for accelerated short-term satisfication and fail to notice how the permanent interface that brings them to us is the seed of the system’s destruction. The fact that the world is now virtually synchronized ensures that these contradictions, or the accidents inherent in the cybernetic world, will transcend localities and become general, global, and universal. It also suggests that our cybernetic understanding of the world will prevent us from learning the true origins of the ‘accidents’ that we produce.

It is this anti-modern and anti-technological philosophical tradition that is reflected in Daniel Suarez’s Daemon. The antagonist is a dead computer genius who creates a low-level artificial intelligence program (the ‘Daemon’ itself) that automatically recruits individuals and synchronizes their actions through virtual competitions to achieve the goals set by the program. The Daemon virtually unites physically atomized individuals in a closed ‘Darknet’ that exploits the hyperconnectivity of a globally networked society. From Virilio’s perspective, the chaos generated by the Daemon itself is inevitable precisely because of the existence of a virtual universality that creates interdependent relationships according to a single cybernetic logic, and is thereby vulnerable to virtual actors who leverage its networked interconnectedness to destroy the system by subverting it to a different logic.

In other words, the networked age may have been built by actors who wanted more communications to accumulate information for faster decision-making, yet those same networks can be turned against the cybernetic organizations of the past. This is how Virilio’s ‘general accident’ is reflected in Suarez’s novel. Because they cling to their linear attempts to apply power and make money in the real world through the virtual, we ‘moderns’ can never truly give themselves to the alternatives presented by network organizations – to remake the real world by connecting with it and not simply through virtual mediation, and finally overcome the contradictions of cybernetic progress.

The question that remains is the conditions upon which we abandon the cybernetic drive for information and speed that virtually unites us but physically divides us. We are thus prevented from coming together in real political action to change the system. Can we realize the possibility of transcending our cybernetic perception before the networks we built for acceleration destroy us? Virilio seems pessimistic, and the plot of Daemon seems to support this. It requires forging a new politics that is anti-cybernetic – actors must literally slow down as opposed to speed up, and rethink the relationship between information, interpretation, and action. That is, we need a new interpretation of reality supported by but not necessarily mediated by technology, one forged by interaction in the real world.

Thomas A. Marks has a new article in PRISM that suggests the U.S. military is not the first to make this realization in the context of combatting an insurgency. He argues that Colombian civilian leadership and the Colombian Army has successfully learned from its previous understanding of the FARC to formulate new strategic and operational approaches that have seriously weakened the insurgency. Out went the dichotomous American typology of conflict involving ‘war’ and ‘military operations other than war’ that was imported from existing American doctrine and practiced throughout state and nation-building missions in the 90s. Instead, the Colombian army, led by Generals Ospina, Mora, and Tapias, developed a new understanding of the war that redefined the understanding of the FARC insurgency as ‘war’ and not simply ‘law enforcement’ in pursuit of peace and order (as envisioned in the war/MOOTW dichotomy). This perspective’s new center of gravity was the legitimacy of the state, and not simply the drug trade (as envisioned by the U.S. in Plan Colombia). These shifts in the understanding of the conflict laid the foundation for new strategic and operational approaches towards defeating the FARC.

Marks argues that these approaches were finally elaborated once the military had a civilian partner in newly elected president Alvaro Uribe. Together, they formulated a new national strategy titled ‘Democratic Security’ to defeat the FARC that identified personal insecurity of ordinary citizens and the absence of the state in large swaths of the country to provide security as the root causes of the conflict . Thus, the new Colombian strategy was one of state building and the strengthening of institutional structures to provide for the needs of Colombian citizens. This necessitated a ‘whole-of-society’ response of which the military played only one part. However, its role was crucial since it was operationalized as counterinsurgency, consisting of offensive operations to degrade the capabilities of insurgents and narcotraffickers and defensive operations to ensure protection of the people, the state, and infrastructure. The Colombian counterinsurgency plan was not simply a top-down reorganization of institutional assets but also bottom-up, as it sought to establish soldados de mi pueblo, or home guards, in rural villages throughout the country. At the same time, Uribe and other government officials regularly held town-hall meetings that enabled them to hear new problems and suggested causes from Colombian citizens. Combined with the reconceptualization of warfare and the shared understanding of the problem formulated by Uribe and the military, Colombia was able to generate an innovative and successful response to the insurgency on both the strategic and operational levels.

What’s interesting about Marks’ description of the Colombian experience is how closely it parallels the tenets of Operational Design – reflexively learn from your environment to reframe your understanding of the problem, and develop solutions on that basis. The key difference, however, is that Marks is clear that the Colombians performed reflexivity not just on the operational level but on the strategic level, recognizing that providing security to the people required expansion of the state structures as a means of regulating existing social structures that caused personal insecurity. Counterinsurgency was just one operational means of achieving that end – although it was important, other political activities had to be articulated and performed to ensure the state’s expansion. And, how Uribe would know how to do this was not immediately apparent. He had to identify what obstacles existed to the expansion of state authority – including organizations outside of the state (such as the FARC) and those actors within it (corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers with ties to the narcotraffickers). He also had to identify what actions would be seen as legitimate by the people and the how the state and its relationship to society should be reorganized (in terms of the above boundary problems). All these problems are ones of knowledge – Uribe had to learn how to understand the problem and the social structures that caused it, and then act to reorganize the environment in which the problem exists through the expansion of the state. Only once he understood the structural causes of the problem could he formulate his strategy to change it and begin the design and planning of subsequent operations.

In looking at the content of the Democratic Security policy, its theme is striking consistent with emancipation. It identifies the referent of security as the individual citizen, and not simply the state:

Security is not regarded primarily as the security of the State, nor as the security
of the citizen without the assistance of the State. Rather, it is the protection of the citizen and democracy by the State with the solidarity and co-operation of the whole of society. . . . This is, in short, a policy for the protection of the population.”

Therefore, the state’s exists to protect the people and democracy in a shared struggle with all of society. The ‘security’ provided by the state is defined broadly – the state is to promote and protect human rights, drive sustainable development, and develop necessary infrastructure. Security thus becomes military, political, social, and economic. And, to learn how that security is to be provided, the Colombian state had to reflexively learn how to achieve and fulfill its strategic goal. Colombia has thereby elevated emancipatory politics and reflexive learning to the strategic level and not only the operational level, as is the case with American counterinsurgency doctrine. Our strategy for state-building in Afghanistan and Iraq is much less defined. We have not engaged in a reflexive process that identifies precisely our strategic end state and the existing structural obstacles and relationships that prevent the achievement of it – nor have we realized how some of our ongoing actions perpetuate the existence of structural relationships that cause personal insecurity for Afghans and Iraqis and promote the weakness of state structures.

In short, we have never engaged in strategic reflexivity. It requires that the entire American state and all partner organizations have a shared understanding of the strategic goal and a shared vision of how we will achieve it. Performing counterinsurgency operations is an important part of that strategy, but it is not enough. Every action taken by an organ of the state or partner states – whether military, paramilitary, political, or economic – needs to further the strategic goal. Otherwise, we work at cross-purposes.

“It is essential that they strengthen the fight against corruption,” Rasmussen said Tuesday in an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors. “All these stories about irregularities and corruption are damaging for public support for our presence in Afghanistan.
Equally important, he said, is the need for ordinary Afghans to develop confidence in their government instead of the Taliban and other insurgents.

“He must get this right,” Rasmussen said of Karzai. “And I think he understands it is crucial.”

He says he believes Karzai knows to act on corruption, but it’s actually a public wish – telling him in the most public terms what he thinks Karzai should think.  In this way, this is a discursive act that is the twice opposite of Cobb’s in Inception. Instead of its utterance in the unconscious dream world, Rasmussen speaks in the real awake world. Instead of private speech with a very limited audience, he speaks openly to the world. Rasmussenwants Karzai to have the same understanding of the corruption problem (just like Cobb wants Fischer to have the same understanding about what he does with his company), but simply speaking of the idea as if it were true without preparing the scene won’t make  Karzai believe he is in the same performance. Cobb can manipulate the dream in Inception, but Rasmussen and NATO have not successfully manipulated real life for Karzai.

NATO needs a comprehensive way to stage that performance in Afghanistan and globally.  As a political aim, they need every possible global actor – state and non-state – to treat Afghanistan as if corruption was ‘crucial’ in discursive utterances and economic exchange relationships. Karzai (and the government) socially learned corruption because of relationships that reinforced it as a normal means of exchange and loyalty. Actors who have reinforced this as a way of business include state and non-state actors, including gun-runners and the CIA. The irony is that even within the American government, our nation-building actors and agents are socially working at cross-purposes, and providing incentives (both discursive and economic) that encourage the pillaging of financial institutions contrary to officially stated nation-building policy. We lack our own coherent idea about what we do in relationship to Afghanistan, yet want Karzai to conform to whatever we demand.