Upstream engagement and downstream entanglements: The assumptions, opportunities, and threats of partnering

Abstract

This article addresses Western recruitment and management of personnel from non-Western countries in armed forces as part of a strategy of state stabilisation, examining its risks and benefits. ‘SFA’ (Security Forces Assistance) to indigenous forces has long been practised by the West and seems to have returned in recent years in a new form with the creation of armies in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, while providing cheap, proxy substitutes for the West and offering opportunities for state-building, the policy creates its own problems and can have significant, negative consequences.

Keywords::

• defence engagement
• security forces assistance
• state-building
• Iraq
• Afghanistan
• stabilisation

Notes

^1.National Security Strategy, 2011.

^2.Johnson, True to Their Salt.

^3.Kaldor, New and Old Wars.

^4.Strachan, ‘The Changing Character of War’.

^5.Kilcullen, Accidental Guerrilla.

^6.Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare.

^7.Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency.

^8. See e.g. Ucko and Egnell, Counterinsurgency in Crisis.

^9.Ritchie, ‘Rethinking Security’.

^10.Kalyvas, Logic of Violence.

^11.Holmes and Keegan, Soldiers.

^12.Collins, Violence, 83ff.; Ardant du Picq (1903), 88–9, cited in Collins, Violence, 83ff.

^13.Holmes, Firing Line.

^14.Spierenburg, ‘Faces of Violence’; on military culture, see Sondhaus, Strategic Culture.

^15.Roy, Brown Warriors.

^16.Galbraith, ‘The “Turbulent Frontier”’.

^17.Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations’, 132.

^18.Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency.

^19.Dodge and Simon, Iraq at the Crossroads; Robinson, ‘The Battle for Iraq’.

^20. See Jacob Stoil, forthcoming Oxford DPhil on Auxiliary forces in the Levant and East Africa, c.1939–45.

^21.Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj.

^22.Dalton, High Tide and After, 211.

^23.Lynn, Battle.

^24.Putzel and Di John, Meeting the Challenge of Crisis States.

^25.Metz and Cuccia, ‘Defining War for the 21st Century’, 15.

^26. State ‘failure’ is a contested idea: while there is widespread recognition of social, economic, or political indicators of an executive's ability to govern, William Easterly and Laura Freschi argue that it has no coherent definition and is used to justify Western intervention. Easterly and Freschi ‘Top 5 Reasons’.

^27.Lieven, Pakistan, 19–21.

^28.Hennessey, Kandak, 122.

^29.UNAMA, Annual Report, 2009.

^30. For the ‘pay crisis’, see Cordesman, ‘Shaping Afghan National Security Forces’, 54.

^31.Shanker and Cushman, ‘Reviews Raise Doubts’; Partlow, ‘More Afghan Soldiers Deserting’; Younossi et al., The Long March, 19.

^32.Partlow, ‘More Afghan Soldiers Deserting’.

^33. Author interview with Afghan Minister [name and location withheld], March 2012.

^34.Haynes, ‘Reforming the Afghan National Army’.

^35. Ibid.

^36.Cordesman, ‘Shaping Afghan National Security Forces’, 26, 52.

^37.Varley, ‘Contesting Concepts’.

^38.Jackson, The Costs of War.

^39.De Coning, ‘Understanding Peacebuilding as Essentially Local’. See also MacGinty, ‘Against Stabilization’, which illustrates the failure to embrace local needs for the sake of international agendas.

^40.International Crisis Group, ‘Afghanistan’.

^41.MacGinty, ‘Transitions and Hybrid Political Orders’.