Who Is Khamenei? - WHO Thailand Repository

Return to Table of Contents
Karl W. Eikenberry
Finally, even as the United States relearns the limits of intervention,
it should not reject all the techniques and procedures put into practice
in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fragile and failing states will continue to
endanger U.S. and international security, and the choice of responses
is not limited to doing nothing or deploying massive numbers of troops
and civilians who must march in lockstep to the beat of Field Manual
3-24. A dispassionate civil-military study comparing the application
of coin doctrine during the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan could be
useful in drawing appropriate lessons from these costly ventures.
The many successful efforts of American diplomats, development
specialists, and soldiers in the field during the war in Afghanistan
should also be duly noted. Americans are creative and innovative
people, and these characteristics have been reflected in the work of
the military and civilian teams on the ground. Working with great
courage and skill, they have devised countless novel, pragmatic, and
often inexpensive approaches to a myriad of difficult security, governance,
and development challenges. Such rich experience, acquired
at great cost and sacrifice, can and should be applied in ways tailored
appropriately to future problems of instability in countries and situations
that matter.
In sum, the essential task is deciding how to do less with less. It
has been said that in Afghanistan, as in Southeast Asia 40 years earlier,
the United States, with the best of intentions, unwittingly tried to
achieve revolutionary aims through semicolonial means. This is perhaps
an overly harsh judgment. And yet the unquestioning use of counterinsurgency
doctrine, unless bounded politically, will always take the
country in just such a direction. Before the next proposed coin toss,
therefore, Americans should insist on a rigorous and transparent
debate about its ends and its means.∂
74 foreign affairs