Our brains just don’t work well in certain situations. Unfortunately, the world is full of “those situations”. There is a wonderful literature out there on how our brains let us down when we do certain kinds of analysis (The Psychology of Intelligence by Richard Heuer remains the best, although ). Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan) furthers this literature in a couple of ways, but most notably by pointing out that trained analysts make their hard-wired incompetence worse because they can fool people with their pedigrees, style, and ties. I bring this up to help set up my commentary on some recent news (although Solomon would say this is just the same old, same old) about Pakistan. Yes, once again, it seems that Pakistan is orchestrating suicide-bombing attacks in Kabul, allowing Islamist insurgents to operate freely within Pakistan, funding these same insurgents, and helping them attack Afghan and Coalition targets within Afghanistan. This accusation has been pretty constant since 9/11, and my point today is not the tactical question of who is providing what level of support to whom and to what ends, but rather the more general one about the need for clarity.
Heuer points out that we are biased to see things in terms of intentional, conspiratorial action. It is not that we are paranoid, but that our minds automatically simplify reality. The world is a much simpler place when the only meaningful actors are countries, armies, nations, classes, races, religions, etc. The problem is that these things are not unitary actors, and if you want to describe them as such you have to do some heavy lifting first if you want people to take you seriously. Unless (per Taleb) you are wearing a tie (or the equivalent sign of analytic authority… for Marx it meant having a cool beard, reading the right books, using big words, and telling people what they wanted to hear; the uniform varies by context). Then people take you seriously despite the obvious flaws in your logic.
None of this is meant to imply that things that happen in Pakistan do not cause problems in Afghanistan. Of course they do. I just think it is dangerous to blame it on this abstraction called “Pakistan”. If any state/country is less of a unitary actor than Pakistan, it can’t be by much. And it’s not just bad analysis, it leads to poor policy.
Pakistan has only its military to thank for keeping it out of “failed state” status. Let’s just look at one aspect of this: all of the bureaucracies in Pakistan are corrupt. This means that local administrators have a great deal of autonomy. On the flip side of of the same coin, it means that the government (elected or dictator) has limited control over the implementation of policy. This “principle – agent” problem is bad enough in relatively efficient places like the USA. In Pakistan it is much worse. This is true whether you are speaking of the amateur paramilitary and police forces, for the intelligence bureaucracy, or the army.
So even if there is no doubt that members of the Pakistan bureaucracy are providing direct assistance to the Islamist forces that are crossing the border into Afghanistan to kill/maim people there it does not follow that the government had anything to do with it [in future blogs I will write of the problems with the reporting of such incidents, and how our inability to do basic statistics on the fly exacerbate this problem]. And blaming “Pakistan” (whoever the heck that is) may help transfer responsibility away from a crippled and frustrated Afghan government and win some points in the polls, policy needs to deal with the real problems with targeted solutions. As one of my favorite G-2’s used to say [and I will paraphrase for the sake of my PG rating] operational planning requires more than major muscle movements in front of large maps. In this particular case, it leads the government of Afghanistan to risk scuttling the sort of fine-grained policy (tactical and operational coordination with Pakistani counterparts) that has the best chance of bring some sense of stability to the people it serves.
