A modest proposal to fix Afghanistan

Ok so this is a case of me cooking up a crazy theory too late at night. I dont particularly buy it, but I think its worth poking at, so I'm opening it up for public mockery.

So one of the things that keeps coming up as people try to transfer what has worked in Iraq to Afghanistan in some version of the "Awakening", Sons of Iraq, tribal militia scheme. Nathan at Registan points out the holes in another new set of suggestions for this type of program.

This stuff is hard, and there’s enormous tension between creating and strengthening local institutions and trying to strengthen a central government with a powerful executive. It’s clear that Green gets that, and bully on him for giving the creation of a tribal engagement and militia creation strategy a whirl. What everyone involved in this effort really needs to do, however, is ask whether or not we make things harder by talking about Afghanistan’s people and society the way we do. When we talk about tribes, we imply institutions or leaders with authority over those in the same kin group. Are we really seeing much of that in Afghanistan above the level of one to a few villages?

This got me thinking about the possible ways we think about ethnic identity. If Afghanistan does have a less centralized political elemant as this passage seems to suggest, prehaps there is a better way to mobilize it than one shaped around political leaders.

There's plenty of lit. in the ethnic conflict field (particularly D. Posner's work on Africa) that suggests that ethnic divisions become politically salient only if there are institutions that incentivises one particular identity over another. So make it that when you join one of the national security services, you can identify as a particular identity. Your presence in the security force, and the success of the missions you undertake is then combined in some type of "tribal team score" that is publicly available, and translates into some type of monetary perk (he with the highest per capita recruitment gets roads first kind of deal).

Do i think this is going to make for a very good free and open society? absolutely not. It entrenches tribalism within the security forces, creates incentives that force people into the security forces against their will, is vulnerable to central government corruption to name only a few, but it seems better than the current system...