Greg Mortenson might owe Capt. Cristian Balan an apology.
Balan teaches digital forensics at Vermont's Champlain College when he's not serving in Afghanistan with the Army National Guard. During a deployment last summer, he married his two vocations by acting as tech support in an Afghan computer lab a few miles from Bagram Air Field. His impulse was straight out of Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea, an account of cross-cultural understanding in Central Asia that's become faddish in counterinsurgency circles. The core lesson: treat the Afghans with respect; address their concerns; and they'll scratch your back, too. If you don't, don't be surprised when you don't get their cooperation against the Taliban.
After I accompanied the sunny Balan on his tech support mission, he asked if I'd read Mortenson's book. When I told him I hadn't, he fetched his dog-eared copy from his trailer and gave it to me to keep.
Balan is hardly the only military officer enamored of Mortenson. Gen. David Petraeus, the lord of all counterinsurgents, is a fan. So is Special Operations Command chief Adm. Eric Olson and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their esteem for Mortenson stems precisely from his basic message that War Is Not The Answer in Afghanistan and Pakistan: durable peace comes from education and respect. As Balan's tale indicates, the military ironically seeks to make Three Cups of Tea an instrument for winning the war. Earlier this month, the Army War College even invited him to speak at its strategy conference.
So it's embarrassing that 60 Minutes has turned up evidence of financial impropriety at Mortenson's nonprofit foundation. The riveting tales of his books -- residents of a Pakistani village called Kophe "nursed him back to health" after a disastrous mountain climbing expedition; he was abducted by the Taliban -- may be exaggerated or false. But should that discredit the message that the military's embraced?
60 Minutes' main allegations don't suggest as much. They're about Mortenson's integrity, not his thesis. And he's not backing down -- though he allows that he "simplif[ied] the sequence of events" in Three Cups of Tea.
At the same time, the military's love for Mortenson was a bit like COIN Gone Crazy, a caricature of counterinsurgency as an effort where the man who drinks the most tea with the most villagers will earn the most goodwill -- when, in fact, it involves and requires a lot of death and destruction. Petraeus, Balan and others recognize that counterinsurgency can't just be a violent endeavor, and they've sought to learn from Mortenson how to supplement their efforts with the necessary cultural respect that will give them a shot at success. Perhaps by showing Afghans basic respect and addressing their grievances, the theory goes, the military can secure Afghan tolerance or support for the bloody and unpleasant work of hunting the Taliban.
But to others in the military, Mortenson's work doesn't look like a supplement to the war. It looks like an alternative to it. And for officers to cheer Mortenson while they're trying to fight a war is an absurdity. For the best explication of this perspective, read Carl Prine's joyful evisceration of Mortenson's supporters. ("No one can take money from a mark unless he thinks he's getting something for nothing. That's what turns 'Three Cups of Tea' into Three-card Monte for the Three Stars.")
And evidence of a will to believe in counterinsurgency circles is palpable, as evidenced by, among other things, the Army's seriously flawed experiment in harnessing anthropology for war, the Human Terrain System. Units formerly used to hunt and kill insurgent bombmakers are now used in a less lethal way in the name of sophisticated counterinsurgency principles, even as the bombs proliferate. Afghanistan has a way of undoing the best laid plans of westerners, like when the Taliban leaders they want to negotiate peace with -- and ply with cash -- turn out to be imposters.
But the counterinsurgency debate is rife with oversimplification. COINdinistas can carry an air of arrogance through their adherence to the "graduate school of warfare." Their critics often pretend that counterinsurgency advocates want to take the war out of war. Too often, the debate looks like an Army of Pansies versus an Army of Brutes, depending on where your sympathies lie. (I'll admit I've been too simplistic at times, myself.)
It's true that many of Mortenson's points are fatuous. Terrorism doesn't result from a lack of education, as Doctor Ayman Zawahiri proves. It shouldn't take a *60 Minutes *expose to point out the flaw there. But the military has had an unhappy experience in Afghanistan when it doesn't show sufficient respect for Afghan prerogatives, as the outrage resulting from civilian casualtiesproves.
Of course, counterinsurgents can still accidentally kill civilians; COIN skeptics can stay on their bases and avoid any antagonizing interactions with Afghan villagers. The hardest problem to disaggregate in Afghanistan right now is whether the war's woes are due to counterinsurgency or the war itself. Respecting Afghans alone can't win the war. But not respecting them can lose it.
That's what the military is trying to teach itself by promoting Mortenson. You might call it self-criticism, an attempt to counterbalance its natural faith in the force of arms. But Danger Room pal Niel Smith argues that the Army has institutionalized counterinsurgency so poorly that officers can fool themselves into embracing caricatures of it. And that's how Mortenson's tea can taste a lot like snake oil.
Photo: U.S. Marine Corps
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