Much of the Civil Affairs mission appears strange to other Marines and to civilians who think they know what the military does in Afghanistan. The Marine Corps as a whole prides itself on being self-sufficient; we look to leverage other resources before using our own. The Marine Corps focuses on its primary mission to locate, close with, and destroy enemies; we try to get indigenous forces to complete this mission instead. Really it's a yin-yang dynamic. The Marine Corps is primarily military, so we must be political.
I'm well-aware of all these differences, but a recent conversation with another Marine veteran demonstrated just how much my perspective has changed in the last few months. Ten minutes after sitting down with our drinks we were arguing about the what was happening in Afghanistan. A little background here: my friend was in the infantry during the invasion of Iraq and then served in the second battle for Fallujah (the most intense urban combat seen since Khe Sanh in Vietnam) so his perspective is one of offensive military operations. The details of our conversation are not important; what really struck me was how I immediately sought ways to understand or identify with the Taliban and see them as a complex organization rather than as "the enemy" whose goal was to kill freedom-loving people all over the globe.
Of course, we need a lot more Marines with his perspective than mine, but in this particular fight we could probably stand to balance out the ratios a bit. As a Marine Officer put it to me, "The worst non-lethal threat we face in Afghanistan is Marines who don't get it." That is, those stuck in the offensive military model. There's a lot more to this fight than the Taliban as an insurgent group.
We often hear from others in the Civil Affairs/State Department community about how easy it is to discredit the standard arguments given about why people join or support violent movements. If it was religion, there would be a lot violence because fundamentalist madrassas [Islamic schools] are sprinkled all over the world. If it was money, there would be more of the 1,000,000,000 people in dire poverty taking up arms. The truth is we don't know - or more accurately, it's impossible to know for any one person or area by looking at large trends. It's our responsibility as CA Marines to analyze the local environment and figure out which factors are contributing to instability and (more importantly) which are NOT.
There may also regional or transnational points to consider, but the concept applies across the spectrum. That's what is so refreshing about CA compared to a lot of other work: it takes away the mental comfort of "knowing" things. There's an intrinsic humility in this sort of work when it's done properly. We seek out advice from the people around the area for everything we do. It's their problem so it has to be their solution. In fact, the more successful we are, the less credit we'll be given. The locals will see how much they've put into a given project and quite naturally decide the weird guys in the crazy camouflage suits didn't do a damn thing. We get to leave and they get to live. Fair trade in my opinion.
The best statistic I've heard illustrating this point is that approximately 75% of the schools we build in Afghanistan end up destroyed, while about 75% of those built by the locals survive. It might not be entirely accurate, but it's worth pondering.
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