Eli Berman co-authors Foreign Affairs article
Constructive COIN: How Development Can Fight Radicals
06/04/2010
Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro,
Foreign Affairs
“We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in,” said General Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, of plans for holding the hard-won town of Marja in February. As Lieutenant General Mohammed Karimi, the deputy chief of staff of the Afghan army, explained, “We want to show people that we can deliver police, and services, and development. We want to convince the Afghans that the government is for them.”
Only a few years ago, the strategy for U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq focused on targeting insurgents. The strategy failed; critics now call it “mowing the grass,” since soldiers would repeatedly clear areas of insurgents only to see them reappear afterward. In the face of steadily increasing violence in Iraq from 2003 through 2006, the approach was abandoned. Today the U.S. military's counterinsurgency strategy centers on protecting the population, with a special emphasis on political and economic development.
Read the full article at Foregin Affairs.
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Eli Berman is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, and a Research Director at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. He is the author of Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism.
