Discussing why American programmes in Afghanistan so often produced the opposite of their stated aim, John Kiriakou offered an example from policing that he treats as definitive.
The scheme
Afghanistan, he began, is very very heavily tribal. And so what was decided — by, in his phrase, some genius in the Pentagon — was to make the regional chiefs of police come from other tribes in other parts of the country. If you were from Herat, you were going to head the police force in Kandahar; if you were from Kandahar, you were going to head the police force up along the border with Tajikistan. [1]
The result
All that did, Kiriakou says, was make people hate representatives of other tribes even more than they had previously. And it did nothing to combat corruption. Nothing. [2]
The pattern it belongs to
The rotation scheme is one of a family of examples Kiriakou uses to argue that American programmes in Afghanistan were designed against the grain of the society they were meant to reform. The same instinct — assembling men from every tribe and region in one place and expecting a national institution to emerge — produced the Afghan National Police poisoning, which he calls mistake number one. [3]
He places it in the same conversation as his broader complaint about how American initiatives were measured. The question he says commanders were asked was how many schools are in that area, when the questions that mattered were how many children attend when we are not there, what curriculum is taught, and how the parents feel. [4] The result across two decades, in his summary, was that the priority rotated — schools one year, the electrical grid the next, then farming, then heroin poppy — nothing was ever finished, and in the end the Americans were thrown out. [5]