Opinion: A Surge of a Different Sort for Afghanistan

The headlines on President Obama's Afghanistan speech have focused on the additional U.S. troops he is sending, but there's another component to the new strategy that is just as vital to achieving some progress and greater stability in that troubled country: the civilian surge. And making this surge a success will be no easy task.

In Afghanistan, problems that feed the insurgency and discontent with the Afghan government (poor governance, corruption, drug trafficking and poverty) are issues that don't have conventional military solutions, and at the start of the year, the Obama administration set a goal of nearly tripling the civilian presence on the ground in Afghanistan from 320 at the start of the year to almost 1,000 in early 2010.

Obama argued that "to advance security, opportunity and justice -- not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces -- we need agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers. That's how we can help the Afghan government serve its people and develop an economy that isn't dominated by illicit drugs. And that's why I'm ordering a substantial increase in our civilians on the ground."

Military commanders, including the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, agree that ramping up these civilian efforts, and making sure they're coordinated as part of a broader strategy, are key to achieving progress. As McChrystal put it in his assessment, released earlier this year: "Effective civilian capabilities and resources mechanisms are critical to achieving demonstrable progress."

But implementing this civilian surge is no small task. The Obama administration is swimming against the tide of decades of relative underinvestment in diplomacy and the civilian side of government.

In the budget plans for the current fiscal year, the Pentagon has at least a 10-1 funding advantage over civilian agencies like the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The fact that it took President Obama more than 10 months to nominate a head for USAID and fill other top positions in development assistance raises concerns.

And many of the U.S. government institutions that are being tasked to increase their efforts are stuck in the last century – hampered by slow bureaucratic processes, inflexibilities in budgeting and personnel staffing, and a lack of resources to conduct effective planning and evaluation the way the Pentagon does.

As a result, recent performance hasn't been stellar.

In Iraq, millions were lost to waste, fraud and abuse in development assistance projects. In Pakistan, where the U.S. Congress just approved a tripling of nonmilitary assistance to $1.5 billion a year for the next five years, U.S. civilian agencies to date have only spent about 10 percent of another $750 million project approved more than two years ago for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, a troubled region near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The Obama administration has outlined an ambitious agenda for using the tools of diplomacy and development assistance to address threats to stability in Africa and key parts of the Middle East -- a 21st century vision to tackling security threats using all components of American power.

If there's an emerging "Obama doctrine" on foreign policy, one of the key pillars is the notion of "smart power" -- getting results from civilian-led efforts around the world, and not just placing the burdens on America's military.

Afghanistan represents many challenges for the Obama administration, but the efforts to implement a civilian surge will not only be an important test case of whether we'll see progress in Afghanistan -- it will also test whether the Obama administration can reform how America implements its broader national security agenda.
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Brian Katulis is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where his work focuses on U.S. national security policy in the Middle East and South Asia.