January 20: Adam Smith's Invisible Hand vs. The Taliban (Small Wars Journal)
During my last tour in Afghanistan at Embassy Kabul, I was tasked with interviewing departing civilian field staff who participated in the historic 2009-2011 Civilian Surge to collect and document their best practices and lessons learned. Though I was not able to conduct exit interviews with all deployed staff consisting of well over 1,000 civilians, I was able to conduct a solid representational sampling. In my estimation, four of these exit interview case studies illustrated a common thread of success as impoverished Afghan communities caught in conflict zones, were allowed to participate in their own economic and security destiny against the forces of a resilient and intimidating Taliban insurgency.
All four case studies from 21st century Afghanistan mirrored the 18th century economic principles of Adam Smith explaining human behavior in another emerging economy of a weak and violence ridden state...