The US has a really bad track record of picking local partners. Mostly because during the Cold War, the "good" local people were more innately socialist, which the Communists exploited, so we got stuck with some pretty horrible people (either ineffective or outright evil) by default.
I don't believe it's feasible to occupy a medium sized country which actively resists using modern militaries. It's certainly not worth it. I'd just focus on keeping a limited presence to rain death from above (like we do in Pakistan, Yemen, etc.) or via limited JSOC strikes (Somalia, Afghanistan before 2007 or so, etc.), and then using armed but civilian organizations to interface with the populace and government.
In a place like Somalia or Afghanistan, foreign organizations should run important infrastructure and logistics services for the local government and population, with the cost subsidized by international donors. i.e. a local Afghan should be able to buy electricity at 0.10/KwH, sell their pomegranates at the world price, and have clean water, Internet, cellphones, etc., without any other focus on building the government (since that's probably hopeless). The organization providing that infrastructure needs self-defense capability, but you don't need much beyond what Blackwater had to do this.
> In a place like Somalia or Afghanistan, foreign organizations should run important infrastructure and logistics services for the local government and population[...]
That's what I thought as well - The documentary left a pretty bleak picture of the Afghans ability to build, extend or even maintain basic infrastructure, but it's desperately needed if they want to get anywhere with education. The country needs at least a good dozen generations to heal the most serious wounds so it can find its own interest in the kind of social development that makes it resistant to terrorism taking root over and over again.
Hand-holding throughout that time is what is required. But that's probably the most costly thing, I would guess. Then again, those drones and all that ammunition sure don't come cheap either. But the US has sunk far too much money into that failed path to turn around and do the other one now.
And even then - the problem is that the citizens are already tired of conflict and both sides, the international troops and the taliban, are trying to exploit that. Just giving them great infrastructure might make it easier for the international troops, but it would probably do the same for the taliban.
Whatever the solution, it sure won't be a quick one. My best bet would be to exploit the countries natural resources and push all the money made from that into infrastructure and security. But that's just the kind of "socialism" that nobody in the west wants to pick up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagons_New_Map from Thomas PM Barnett is probably the "official" version of this -- a small, lethal military designed to win wars, and a "SysAdmin force" designed to build nations after the fact.
I'm not sure how well this theory has held up (it's from 2004...), or how much support it has. I think what happened is we got lucky in Iraq in 2007-2010 using the old British strategy of allying with semi-enemies against real enemies (Sons of Iraq and the other Sunni tribes, and non-aggression with the Shia militias), eked out a borderline draw in Iraq while calling it "a victory for COIN", applied the "COIN" model rather than the "British" model to Afghanistan with the surge and all, and have proceeded to lose from 2009-now in Afghanistan.
> The US has a really bad track record of picking local partners. Mostly because during the Cold War, the "good" local people were more innately socialist, which the Communists exploited, so we got stuck with some pretty horrible people (either ineffective or outright evil) by default.
The US doesn't care that much about the "good" people. They picked the most effective people for fighting the USSR. And out of necessity they needed to use Pakistan's ISI which wanted trained Mujihadeen for their own purposes (asymetric warfare with India) to deliver arms to the "freedom fighters."
I don't believe it's feasible to occupy a medium sized country which actively resists using modern militaries. It's certainly not worth it. I'd just focus on keeping a limited presence to rain death from above (like we do in Pakistan, Yemen, etc.) or via limited JSOC strikes (Somalia, Afghanistan before 2007 or so, etc.), and then using armed but civilian organizations to interface with the populace and government.
In a place like Somalia or Afghanistan, foreign organizations should run important infrastructure and logistics services for the local government and population, with the cost subsidized by international donors. i.e. a local Afghan should be able to buy electricity at 0.10/KwH, sell their pomegranates at the world price, and have clean water, Internet, cellphones, etc., without any other focus on building the government (since that's probably hopeless). The organization providing that infrastructure needs self-defense capability, but you don't need much beyond what Blackwater had to do this.