Those who can't do, train
We assume that non-Western countries are worse off than us because they don't know stuff and do things wrong. So we made training the dominant form of interaction between us and them.
Over the course of the summer, as Ukraine’s vaunted counter-offensive failed to produce the breakthroughs promised earlier by breathless think tankers, there came a change in tone from the pundits who had previously been so confident about the Ukrainian military’s abilities. Confidence that was often grounded in the assertion that Ukraine was doing so much better than the Russians because its officers had benefited from Western military training since at least 2014 and in the process undergone a complete change in culture, away from sluggish, centralized Soviet styles of command towards more nimble, empowered decision-making by officers in the field.
If the tone had previously been ecstatic, it now turned fidgety and defensive: the Ukrainian military was still riddled with the old Soviet mentality and was stubbornly failing, and indeed refusing, to do the combined arms operations that is the Western gold standard and that would somehow change their fortune against Russian fortifications. Success had had a Western father, but failure must have been raised in a grim Soviet orphanage.
They hadn’t listened to their Western training. Clearly, they needed more training.
This discourse about training by Western partners is intensely familiar from virtually every area I have ever worked in - civil society development, women’s rights and fighting violence against women, human rights and the rule of law, peacebuilding etc. In much of my work, I found myself ensconded in the ecosystem that grows from this discourse: the training-industrial complex. The latter is the source of constant frustration, waste and indignity in the lives of people caught in foreign aid transactions of any kind. So the chatter about Ukraine’s counter-offensive failing because they do not heed training or need more training makes me prick my ears. It feels triggering, in a visceral way.
Beyond things military: they do things wrong over there
The conceit inherent to most forms of foreign aid is that things are bad (poor, corrupt, lawless, violent, unequal, dysfunctional, losing wars etc) over there because unlike us, the people over there don't know things and do them wrong. Not because of structural issues or factors beyond human control even with the best know-how, and, heaven forbid, certainly not because of anything we might have done to them, like (colonial) violence and exploitation, unjust terms of trade, our banks getting rich off their oligarchs’ money, or the climate catastrophe wrought by our fossile fuel-dependent prosperity.
If only they had our superior expertise and competence, and the stalwart principles and discipline that come with it, they would overcome their problems, tackle the task at hand and succeed. Just like we had succeeded.
Had we succeeded, though?
The US (and the small number of its Western allies that actually go to war and don’t just pretend) haven’t fought a war like the one Ukraine is fighting for at least 70 years, if we take the Korean war as the last major tank/artillery/fortifications war in which both sides fielded roughly similar forces. If we consider the Revolution in Military Affairs of the late Cold War, never mind the exponential innovations of the last years such as drone warfare, then arguably neither the West, nor anyone else, has ever fought a war quite like the one Ukraine and Russia are fighting now.
Consequently, the elegant, cutting-edge doctrines the US and its allies have drawn up have never been tested in real-life conditions. To their credit, this is being acknowledged by a growing list of Western experts - here, here or here, and probably more that I missed.
Maybe (most likely), Western doctrine and tactics wouldn’t work against those Russian minefields and fortifications, either. Maybe Ukraine couldn’t break through line after line of dense minefields and fortifications, even if it had been given all the weapons it has requested and followed all the advice. Maybe even NATO, with all the capacities, weapons and resources at its disposal, would fail at the combined arms warfare that Western think tankers now testily accuse Ukrainians of foregoing, due to the clunky, uninspired, old Soviet ways they supposedly cannot shake.
In recent decades, the US and those few NATO members that actually fight wars have conducted mostly counter-insurgency (COIN) warfare. I do not discount the doctrinal complexities of COIN, nor the very real fear, stress and trauma incurred by troops (though those pale in comparison to the violence and devastation Western armies unleashed onto these societies). But there is a reason for the long tradition of (mostly British) comedy about fighting natives armed with sharpened sticks. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, the natives with their sharpened sticks ultimately won. Despite the truly massive investment into COIN analysis, the development of doctrine and testing different approaches, vast technological and material superiority, never mind the delirious sums of money spent on it all.
What if there are problems that defy our superiority, military constellations that defy our most sophisticated doctrines and powerful weapons? What if that superiority isn’t as clear and vast as we’d like to think? What if the Russian-Ukrainian war is in fact unwinnable?
I don’t mean unwinnable in the sense that the cost and trauma incurred render any victory bitter, painful, pyrrhic (the people I worked with who had lived through war, whether their side won or not, tend to see it that way). Here, I mean unwinnable in purely technical terms. This notion isn’t as subversive and marginal as the hyperventilating reaction by some in the pundit class suggests. Most wars eventually turn out to be unwinnable, if we take the standard definition of the term winning - defeating and disarming the enemy, so that we can impose our political objectives on him. They end in stalemates, sometimes (though not likely here) just petering out de facto, sometimes with a formal ceasefire, in the best case with a comprehensive, inclusive peace process.
A growing number of Western military experts are arguing that the war may be unwinnable, if winning is defined as restoring Ukrainian control over all its internationally recognized territory, and weakening Russia to such an extent that it can no longer push right back in. The loudest Western voices summoning a Ukrainian victory are none of them soldiers or military analysts. Their chief arguments are force of will, the conviction that good must prevail over evil or democracy over autocracy, and that we, the West, are on the Ukrainians’ side. Magical thinking, basically. There are gaping holes in their theory of change.1
“A minefield two meters wide”
When it comes to the act of sharing the West’s alleged doctrinal and technological (never mind ideological and moral) superiority, via training, it can be surprisingly shoddy, wasteful and even counterproductive. I find this curious.
In “NATO training leaves Ukrainian troops ‘underprepared’ for war”, Isobel Koshiw reports that training provided to Ukrainian troops in NATO member states is based on typical COIN scenarios, nothing like the trench warfare and mine-clearing Ukraine is faced with on its eastern steppe.
Remarkably, amidst all the media references to Western training of Ukrainian troops, so frequent they feel like religious incantations recited to conjure victory for Ukraine, Koshiw’s article was the first I saw that described what exactly this much-vaunted training looks like. Although Koshiw’s reporting from Ukraine has appeared in the Guardian, Economist, Washington Post and Financial Times, she published this article with the much humbler, non-profit OpenDemocracy.
In essence, Western training not only fails to prepare Ukrainian troops for the kind for the kind of war they are fighting. The kind no Western army has ever fought, against which its sophisticated, complex doctrines have never been tested. Instead the training modules are based on COIN doctrine, not just the wrong kind of warfare, but one that the West, ultimately, has failed at, too.
A lesson on de-mining, arguably the most critical skill in Ukraine’s counter-offensive, lasts two hours, on a minefield two meters wide.
So why do Ukrainian soldiers attend such training? Apart from the fact that they’re soldiers, who by definition can be ordered to do things and don’t have a say in the matter. Because it’s the hoop they must jump through to get other, more desirable, benefits. Like those Western weapons Ukraine relies on. Or, for the individual soldier, “thousands of pounds’ worth of equipment, including body armour and medical supplies”.
Those who can, do; those who can't, train.
The dynamics unfolding around Western military support for Ukraine are echoed across all areas of foreign aid and technocratic intervention by Western governments and non-governmental institutions, across aid-recipient countries. They have spawned a training-industrial complex that has become so entrenched that the underlying assumption - “these countries are worse off because they don’t know how to do things properly, so we will train them" - is rarely spelled out, let alone open to questioning. Beyond the dubious foundations of this assumption, there are material factors that make the training-industrial complex self-perpetuating.
In fall 2022, I had an intensive exchange with a network of Moldovan activists on this matter. They work on violence against women, some of them as long as 30 years, having pioneered principled, feminist work in their conservative, patriarchal society, where they face indifference if not outright hostility. Through grit, tenacity and an enormous capacity for learning they have built infrastructure and sophisticated programs, and have accrued so much authority that they have become a force to be reckoned with, including for their government. They are extremely good at what they do, by any country’s standard, in extremely difficult circumstances.
When in February 2022, refugees from neighboring Ukraine started pouring into Moldova, a tiny, impoverished country with a public sector that creaks along only because of foreign subsidies, these activists sprung into action. The day after Russia’s invasion, they were at the border, meeting arrivals. They organized transport, food, clothes, medicine, orientation. With a network of shelter space all over the country, they were able to offer housing and psycho-social assistance immediately.
A surprisingly high number of Ukrainian refugees chose to stay in Moldova, even as they could have moved further, to more prosperous EU countries. From what I saw, this was due to the neighborly welcome and solidarity they were shown by Moldovan civil society, who treated them as their equals as a matter of course.
Some months later, international aid agencies started to set up shop to offer assistance to the refugees. Which they did, as they do all over the world, by subcontracting the actual work to local NGOs as their implementing partners.
Turning local NGOs into implementing partners was once, decades ago, an innovation, and a well-meant one. Prior to that, the UN agencies, ICRCs, IRCs, CAREs and other big players of the humanitarian industry would bring large foreign staff to crisis zones, directly hire locals and do all of their work themselves. In the decades since contracting local implementing partners became standard procedure, grass-roots NGOs around the world, who’d always had the advantage of knowing local realities, needs and ways of getting things done, have also become increasingly sophisticated in technical and operational terms. The assumption that they are any less capable of running large-scale, complex operations according to cutting-edge best practices than expats working for international aid agencies no longer bears out in reality.
Since this fact is widely, if quietly, acknowledged, why does it still make sense for UN agencies and large, globally operating international NGOs (and they are large - the IRC’s annual revenue is some $1 billion) to set up offices in the toniest rental properties, staff them with expensive expats, surround them with fleets of shiny four-wheel drives and burn through plush overheads?
One answer is that their donors - bilateral aid agencies and MFAs - prefer spending their budgets through them, because they already have existing financial, operational and policy relationships. But that’s obviously not a good answer. It tells us nothing about the quality of the work or the effectiveness of the aid, and we should at least pretend that these things matter. It’s the sort of answer diplomats will give you while looking sheepishly at the floor.
Instead, we prefer to uphold the fiction that international organizations are needed for ensuring technical and operational quality - for knowledge transfer. It becomes a central raison d'être of the entire conglomerate of humanitarian, development, reform, democracy and human rights promotion industries. On the ground, this takes the shape of training. So much training. Not so much doing.
An activist in Chechnya - a sweet, compassionate, heart-on-her-sleeve expert on psycho-social care for adolescents and women - told me once, without a trace of irony: “I am an activist, so my job is attending training workshops”. She said this at a training workshop. Her peers, sitting in a circle around her, nodded.
In Moldova last year, my colleagues spoke with exasperation of how they’d spend days out of every week in conference rooms staring at powerpoint slides if they attended all the training sessions their new humanitarian partners kept scheduling. Every day, there were signs for yet several more training events by yet another international organization pinned to the reception at my hotel. It was the same at all the hotels in the center of Chisinau, my colleagues said. A never-ending circuit of flip charts, post-its, expats lecturing through a translator and dreary coffee breaks.
This reality pervades beyond the humanitarian sector. If anything, it is worse in other sectors of foreign aid-/philanthropy-funded engagement: development aid, support for policy reforms, civil society development, democracy promotion, human rights advocacy etc.
Our magical pixy dust
The centrality of training, of the transfer of expertise as the essential and often exclusive activity of the humanitarian, development and democracy promotion industries, is perpetuated by the proxies and implementing partners of global and mostly Western actors - local NGOs. It is a learned behavior for them; after all, when they started out and became the recipients of Western funding, their experience was largely about sitting through training. Now that they seek resources to stay afloat in a viciously competitive environment, they replicate this model. They become providers of training. It is the way to be.
I witnessed many times how grassroots activists get trapped in this perpetual template of training, when I was helping them write grant proposals. Many of them would prefer to tackle the problems they have identified in their community - lack of jobs, high cost of medicine, inadequate housing, no afterschool programs etc - through direct, targeted interventions assisting individuals in need. But that would imply activities that most Western grant makers would consider unorthodox, sloppy, not neat enough to be measurable, and, most critically, deviating from the dogma of “empowering” people so they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
So instead, staring at the empty grant proposal form with its rigid instructions, activists will propose to conduct training. It fits into those text boxes and can be translated into clear-cut indicators. Donors never arch an eyebrow at proposals to conduct training. If their grassroots grantees in far-off, hopeless places want to transfer expertise - Western expertise at that, though typically described as global best practice, cutting-edge, the gold standard, objective and data-based - it reaffirms grant-makers’ deeply held belief in their societies’ magical pixy dust.
As a reviewer for grant proposals to the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women some years ago, I analyzed more than 50 projects by NGOs from aid-recipient countries all over the world. Countries that differ in every possible way - political systems, income and education levels, and certainly gender roles and equality. And yet, a majority of the proposals centered on providing training that looked surprisingly similar in content, format and even the catered meals and other perks provided. Training whom? Mostly so-called duty-bearers (police, judges, elected officials, civil servants), sometimes religious leaders or community elders. Exclusively or predominantly male, by the way (more on that below).
After a first read-through of all the proposals, I was struck by how pervasive and cookie-cutter all this training was. Maybe, I thought, I’d missed some global trend, maybe random, self-appointed NGOs taking it upon themselves to train state institutions had become the norm. I reached out to activists in Europe (the non-aid-recipient corners). No, my acquaintances in Europe said, if we approached the police or the courts and offered to hold training for them, we’d be rebuffed and considered weird for even asking. If they want their staff to learn something new, they organize it in-house.
In aid-recipient countries, everyone must stand at attention and do their part to keep the foreign aid flowing. If you’re a police officer, judge, teacher or cleric, sitting (or napping, playing on your phone etc) through training by NGOs is normalized. It is the way to be.
Everything you can do, I can’t do better. But I will train you anyway.
Returning to Moldova at the height of the Ukrainian refugee crisis. What kind of expertise was being transferred? Was it really that different from the practices and principles local service providers had developed and learned over the years? New, more effective, relevant, cutting-edge, transformative?
Judge for yourself: the doyenne of fighting violence against women in Moldova, a woman who for 30 years had fought, clawed, advocated and educated, so that in her reactionary, struggling, uninterested country there would be laws, institutions and a support network for women suffering under male violence, a woman who had built the country’s first shelter, run it for a quarter century and proudly admits that every day she keeps learning how to do this work better and avoid past mistakes, this woman was required to sit through a rote, half-hearted training on “what is gender-based violence”, delivered by some expat, all-purpose humanitarian hack. Or else she and her team would not receive funding to take care of Ukrainian refugees.
She asked me to come along to a routine meeting with their humanitarian aid donor, so I could offer moral support. She’d had it with their micro-managing and constant training and was going to put her foot down. The meeting took place at their domestic violence shelter, which was unheated, despite the chilly fall weather. We were shivering all through it. One month’s salary of the donor’s representative we were meeting with would cover the shelter’s heating costs for more than a year. Four of them showed up.
The lead donor agency’s manager, recently arrived in Moldova for the first time in her life, was visibly nonplussed to face resistance from a local implementing partner, but soon enough snapped back into the default mode of knowing better. So you’re running a domestic violence shelter here, right? Of course, I’m against violence against women, too, we’re all feminists here, aren’t we? I wonder, though - after all your years of work, why is there still violence against women in Moldova? Why aren’t you making any progress? Why don’t you work with men instead, tell them to stop beating women? Seems like a far more effective approach to me than just protecting women survivors.
[Note: “Working with men and boys”, a supposed shortcut to ending male violence against women has long been a fashionable policy idea - among those who don’t actually work on ending male violence against women. It has been discredited all over the world as remarkably ineffective at reducing violence against women, while being extremely costly. The fact that it strikes non-experts as such a brilliant, obvious solution is the patriarchy rearing its head: it gets antsy when resources are allocated to women, away from men, and enable women to liberate themselves.]
Why would leading Moldovan experts agree to sit through all this redundant, shoddy, irrelevant training? Like the Ukrainian soldiers appreciating the essential gear they get to take home from training, they do it because it is the condition for getting the resources they need to do their job. The funding they receive from international humanitarian agencies allows them to keep the lights on (if not the heating), pay staff and stock food, clothes, diapers and laundry detergent for the Ukrainian refugees they support. If they resist too much, if they’re too “difficult”, if they insist on doing things their own way, they lose out on the unprecedented resources flooding their community during this crisis.
Foregoing this funding to preserve their autonomy, dignity and sanity sounds like a noble idea, but is a luxury grassroots activists can ill afford. They would end up sidelined, no longer invited to conferences and networking, invisible, unable to keep up even their pre-crisis activities. They could go under for good.
Our conversation with the rest of the world
Western allies have never fought a war like Ukrainians are fighting today. They have certainly never won a war like it. We have not even begun to grapple with its full implications for anything from doctrine to implications for the future of the laws of war.2 The Ukrainian and, it must be said, Russian militaries, understand the reality of this war better than we do and have already learned more, in a more granular way, about how to fight it. They now hold the bulk of institutional knowledge, between them. This still doesn’t mean they can win it, that it is closer to being winnable.
We also have not ended male violence against women, in the West. We haven’t even made a significant dent into it. Every day, feminist activists, lawyers, social workers in the West do their best to just to hold on to what incremental advances we’ve made and against the backsliding and backlash we’re facing, and on many days we lose that fight. We make progress, too, but it is hard-won and precarious. Our stories, strategies, triumphs and challenges are remarkably similar to those of our colleagues in countries like Moldova, where someone like me might get dispatched to “deliver training” (I cringe at the thought of it). If anything, our Moldovan colleagues beat us on resilience, creativity and courage.
The same dynamic exists in any area covered by the foreign aid-training-industrial complex. So much so that the foreign aid-training-industrial complex has become the main interface where our foreign policy elites’ engage with the rest of the world. In the course of his or her career, the average Western diplomat spends more time giving lectures on bike trails in urbanism workshops or visiting embassy-funded small business fairs than talking to their MFA counterparts as equals, on matters of mutual or clashing interests. That’s not counting the shadow armies of consultants, program officers, country directors, MEL specialists and, well, trainers deploying to countries with which we have this not-so-special relationship.
I think about this a lot. About the hubris and delusions that blind us and keep us from seeing, hearing and appreciating others, about the waste, exhaustion, alienation, frustration and burn-out this causes among hard-working, brilliant, passionate people on both sides, about the racist, supremacist, mission civilisatrice-style beliefs that poke through the threadbare surface of our conversation with the rest of the world.
Postscript:
I wrote about warfare and women’s rights as areas in which Western elites like to dispense what they consider indispensable training, initiation to our superior way of being and doing things and supposedly solving intractable problems.
I want to be very clear that these two areas are not the same to me.
I wrote about warfare above, and Western training for the West’s allies and proxies, because it is a poignant and broadly relatable case study for my larger point about training as the preeminent form of our interaction with the world. It’s frontpage news. But I don’t think we will ever develop the technology and doctrine and muster the resources, morale and tenacity to win every war we set our eyes on. Clearly, despite overwhelming material and technological advances, we keep losing many more wars than we win. So do other nations and groups that fight wars - much of what passes for “winning” is simply surviving, at immense cost, until an aggressor gets tired and quits.
I believe (and this informs my work) that we should accept this reality and stop pursuing the elusive fixation of winning wars, better and more than all others, once and for all. It is the road to ruin. We’ve been deluding ourselves that our technological superiority combined with our inherent goodness means we’re now fighting light-touch, clean, antiseptic, humane wars. Yet here we are, fighting vicariously, via the torn bodies of Ukrainian soldiers, a hyper-bloody and -destructive war that churns through thousands of square miles that will be left poisoned by mines for generations. A war neither side is winning, which for all we know is unwinnable.
There is no Wunderwaffe, either. The obsession with devising one makes us throw infinite resources at ever-more horrific means of death and destruction, to the blood-drunk crowing of the chicken hawk classes. I’m old enough to remember the blob’s slobbering infatuation with the Mother of all Bombs during the Iraq war. In this war, that crowd has grown to include mild-mannered humanities professors, who overnight learned all the acronyms for all the weapons systems, their ranges and payloads, and spend hours, days, months watching drone videos of soldiers bleeding to death in trenches.
In the words of a Ukrainian woman, war is when she had to dig her children’s grave with the frying pan she used to make omelettes for them. I cannot wish for us or anyone to get better at it, to train others at how to be better at it.
On women’s rights, I believe that we will dismantle the patriarchy and liberate women, and that until then we should never stop trying. While we are at it, we are already making so many things better for everyone.
Some years ago, after a too-short meeting with women’s rights activists from Chechnya in a nearby country, I had to catch an early morning flight. One activist, a quiet young woman in her early 20s who’d been with us since she was a student, asked whether she could ride in the taxi to the airport with me, so we could talk. At first, we chatted about her work with teenage girls, her plans for continuing her education, maybe studying abroad. She seemed reserved, uncertain. After a pause, she burst out, with vehemence, “Almut, what I really wanted to ask, how much longer until women will have equality and our rights? How many more years, do you think?”
This was different from the mentoring I would normally do, about scholarships and study tours, editing resumes and practicing for interviews. It felt momentous and weighty, like I ought to choose my words carefully, so as not to crush her spirit.
“I wish I could say it will happen in my lifetime, but to be honest, I don’t think I will live to see it. Maybe it will happen in your lifetime. Don’t lose heart. Look at how far we have come, how we are making change all the time. If you choose to fight for women’s rights, it will be for the long haul, but your life will be a true adventure. Like The Lord of the Rings” - this was a very bookish girl - “only better, because you will be surrounded by women.”
Post-postscript:
A critical nuance to the above: not all the expats working for international humanitarian, development, democracy promotion etc organizations are shallow, condescending hacks. Quite a few are anything but, and therein lies another tragic, frustrating facet of the expertise-transfer/ “training” model that dominates this sector.
It’s not unusual for thoughtful, passionate, highly competent professionals, some of whom I’d consider leading thinkers in their fields, to go to work for a UN agency or multinational aid group. Often with reservations because of what they know about these institutions, but still precisely because they are so motivated to do this work - whether it’s setting up small businesses, protecting women from gender-based violence or helping refugee children catch up with their education etc - and so they have to enlist with the organizations that do this work.
And then they find, again and again, that their expertise and the best practices and values it encompasses, isn’t wanted, because it complicates matters. They might propose that local partners should take the lead on designing this or that intervention and are told to instead copy and paste their organization’s scaleable model developed half-way around the world. They’re ordered to sit day in, day out, in an air-conditioned office and produce a data- and graphics-heavy handbooks of best practices, to be printed on heavy, glossy paper and handed out as part of the swag at glamorous conferences far away. When they’d much rather be out with local activists and in the community, showing support and solidarity, solving problems together, listening and learning.
After a year or two of constant compromise and battles, they leave the sector for a while, frustrated and burnt-out. Their handbook gathers dust in boxes at headquarters. It was never even translated into the language of the place where it was written, of the people who inspired it.
To cover all eventualities, I should add that conceivable ways for Ukraine to win this war would be for the Russian army (the Russian state?) to collapse entirely, or at least to commit massive, glaring mistakes, like they did last fall around Kharkiv and in the northern Donbas, where they left long stretches of the frontline neither fortified nor guarded by anyone but the equivalent of riot police. The likelihood of such mistakes diminishes over time, however, because armies at war adapt. They learn from their mistakes, and then some. Besides, there is little or nothing we can do to induce Russian collapse or mistakes.
Will the international ban on land mines, enacted as a convention in 1997 and increasingly taking on the feel of customary international law in the run-up to this war, fade into oblivion, now that landmines have proven such an effective a tool at stopping an offensive by Europe’s most powerful army, equipped with Western weapons systems?