She is also an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a nonresident fellow at both the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Global Public Policy Institute.
Gaston applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and reported the following:
Page 99 discusses why the so-called “bargaining environment” in Afghanistan in 2009 was much more diverse, multi-player, and complex than in 2005 in Iraq, when U.S. military leaders in Iraq had much closer to a monopoly on military and political decision-making regarding U.S. initiatives. This page would give a flavor for the type of analysis and subject matter as a whole: it touches on two of the three main arenas for the book (Afghanistan and Iraq in periods of U.S. intervention) and also deals with the idea of bargaining debates influencing policy outcomes, which is one of the central theoretical premises. However, because page 99 offers evidence relevant to understanding only two of nine case studies, and related to a minor theoretical sub-contention, it would not necessarily give a sense of the main themes, features, or overall argument of the book. The larger focus of the book is on how a series of tactical or technical measures adopted by the United States to mitigate risks associated with irregular forces (militias, rebels and other local armed groups) often contributed to these initiatives being authorized or approved, but ultimately did little to address the risks in question. This introduced a degree of moral hazard, potentially leading the US to engage in riskier partnerships than it might have. At a theoretical level, the book tests the most common academic paradigm applied to these proxy relationships, which is principal-agent theory, against the evidence. While principal-agent theory well describes the risks involved when the US tried to delegate security and other policy tasks to these irregular forces, it does not do a good job of explaining why the US imposed such a range of checks and controls, even as they proved increasingly costly and ineffective. Instead the evidence much more closely aligns with the theoretical expectations of bureaucratic policy analysis (BPA), which finds that policy outcomes are more likely to be influenced by political bargaining and organizational inputs as by top-down cost-benefit analyses or other more strategic calculations. The BPA bargaining lens is even more broadly applicable when expanded to include the much wider range of transnational and non-US government players that tend to be involved in these sorts of hybrid political and security environments. Page 99 fits into this by exploring the nature of the bargaining arena, and how this helps explain why so many more checks were imposed on Afghan local forces (the Afghan Local Police) than on the Iraqi forces mobilized only a few years earlier (the sahwa). It’s an important piece of the puzzle but likely not enough of one for the reader to get a sense of the full book on its own.Learn more about Illusions of Control at the Columbia University Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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