Stephen Walt on whether the US murdered Bin Laden

Stephen Walt talks a look at the question, Did the United States murder bin Laden? Foreign Policy 05/04/2011. He indicates that he's "inclined to cut them [the Administration] a bit of slack on this one." Based on what we know so far, he thinks "it would hardly be a stretch to imagine Obama sending in the SEALs not with deliberate orders to kill bin Laden, but with instructions that made his death very, very likely." And he also observes that sending in a SEALs team rather than use a drone strike was likely made in part to minimize noncombatant casualties. And also to be able to make a more credible case that we had really killed Bin Laden.

But he leans toward thinking the intent was to take Bin Laden dead rather than alive:

There are two reasons to suspect that we were more interested in killing him than capturing him. The first is the obvious point that having him in custody would have been a major policy challenge. How many terror threats or hostage takings might have accompanied his trial and incarceration? In the abstract, I'd prefer to have put him on trial for his crimes, to draw the sharpest possible contrast between his lawless behavior and the principles of the rule of law that we like to proclaim. But the practical obstacles to that course would have been daunting, and I can understand why the U.S. government might have preferred just taking him out.

The second reason, of course, is that targeted assassinations have become an increasingly favorite tool of U.S. security policy. And it's not just drone attacks on suspected terrorists in Pakistan or Yemen, targeted killings by special forces are one of the key ways that we are prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. And there's certainly some reason to believe that this is how NATO is trying to resolve the civil war in Libya, though of course we will never say so openly. [my emphasis]

As he's explained in another post, targeted assassination is a problematic policy in a number of ways.

Leaving aside the notion of assassinating heads of state, when dealing with any terrorist group, obviously disrupting, imprisoning or otherwise neutralizing their leaders can have a major effect. Especially if it's a matter of a relatively isolated sect, like the Red Army Faction (RAF) in Germany or the Weather Underground in the US. Although we should note than in those two incidents, the authorities in their respective countries did not concentrate on trying to kill their leaders.

But even isolated groups have some kind of network of sympathizers. When we look at groups founded in tribal societies in which family clan ties are important, like Afghanistan today or (to a significant extent) the American South during Reconstruction, then eliminating the leadership may complicate rather than facilitate counterinsurgency efforts. If you want a terrorist group to lay down its arms and negotiate a peace deal, or even if you want to keep that option open, leaders who are experienced and trusted among the fighters are more likely to be able to make such a deal and see that it's implemented than newer leaders who have to prove their credibility to their followers. Aside from the need of new leaders to prove themselves in military/terrorist operations, there's no guarantee that a new leader will be less effective from the group's side, or more favorable generally from the counterinsurgency's side, than the old ones. Killing a respected leader may make his remaining followers more intransigent.

Israel has practiced targeted assassination for many years against Palestinian leaders. In their case, increasing intransigence and radicalization among the survivors in the terrorist group may have been part of the intention. Or at least an effect that wasn't entirely unwelcome to an Israeli leadership that preferred not to have a negotiated settlement that would likely be acceptable to the Palestinians.

Tags: counterinsurgency, israel, osama bin laden, stephen walt, terrorism

The mythical magic of The Surge

[W]hat should really be taken away from the US military's experience over the past ten years is not that the United States understands how to fight and win population-centric counterinsurgencies but that counterinsurgencies are as violent and inconclusive as any other conflicts, and that the United States should avoid such wars at all costs.

... writes Michael Cohen. (Tossing the Afghan COIN The Nation 12/16/2010)

This is not the triumphalist view that currently guides US strategy in the Afghanistan War. I'll cite Peter Bergen's article, The Generals' Victory New Republic 12/16/2010, once more here. Because he is writing from the triumphalist framework. A key piece of the current counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare approach of the US is the The Surge of 2007-8 in Iraq brought victory:

If one ghost hovering over the discussion of Afghanistan was that of Vietnam, where an earlier Democratic president had come to grief by escalating a war in Asia, another ghost was that of the "surge" in Iraq, which had been opposed by the key officials presiding over the Afghan review, including the president himself, the vice president, and Secretary of State Clinton. Of course, the surge in Iraq had succeeded for a number of reasons, including the Sunni Awakening, but Obama had never publicly conceded that he had been wrong about it. At a meeting late in the review process, Obama said, "I'm not saying it'd be the exact same plan as Iraq, but I am looking for something that is a surge to create the conditions for a transition." [my emphasis]

Bergen writes about the early months of the Obama Administration and its Afghanistan War policy:

... the tension between the military officers who wanted a full-blown counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan for as long as it was going to take—in effect, well past the presidential election of 2012, and at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars — while the president and much of his political team (at least initially) took the position that they wanted something far more modest. This tension was compounded by the fact that the new president had never served in the military and was a vocal opponent of both the Iraq war and the surge, while the Pentagon had gotten pretty much whatever it had wanted from Bush in the latter years of the Iraq war. [my emphasis]

Nir Rosen in a recent interview with Glenn Greenwald (Transcript: Nir Rosen Salon 12/13/2010) gives a more real-world view of The Surge than Bergen's comic-book version:

It is really, really important for Americans to understand what happened in Iraq during the surge. ... There is the notion that the surge was a success in Iraq. Petraeus and the surge was a success in Iraq, so Petraeus and the surge will be a success in Afghanistan. Now, the surge, strictly speaking, was just an increase in troops by 30,000 people, which began in 2007.

But the surge has come to mean a lot more than that, and it now signifies a period from late 2006 until 2008 in which a complex synergy of primarily Iraqi dynamics interacting with some changes in what the Americans are doing ended up reducing violence from the terrible terrible levels of 2006-2007, to the just really, really bad levels of today. Even calling what you have in Iraq today a success is deeply offensive because violence in Iraq today is still worse than it is in Afghanistan; people are being blown up and assassinated every day. The government is brutal and ugly and torturous and corrupt.

But violence did go down. It went down primarily not because of the American surge, primarily you had a civil war and the Shias won. It wasn't so much that the Americans defeated the Sunni Arab insurgency, it was that Shia militias brutalized the Sunni population. Shias were the majority, so they had that numerical superiority, and they had the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army working for them too, those were acting for the first three years basically as Shia death squads, and they had the American military on their side. So they brutalized the Sunni population until Sunni militiamen began to realize by summer 2006 that they had lost. [,y emphasis]

Rosen has more to say about The Surge and US policies in both Iraq and Afghanistan in that interview. But that's the key thing about The Surge: the US forces allied with Sunni militias against "Al Qa'ida in Iraq", a mostly Iraqi group with little if any meaningful operation connection to Bin Laden's organization. And this was made possible by the Shi'a militias' bloody victory in the Iraqi civil war, largely supported by US forces.

As Rosen puts it, "Now, you no longer had any more mixed areas to speak of in Iraq; Sunnis and Shias were separated." Later in the interview, he summarizes The Surge this way:

So once the Iraqi civil war had sufficiently devastated its population, the Americans came in there, kind of froze the gains of the civil war with these massive walls, in a way that reminded me of the way that the Dayton accords froze the Serbian gains in the Bosnian civil war.

He means literal walls, in the case of Baghdad:

Iraq was also much easier [than Afghanistan]in the sense that the battle was an urban one for the most part, and you could build these immense walls around different neighborhoods. It was very oppressive, it was like Palestine; it disrupted the social fabric, it made life hell, but it allowed you to control the people and control who went in and who went out of neighborhoods. You could conduct a census and determine who belonged. You could prevent arms and bombs from going in a neighborhood because you controlled the only entry and exit point to it. You could prevent militias from going into a neighborhood. [my emphasis]

Gareth Porter characterized The Surge back in 2008 as follows (The Surge and American Military Triumphalism Huffington Post 01/04/2008):

In 2003 U.S. military forces destroyed the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein and installed a Shiite regime in its stead. The Sunnis predictably launched a military resistance, and the U.S. military began its own war against Sunni insurgents. The presence of a U.S . military occupation force in an Islamic country with some of Islam's holiest sites predictably incited much greater popular support among Sunnis, both within Iraq and in neighboring Sunni countries, for jihadi extremists aligned with al Qaeda.

Thus al Qaeda, which had practically no support in Iraq in 2003, quickly became a major force in 2003 and 2004. By 2005, however, the tensions between al Qaeda and the predominantly Baathist nationalist Sunni insurgents had reached the point of open warfare. That warfare had become even more violent during 2006. The main non-al Qaeda Sunni resistance groups tried to negotiate a peace agreement with the United States in 2005-2006, but Bush refused.

By 2007, however, the Bush administration had changed sides in Iraq. It was more concerned with Shiite forces they associated with Iran than with the Sunni resistance. The United States finally began allowing them to police their own cities - something the Sunnis themselves had been proposing since 2005 but which Bush had refused to approve. The nationalist Sunnis have shown they were perfectly capable of taking care of al Qaeda themselves if the United States would only stop attacking them and get out of the way, which is what they had been saying all along.

In a more recent assessment, Leaked Report, New Iraqi Alignment Reveal U.S. War Failure Inter Press Service 10/25/2010, he writes about information from Wikileaks published in the New York Times, that shed new light on dealings between the Shi'a Prime Minister al-Maliki and Mahdi Army leader Muqtada al-Sadr. The short version is, they teamed up to thwart US efforts to crush the Mahdi Army and maneuver the Cheney-Bush Administration into a withdrawal agreement:

Iran prevailed on Sadr to agree to a unilateral ceasefire in September 2007 and to end fighting in Basra and Sadr City in late March and early May 2008. The latter two agreements prevented U.S. troops from carrying out major offensives in both cases.

The quid pro quo for Sadr's agreement to those ceasefires appears to have been the promise of a U.S. troop withdrawal.

Maliki's renewal of the alliance with Sadr on the way to forming a new Shi'a government has brought strong protest from the Barack Obama administration. U.S. Ambassador James Jeffries has repeatedly said in recent weeks that Sadr's inclusion in an Iraqi government is unacceptable to Washington.

But that protest has only underlined the fact that the United States is the odd man out in the Shi'a-dominated politics of Iraq.

Yet in the mythology of Afghanistan War hawks like Peter Bergen, The Surge in Iraq of 2007-8 was a brilliant triumph of American arms and strategy.

To those of us not among the Serious People, it looks an awful lot like our generals, including our Savior-General Petraeus, taking credit in the name of The Surge for the results of a bloody civil war set off by the American invasion and by the inability of the military under Rummy's leadership to maintain order in occupied Iraq. And accepting the more-or-less unavoidable option of agreeing to a troop withdrawal schedule.

Tags: afghanistan war, coin, counterinsurgency, gareth porter, iraq war

McChrystal's command style

Steven Metz gives an overview of the faults in Gen. Stanley McChrystal's command style in the specific context of the Afghanistan War (Why General Petraeus Is Better Suited for Our Afghanistan Mission Than General McChrystal Ever Was Entanglements 06/24/2010):

Had General McChrystal's configured his organization solely with the destruction of the enemy in mind (as with his Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq, which undertook what the military euphemistically terms "high-value targeting"), his command climate would have been well-matched. But its mission was counterinsurgency, a practice that requires its own skill sets, techniques, and procedures, and, finally, a unique and uniquely sensitive, politically sophisticated command climate.

The cliché contains a kernel of truth: the predominance of the political and the psychological distinguishes counterinsurgency from conventional warfare. Physical effects—what the military calls "kinetic" action—matter less than intangible and mostly psychological outcomes. The complexity of all this cannot be overstated. As a precondition for success, a commander and his organization need to cultivate different perceptions and expectations among multiple and very different audiences. They must persuade the enemy and its supporters that the insurgency has been doomed to failure but also that laying down one’s arms and surrendering offers honorable and realistic options. They must convince local allies—in this case the Afghan people, government, and security forces—that the United States will support them, given certain conditions but regardless of consequence. And they must convince the American people and their elites that the counterinsurgency deserves public support and, indeed, will culminate in something other than a bloody and protracted stalemate or defeat.

Put simply, a strategic communicator ought to know how to communicate. Some military leaders, even supremely talented combat commanders like General McChrystal, have been tested and found wanting in this regard. While there were already rumors swirling within the officer corps to this effect, the explosive Rolling Stone article makes this truth plain for all to see. The command climate at McChrystal's headquarters was keyed to fight a war, but hardly attuned to the psychological and political elements of strategic level counterinsurgency.

Tags: afghanistan war, counterinsurgency

Hearts, minds and McChrystal

Marcy Wheeler's post Ill-Considered Trash Talk McChrystal’s Idea of Winning Hearts and Minds Emptywheel 06/22/2010 makes a connenction that hadn't occurred to me between two of the themes in my previous post:

So take a step back and think about what that means for McChrystal (and should mean for the question of whether or not he gets fired for this). Stanley McChrystal, the guy in charge of winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan, okayed this article, presumably intending it to win hearts and minds in the US.

And McChrystal presumably knows US culture better than he knows Afghanistan culture.

This article is McChrystal’s idea of winning hearts and minds.

Argue what you will about whether McChrystal’s insubordination requires his firing. Argue what you will about his unique qualifications for the job.

But if this is McChrystal’s idea of how to win hearts and minds then we will never achieve success in Afghanistan so long as he’s in charge.

Tags: counterinsurgency, us military

Robert Gates' new presentation of the military's strategic needs

I mentioned in the previous post an article by McClatchy's Nancy Youssef in which she cites the article by Bush-Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Helping Others Defend Themselves: The Future of U.S. Security Assistance" Foreign Affairs May/June 2010, as a broad statement of an allegedly new perspective on counterinsurgency wars that Pentagon-related sources are promoting. In this post, I'm relying on the full version publicly available at Scribd.com; all but the first four paragraphs are behind subscription at the Foreign Affairs website.

As such articles or speeches by senior administration officials typically are, this one mostly presents concepts on a fairly high level of abstraction. So I'll focus here on some items that raise important concerns.

Gates uses it as an I-feel-your-pain type sales pitch in this article. But it's worth noting that he says in it:

As a career CIA officer who watched the military's role in intelligence grow ever larger, I am keenly aware that the Defense Department, because of its sheer size, is not only the 800-pound gorilla of the U.S. government but one with a sometimes very active pituitary gland.

Yes, the Secretary of Defense for both Cheney-Bush and Obama is saying that the Pentagon is so huge it inevitably throws its weight around in the unending contests for budget resources in a way that no civilian agency is capable of doing. What he means by its "very active pituitary gland" is a bit enigmatic. Presumably, he is referring to its role as a growth hormone. The Pituitary Network Association defines that part of its role this way: "the pituitary gland produces growth hormone for normal development of height."

But their definition also includes this:

The pituitary is a small, pea-sized gland located at the base of the brain that functions as "The Master Gland." From its lofty position above the rest of the body it sends signals to the thyroid gland, adrenal glands, ovaries and testes, directing them to produce thyroid hormone, cortisol, estrogen, testosterone, and many more. These hormones have dramatic effects on metabolism, blood pressure, sexuality, reproduction, and other vital body functions.

So the Secretary of Defense could be said to be implying that the Pentagon has an inappropriately central influence on the federal government as a whole.

Like I say, it's more of a sales line. But it's worth remembering the next time some conservative commentator suggests that it's "anti-military" for anyone to make comments along the same lines. Gates also repeats his earlier public comment about the danger of the "creeping militarization" in US foreign policy.

Gates' article presents several red flags to me. One is this:

... there continues to be a struggle for legitimacy, loyalty, and power across the Islamic world between modernizing, moderate forces and the violent, extremist organizations epitomized by al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other such groups.

This is essentially the neoconservative framework for the Global War on Terror (GWOT). In most of the Islamic world, groups of Al Qa'ida's type are not serious contenders for power or mass influence in any meaningful sense of the word. If we had to describe some two side characterizing politics in Islamic countries, Islamic modernizers that don't take anything like the "jihadist" approach to politics and conservative Islamic dictators of various sorts would be a more realistic pair. Al Qa'ida itself probably doesn't exist in anything much resembling its 2001 form, although their jihadist ideology has inspired many other extremist groups. But elevating such small, extremist bands - however dangerous they might be as terrorist threats - into one of the two powers likely to dominate the entire Islamic world in the foreseeable future is major-league threat inflation.

This threat inflation is probably reflected in an odd precedent he cites to suggest a shift from direct combat to what he calls "partner building capacity," which primarily means playing the role of providing aid and assistance to governments fighting opposition groups that the US wants to specially target. He uses the example of US weapons and equipment to Great Britain and the Soviet Union in the early months of the Second World War, "the period before the United States entered World War II." Ever since then, the analogies our policymakers use have had us going to war with essentially nobody but Hitler. North Korea's Kim Il Sung was Hitler, Ho Chi Minh was Hitler, Saddam Hussein was Hitler, now Osama bin Laden hiding out somewhere is Hitler.

But there is an obvious other side to Gates' Second World War analogy. He refers to the time before US entry into the war. Those examples of military assistance to (technically informal) allies was followed by the biggest foreign war in US history. In this case, it was not the military aid that caused the US to enter the war. But eemingly small commitments of military assistance can often start looking like an investment too big to fail. A failure in the initial levels of aid can easily lead to threat inflation of the opposition, which leads to larger commitments, which means that United States Prestige is on the line even more, and we can't afford to back down or [insert your favorite version of the Munich analogy here].

He opens the article by saying:

In the decades to come, the most lethal threats to the United States' safety and security -- a city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack -- are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory. Dealing with such fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main security challenge of our time.

This is also a favorite neoconservative justification for widespread interventions. It's also a very misleading formulation. Bin Laden may have been in Afghanistan, his presence tolerated by the Afghan government under Mullah Omar and the Taliban during the planning of the 9/11 attacks. But most of the actual planning and logistics for them were done in Germany and the United States by the plotters involved. Bin Laden at the time had concentrations of personnel in Afghanistan, a model that Al Qa'ida and other jihadists abandoned after the US attacks took a heavy toll on the Al Qa'ida cadres of 2001. And, though it's heresy to the neocons and most Republicans, the anti-terrorism fight is primarily a matter of national and international law-enforcement as well as necessary security precautions in such places as airplanes, an approach which is infinitely more cost-effective in combatting the actual terrorist threat than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been.

And, as evidenced by the number of violent attacks, killings and foiled plots of the last couple of years, domestic far-right groups are currently the most significant source of potential terrorist threats on American targets. And outside of that same far-right milieu, I don't know of anyone who would describe the United States itself as a failed state. Gates' formulation, in which he has to be presumed to be speaking on behalf of the Obama administration, is an inaccurate statement of the sources of current terrorist threats.

Gates argues for approaching counterinsurgency commitments by "building the institutional capacities) such as defense ministries)" and "the human capital (including leadership skills and attitudes) needed to sustain security over the long term" for regimes we choose to favor with our help. He cites Lebanon, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines as examples of some countries where we have successfully done this in the previous years of the GWOT. It strikes me that there has been painfully little Congressional investigation or mainstream news coverage or public debate over our "assistance interventions" (to coin my own phrase) in any of those five countries but Pakistan. That relative secrecy and lack of scrutiny from outside the Executive Branch or even outside the Pentagon is surely a very appealing aspect of this proposal to Gates and many of our infallible generals.

Another particular red flag for me in Gates' article comes near the end:

Convincing other countries and leaders to be partners of the United States, often at great political and physical risk, ultimately depends on proving that the United States is capable of being a reliable partner over time. To be blunt, this means that the United States cannot cut off assistance and relationships every time a country does something Washington dislikes or disagrees with.

He mentions earlier that prior to the 9/11 attacks:

... Washington cut off military-to-military exchange and training programs with Pakistan, for well-intentioned but ultimately shortsighted - and strategically damaging - reasons.

The main well-intentioned but shortsighted reason was Pakistan's role as the greatest purveyor of nuclear proliferation. This may be the most disturbing single piece of Gates' article. Containing nuclear proliferation is a more vital interest of the United States than fighting terrorism. Though the two are obviously related in some ways.

Gates is suggesting a kind of once-in-never-out theory of US military assistance. His statement about "being a reliable partner over time" only makes sense if it means taking cuts in military assistance off the table as a diplomatic tool. Which would be even more of that creeping militarization of US foreign policy about which he claims to be concerned. Since our military aid dwarfs other forms of foreign aid, taking military assistance off the table as a potential tool of diplomatic pressure would drastically reduce the United States' ability to use normal tools of diplomacy. This is true with Pakistan and India on nonproliferation issues. It's true of Israel, where only a significant reduction in US military aid is ever going to bring them to halt and reverse the settlement policy in the West Bank, a goal which is at least nominally the official policy of the United States. And there are many other situations where that would be the case, as well.

All in all, I don't see a lot that's encouraging when it comes to a more realistic and pragmatic military policy in Gates' article.

Tags: counterinsurgency, nuclear nonproliferation

Our endless wars

Wow, the Pentagon has a brand-new, whiz-bang, cutting-edge idea! Let's forget all this counterinsurgency hoo-haw and go back to, well, something that sounds an awful lot like preparing to defend Western Europe against the Soviet Red Army pouring through the Fulda gap. Also known as, instead of screwing around trying to fight counterinsurgencies, let's go back to just planning to bomb the crap out of any country we think we need to attack this week. From Nancy Youssef, Pentagon rethinking value of major counterinsurgencies McClatchy Newspapers 05/12/10:

Counterinsurgency "is a good way to get out of a situation gone bad," but it's not the best way to use combat forces, said Andrew Exum, a fellow with the Washington-based Center for a New American Security. "I think everyone realizes counterinsurgency is a losing proposition for U.S. combat troops. I can't imagine anyone would opt for this option."

Many Pentagon strategists think that future counterinsurgencies should involve fewer American ground troops and more military trainers, special forces and airstrikes. Instead of "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here," as former President George W. Bush once defined the Afghan and Iraq wars, the Pentagon thinks it must train local populations to fight local insurgents.

The military calls it "foreign internal defense," although some have a pithier name: counterinsurgency light. [my emphasis]

This is a complicated issue, because the arguments against current strategies can lead to new strategies that aren't so great, either. As Youssef (one of the best foreign affairs reporters for a US news service) puts it:

... U.S. military strategists are quietly shifting gears, saying that large-scale counterinsurgency efforts cost too much and last too long.

... The biggest spur ... is a growing recognition that large-scale counterinsurgency battles have high casualty rates for troops and civilians, eat up equipment that must be replaced and rarely end in clear victory or defeat.

But this may be the key point of this new (?) direction: "The newer approach is on display in Yemen and Pakistan, countries in which the U.S. faces entrenched extremist organizations with ties to al Qaida."

US military involvement in both Pakistan and Yemen is highly questionable, to put it mildly. Both are the result of mission creep. The descriptions from the Pentagon-related sources in this article present those interventions as something almost easy and benign. In fact, ill-conceived small-scale interventions can lead to much bigger complications and much deeper involvement.

Reinforcing the impression of the Pentagon wanting to go back to preparing to fight the Red Army of the USSR that came to an end nearly two decades ago is this part of Youssef's article:

The shift to a lighter form of counterinsurgency also incorporates the Obama administration's national security view, which calls for getting troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. forces are set to begin leaving Afghanistan in July 2011, and a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is to be complete by the end of that year.

It also, military strategists said, allows the United States to prepare better for a future war that would be fought against another country, not against relatively amorphous terrorist groups.

U.S. officials acknowledge that since 9/11 there's been little training for the kind of coordinated land, sea and air battles that have characterized most of the United States' previous conflicts. While no one wants to predict where such a war might be fought, military strategists say that U.S. troops could be involved in battles between India and Pakistan, North and South Korea, and China and Taiwan. [my emphasis]

Here is where criticism of existing strategies gets very tricky. On the one hand, in the foreseeable future, its more likely that the US military will be required to fight counterinsurgencies rather than Gulf War I, which is the kind most of our generals would likely prefer to prepare for. On the other hand, the US needs an approach that puts reasonable limits on the length and intensity of US involvement in couterinsurgency kinds of situations. Open-ended counterinsurgency commitments, which is what we wound up with in Iraq and Afghanista, just don't make sense.

And it really is a fundamental problem that the US military is just too big. As long as the US is spending half or so of the military budgets of the world, as long as we maintain forces far in excess of those required to deal with any remotely likely conventional or nuclear military attacker, as long as we define the military's goal as being immediately prepared to fight and win wars anywhere in the world (or something similar), then we - "we" in this case meaning the military-industrial establishment - will find new dangers for which we must prepare and new crises that may call for US military intervention.

But short of breaking the basic Cold War habit, something neither the Democrats nor certainly the Republicans are ready to attempt, we could break the never-leave habit established by the Second World War and the Korean War, the latter probably being the more relevant example. The Pentagon is reluctant to completely disengage militarily from anyplace we have a war. The Iraq War and the Afghanistan War should have endings, endings that include US combat forces leaving completely, including mercenaries and combat forces rebranded as "trainers." So should our interventions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Youssef cites the article by Bush-Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates, "Helping Others Defend Themselves: The Future of U.S. Security Assistance" Foreign Affairs May/June 2010, as a broad statement of this new perspective.

Tags: counterinsurgency

Not shooting ourselves in the foot

Stephen Walt argues in What I told the Navy Foreign Policy Online 06/18/09 that the US is and will remain the predominant global power for the foreseeable future, i.e., decades. And that "the United States can do more to harm itself through misguided policies than our adversaries can do to us through deliberate acts of malevolence". And he details some of the more important mistakes to avoid:

The first self-inflicted wound the United States could make would be to spend too much on national security. ...

A second self-inflicted wound is the recurring tendency to view allies as liabilities rather than assets.

His third point of caution is one that touches on an issue that needs a lot more clarity in the public debate than our current political and media establishments seem able to muster. One the one hand, it makes sense to prepare for the likelihood that we will be fighting other wars in the Middle East and South Asia. And it would be foolish to keep on developing a military designed to fight the Soviet Union in Europe, which is largely what the Pentagon has done since the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, unilateral conquest and protracted colonial-style warfare like we have in both Iraq and Afghanistan right now is not something that we should plan on repeating. There could always be a need for some limited action like the initial months of the Afghanistan War, which should have focused much more exclusively on finding, capturing and/or destroying actual units of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida group. There needs to be a useful balance between preparing for such wars, for instance, by teaching Arabic to a lot more of our soldiers. But there's also an effect that if we plan for taking over countries and trying to do what we've been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we'll be tempted to find opportunities to use those capabilities in cases where doing so is not in the national interest, and/or where applying such capabilities in an Iraq- or Afghanistan-type protracted war will be in itself damaging to our interests.

The third self-inflicted wound is forgetting what the U.S. military is and isn't designed to do, and ending up in costly efforts to remake the politics of areas that we do not understand. U.S. armed forces are extremely good at deterring or reversing large-scale conventional aggression, at preserving balance of power in key regions, and contributing to other aspects of global stability, like putting teeth in programs like the Proliferation Security Initiative. But the United States is not good at governing other societies -- who is? -- particularly when it lacks detailed knowledge of the societies in question, has insufficient language skills within the national security and foreign policy establishments, and when the prerequisites for democracy are absent from these areas. It follows that our current preoccupation with counterinsurgency -- which is largely an artifact of the decisions to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq on a long-term basis -- is a strategic misstep. [my emphasis]

In the end, wars are political decisions. And when the Executive and the Congress may decisions about wars on the flimsy basis that such decisions were made with both Afghanistan and especially Iraq, no amount of preparation by the military is going to be able to avoid bad results. What's happening right now is that Pentagon is still focusing on massive resources for nuclear and conventional war and tacking on counterinsurgency (COIN) capabilities as an extra. Although in practice, the latter seems to be little more than conventional war adapted to to bombing villages and adapting conventional tactics to small-unit urban guerrilla warfare than any basic re-orientation of methods of warfare. And it's hard to see how it can be much different, unless we own up to intending to do in the future what we've been doing for the last seven years and counting in Afghanistan and six years and counting in Iraq: something not a lot different that British and French colonial warfare with up-to-date weaponry.

And owning up to that would bring its own set of problems.

Tags: coin, counterinsurgency, stephen walt, us foreign policy

Walls in Iraq

A big part of the alleged success of The Surge of 2007-8 came from the establishment in Baghdad of neighborhoods that had undergone sectarian cleansing along Shi'a-Sunni lines. And part of The Surge strategy was to construct a system of walls in Baghdad that reinforce the separate sectarian characteristics of neighborhoods. While it has played a role in reducing violence in the overall context of the American approach, it makes sectarian reconciliation even more of a challenge. And sectarian reconcilation was supposedly the political goal of The Surge.

Steve Neva in "Walling Off Iraq: Israel's Imprint on U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine" Middle East Policy Fall 2008 looks at this aspect of a phenemenon that I don't see discussed very much in the US commentary on the Iraq War, which is great extent to which American counterinsurgency (COIN) approaches in the Middle East are influenced by Israel's approach.

This always concerns me when I hear about it. Because Israel was founded in 1948 and has had conflicts with the Palestinians ever since. That conflict entered a new stage in 1967 with the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. That was 41 years ago. And there is no end in sight to Israel's conflict with Palestinian terrorism. I'm not exactly sure what kind of "success" that represents.

Neva writes:

Although overall measurements of violence in Iraq may have numerically declined, Iraq has become increasingly caged within an archipelago of isolated ethnic [more accurately, sectarian] enclaves surrounded by walls and razor wire and reinforced by an aerial occupation.

He expands on the point:

Yet, while the military touts its increased use of embedded anthropologists and “human terrain systems” teams as examples of this new culture-friendly approach, the cornerstone of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq today is less about cultivating human relationships or political solutions than about limiting and imposing them, primarily through concrete walls backed by increased violence from the skies above Iraq.

This surge in walls and enclaves suggests that the primary “lessons of history” being followed by the U.S. military’s actual counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq today derive less from Malaya, Algeria or Vietnam, than from Israel’s urban-warfare laboratory in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip over the past decade. [my emphasis]

Now, obviously, there's nothing wrong with learning from Israel's experiences. But given what we're seeing in Iraq, I have to wonder how much our military's COIN experts are taking into account the downsides of the Israeli experience.

Neva also points to the plausible likelihood that the strategy of targeted assassination by aerial strikes that we've seen practiced by the Cheney-Bush administration not only in Iraq but in Pakistan, Somalia and Syria is also heavily influenced by Israeli practices, if not by any demonstrated long-term net benefit:

[Israel] has erected hundreds of miles of separation walls and high-tech fences and over 400 checkpoints across occupied territory that enclose Palestinians within an archipelago of enclaves in order to separate them from each other and from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

This strategy is maintained under a blanket of aerial surveillance and deadly unmanned drones, backed up by frequent airborne assassinations and strikes.

It seems to me that it's important to recognize that, official rhetoric aside, Israeli policy in the West Bank has in practice been build around a model of permanent occupation and a willingness to continue such "low-intensity" (i.e., counterinsurgency) operations indefinitely. It's already been going on for 41 years. As Neva describes it:

The United States continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel’s responses to
unconventional war have never been well developed or very successful. It was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice. Its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israel is arguably more insecure now than it has ever been.

Is that really the optimal model for the US in Iraq and Afghanistan and the various other countries against which this administration has been making strikes predicated on the aerial-assassination strategy? (Just to be clear, when I refer to targeted assassinations, I mean air strikes aimed at killing particular individuals, like the one that alleged successfully targeted Rashid Rauf in Pakistan early today their time.)

Neva gives the immediate background of this desire to copy Isreal's approaches of dubious long-term success:

[N]ew U.S. military deployments in Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti and then in the Balkans in the early 1990s provoked a longer-term recognition that the future of war was likely to include unconventional and counterinsurgent warfare, and a growing strategic desire to find a way to “win” such conflicts.

In this context Israel emerged as a default model for how to directly fight insurgencies, especially after the “Black Hawk down” debacle of 1993 in Somalia, which led U.S. military strategists to rethink their approach to fighting urban warfare in Third World “battle spaces.” In the following years, according to urban theorist Mike Davis, Israeli advisers were brought in to teach Marines, Rangers and Navy Seals the state-of-the-art tactics against urban insurgencies that Israel was using to suppress Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. At that time, the United States had an almost dreamy regard for Israel’s military acumen: lightning victories on the battlefield, ruthless pursuit of enemies, and intelligence agencies worthy of great deference. [my emphasis]

Nava points out that despite the seemingly enlightened talk from our generals that counterinsurgencies can't be solved by military means - a line that also serves as an alibi for the military's failures - Israeli and American COIN strategies in practice seem to assume the opposite:

Behind the use of Israeli-style walls and enclaves in Iraq there appears to be a deeper U.S. embrace of a new post-Vietnam strategic doctrine regarding counterinsurgent warfare that bears many similarities with Israel. It is based on the
belief that violent insurgencies against foreign military occupation can actually be
defeated through shifting military tactics rather than through a political solution that addresses the root of the insurgency, namely an end to foreign occupation.

Which is a strategy that makes sense if it's aimed at implementing a foreign policy like Israel's in the West Bank oriented toward an essentially permanent state of violent conflict. And in practice, the Israelis see that state as something very much like "winning".

But that's not how the famous COIN doctrine of our Savior-General Petraeus is being passed off to the American public. It is consistent, though, with Cheney's original idea of a permanent occupation of Iraq with the ability to use bases in Iraq as jumping-off points for applying "regime change" in other Middle Eastern countries.

With our generals now hinting at a "surge" (aka, military escalation) in Afghanistan of as many as 20,000 troops, these aspects of the Savior-General's COIN strategy need to be examined closely.

And in the broader sense, this has implications for long-term US military planning. On the one hand, given actual experience of the last two decades especially, it makes sense to maintain a higher level of COIN capability than our glorious generals did prior to 2001. But on the other, if that COIN capability is based on a deeply flawed approach, that could wind up doing a lot more harm than good. Especially if we go looking for wars in which to apply those mistaken COIN appraoches.

Tags: counterinsurgency, coin, iraq war, steve neva, surge

More on information warfare directed at the American public

This is another piece in the Summer 2008 Parameters that is a basically arguing for the need to our military to wage information operations aimed at propagandizing the American public, Waging Communication War by Kenneth Payne. He writes:

Communication in this period became a force multiplier - reassuring local populations and building productive information relationships, and helping to shore up support for the policy goals with domestic American audiences. General David Petraeus’s appearances before Congress, ostensibly about oversight, were useful for building domestic support for a costly deployment and a revitalized counterinsurgency strategy.

Sound strategy, then, is an essential prerequisite of effective communication. But the relationship should not only be in one direction. Strategists would do well to reflect on the opinion of audiences, leveraging them in pursuit of policy goals, and working with the grain of the audience rather than against it. If war is conceived as a violent struggle of wills between opposing forces, and moreover, one in which these forces are competing for the will of a population, then shrewd commanders should reflect on the characteristics of the audiences with which they are communicating. To persuade an audience, one ought to have a persuasive message, and this makes understanding the audience vital. (my emphasis)

The more I hear of this kind of argument, that war is "a violent struggle of wills", and not just of wills of the opposing armies, but the "will of a population", the more it seems to me an inherently undemocratic notion when it defines public opinion of the warring country as a specifically military factor, failing to make the critical democratic distinctions between military responsibilities and civilian.

Payne makes that tendency even more explicit:

That is a tricky communication challenge given the views of a large segment of the domestic American audience, where a slim plurality favors bringing forces home quickly, and with whom the war in Iraq is becoming increasingly unpopular. This domestic audience is vital for the counterinsurgent, but is typically neglected in studies of counterinsurgency. Sooner or later, as the French discovered in Indochina and Algeria, lackluster domestic support produces tangible battlefield results - resources may not be forthcoming, the public is no longer prepared to accept the price in blood, treasure, and prestige of sustaining the unpopular defense of nonexistential causes.

Democratic states have proved to be poor counterinsurgents. They lack the repressive brutality that totalitarian regimes demonstrate in suppressing political dissent; they operate on a democratic cycle that is much shorter than the timeline typically required for counterinsurgency; and the attitudes of the domestic audience have the ability to definitively shape policy, by means of the ballot box or by exerting pressure on elected officials. (my emphasis)

I should note that the polls showing only a plurality of Americans are in favor of "bringing forces home quickly" from Iraq make a distinction between "quickly" and "within a year". Large majorities for years now have fallen within those two categories. And most antiwar activists consider a year to be the quickest feasible withdrawal time. His presentation is very misleading on that point. It would be more accurate to say that a plurality wants to get the troops out of Iraq even faster than most antiwar activists think is even feasible.

What can you say to this? Democracies tend to oppose colonial-type wars that involve protracted warfare because normal people generally don't like war! And any remotely sane approach to war of any kind has to attempt to make some reasonable assessment of costs in comparison to possible benefits.

French people who came to oppose the Algerian War were right that the costs were greater than any reasonably possible benefits to France. Americans who made a similar assessment about the Vietnam War were also right. And people who now favor a withdrawal from Iraq are right in their desire, and more reasonable in their cost-benefit assessments than McCain and other war zealots.

Part of the problem of discussing the Will of the home population as a technical military factor is that it effectively hides the usually-implied ideological argument, which is that it is illegitimate for the people of a country to make the judgment that a particular war is costing more than it's worth to their country. That's not democracy. And it's that kind of thinking that made the Founders worry that a standing army would be a danger to democracy.

Tags: counterinsurgency, iraq war, kenneth payne

Air war: the invincible key to Victory

Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, Jr., writes on Making Revolutionary Change: Airpower in COIN Today in Parameters Summer 2008. (Yes, I'm on a roll of summarizing those articles.)

He opens with a 2008 quotation from Tony Cordesman, a former national-security advisor to Sen. John McCain and now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), "Much of the reporting on the Iraqi and Afghan wars focuses on the ground dimension. ... The fact remains, however, that Iraq and Afghanistan are air wars as well, and wars where airpower has also played a critical role in combat."

Dunlap's article explains that the current counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24 for short, written under the direction of our Savior-General David Petraeus, did provide an accurate forecast of how COIN operations in Iraq proceeded in 2007-8. Because air power played a much larger role than FM 3-24 envisioned.

Dunlap is making a pitch for the usefulness of air power in COIN warfare. This is a pretty good statement of the undying faith of air power zealots in the infinite usefulness of their favorite service:

Was airpower omitted from the operations that produced 2007’s successes? Hardly. Of enormous significance is the fact that airstrikes in Iraq increased fivefold between 2006 and 2007. In addition, virtually every other aspect of airpower was exploited during the surge with great effect. In short, contrary to the assumptions bred by FM 3-24, ground-force commanders rather unexpectedly embraced airpower’s potential and created the modern era’s most dramatic revolution in COIN warfare.

This article examines why airpower became critical to COIN operations in 2007, a trend continuing today and one with huge implications for the future. Among other things, it will discuss the revolutions in precision and persistence that have so radically enhanced airpower’s value in COIN warfare. It will also outline the strengths and weaknesses of the Air Force’s new doctrine on irregular warfare which seeks to capture the service’s COIN approach. The author argues that while FM 3-24’s surface-force-centric approach to COIN can work, recent experience in Iraq demonstrates that leaders of all services want a more joint and interdependent concept that exploits airpower in all its dimensions. Such an approach can reduce the need for the enormous numbers of US ground forces FM 3-24 entails, freeing them to prepare for other kinds of conflicts. Airpower can help, this article contends, to provide options for decisionmakers faced with a COIN challenge that capitalize on systems which are also useful in other kinds of conflicts. (my emphasis)

This is basically the boilerplate argument for using air power in fighting counterinsurgency wars, in Iraq primarily against urban combatants. The claim is that "precision and persistence" minimize civilian casualties. But actual experience doesn't bear that out. And when the US Air Force is dropping 2,000-lb. bombs in crowded urban residential areas, it's almost certain that civilian casualties will result.

They also make the pitch that because air power can accomplish such magically effective things that it reduces the need for ground troops, and therefore minimizes American casualties. I'm convinced this is the thinking behind McCain's claims that Americans care only about American casualties, not the presence of American troops in Iraq.

In fact, we've seen over and over, in Vietnam and now in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the heavy reliance of artillery and air power actually has a major effect in undercutting the long-term possibilities of political stabilization.

You can guess the general line of Dunlap's argument from here. The Surge was successful - because it used so much bombing and shooting from air power. The Air Force has super-duper weapons that can practically obliterate a gnat on someone's arm while leaving the person unscathed. And we have golly-gee new technology like unmanned armed drones to kill people with. He even quotes defense analyst Loren Thompson those drones provide really neato-keeno intelligence, too, "almost like having your own little satellite over a terrorist cell."

And, besides, those backward natives are so dumb and barbaric that they're scared to death of our magic air weapons, which primitives like them can't possibly fathom:

The precision and persistence of today’s airpower creates opportunities to dislocate the psychology of the insurgents. Insurgents’ sheer inability to anticipate how high-technology airpower might put them at risk can inflict stress, thereby greatly diminishing their effectiveness.

Don't bother thinking too hard about what a phrase like "dislocate the psychology" of someone may mean. It's all a bunch of hype about how super-terrifying and superior our weapons are. Why, he says, "Airpower can unnerve even the fiercest fighters."

None of this is new. This has been the promise of air power since it was invented. In the 1930s, it was anticipated that bombing cities would cause public morale to crumple and make their side continuing the war impossible. There were similar claims in subsequent wars. The toys for the boys were different in Vietnam, but the optimistic claims were similar. In fact, no amount of disconfirmation of such theories by actual experience seems to phase the faith of the air power true believers.

This is a classic profession of faith:

As important as imposing this kind of "friction" on the minds of enemy combatants may be, it is also still possible in certain circumstances to use airpower kinetically to influence the civilian population, albeit not in the traditional way. Doing so can help win hearts and minds. For example, consider the effect when B-1 bombers destroyed an al Qaeda torture compound in early March 2008. After the facility was flattened, a former Iraqi victim declared, "I'm a lot happier now . ... It was like my mother gave birth to me again." Furthermore reports say that "[a]s Coalition forces left the area, villagers stood on the side of the road cheering and clapping to be rid of this remnant of al-Qaida." (my emphasis)

What? No flowers being showered underneath the planes' flight paths?

After this, I wouldn't have been surprised to see him write that air power helps paint schools and distributes candy to friendly kiddies, favorite images of the CENTCOM press office.

The realities of the effects of air power are so different from what Dunlap tries to convey here that it's almost a joke. But COIN in the "in" thing in the military right now. And, like during the Vietnam War, the Air Force doesn't want to come up short on the budget bucks. Budget dollars are no joking matter for them.

But in terms of what really happens, the notion that he outlines in the conclusion that we can successfully wage counterinsurgency warfare in foreign countries by relying mainly on blasting villages and urban neighborhoods from the air is just cracked:

Considering all the brutal realities of twenty-first century insurgencies it is imperative, as strategist Phillip Meilinger observes, to completely recast America's approach to COIN in an effort to achieve "politically desirable results with the least cost in blood and treasure." Doing so, Meilinger contends, requires the adaptation of a new paradigm that leverages airpower's precision strike and persistent ISR capabilities with US Special Forces and indigenous troops on the ground - much the formula employed with great success in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and northern Iraq in the early 1990s. Overarching this effort would be a reconceptualization of the entire fight against extremism, one that makes psychological operations the main "weapon" and posits an intelligence entity as the supported command.

To be sure, a COIN doctrine compatible with America's posture in the world, as well as its high-tech strengths, does not necessarily eliminate the need for "boots-on-the-ground." It does, however, emphasize that indigenous forces should comprise the bulk of the counterinsurgent force ratios outlined in FM 3-24. They can be supported by US Special Forces, along with specially trained Army advisers, but the "face" of the COIN effort interfacing with the local population should be native, not American. This blend of local ground forces reinforced with US advisers and sophisticated American technology can work; recent reports, for example, "showed the Iraqi Army to be considerably resilient when backed by Coalition airpower." Necessary for success, however, is not just any kind of airpower, but rather the high-tech precision and persistence-enabled airpower that has proven so effective since 2007.

Of course, the solution to any COIN situation will never be exclusively military. Yet at the same time it is a mistake to underestimate what military means can accomplish. In that respect, exploitation of the air weapon can contribute as never before. The experience of 2007 clearly demonstrates that its newfound precision and persistence have revolutionized COIN warfare. US doctrine must evolve to fully capitalize airpower's newly enhanced prowess. (my emphasis)

As Tom Englehardt and Nick Turse have argued for a long time, the mainstream press is doing a poor job on reporting about the air war. The fact that such potentially disastrous theories as the one argued by Dunlap are being taken seriously by decisionmakers is another reminder of how important it is for the press to start doing their job much better on this aspect of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tags: air power, air war, charles dunlap jr, counterinsurgency, iraq war

COIN in Iraq

In another of the articles in the Summer 2008 Parameters is With Friends Like These: Grievance, Governance, and Capacity-Building in COIN by Robert Chamberlain. He looks at the lessons of counterinsurgency (COIN) in El Salvador in order to draw some lessons in evaluating the Iraq War.

One lesson he draws is that the US messed up big-time in building the ISF (Iraqi Security Forces):

Coalition planners assumed that the Iraqi security forces would be a public institution that acted in the best interests of the entire population. The commanders of the National Police had other plans. The Ministry of the Interior was initially controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shia group that, as its name suggests, wishes to remold Iraq into a Shia republic along the Iranian model. Having experienced severe repression at the hands of the state security forces in the Saddam era, they viewed control of the police forces as an absolute necessity. The Iraqi police, and especially the Iraqi National Police, became a force created with Coalition resources and yet subverted to advance a violent sectarian agenda.

The result was predictable. Just as good intentions in El Salvador fueled the creation of [a counterinsurgency group called] ORDEN and the murder of thousands of campesinos, good intentions in Iraq created the National Police and resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. National Police units facilitated the operation of Shia death squads in neighborhoods they were responsible for, ran their own network of secret prisons and torture chambers, and were implicated in repeated massacres of Sunni civilians. The situation became so bad that an entire Iraqi police commando brigade was taken off line for retraining, nine brigade and 17 battalion commanders were replaced, and the Coalition pressured Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki into naming a new, reformist Minister of the Interior.

Unfortunately, the damage caused by the rush to achieve security through the creation of the National Police may be irreversible. Much like the structures of ORDEN [in El Salvador] that survived the formal dissolution of the organization in 1980, the Ministry of the Interior and the National Police have proven resistant to reform. Despite Coalition efforts, the force is still overwhelmingly Shia, and the government has ignored a recently created police training center in Anbar Province, according to its commander. Additionally, the National Police are widely reviled and have been so thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the population that General James Jones’s commission on Iraqi Security Forces recommended it be entirely disbanded. (my emphasis)

I'll ask my tired question again. If a US Army War College publication like Parameters can publish straightforward, critical analyses like this that reflect reality rather than the Bush administration line, why can't the Establishment press do it more often?

Chamberlain also makes a point of how important it is that the external allies supporting counterinsurgency efforts keep a credible threat of withdrawal. The Republicans seem incapable these days of even considering such a thing:

A successful counterinsurgency campaign has to carry within it a credible threat of withdrawal. Rather than a security plan that will be implemented regardless of political change, security aid should be tied to political benchmarks. Consistent failure to achieve those benchmarks can result in the continual drawdown and eventual elimination of US support. In one sense this is brinksmanship - the host nation government's fear of revolution versus the US government's discomfort with instability. But in another, it's just common sense; without political reform, American forces will be mired in and contributing to the perpetuation of an unending conflict. Feckless, self-interested, sectarian politicians do not deserve the sacrifices in blood and treasure required to prop up their regimes. (my emphasis)

Again, why can't our Big Pundits ever seem to put things this clearly?

Tags: counterinsurgency, iraq war, robert chamberlain

War casualties, counterinsurgency and the stab-in-the-back excuse

I've commented before on the notion, deeply ingrained among our foreign policy and military "elite", that the American public has a low tolerance for casualties in war. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world in which our Serious Foreign Policy Experts sometimes live, this is taken to be a bad thing and a weakness. Why any damn fool would be indifferent to casualties incurred in war is very hard for me to even imagine.

But it's also not true in the sense that the conventional wisdom of the "experts" holds it. The American public is perfectly capable of distinguishing between a necessary war along with the casualties it involves and a war that is unnecessary with the unnecessary casualties that are part of it. (The ability of a dishonest and irresponsible administration to stampede the country into a war initially is a separate issue.)

But this notion is amazingly resilient among people who one might think would take a more critical look at it. For instance, Beyond Iraq: The Lessons of a Hard Place by Anton Smith with Conrad Crane (US Army Center for Strategic Leadership Student Issue Paper) July 2007:

As illustrated by French knights' resistance to the British introduction of the longbow in 1346, or the British befuddlement when confronted by colonial snipers during the American Revolution, advantage accrues to the creative. Innovation can shift the odds of victory. Low-tech approaches can threaten high-tech yet doctrinaire capabilities, the very deployment of which is delicately balanced on fragile political will and low tolerance for casualties in the U.S. Military superiority relegates conventional force-on-force conflict to the past, and today’s strategic leaders must recognize the vulnerability created by power that shifts our opponents' targeting to the civil society our military is designed to protect. Eisenhower's warning has come true. The juggernaut of our defense bureaucracy and the attendant industrial complex is animated by factors that have become obsolete. (my emphasis)

Let's give Smith and Crane credit for creativity here. This is the first time I've ever seen Eisenhower's famous warning about militarism in the form of the military-industrial complex in support of the notion that the American public is just too dang weak-kneed and cowardly to support the glorious wars our Serious Experts dream up for American soldiers to fight.

Later on, he says that Muslim terrorists groups "now target the West, taking aim at the will of the population, nibbling away at public confidence."

Smith and Crane make some good points, like about the blowback we've experienced from assisting the brave mujaheddin freedom fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviets. That would be the mujaheddin freedom fighters of the kind that we know call The Terrorists who Bush repeatedly reminds us hate us for our values and want to kill us all in our beds or whatever.

But the more valuable ideas like that are heavily mixed in with more dubious notions about the nature of transnational terrorism and this flawed notion about the gutless American public and highly dubious clash-of-civilizations ideas. They even rely on the theory of nations from Catholic mystic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which kind of boggles my mind to see. Although it's not surprising that the way they use it doesn't make much sense.

They also rely on the mystical theology of economist Milton Friedman on the magic power of the Free Market. In their view, the occupation authorities didn't apply enough free-market shock therapy to Iraq in the first year or so. Teilhard's mystical notions look like rock-solid pragmatism next to such a fanciful view.

The synopsis of the article on the Army War College Web site is misleading:

The war in Iraq is revealing the weakness of a U.S. foreign policy focused disproportionately on conventional military power and unilateral action. Current policy overlooks the ways in which a global jihadist insurgency is undercutting the modern states system. Understanding cultural and historical differences between the West and the rest of the world, as well as the primacy of economic development over political process is critical to ensuring U.S. interests are advanced. Alliances with and mechanisms for support of regional states are essential to safeguard the current order. Rebalancing our focus on the instruments of national power – with particular attention to diplomacy and economic development – will be key to the containment and shaping of inevitable instability in the Middle East.

That synopsis makes it sound like Smith and Crane are arguing against the expansionist, unilateralist thrust of the Bush Doctrine.

In fact, their argument provides a great example of what I've been saying about the notion of shifting American military forces to a greater counterinsurgency (COIN) capability. This is not a matter of predicting the challenges of some inevitable, immutable future. The mix of forces should be driven by a sensible foreign policy. Smith and Crane are arguing that wars like Iraq could be won if we just were less concerned about all this democracy and human rights crap and were willing to be more ruthless in applying faith-based free-market economic theories to the countries we conquer and occupy. (That seems to be what the synopsis-writer transmuted into "the primacy of economic development over political process".) For example:

As the National Security Strategy notes, many countries accumulating oil revenue suffer weak leadership. The problem is not so much in the transfer of power, through money, to these countries as it is distribution of that power within them. Saddam Hussein maintained a tighter grip on economic power than he did on political power. He did so by concentrating oil wealth in a single account under his control. Such power has a corrupting influence. Essentially, we left Saddam’s economic system intact for a weak and divided government to squabble over. We should not be surprised if the result is unfavorable. When faced with similar opportunities in the future, we should focus on establishment of capitalist, free-market systems that disperse power, and which complement the political and humanitarian goals we also wish to advance. Absent new exercises in preemption and regime change, economic reforms should remain at the very top of our national agenda in all international relationships, particularly in the Middle East. Strong and economically vibrant middle classes will do more to support our goals than all the military power we can muster. (my emphasis)

Now, is it wimpishness and cowardice that would make most people say, "What the [Cheney]?!?", when they see supposedly serious analysts referring to more situations like the Iraq War as "similar opportunities in the future"? Or is it simply curiosity and astonishment at their seeming disconnection from reality?

Similar opportunities in the future? Maybe what we need is a Tom Sawyer Fence Doctrine, in which we concentrate on conning other countries - preferably ones that we don't like very much - into pursuing such "similar opportunities" in our place.

But this idea of the American public being too reluctant to accept casualties in war is a key element of the already-developing "stab-in-the-back" arguments that are being used to exonerate Republican politicians, neoconservative ideologues and our infallible generals for the disaster known as the Iraq War. So the concept deserves the closest and most critical scrutiny when it pops up.

Tags: anton smith, beyond iraq the lessons of a hard place, conrad crame, counterinsurgency, iraq war, stab-in-the-back

The military and the media

Gen. David Petraeus - Is managing American public opinion part of his "battlespace"?

Two recent articles on counterinsurgency (COIN) raise the issue of "information operations" in the broader sense of managing public perceptions in war via the various news media: Neo-Classical Insurgency? by Frank Hoffman Parameters Summer 2007 and New Paradigms for 21st Century Conflict by David Kilcullen eJournal (US State Department) May 2007. I quote some of the key passages below.

"Information operations" were traditionally aimed at enemy armed forces or enemy populations, from messages to mislead the enemy about troop movements to propaganda leaflets and broadcasts directly to the enemy country's citizens. But especially in insurgency situations, information operations is taken to include influencing broader audiences, including the American public.

Military discussions about "information operations" as they related to American opinion have to be evaluated in the context of a particular view of the Vietnam War widely held among military officers, the Christian Right and various Republican ideologues. In this view the US military won the Vietnam War. But the gutless civilians, hippie protesters and weak-kneed Congress lost the war by refusing to support an open-ended commitment to continuing American participation in the war. And chief blame for that loss of political Will is placed on "the media".

Refighting the Vietnam media "war"

I've posted a number of times on the problems of that analysis of the Vietnam War and I won't recap them here. But the prevalence of that view, flawed though it is, means that whatever the views of particular writers on "information operations", much of their audience is going to process their work from the viewpoint of this the-military-won-the-Vietnam-War framework. Which means they are likely to view management of American public opinion as a key military task. And that they are likely to understand that as being primarily a function of manipulating media coverage of the war and the military.

That has led in practice to the military managing to repeat in the Iraq War their basic mistakes in their public communications during the Vietnam War.

The basic problem can be seen in this statement from Gen. Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in April 2005: "I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time."

It doesn't matter how favorable the attitude of the press is, when military spokespeople keep repeating happy-face assurances like that in a war like the one in Iraq that has gone on longer than US participation in the Second World War with no happy ending (or no ending at all!) in sight, people stop believing it. It's the opposite of the proverbial "crying wolf". When the generals constantly cry "no wolf" by promising progress, tipping points, turning points and victory, when the situation is obviously a terrible mess, after a while most people won't believe it even if events change to make the smiley-face predictions closer to reality.

Nobody expects military spokespeople to go out and badmouth an ongoing war effort. But they should at least be realistic about what happens to the military's public credibility when the pep-rally pronouncements keep crashing and burning.

Members of Congress as well as most voters can and do distinguish between the credibility of generals and military spokespeople, on the one hand, and the success of a war policy, on the other. Our generals could reduce the damage to their own credibility from a bad war policy by learning some basic lessons from the experience of the Iraq War.

One is to report casualties as realistically as possible, on both the American side and the enemy's side, including civilian casualties. Another is to avoid bone-headed stunts like the Jessica Lynch rescue action-video. And downright sleazy acts like lying to Pat Tillman's family about his "friendly-fire" death. Things like that convey a sense that the military leadership doesn't respect its own soldiers and their families, much less the public.

There's also a distinction, to use business terms, between marketing as a broad concept and advertising in the more narrow sense. Even the best product needs good advertising. But even the best advertising can't make up for a bad product. In the war context, even ugly war-crimes incidents like Haditha don't necessarily damage the military's credibility among the public, provided the chain of command follows the law and their own rules and prosecutes them. Doing so consistently could even produce a net increase in the military's public credibility in the short run.

The best advertising won't save a bad product

On the other hand, when the military is intimately associated with a "product" like the Cheney-Bush torture policy as practiced in Guantanamo, Abu Ghuraib, Baghram and other locations, nothing can stop that from damaging the military's credibility in a serious way. That kind of thing is going to become public, often sooner rather than later, and no amount of PR spin is going to make it look like a good thing to most people. And the failures of the chain of command in the case of the torture policy in particular will continue to have practical, political and legal repercussions for a long time. If military leaders don't want their credibility damaged by that sort of thing, they just need to stick to the law and not involve themselves in the systematic practice of torture.

Military leaders enjoy a great deal of public and Congressional deference on military matters. At times that may be because people don't know what the generals are talking about. But that trust and respect for military opinion on military matters is widespread.

The military shouldn't allow people like the Christian General Jerry Boykin to squander that reserve of credibility it by going out in public and talking about how our God's bigger than the other side's God. Or by allowing Gen. Myers, the nation's most senior military officer (JCS Chairman) at the time, to go to an American Legion national convention as he did in 2005 and tell them, "Resolve or will is ultimately what will decide whether we defeat ... extremism and terrorism or whether we give in." This at the same convention where the Legion's "national commander" Thomas Cadmus told the delegates that antiwar protesters were trying to "demoralize our troops, or worse, endanger their lives by encouraging terrorists to continue their cowardly attacks against freedom-loving peoples." Cadmus called for an end to "public protests" and "media events" opposing the Iraq War, and Editor & Publisher reported, The delegates voted to use whatever means necessary to 'ensure the united backing of the American people to support our troops and the global war on terrorism'." It's hard to read that as other than encouraging violence against antiwar demonstrators. I don't recall hearing of octogenarian Legionaires actually doing so. But the chief military official of a democracy should not be attending such a convention and encouraging such sentiments. Especially if he wants to have credibility among anyone but drooling-at-the-mouth authoritarians.

There's also the fact, as noted in the paper The Impact of Religious and Political Affiliation on Strategic Military Decisions and Policy Recommendations by Lt. Col. William Millonig (USAF) 03/15/06, that the officer corps is overwhelmingly Republican and disproportionately conservative-Christian in religious terms. Most of the public are neither. That means that military spokespeople and those designing public communications strategies should make extra effort to understand where people are coming from, and not assume that what they hear from Bill O'Reilley or John Hagee or Rush Limbaugh about what "the liberals" think and say bears any relation to reality.

Military leaders should recognize that their own capacity to rally public support for a war is actually limited. American public opinion is not the "center of gravity" in a war. And it's not the military's job to mobilize it. That's the job of political leaders.

There seems to be an irresistible tendency for military leaders to conceive of public-communications functions in terms of censorship and manipulation. So you get things like the Pat Tillman attempted cover-up, which the generals should have known was likely to fall apart fairly quickly, and which is also the kind of thing that would almost make even a Rush Limbaugh "dittohead" angry.

But no amount of manipulation can make a deeply flawed policy popular in a situation like the Iraq War, whatever portion of that bad policy is or isn't the military's own fault. The Soviet Union had far more extensive censorship capabilities than the US military does. But even they couldn't prevent their Afghanistan War from being deeply unpopular and become a serious political problem for the leadership.

Should we rely on Osama bin Laden as a military authority?

I don't know whether the two authors I mentioned in the first paragraph share the particular view of the Vietnam War that I described. But much of their audience will view their arguments through that lens. Hoffman writes:

The sophisticated use of modern information technology can generate significant support for one's cause throughout the international system or more directly through a network of sympathizers and supporters. It is a force multiplier for the side capable of creating a compelling narrative in the effort to gain and sustain an advantage. The [Army counterinsurgency] manual notes the importance of such narratives but then inexplicably defines the information domain as a potential "virtual sanctuary" to the adversary, instead of identifying the virtual dimension as a crucial zone within the expanded battlespace.

While irregular wars are quintessentially won or lost in the minds of men (and women), the US government and the Pentagon have yet to master modern information operations. The decision to withdraw the Marines from Fallujah in April of 2004 highlights the powerful effect that modern communications can have on local, regional, and global audiences.

... Like the French levée en masse, the evolving character of communications is altering the patterns of popular mobilization, and having profound implications on why and how people will fight. The availability of modern media in all its many forms has radically changed the manner by which adversaries acquire and disseminate strategic intelligence, recruit, rehearse, and promote their cause.

Current antagonists seem to understand this, perhaps better than America’s strategists and policymakers. In a letter written by bin Laden to Emir Al-Momineed, he stated, "It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact its ratio may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for the battles." (my emphasis)

Hoffman is writing at a general enough level that nothing blatantly objectionable stands out in the wording just quoted. He doesn't, for example, explicitly describe American public opinion as part of the "virtual battlespace".

But here's where the audience perception comes in. If military leaders and planners define American public opinion as part of the "battlespace", then it becomes one more part of the spectrum of battle over which they need to exercise "full-spectrum dominance". Conceived of as a "battlespace", the military will inevitably assume that exerting control via censorship, manipulation and propaganda to be the necessary approach. Even if they have people with the talent of a Frank Capra or Steven Spielberg designed the PR strategy - as opposed to the bright lights who came up with the Jessica Lynch "reality-TV" show or the Pat Tillman cover-up - they will wind up creating a new credibility gap with every war that last longer than a month or two.

The other problem is that military spokespeople often seem to equate the proper public "narrative" (to use Hoffman's term) with some vague psychological notion of Will. For instance, he writes, "The decision to withdraw the Marines from Fallujah in April of 2004 highlights the powerful effect that modern communications can have on local, regional, and global audiences." He doesn't expand on that point, so it could even be read to mean that the short-term solution that produced the withdrawal from Fallujah in April 2004 was a good image for the US to project. But given the nature of the commentary I've seen on that, I'm confident that most readers will take that to say it was an insufficient show of determination and Will.

In classic Clauswitzian terms, destroying the opposing army's will to fight is the goal of military operations. But the notion of demonstrating Will as used by most Republican politicians in the US is a much more general, vague notion of not backing down. It's usually used to project the image of courage, toughness, backbone, etc., for the politician (or pundit) posturing about the need to show Will and to paint the advocates of restraint as lacking in martial manliness.

And this may be one area in which the heavily Republican political leanings of the officer corps may lead to a risky form of groupthink. Breaking the enemy army's will to fight is one thing. Assuming that demonstrations of Will in the sense Republican politicians and FOX News commentators use it is key to winning the support of the American public for a particular war is a very different thing.

A final comment on the Hoffman quote: It's become common for writers and politicians to illustrate their points with brief quotes from Osama Bin Laden. Hoffman quotes him as saying, "It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact its ratio may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for the battles."

But is Bin Laden really a reliable authority on such matters? Yes, he's been successful terrorist leader and jihadist agitator. But the guy is hiding in cave or a hut somewhere in the Pakistani badlands or some other godforsaken corner of the world. He lives in a world where God communicates to him and his followers through dreams and visions. He defines every real existing Muslim government of the world as unbelievers. He pursues what to most Muslims is a very extreme Salafist view of Islam. Do we even know what he means when he said something like "the media war" is 90% or so of "total preparation for the battles"?

After all, for all the anger in the Muslim world toward the US, we don't see massive numbers of Muslims flocking to set up Bin Laden as the caliph of all the world's Muslims. Even in Iraq, the hardcore Sunni guerrillas who have been so tenacious in fighting the Americans are also killing adherents of "Al Qaida in Mesopotamia". How successful is Bin Laden's approach to information operations really?

That particular quote is taken from Steven Corman and Jill Schiefelbein, Communication and Media Strategy in the Jihadi War of Ideas Report #0601, Consortium for Strategic Communication, Arizona State Univ., April 20, 2006. The full English text is found at the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point's Web site, Document #: AFGP-2002-600321 Full Translation Date: June 5, 2002. The Emir Al-Momineed to whom that letter was addressed is better known as Mullah Mohammed ‘Omar, head of the Taliban government in Afghanistan that was overthrown by the Northern Alliance with American leadership and assistance in late 2001.

It's not even entirely clear that Bin Laden intended that statement to be some kind of blanket principle of insurgent warfare, as opposed to addressing a more particular goal at a point in time. It seems doubtful that it was meant as a principle of insurgent warfare as such at all. The document is shown as having been translated as of 06/05/2002 but the CTC identifies it as "date unknown". The content refers to events prior to the overthrow of Mullah Omar's Taliban government, focusing on the need to organize jihad actions in the "Islamic Republics region" of Central Asia, in part to divert American and Russian hostility to the Taliban regime. The second major theme of his letter is the importance of Saudi Arabia to the jihadist cause:

The existence of the Ka’abah [in Mecca] and the Prophet’s mosque [in Medina] -The existence of 75% of the world’s oil in the gulf region; and whoever controls the oil controls the world’s economy. -This explains the wide international interest in this matter. It also explains clearly the tenacity of the American forces and others to staying over the land of the two Holy Mosques, and their bragging that they will not leave and abandon their interests in these areas. -Many international media agencies corresponded with us requesting an interview with us. We believe this is a good opportunity to make Muslims aware of what is taking place over the land of the two Holy Mosques as well as of what is happening here in Afghanistan of establishing and strengthen the religion, and applying Sheri'a (Islamic laws). -It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its ratio may reach 90% of the total preparation for the battles. These matters and others of Moslems interests which we wish with Allah’s assistance to get together and consult about; hoping for His guidance to accomplish our goals. Peace, mercy and blessings of Allah upon you. (my emphasis in bold; quote selected by Hoffman in italics)

Another of Bin Laden's statements, this one addressing specifically the war in Iraq, does not give the impression that Bin Laden thinks that actual insurgent warfare is 90% public relations. This is from an audiotape broadcast on Al Jazeera 01/04/2004, included in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (2005), Bruce Lawrence, ed., "Resist the New Rome". Lawrence in his introductory note to this text says that it "was bin Laden's most outspoken attack on the rulers of the Arabian peninsula". Bin Laden said in that message:

Therefore the advocates of reform should know that reforming and uniting the nation under Islam cannot be achieved through lectures and books only, but through a practical plan involving the entire nation, each according to his own capabilities, beginning with prayer to God and ending with fighting in the cause of God, for fighting in the cause of God is an indivisible part of our religion. In fact, it is the pinnacle of religion. So, how can religion survive without its apex? It is a pressing need for our nation's life, glory, and survival. Although our enemy lies, our religion tells the truth when it stipulates: You fight, so you exist. This is what they teach their children, but they tell us the contrary. Moreover, fighting comes about through the big powers' need for survival. Just read history if you want — including the history of America, which has ignited dozens of wars throughout only six decades. This is because this was one of its most pressing needs. When the United States makes a sincere decision to stop wars in the world, it knows before anyone else that that day will mark the beginning of its collapse and the disintegration of its states. This day is coming, God willing. So, beware of any call for laying down arms on the pretext of achieving peace. This is because this will be a call to humiliate us. Only a hypocrite or an ignorant person can promote such calls.

Before concluding, I urge the Muslim youths to carry out jihad, particularly in Palestine and Iraq. I also call on them to be patient and pious, and to weaken the enemy by inflicting wounds on it, along with protecting Muslims during these actions. They also should be careful not to expand on applying the law regarding the use of human shields, for this should be left to their honest ulctiiii on a case-by-case basis. We beseech God to grant us victory through patience and piety. May God make us patient and pious. (my emphasis)

My point on this is that brief, isolated quotations from Bin Laden can be misleading because he is operating from a very different set of conceptions than that of most Americans and from that of most Muslims in the world. And, while Bin Laden is a successful practitioner of the "propaganda of the deed" with his terrorist attacks, it's a huge leap to assume that his maxims are somehow definitive statements on the functioning of insurgencies like the complex one going on in Iraq right now. And another huge leap to assume that some kind of mirror-image assumption makes since as a counterinsurgency approach.

Kilcullen on information-operations strategy

David Kilcullen is one of the leading contemporary authorities on counterinsurgency. In the article cited above, he writes on "strategic information warfare":

Al-Qaida is highly skilled at exploiting multiple, diverse actions by individuals and groups, by framing them in a propaganda narrative to manipulate local and global audiences. Al-Qaida maintains a network that collects information about the debate in the West and feeds this, along with an assessment of the effectiveness of al-Qaida's propaganda, to its leaders. They use physical operations (bombings, insurgent activity, beheadings) as supporting material for an integrated "armed propaganda" campaign. The "information" side of al-Qaida's operation is primary; the physical is merely the tool to achieve a propaganda result. The Taliban, GSPC (previously, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, now known as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb), and some other al-Qaida-aligned groups, as well as Hezbollah, adopt similar approaches.

Contrast this with our approach: We typically design physical operations first, then craft supporting information operations to explain our actions. This is the reverse of al-Qaida's approach. For all our professionalism, compared to the enemy's, our public information is an afterthought. In military terms, for al-Qaida the "main effort" is information; for us, information is a "supporting effort." As noted, there are 1.68 million people in the U.S. military, and what they do speaks louder than what our public information professionals (who number in the hundreds) say. Thus, to combat extremist propaganda, we need a capacity for strategic information warfare — an integrating function that draws together all components of what we say and what we do to send strategic messages that support our overall policy.

At present, the military has a well-developed information operations doctrine, but other agencies do not, and they are often rightly wary of military methods. Militarizing information operations would be a severe mistake that would confuse a part (military operations) with the whole (U.S. national strategy) and so undermine our overall policy. Lacking a whole-of-government doctrine and the capability to fight strategic information warfare limits our effectiveness and creates message dissonance, in which different elements of the U.S. government send out different messages or work to differing information agendas.

We need an interagency effort, with leadership from the very top in the executive and legislative branches of government, to create capabilities, organizations, and doctrine for a national-level strategic information campaign. Building such a capability is perhaps the most important of our many capability challenges in this new era of information-driven conflict. (my emphasis)

As Anthony Cordesman observes, "political legitimacy in counterinsurgency is measured in local terms and not in terms of American ideology." (A Poisoned Chalice? The Flaws in the FY2008 Defense Program Center for Strategic and International Studies 07/03/07). So targeting media information operations at American public opinion may be directly counterproductive to the political goals of the COIN effort.

There are no foolproof formulas in such things. But the current fad of pressing on-duty servicepeople into reflecting the political line of the Cheney-Bush administration in public appearances or even "news" videos that are really propaganda pieces is an unhealthy development. The idea that the Chief Executive would go before the nation the way Bush does and say that he's simply going to do whatever the generals ask him to do is ridiculous. It's not true, for one thing. But it also reinforces the pressure on those in uniform to promote the political positions of the administration.

Again, there are no hard-and-fast lines that can be drawn, especially in COIN operations when the "purely" military and the political often blur together more than in conventional wars.

But somehow, our political culture needs to find a way to back away from this notion of justifying policy decisions on wars by insisting that it reflects the judgment of military leaders. And our military leaders and strategists need to back off the notion that its their business to manage American public opinion as an integral part of warfighting.

Tags: al qaida, counterinsurgency, david kilcullen, frank hoffman, militarism, osama bin laden