And Then Pop Bottles
To all counterinsurgents: lighters in the air! Meet Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, the hero of Tall Afar. And meet Brigadier General Sean McFarland, hero of the Anbar Awakening. The champagne spray has already doused Abu Muqawama.
But what was Tall Afar, anyway? To one brave Winter Soldier, it was this:
Before Congress, Ewing provided a dark counternarrative to 3rd ACR. During a two-house search, Ewing remembered, he entered a house to find soldiers from a mortar platoon holding six Iraqi men against a wall. Out in the driveway, “several middle-aged women” lay on the concrete “covered in blood.” An Apache helicopter “had fired several high-explosive rounds into the front yard.”
Ewing’s comrades provided what medical care to the wounded they could. But, growing emotional, he recalled that some of the women were beyond treatment. “A little boy, about nine, a nine-year old boy,” he said, “came up to me and pointed to his chest and there was a blood spot on it.” He got the boy and some of the women to an aid station.
“This incident,” he said, “illustrates the first serious difference between what I saw in Iraq and what is seen back home. There has been almost no explicit reporting by the mainstream media of civilian casualties caused by U.S. troops in Iraq. Anytime a suicide bomber kills civilians it is highly publicized. But from my personal experience in Tall Afar, the number of Iraqis killed or injured by our forces far outnumbered those killed by insurgents or suicide bombers.”
We All Need Somebody To Lean On
Did these guys hold it down or what? Eric, Ilan, Cernig and Fester: thank you guys. Everyone’s reading their blogs, right?
In other, more-self promotional news, my latest Windy piece is the sixth installment of my “Rise of the Counterinsurgents” series. It’s about why the civilian component of the government has faced a steeper COIN learning curve than the military has:
As the structure of the nation’s wars changes, so, too, must the organization of the U.S. government, argues the new generation of counterinsurgency theorists. They say that diplomats, reconstruction experts, governance advisers, economists, lawyers and even agronomists must be as easily inserted into a theater of battle as troops are — and must work with the warfighters in the effort to convince a population not to ally with insurgents.
This capability is now largely missing. So some counterinsurgents are trying innovative methods to solve the problem. But it is still unclear if they will be sufficient — let alone timely enough to reverse the fortunes of both current wars.
There are many reasons why American civilians working for the government have stayed on the sidelines of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. For one thing, the United States still lacks a corps of civilians ready to deploy into conflict zones. That is unlikely to change. “We’ll never match boots on the ground with wingtips on the ground,” said Eliot A. Cohen, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, using a shorthand term for diplomats that is common among the counterinsurgency community.
Stabbed In The Back
Phil Carter saves me from the pain of Ricardo Sanchez’s memoir. Last year we saw Sanchez spit unhinged invective about how everyone who isn’t in a uniform is a sybaritic and valueless coward. Phil finds Sanchez up to his old tricks. This time, he blames the loss of South Vietnam on… his countrymen. Phil responds so well I’ll quote him at length:
Ah yes, the “stabbed in the back narrative.” … No amount of America firepower could have crushed the North Vietnamese people’s will. It’s true that we made many missteps in waging the Vietnam War, and that we might have achieved a better outcome in the short term had we backed better South Vietnamese leaders, implemented smarter counterinsurgency strategies sooner, and pursued Vietnamization earlier. But the ultimate outcome was ordained long before 1973, and probably long before American combat troops arrived in 1965. Most of the histories I’ve read suggest the die was cast sometime around when the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. We didn’t lose the Vietnam War because of any “stab in the back.” We lost because we failed to see the strategic environment correctly, and we chose a war of a time, place and manner that we could not win.
This narrative came to mean a great deal to the cohort of American military officers who shepherded the services through the post-Vietnam years. They vowed to never again fight a war like Vietnam. These generals embraced the Weinberger-Powell doctrine prescribing when, how and why they would fight. They rejected counterinsurgency efforts and small wars, choosing instead conventional wars with defined objectives and familiar features. And they rebuilt the Army with capabilities to fight these wars, marginalizing those who thought about small wars and pushing them into the special forces, civil affairs, military police and intelligence communities. Even during the 1990s, when the Army deployed for peacekeeping operations around the world, these missions remained peripheral.
On the very next page, Sanchez criticizes the decision to send “unprepared and improperly trained soldiers” into the “guerilla warfighting conditions” of Vietnam. He appears to miss the connection, however, between his misunderstanding of the Vietnam war and the Army’s lack of preparedness for Iraq, which flowed from that deeply flawed view.
Every Man For Himself And God Against Them All
You know who knows a ton about Lebanon and Hezbollah? Abu Muqawama. Get ready for some blogging-on-the-graduate-studies-level!
Hizbollah may very well get the government to back down from their positions on both the telecommunications system and, more likely, Wafiq Shoucair. (Although the international community — and the international business community — is not going to rest easy on the accusations Hizbollah is spying on flights landing at the airport.) But the fact is, if civil war does break out, Hizbollah is going to get the blame from basically everyone but Syria, Iran, and other Shia worldwide. This is not 2006 and this is not Israel that Hizbollah is staring down. This is 2008 and these are other Lebanese — Sunni and Druze and Christian. Hizbollah can’t count on the support from anyone but a few pariah states, and though Abu Muqawama is not quick to start quoting U.S. government officials in times like these, what Zalmay Khalilzad said yesterday probably sums up what a lot of folks are feeling, that Hezbollah had “made progress in establishing a state within a state. They have not implemented agreements and resolutions with regard to disarming their militia. That in turn is encouraging other groups to rearm as well. There is a lack of progress because of their opposition in terms of the election of a president, although everyone has agreed on Mr. Suleiman.”
Hizbollah will claim that’s not a fair representation of the realities in Beirut. And Hizbollah — and the Shia — have legitimate political greivences within what passes for a political system in Lebanon. But if things continue to go to guns, they will get all the blame for the new civil war because following the last civil war, they were the only group that was allowed to keep their weapons. (Well, they and the Palestinian militants.) Is Hizbollah ready to take on the blame for this in the same way the PLO (unjustly) took all the blame for the last war?
No Security For You
Ali catches Max Boot saying the Walls of Adhimiya are no different from the gated communities of Cherry Hill or Shaker Heights or any other bucolic suburban outpost of ostentatious and fearful splendor:
It’s true that there are walls around Dora and other Baghdad neighborhoods. (Although as far as I know there aren’t any “contending ethnic neighborhoods” in Fallujah.) But then there are walls around many gated communities in the U.S. too. The walls per se are not evidence of reconciliation, I’ll grant you that. But nor are they evidence that reconciliation is impossible. They are one of the important security measures implemented in the past year that is reducing violence and making possible political progress—which is real, whether you admit it or not.
I’m unconvinced that replying seriously to someone so devoted to making a bad-faith argument is productive. But notice how Boot deliberately misrepresents the Iraq debate. No one argues that the walls are “evidence that reconciliation is impossible.” The contention is that creating and enforcing ethnically cleansed neighborhoods is the kind of treatment that feeds the disease and helps kill the patient.
And the political progress Boot cites is chimerical — whether he admits or not. Will the Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow for National Security please tell us how many American lives the fall provincial elections are worth?
We’re At The War’s End
Part II of that raw Petraeus-interview audio. Here we ask: how will the war end?
I Said I Said What I Said
So I see several people are like, “Ackerman should release the transcript of his Petraeus interview, because God that piece was puffy.” Well, you know what? Here’s part one.
We Can Work It Out
Dave Dilegge at Small Wars Journal reads Inside Defense so you don’t have to. (Or, rather, so you don’t have to buy a subscription.) And what does he find contained in its august pages? A bon-voyage effort by the Gates Pentagon at reorganization. Good luck with that!
Check out the COIN goodness:
The fourth issue group will focus on irregular warfare. It will be led by Michael Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for special operations / low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities; Marine Corps General James Mattis, commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command; and Lieutenant General John Sattler of the Joint Staff, also a Marine.
This group will examine irregular warfare capabilities that are common to special operations forces and general purpose forces in order to explore opportunities to forge greater integration and interoperability between the two, according to the draft document.
“What DOD organizational structure would provide the best oversight for irregular warfare, maximize efficiencies across DOD components, better balance risk and investment priorities, enhance future capabilities development and ensure effective operations?” asks the draft document.
Kind of a perennial question, but Vickers — he was the nerd/deathray-guru in Charlie Wilson’s War — Sattler, and Mattis bring a lot of COIN-mojo to the task.
Everyone Is So Weird And So Alone
Charlie, attending the D.C. Special Forces Association dinner this weekend, confesses her hatred of America:
Lee Greenwood. No, he wasn’t actually there, but his miserable, treacly song was. And not only that, but people stood for it like it was the National Anthem. What. The. F*ck. Is this some sort of Army thing? Does graduating from the Q course leave you totally devoid of a sense of irony?
Whoa! Her ugly elitism even comes garnished with a dollop of service-parochialism! Honestly, you know what’s an even worse song than “God Bless The U.S.A.”? “The Star Spangled Banner.” There, I said it. I will not rest until our national anthem is Radiohead’s “The National Anthem.”
Walk Hard Down Life’s Rocky Road
Dave Kilcullen, breaking his long SWJ silence, advises the counterinsurgents of the world to build roads.
Like the Romans, counterinsurgents through history have engaged in road-building as a tool for projecting military force, extending governance and the rule of law, enhancing political communication and bringing economic development, health and education to the population. Clearly, roads that are patrolled by friendly forces or secured by local allies also have the tactical benefit of channeling and restricting insurgent movement and compartmenting terrain across which guerrillas could otherwise move freely. But the political impact of road-building is even more striking than its tactical effect.
Also with great political impact is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. While I haven’t read Blood Meridian, which everyone says is his masterpiece, I’d be stunned if he wrote a better or more complex/austere novel than The Road. But back to Dave! What does he mean when he says that the road has a significant “political impact”?
But the effects accrue not just from the road itself, but rather from a conscious and well-developed strategy that uses the road as a tool, and seizes the opportunity created by its construction to generate security, economic, governance and political benefits. This is exactly what is happening in Kunar: the road is one component, albeit a key one, in a broader strategy that uses the road as an organizing framework around which to synchronize and coordinate a series of political-military effects. This is a conscious, developed strategy that was first put in place in 2005-6 and has been consistently executed since. Thus, the mere building of a road is not enough: it generates some, but not all of these effects, and may even be used to oppress or harm the population rather than benefit it. Road construction in many parts of the world has had negative security and political effects, especially when executed unthinkingly or in an un-coordinated fashion. What we are seeing here, in contrast, is a coordinated civil-military activity based on a political strategy of separating the insurgent from the people and connecting the people to the government. In short, this is a political maneuver with the road as a means to a political end.
I Wanna See Some Of History
Matt Yglesias reads about the new plan to wall off Sadr City and remarks, “If It Was Good Enough For Khruschev…”
What’s so striking to me — and something I’ll be dealing with in a forthcoming installment of my counterinsurgency series — is the willingness of many counterinsurgents to embrace failed tactics of counterinsurgency of the past out of an apparent belief that they should have worked. There’s been a lot of defending of the strategic hamlets program in Vietnam — I recently heard a very senior officer give it two cheers — on the grounds that its Malayan antecedent produced results in different circumstances.
“You can’t really repair anything that is broken until you establish security,” a cavalry-squad commander tells the New York Times by way of explaining the wall. “A wall that isolates those who would continue to attack the Iraqi Army and coalition forces can create security conditions that they can go in and rebuild.” Except that Sadr City is a neighborhood of as many as 3 millio