It ain’t over

This from Michael Yon seems rather premature:

‘The war continues to abate in Iraq. Violence is still present, but, of course, Iraq was a relatively violent place long before Coalition forces moved in. I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it’s time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.’

Now, lets get a few things clear: General Petraeus should be richly decorated for his work in Northern Iraq; Al Qaeda in Iraq has been battered, discredited itself and alienated old allies and many Muslims, the shape of things to come; people who are invested emotionally and politically in the certainty of defeat in Iraq need to pay attention to what is happening; and the new Iraqi state is showing signs of great strengthening in its capacity to keep order, a process tied to us getting out. This is about more than one’s opinion of Bush and the wicked ‘neocons’, its about a vital cause, and folk who would rather Iraq go up in flames than America succeed need to take a more reflective view.

But can we stop the continual, round-the-clock declarations of victory and defeat? Because of a momentary realignment of forces in the Sunni triangle, the restraint of Sadr and the lull in violence, we should resist the urge to announce finality of any kind. There are too many unknowns: various Shia groups may simply be waiting out the savaging of Al Qaeda and the departure of the US. The new US allies, a coalition of gangsters, tribal leaders and opportunists, as well as a widespread revolt by former Sunni supremacists, may not see this phase as the last battle before the new federal democracy springs into life. They may see it as the latest tactical phase in which the US funds and arms them to battle AQ before they turn their violent attention elsewhere. And if we have ‘won’ overall, and a new Iraq can be salvaged, that is an extraordinary achievement by the US military, but it still tastes of ashes. Iraq has been a tragedy.

Secondly, notice how Afghanistan is now being redefined as the ‘hard’ war and Iraq as the ‘doable war’:

‘ I wish I could say the same for Afghanistan. But that war we clearly are losing: I am preparing to go there and see the situation for myself. My friends and contacts who have a good understanding of Afghanistan are, to a man, pessimistic about the current situation. Interestingly, however, every one of them believes that Afghanistan can be turned into a success. They all say we need to change our approach, but in the long-term Afghanistan can stand on its own. The sources range from four-stars to civilians from the United States, Great Britain and other places. A couple years ago, some of these sources believed that defeat was imminent in Iraq. They were nearly right about Iraq, although some of them knew far less about Iraq than they do about Afghanistan. But it’s clear that hard days are ahead in Afghanistan. We just lost nine of our soldiers in a single firefight, where the enemy entered a base and nearly overran it.’

One of the problems with fighting two wars in tandem is that we are drawn to evaluate each via a spurious comparison. When Iraq was collapsing into horrific communal violence, Afghanistan was touted as the ‘winnable’ war, despite the profound and wildly unfavourable conditions in which it is being fought. An unwieldy coalition, many of whom have little stomach for the effort, fighting in difficult terrain to prop up a weak and corrupt central state against insurgents who have sanctuary over the frontier and can regenerate themselves, amongst survivalist Afghans who know that the turbaned jihadists will always return. How was that ever conceived as the realistic war? Because Iraq looked worse.

My money is still on a cruder skepticism: This isn’t World War Two. The surge is not Okinawa. It ain’t over.

Doctrine and Jargon

Does jargon kill? Disturbingly, a recent Fort Leavenworth study of the 2006 July War found that Israel’s SOD doctrine (Systemic Operational Design) was cutting edge, complex…and almost impossible to understand:

‘The language and style incorporated in the doctrine proved nearly incomprehensible to many officers within the IDF…The core of SOD may not be without merit, but it is useless if it cannot be understood by officers attempting to carry out operation orders using SOD terminology and methodology.’

And there are signs that this problem of language, confusing complexity with obscurity, infects Western militaries more broadly. Brian Linn argues in his excellent new study of American strategic culture that while we lack a coherent concept of the nature of the current war, we are left with technocratic gibberish, the Pentagon-speak of ‘capabilities organised cross-enterprise, adapting dynamically to uncertainty and turbulence in a multi-dimensional, nonlinear, competitive environment.’

Given that military doctrine is simply the principles that guide action, it should be clear and quickly understood. Once it becomes too elaborate by trying to replicate the complexity of the world, once it uses language that makes it too indigestible, then it stops being doctrine.

This may also reflect one broader difficulty: we are dealing here not just with doctrine, but with codified doctrine. Doctrine can exist as an unwritten, remembered operational code rather than as a formally written, official text. In collective memory, wisdom and principles can be vague and contradictory, but they are passed down in the vernacular and in a way that can be understood and transmitted.

By contrast, doctrine that is endlessly rewritten and supplemented by talented theoretical minds can quickly lose the strengths of an ‘oral’ tradition, becoming an elite manual for specialist insiders rather than a shared and effective code. Worse, it can become something folk don’t want to read in the first place.

Clearly, this isn’t always the case. But it’s a danger to be wary of.

Buzzwords amongst the people

This is an ongoing debate on KOW, but it sort of matters. I agree with David (in the comments below) that this century could be a very bloody one. But I was drawn to the provocative article David linked to, which complains:

‘our militaries are still structured to fight an industrial battle against a nonexistent Soviet enemy, and the political-military way of thinking about using force is still based on models of industrial war.’

The Soviet enemy may not exist. But states wielding military force aggressively, even irrationally, will continue to exist for some time, or will return sooner or later. Being prepared to deter and respond to conventional agressors did not become an eccentric or redundant task in 1989. In the time between then and now, Iraq invaded Kuwait, Ethiopia invaded Somalia, NATO attacked Serbia, America attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. In the final decade of the Cold War, Argentina invaded the Falklands and Iraq invaded Iran. These kinds of conflicts may be receding, but the dangers in even one are sufficiently serious to bear preparing for and, if possible, preventing.

To be sure, nuclear weapons, costs, the memory of past interstate wars and other things mean that it remains an activity bound to make many nervous. But part of the task of the US as hegemon should be to keep it that way, rather than falling prey to the delusion of ‘full spectrum dominance’ and the trap of endless, unwinnable expeditionary wars.

Moreover, things might change. To assume the obsolescence of state threats from a recent tendency for fewer, less decisive interstate wars in the past twenty years would be an unfortunate case of ‘presentism.’

So personally, I’m still not convinced that we should overhaul our militaries or states fundamentally away from their core task. Clearly we need to avoid dichotomous thinking - peacekeeping, liberal intervention, or the sheer unpredictability of war make flexibility imperative. But we should resist the logic that because the strategic environment will make ‘asymmetric methods’ more attractive, therefore we have no choice but to prepare to commit our forces to expeditions to deal with them.

We have choices, and a strictly limited view of when and where military force is appropriate is a more prudent response. Grand strategy is about the avoidance of war as much as the preparation for it, and as well as sharpening our military instrument, we need to keep thinking very carefully about how it is used.

In terms of the July War, the conflict used by Ilana Bet-El to plea for a post-industrial military posture, an alternative approach is possible. That war wasn’t profoundly new, other than in the particular sophistication of Hezballa. It has never been a great idea to attack a population indiscriminately, stir up shared religious-nationalist opposition, alienate world opinion and weaken your military mystique (ask Napoleon, ask Brezhnev). Israel had the right to use some force against Hezballa’s persistent rocketing and kidnapping, but surely the wrong reaction to that war is to conclude, ‘let’s reform ourselves to fight it better next time.’ The strategic lesson should be, ‘try not to do it.’

Finally, we should avoid declaring certain forms of war ‘dead.’ We have had quite enough of this shallow, overconfident kind of futurology. As William Pitt found after 1792, and Norman Angell after 1912, this can look a bit embarrassing in hindsite.

Between the strategic and the heroic

Between the strategic and the heroic

Either this sort of thing gives you a lump in your throat, or it doesn’t.

Two thoughts come to mind when watching this film (or for me, anyway). First, that we are moved by brave and unyielding soldier-politicians of the likes of Churchill, Roosevelt or even the white-haired veteran, John McCain. A little defiance against the enemies of liberal society, against those who delight in the weakening of America and all it stands for, is uplifting. Like Lincoln, McCain has staked his election campaign on a firm belief in victory, a word deeply unfashionable in the post-modern discourse of war studies. To his credit, McCain also believes in preserving something to defend, committing to shutting down the disgrace of Guantanamo. The spirit of his advertisement is not only one of granite belief and determination. It is that heroism sometimes entails persistence against ridiculous odds. In recommitting Americans morally to a cause that may be unlikely to succeed, heroism cuts against calculated common sense. If Winston Churchill said ‘Never give in, never give in…except to convictions of honour or good sense’, the part of our instincts that loves heroism pays little heed to Churchill’s ‘good sense’ caveat.

Yet in being part of ‘war studies’, we insist and tell our students that war must be approached strategically and cautiously, as an exceedingly unpredictable and dangerous instrument. Take national security policy and Iraq. There are very good arguments for believing that we need to limit and tighten the conditions in which we would commit ground forces anywhere. A war of 2 billion US dollars a week is hardly sustainable. And there are too many dead people. Even if Iraq becomes an Arab Switzerland tomorrow, or even if Afghanistan became a gentle Islamic Republic with the Taliban routed, the large-scale military occupations in those countries have resulted in crises on the flanks, in the menace of nuclear theocracies in Tehran and Islamabad. Sure, we didn’t ‘make’ the Iranian leadership say what it says, but having troops stationed on either side of a paranoid regime has mobilised it, stifled domestic dissent, and accelerated its quest for nuclear capability. Politics in Pakistan is unquestionably radicalised by the war raging on its frontier. Like Austria-Hungary in 1914-1918, we could start with a war against an underground terrorist movement, and end with war against powerful states.

In other words, we can be caught between two instincts, the heroic and the strategic. So in Iraq, American and local forces have struck hard against Al Qaeda, in offensives that mark a staggering shift in the struggle. Building on a bottom-up revolt by former Sunni insurgents and tribes and powers who have learnt to hate AQ’s brutality (not to mention its competition for crime markets), the coalition has pulverised the tv beheaders and amputating thugs. In a virtuous cycle, their atrocities have alienated Muslims everywhere, even their own old allies. Then reduced to ineffectual and sporadic violence, they are further discredited. They look worse than bad. They look weak. Iraqis are tired of the violent onslaught on their civil society, their constitutional government is holding on and getting stronger, and violence is being lowered. Under General Petraeus, the US has helped drive a heroic turnaround, with unbelievably brave people creating a critical space in which some now talk of victory. As Margaret Thatcher might say, ‘just rejoice.’

Yet the strategist in us never ‘just rejoices.’ We recall that triumphalism is often premature. That these gains may be reversed and snuffed out by new waves of ethnic cleansing and sectarian killings, by AQ’s ability to regenerate itself in new training camps. Even in the best-case scenario, if AQI is decisively beaten, the newly empowered northern tribes are flush with weapons, cash and experience, and may turn this new strength against other Iraqis. The dream of a stable federal democracy, freed by new alliances of Americans and Arabs, may go the way of the confidence that was building amongst US troops who were steadily mastering the art of counterinsurgency in Vietnam, circa 1969.

This is one of the real problems faced by the ‘big story’ of the war on terror, which was then rebranded as the Long War, and lately, the Global Counterinsurgency. It is based on the view of a long-term, complex and shifting struggle, where we won’t have the clarity of victory and defeat. Yet politically, and as humans, many people haven’t lost their instinct for the climactic language of heroism. There remains something down in our gut where we can’t only think in terms of pure strategy. The leader who announces that this war, unlike those of our grandfathers, will not be settled by a formal surrender and a fixed terminus, is the same man who declares combat operations over against a banner saying ‘Mission Accomplished.’

Face value

What do you get when you cross a mafia boss with a hostile religious militant?

A facial makeover, according to the New York Times:

‘One of the first targets of the Taliban are usually criminals with whom they often fashion a symbiotic relationship, officials here said. Often the Taliban attack criminals and in that way increase their social standing with local people.

And then to win favor with the Taliban, the criminals grow their hair and their beards, and join forces with the militants, they said. In this way, the criminals get protection from the militants for the money they give to the Taliban from their extortion rackets.’

Organized crime is a very large part of the complex wars we face today. But our knowledge of criminal networks is often discussed separately from our analysis of the enemy’s strategic culture.

This is a gap that needs more work. One of the difficulties with cultural analysis is the need to separate material context from what people claim about themselves.

When we talk about the importance of religious concepts and tribal lore, are we sometimes falling prey to the propaganda of canny crime lords, rebranding themselves and adapting to a new and deadly environment?

Of course, the distinction is often a bit false. AQI are fighting other Iraqis in the Sunni triangle over crime fiefdoms and banditry markets, while there are probably crime lords who think of themselves as devout believers.

But there are also opportunists, ready to grow their beards and nod to the rhetoric of jihad. Its good for business.

Al-Qaeda’s Propaganda Machine

Craig Whitlock followed up his excellent piece on the failings of al-Hurra with a look at al-Qaeda’s own Internet propaganda abilities.  Excerpts are below under bolded headings, along with a few of my own niggling comments. The piece, which is worth reading in its entirety, is here.

Al-Qaeda’s Proficiency of Distribution

The war against terrorism has evolved into a war of ideas and propaganda, a struggle for hearts and minds fought on television and the Internet. On those fronts, al-Qaeda’s voice has grown much more powerful in recent years. Taking advantage of new technology and mistakes by its adversaries, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has built an increasingly prolific propaganda operation, enabling it to communicate constantly, securely and in numerous languages with loyalists and potential recruits worldwide.

Every three or four days, on average, a new video or audio from one of al-Qaeda’s commanders is released online by as-Sahab, the terrorist network’s in-house propaganda studio. Even as its masters dodge a global manhunt, as-Sahab produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and cellphone videos. Last year it released 97 original videos, a sixfold increase from 2005. (As-Sahab means “the clouds” in Arabic, a reference to the skyscraping mountain peaks of Afghanistan.)

2 points here:

1. We need to be careful about conflating the ability to disseminate a message with the strength of the message.  Al-Qaeda has had some PR problems of its own with regard to its message, particularly regarding the killing of innocent Muslims. Just something to always keep in mind so we don’t start thinking the only thing that can defeat al-Qaeda is kryptonite. 

2. Terrorism is about propaganda, so to suggest it has evolved into this is incorrect. It is also incorrect to assume that the only thing we need to do is communicate better on TV and the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the counter-narrative.  But this is a multi-tool endeavor: foreign policy, CT operations, public diplomacy… all of these things count too. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to get better at communicating, something those prosecuting the War on Terror seem to finally be coming to grips with. 

That said… We still have a “Failure to Communicate”

U.S. officials have also acknowledged their inability to counter al-Qaeda’s ideological arguments, despite a multibillion-dollar investment in public diplomacy and covert propaganda efforts aimed at Muslims.

“It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in a speech in November. “As one foreign diplomat asked a couple of years ago, ‘How has one man in a cave managed to outcommunicate the world’s greatest communication society?’ “

No real argument there.

Message vs. Medium

Some U.S. lawmakers are trying to attack the distribution system anyway.

Last month, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, wrote to Google officials, urging them to take down YouTube videos produced by al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. YouTube said that it pulled some videos but that others targeted by Lieberman were not violent or did not qualify as “hate speech.”

Other officials said such an approach was unlikely to be effective because the videos are so widespread and can resurface almost immediately on other sites.

“Initially, that was reflexively the first option people came to –’Let’s not let Osama bin Laden speak’ or ‘Let’s not let the extremists on the Internet,’ ” the senior U.S. counterterrorism official said. “I don’t think that’s possible. Yes, we could go around shutting down Web sites, but it doesn’t really work as a strategic weapon against al-Qaeda.”

Yeah… methinks that approach would be akin to trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.  

 

 

“Life After the Fall”

In 2003, Iraqi director Kasim Abid, who had been living abroad for 30 years, returned home to start a film school in Baghdad. Reunited with three generations of his family after three decades away, he began filming  daily events in their lives.  The result is a documentary tracing the arc of experience for a typical middle class Iraqi family in the years following Saddam’s fall. 

As one would expect, “Life After the Fall” is not a happy movie, though it is at times a very funny one. His nieces, all of whom are around college age, provide some of the sharpest analysis.  And serve as yet another reminder of how important empowering women can be when trying to do COIN and/or nation-building.  

The film is in two parts, and it is the second one that illustrates an Iraq we have all become too familiar with. Foreshadowing the degree to which violence spiraled out of control and Iraqi’s lost faith in the U.S. to protect them, Abid’s oldest brother asks: If the Americans can’t even secure the road to the airport then how do they hope to secure the country?  You don’t really need to be a COIN expert – I’m not and presumably neither is his brother – to understand that logic. The film ends before the surge really has a chance to take effect, but by this point Abid has already had another brother murdered and seen his sister’s family flee to Damascus to join approximately 1.4 million other Iraqi refugees. 

With all of the news and analysis coming out about Iraq, and the  U.S. government debating its own metrics for measuring progress in Iraq, Abid’s film is an important reminder of the people behind the numbers. 

 

 

 

Blaming Britain First

Seriously, this ungainly form of World War Two revisionism, and this extreme reaction against the Churchill cult, is getting ridiculous.

According to Counterpunch,

“It was Churchill, not Hitler, who first targeted civilian populations in World War II and caused the structure of civilized warfare to collapse in ruins.”

Um, actually not one word of that is true. The Reich bombed civilians in Warsaw and Rotterdam, starting on 25 September 1939 and 14 May respectively. Various other Polish towns were terrorised from the sky before even then.

Churchill was not even prime Minister until 10 May 1940. The first RAF bombing on the interior of Germany took place on 15 May.

Sometimes chronology helps to clarify things. A search engine, or even a book, can help.

The Allied aggressors?

Britain’s policies of appeasement towards Nazi Germany, so revisionists argue, should be explained in context. It appeased Hitler under public pressure. It was trying to balance amongst many deadly potential enemies from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Imperial Japan to Fascist Italy. It feared the threat of strategic bombing, whose full destructiveness and effects could only be estimated. It needed time to rearm itself. America had strategically distanced itself from military commitments on the continent. And Nazi Germany had some legitimate grievances as well as toxic ambitions.

I happen not to agree with the burden of these arguments, as they resulted in close to a worst-case scenario, climaxing in a war that left 50 million dead and half of Europe dominated by Stalinism. An attempt at deterrance, a robust anti-Nazi coalition, and support for French intolerance of the violation of the Versailles treaty may not have prevented war, but may have forced Hitler to fight at less comparative strength. Appeasement ended up being both ill-judged and cynical. But the 1930’s are complex, and some understanding is needed to temper the Churchill cult and the over-mythologising of the period.

But Patrick Buchanan, on record as a fascist sympathiser, an anti-Semite and reactionary isolationist, casts Britain as the gravest wrongdoer. He revives an argument made with more wit by AJP Taylor, essentially that Nazi Germany was a relatively rational state that was tricked or forced into an unnecessary war. And novelist Nicholson Baker also argues that Britain and America were responsible for the war and the Holocaust it unleashed.
There’s lots to dispute here. But lets focus on one major claim both make. That is, Nazi Germany (and for that matter, Imperial Japan) was a victim, was radicalised by the punitive post-war Diktat, and conflict against it could have been avoided outright if its ‘legitimate grievances’ had been serially accommodated. Worse, the Allies then committed grave war crimes by bombing German cities, and created a war that resulted in Holocaust and catastrophe. After all, World War Two for Britain was a war of choice. Britain was offered a settlement in 1940, of co-existence with an Anglophile Reich.

In other words, we are asked to believe that the imperialist ambitions of Nazism could have been continually postponed. Or that if Britain had allowed Nazi Germany to dominate the continent, there would not have been further aggression that would result in millions of deaths and persecution.

There is something deeply naive about this. Obviously, there is the shrill genocidal rhetoric of Mein Kampf, the ideology of Asian conquest of Tojo. There is also ever-increasing evidence for the serious long-term plans both regimes had for grandiose military conquest, dispossession, race war and world mastery.

In 1936, Nazi agriculture minister Richard Darre addressed the Reichsnaehrstand. He outlined the concrete expansionist plans of the state:

‘The natural area for settlement by the German people is the territory to the east of the Reich’s boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the South by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea. We will settle this space, according to the law that a superior people always has the right to conquer and to own the land of an inferior people.’

He followed this with the usual prophecy of racial mastery, Lebensraum and the rights of conquest. This speech accorded strongly with private speeches Hitler made to Germany’s military leadership.

There was once a saying amongst interwar leftists: ‘Fascism means War.’ It organises society around war, it narrates the world as an apocalyptic struggle, it intends war, and ultimately it will force others to counter it with war. Regardless of the tactical adjustments and retreats that Hitler was capable of making after taking power, a great struggle was his concrete intention.

Nazi Germany was ruled by a regime that stood for barbarism without limit. It had begun torturing and murdering its own mentally and physically disabled. It had announced that the Jews were a mortal enemy to be cleansed from the earth, and had begun its steady, escalating persecution of them. It had underwritten Franco’s coup in Spain. And it had done all this under the cover of national victimhood and self-pity. This was not your grandfather’s dictator.

There is a disturbing general discourse of self-blame about this, where even the most maniacal aggression is traced back to the errors of the Atlantic. But had Hitler been allowed to swallow Poland, his industrial-economic base would have grown, and he would be in a strong position to pursue his cherished aims. What happened next was a tragedy for Poland and the world, but it was etched into the logic of Nazism, which ultimately had to be stopped by force. Sometimes there is a black and white, and in this instance, the regime that had started race war had to be brought to its knees. It is as simple, and as difficult, as that.

Web 2.0: Blending the Real and the Virtual

One of the sub-themes of the KOW site is an ongoing discussion of the ways in which ‘the medium’ and ’the message’ relate, often in reference to insurgency, counterinsurgency or political dissent (violent or not).  In that vein, the recent South Korean protests over American beef imports are interesting, as described in today’s IHT.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the article (and by extension, the phenomenon) is how the real and virtual are blended to produce a powerful result.  As one South Korean researcher puts it:

when the nation’s world-class Internet infrastructure, its nationalism and its hot tempo all come together, you have a major conflagration.

While hardly scientific in its portrayal, the admixture of channel (the internet), content (nationalism), and culture (the so-called hot tempo) forms a solid basis for analysis of similar events.