Edward Luttwak is one of the most thoughtful historians around. In Harpers he makes it clear that defeating insurgents is a straightforward task done well countless times by regular forces.
But he is clear that such an option is not likely to be available to a modern democratic state - so he leaves open the question can, in a Messy World, a state engage in such work? Here is the core of his argument:
Perfectly ordinary regular armed forces, with no counterinsurgency
doctrine or training whatever, have in the past regularly defeated
insurgents, by using a number of well-proven methods. It is enough to
consider these methods to see why the armed forces of the United States
or of any other democratic country cannot possibly use them.
The simple starting point is that insurgents are not the only ones who
can intimidate or terrorize civilians. For instance, whenever
insurgents are believed to be present in a village, small town, or
distinct city district—a very common occurrence in Iraq at present, as
in other insurgency situations—the local notables can be compelled to
surrender them to the authorities, under the threat of escalating
punishments, all the way to mass executions. That is how the Ottoman
Empire could control entire provinces with a few feared janissaries and
a squadron or two of cavalry. The Turks were simply too few to hunt
down hidden rebels, but they did not have to: they went to the village
chiefs and town notables instead, to demand their surrender, or else. A
massacre once in a while remained an effective warning for decades. So
it was mostly by social pressure rather than brute force that the
Ottomans preserved their rule: it was the leaders of each ethnic or
religious group inclined to rebellion that did their best to keep
things quiet, and if they failed, they were quite likely to tell the
Turks where to find the rebels before more harm was done.
His assessment is this. The "terrain" in an insurgency is the "Population". The work is to win the war of intimidation - another way of seeing the term "Hearts and Minds". (See follow on by Dave Dilegge of SWJ for how Hearts and Minds really work)
The insurgents rely on the local population to hide them. They do this not by being nice but by the use of terror. They use exemplary killing and torture to ensure that the local are obedient. No amount of medical help, handing out of gum or having coffee by westerners is going to change this.
There are only two ways to to win.
We have to understand that Hearts and Minds is actually about intimidation - which is why western democratic states cannot do this
We have to understand that we have to be arounbd for longer than the bad boys - which is also why western states cannot do this
So being who we are - the only 2 ways of beating an insurgency over time are not available to us.
This then opens the real question.
Are we serious and do we really want to beat these people? If we are and we cannot do the work because of our own political reality at home - what do we do? There has to be more than a new COIN manual!!!!
Or we are not serious and we should not only leave but give up the idea of intervening in failed states at all.
This is how war is won or lost in the Messy World. You win by setting up situations where you get the population to take your side. The battlefield is Social Media. When I say "Population" I mean the local population and the home population of the western power that you are focusing on.
If you are a leader in Al Qaeda - what is your mission? It is to create "no win media situations" for the occupying power. What would this look like in practice?
One of the things you do is to ensure that the foreigners become naturally paranoid about their personal security so that they have to see everyone as a potential killer. You set the environment up so that everyone looks like a threat and so that if your job is to provide security, you have only a fraction of a second to make a choice - and whatever you choose it will be wrong!
Here is a taste of what it is like to drive around Baghdad today:
I don't think most Americans
appreciate how broken Iraq really is. I've worked in Iraq several
times, between 2003 and 2006. During the most recent trip, accompanying
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, our motorcade from the Baghdad
airport was held up by an explosive device in the road - discovered in
the road just in time.
Visit Baghdad, and one of the first things you notice is the total
lack of even rudimentary traffic rules. Want to make a left turn, but a
traffic island makes that impossible? Make a U-turn down the road, and
then drive into oncoming traffic for several blocks until you reach
your street. No one will raise an eyebrow.
One time, driving to an appointment along a main street, the traffic
just stopped. A traffic snarl had inconvenienced drivers in the
opposing three lanes of traffic, so they simply diverted to our side
the road, until the two streams of traffic met head on and stopped,
each side waiting for the other to give in. I left before the standoff
was resolved.
Imagine you are concerned about security in your neighborhood. So
you install roadblocks of sand bags, cement bricks and barbed wire,
manned by armed mercenaries, at both ends of your block. An unintended
result: None of your neighbors can drive home. That happens across
Baghdad, and the neighbors have no recourse, no one to complain to.
Maybe those problems seem petty when compared to the larger picture
of violence and death. But they do give a flavor of a society out of
control.
Blackwater is accused of killing 17 people in a drive-by shooting.
Well, drive-by shootings are a daily occurrence. Pick just one day,
Oct. 10. Gunmen driving a black Opal Vectra fired upon Gen. Abdulameer
Mahmoud, a security official. He and two guards were hospitalized.
Gunmen fired on a bus full of Railways Commission employees driving
home from work, killing one and injuring five. That same day, gunmen
fired on a Kia minibus full of civilians, killing one and injuring six
others.
Across Iraq that day, according to a McClatchy Newspapers roundup,
eight bodies were found, seven of them unidentified. Four roadside
explosive devices detonated, killing two people and injuring six
others. Kidnappers seized one government official. A car bomb killed
two people and inured 17. A mortar attack on a school for girls injured
11 students and two teachers. Gunmen shot and killed three policemen.
And if that day is like most every other, no one will ever be taken to
account.
During my first reporting trip to Iraq, in late 2003, my colleagues
and I were awakened early one morning by an explosion. Several of us
drove to the scene of the bombing. A crowd had already gathered. We got
out, and as we walked toward the scene several people from the crowd
looked back at us. One shouted something. The crowd turned and rushed
at us, screaming, "kill them!" They began hurling rocks. We scrambled
back into our car and took off, but not before a rock had hit our
photographer on the head, and others had smashed several windows.
The incident helped force us to reappraise our stance in Iraq. After
that, we considered every new situation as potentially hostile. (Joel Brinkley is a professor
of journalism at Stanford University and a former foreign policy
correspondent for the New York Times.)
So here is the no win trap that is set daily for both the military and Blackwater.
The white car that enters the no go perimeter near your barrier or convoy will have a family in it. It is naive to think that bombers are all young men in some kind of uniform. More and more women are involved. The tactic remember is to make the choice for the soldier/guard impossible.
It may have a bomb or not. If you let it by, then you tell AQ that they can get close and they will do that. If you routinely let the car get close, it will have a bomb in it and you and those you protect will die.
If you pre-empt the car getting close by firing upon it, many times there will be no bomb and you will be branded a criminal.
No this is what every corporal, every BW mission leader has to deal with every day.
We are being manipulated - I am stunned at how naive we all are. The expert warrior choses his battleground. The insurgents set up the conditions where we either die or look like criminals - they then exploit social media for all its worth to amplify the result.
They use our own rules as a weakness. If you think I exaggerate then recall the USS Cole incident. 2 men in a rubber boat got close enough to the USS Cole to kill 17 sailors and nearly sink the ship. This is what it felt like - imagine you as OD - what a choice?
"The destroyer's
rules of engagement, as approved by the Pentagon, kept its guards from
firing upon the small boat loaded with explosives as it neared them
without first obtaining permission from the Cole's
captain or another officer.
Petty Officer John Washak said that right
after the blast, a senior chief petty officer ordered him to turn an
M-60 machine gun on the Cole's
fantail away from a second small boat approaching. "With blood still on
my face," he said, he was told: "That's the rules of engagement: no
shooting unless we're shot at." He added, "In the military, it's like
we're trained to hesitate now. If somebody had seen something wrong and
shot, he probably would have been court-martialed." Petty Officer
Jennifer Kudrick said that if the sentries had fired on the suicide
craft "we would have gotten in more trouble for shooting two foreigners
than losing seventeen American sailors."
Now the Navy puts a death zone around its ships.
If anyone enters the zone, they will be fired upon as if they were bombers. The Navy has to do this or it too will again be successfully attacked.
It is quite straightforward to do this in a port - but in Baghdad????
So let's look more realistically at how things really are in Baghdad. Baghdad is not a mid west US City. It's not even the wild west - it is more dangerous than any urban environment has ever been.
To have any chance we have to have Rules of Engagement that deliver the political effect that we need to win. Setting the ROE is not the job of the soldier or the Personal Security guard - it is a political decision.
Allow vehicles to get close and accept more American deaths
Be clear about how close a vehicle can get and then make any further intrusion a fatal one and accept more opprobrium
Shitty choices! But what others are there.
The real issue that underlines all of this is political will - not the day to day work of those on the ground. here is THE CLIP showing this paradox. It is from the classic film the Battle of Algiers. The para Colonel is being accused of being a brutal cowboy by the media. Hear his response and think about your role.
The real choice is the one that the Para Colonel asked the journalist. Are we in or out?
If the answer is "In" then we are in Iraq for a very long time. Decades.
Hearts and Minds are not won or lost by beng nice but by making it clear that we will win and that the bad people will go away. We lose by showing that we will leave soon. If the Iraqi people know that we will cut and run, they they have to support the bad people - for they will be there after we have left.
If the answer is "In" then we have to show that we cannot be played with. We cannot allow the bad boys to control the media war.
Of course, if the answer is "out" we all go home and that is the end of it.
In Algeria, the answer was "Out". The army won the Battle of Algiers but France lost the political war.
Putting the burden on the front line is a pathetic cop out. I wonder if the outrage about Blackwater is really our own feeling of futility and guilt that we cannot put on the formal military and most importantly upon ourselves. The power of the emotions feel like "projection".
So I don't think the debate about the "Mission" has really begun properly. People like David Kilcullen and John Nagl and General Petraeus actually do know the score. But at home its all about numbers - the surge - no one wants to talk about what it would take to outlast and to defeat the bad guys.
More later - sorry about the length - it's a work in progress
There is no doubt that the US Army has to rethink everything about itself. The same is true for most sectors of out world today.
The Media, Education, Healthcare - all have the same problem - the Kinetic/mechanical approach is failing.
What I find interesting about Petraeus (an old pic - now he has 4 stars but this shows his open face better than some recent pics) is that instead of having a large committee of the old guard - he invited a handful of 40 year olds who were BOTH practitioners and thinkers to help him think through what really confronted them.
In 3 years - they have made huge progress in defining the challenge and in starting to make inroads on the solution.
The two key men?
Lt Col John Nagl
And Lt Col (Rtd) David Kilcullen
Isn't this a lesson for all of us struggling with how to make a breakthrough in any of these fields? It seems that progress is most easily found with a real leader who has both the Rank to carry weight in the system, the intellectual horse power to lead the debate and the character to attract the very brightest people to their side.
The team that works the best is very small and is NOT made up of the good and the great but of the brightest and the best.
So if we were to have a go at fixing our desperate educational results on PEI - I think that the Petraeus model would suit us well. A Leader with the Rank and the Character plus a few good men and women.
Here my dear friend Paul Hawken reveals another response based on another story to the Messy World.
A vast network of people from all classes and places are emerging around the story of a re-connection to the planet and to life itself.
Just as the boy in Pakistan can find the hero path in Jihadism, so another can find it in the work to restore life to our home.
I wonder - the 20th century was a conflict of conventional ideology - capitalism, socialism, communism and fascism. Now we see Corporatism and its challengers Jihadism and "Naturalism". Please Dave give it a name!
My favorite actress, Deborah Kerr. She represents for me a lost world, the England of my youth.
My favorite film of hers - The Life and Times of Col Blimp - her breakthrough film made in 1943 - made by the incomparable Powell and Pressburger. Kerr plays 3 women - all central to who I think she was - brave, cool and loving. The part she played again and again and so well in the King and I.
I feel very old today at the news of her passing. I think I too am a kind of Blimp who looks nostalgically back at a time when your word meant something ....
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