Arms and influence

Seeing Iraq, thinking Malaya

IN THE NEWS
The latest Foreign Affairs contains one of the most specious rebuttals to critics of the American strategy in Iraq I've read. Stephen Biddle's article "Seeing Iraq, Thinking Vietnam," contains one basic argument: since the Vietnamese insurgency was a "Maoist people's war," and the Iraq insurgency is a clash of distinct communities, divided along ethnic and sectarian lines, Vietnam/Iraq analogies don't stand up. He takes particular issue with proponents of classic counterinsurgency strategy. Since that category includes me, I feel obliged to respond—particularly since Biddle is overlooking important aspects of the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and counterinsurgency theory.

First, let's look at the presumed distinction between a people's war and a communal (a.k.a. civil) war. Although Vietnam had nothing like the obvious divisions between very large sub-populations, it's ridiculous to say that there were no ethnic or sectarian tensions in Vietnam. Long before Ho Chi Minh or Karl Marx were born, lowland Vietnamese and highland "Montagnards," two ethnically distinct communities, regarded each other with disdain. This conflict played a role in the Vietnam War, though it did not define the two sides in the conflict—though the continued suppression of the Montagnards was clearly a goal of both the North and South Vietnamese regimes. It's also worth mentioning the historical animosity between the Vietnamese and Chinese, which was a far more important factor in the People's Republic of China's attack on South Vietnam in 1975 than, say, differences over Marxist-Leninist dogma.

Before the division of the country into North and South, considerable animosity existed between populations of both major regions of Vietnam. Religious tensions also existed, particularly between the Catholic elite that French colonial administrators created, and which continued to dominate South Vietnamese politics after the French withdrawal. To the extent that you buy the argument that Communism was a sort of "secular faith," the Vietnam War was also a clash of ideologies, rooted in inter-group tensions.

It's not worth exaggerating these characteristics of Vietnam to rebut Biddle, however. If Biddle is right, classic counterinsurgency doctrine should have worked better in Vietnam than another country where, like Iraq, the ethnic and sectarian divisions were sharper. Fortunately, there is a very pertinent example from nearly the same time period as Vietnam, the Malayan Emergency. Unfortunately for Biddle, classic counterinsurgency was wildly successful in Malaya, where tensions between Malays and Chinese antedated the Emergency and British colonial rule. The Communist MRLA guerrilla movement, rooted in the minority Chinese population, was therefore not unlike the distinctly Ba'athist bent of Sunni insurgents, or the Islamist orientation of Shi'ite revolutionaries. (There are, of course, Sunni Islamists and more secular Shi'ite insurgents, so the previous sentence is guilty of caricaturing "the insurgency" yet again.)

The British strategy in Malaya, the archetype of classic counterinsurgency theory, should therefore, in Buddle's thinking, have been a spectacular failure. Instead, it was so much of a success that it became an archetype for generations of counterinsurgency practitioners and scholars.

Perhaps because he is stating his opinions in a short article, Biddle didn't have the opportunity to pick apart counterinsurgency strategy per se. Like the facts of the Vietnam and Iraq conflicts, however, the strategy itself includes important details that Biddle omits. For example, the primary goal of counterinsurgency is, through a patient program of population security and reform, to defeat the insurgents militarily and politically. For example, in Malaya, the British made a credible case that they would quit their former colony, leaving in their place a new government that represented the interest of Malays and Chinese alike. Meanwhile, British and Malayan forces gathered intelligence on the insurgents, swept them out of a series of "enclaves," and effectively used small-unit tactics to pursue the guerrillas outside of these enclaves.

The fact that the MRLA agents captured, the MRLA guerrillas turned, and the MRLA sympathizers won to the government's cause were Chinese was just another important facet of the strategy. In conflicts like Iraq and Malaya, counterinsurgency's theater or grand strategy requires the reconciliation of battling ethnic or sectarian groups. In other cases, the conflict is more purely ideological, requiring a different outcome. Differences at the higher planes of strategy don't change the general methods needed at the operational, tactical, and technical levels. The same rule applies to conventional warfare: the US military that evicted Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 used the same methods to invade Iraq in 2003.

I do agree with Biddle on other points, such as the risk the United States is taking in pursuing "Iraqization" in a way that's inflaming, not suppressing, inter-group tensions. However, his core argument, the lessons of counterinsurgency do not apply to Iraq, is flawed historically and strategically. Biddle concludes his article by saying, "Whatever the prospects for peace, they would be considerably better if Washington stopped mistaking Iraq for Vietnam and started seeing it for what it really is." Agreed—as long as we don't exaggerate both the similarities and the differences between these two wars, and we don't throw out counterinsurgency strategy altogether in the process.

FARC this

IN THE NEWS
Needless to say, the Justice Department's indictments of 50 leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is purely symbolic. It may be a useful sop to Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, assuring his government that the US remains behind his efforts to fight the FARC. However, the indictments don't commit the United States to anything, and the FARC leaders must have laughed themselves sick at US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez's press conference.

The FARC is a tough, mean, and cynical guerrilla group that long ago traded its revolutionary ambitions for the profits that the drug trade brings. While these indictments may be unintentionally amusing, the FARC is no joke.

Measuring progress in Afghanistan

IN THE NEWS
I've calmed down enough from that last post about Ryan Henry, the Pentagon's Jimmy Olsen, to recommend an excellent article in Parameters about the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan. The PRTs are the closest thing to a classic civil-military counterinsurgency model that the United States has going today, and so far they've received a lot of praise from people who have been examining their work.

Although the PRTs are doing a better job than their counterparts in Iraq, it's important to note where they haven't succeeded, or where they could have made more progress. The Parameters article provides just this sort of sober look at the PRTs, including some matter-of-fact statements about how to measure their success:

Broadly assessed against these measures, the PRTs are clearly having a positive impact in Afghanistan. But this assessment is still only partially better than the “smiles on Afghan faces” methodology. More robust metrics are needed to more fully determine the effectiveness of the PRT program, individual PRTs, and specific PRT initiatives. Such metrics are under development, but this effort, too, is a bit of a muddle. As PRTs cross programmatic and organizational boundaries, different groups are working on ways to measure the effectiveness of the PRTs. One hopes the PRT Executive Steering Committee will be able to integrate their work into a single useful tool for all PRTs.

After you read Henry's article for the sheer comic value, read the article about Afghanistan. It's good on its own merits, and it's the sort of analysis that's a lot more representative of the good work the editors of Parameters have been doing in the last couple of decades.

P.S. I still haven't run out of bad things to say about the QDR. Unintentionally, the Afghanistan article sets the record straight about a passage in the QDR that must have raised a few hackles in the Marine Corps:

The Marine Corps has increased both its capacity and its capability to conduct irregular warfare. Since 2001, the Marines Corps has realigned its force structure to address lessons learned in recent operations, resulting in a 12% increase in infantry capacity and related intelligence support to infantry units, an additional Active Component rotary wing aircraft squadron, a 25% increase in light armor units, a 38% increase in reconnaissance capacity, 50% more Joint Fire Liaison Teams and a 30% increase in reserve intelligence structure.

This excerpt makes it sound as though the Marines just discovered "irregular warfare," when in fact they quite literally wrote the book on it. Here's a key quote from the piece on Afghanistan:

The US Marine Corps’ draft Small Wars manual observes: “Military planners might choose to consider the initial conventional combat phase as the shaping phase, rather than the decisive phase. . . . [I]f our political objectives can only be accomplished after a successful stability phase, then the stability phase is, de facto, the decisive phase.” Events in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate that the stability phase of war is often more challenging than the combat phase. America’s inability to achieve its goals in both countries more quickly has sparked much-needed debates about how America and the world should prepare for and conduct stabilization and reconstruction (S&R) activities.

The US Marine Corps published the Small Wars manual in 1940, not 2006.

Counterinsurgency is doable, part V

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, Act V, Scene V.

THEORY
The tragedy of Macbeth
Shakespeare's tragedy, Macbeth, is a cautionary political tale in which assassination, terror, and civil war feature prominently. Macbeth gains the throne of Scotland through naked violence, and soon loses both power and his life in an equally violent fashion. The play is not, however, an argument for pacificism. Instead, it warns its audience about the horrors unleashed when powerful people, with the instruments of violence at their disposal, lose touch with their own principles.

Counterinsurgency is just as much a narrative about violence as Shakespeare's play. Those fighting guerrillas often fail for the same reasons as Macbeth, who depended on violence alone to maintain power. Without legitimacy, not even the most ruthless measures could keep Macbeth on the throne. Unfortunately, without legitimacy, ruthlessness is all people in Macbeth's position have left. Failed revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike have followed the same logic to its gruesome conclusion. When the burden of political murder becomes too great to bear for a society to bear, those in power build an even greater pile of new corpses—this time, the bodies of anyone who might have sided with the original victims—to keep the weight of outrage from crushing them. The Robespierres, Pinochets, and Pol Pots of history's great tragedies eventually reach one of two outcomes. Either they craft the machinery of political violence to the point where torture, terror, and execution outpace any possible resistance, or the whole enterprise collapses under the weight of collective guilt.

There is, happily, more than one way to use violence to forward or counter revolution. Practitioners of counterinsurgency, the focus of this series of posts, can pursue two strategies, the "Stalinist" and "British" approaches. Adherents of both approaches have experienced successes and failures, so it is important to address them with equal seriousness. It is important to understand the nature of this choice, since there is no middle ground between them. Either you pursue legitimacy and security simultaneously, or you are left with a terrible alternative, the Stalinist approach.

Stalin vs. Templer
The Soviet state was successful at crushing insurgencies that threatened Moscow's control over the non-Russian republics. The stories of these rebellions, which stretched from the Baltic States through Central Asia, are not well-documented or well-understood in the West—a major reason, incidentally, that the thorough collapse of the Soviet Union took Western intelligence agencies by surprise. The secular Soviet regime fought its own bitter counterinsurgency war against Muslim opponents in "the Stans," Muslim-dominated regions such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Stalin subjugated these populations through the most ruthless measures possible: mass deportation; mass starvation; the penetration of the police state into every aspect of people's lives; the spread of terror through imprisonment, torture, and execution; the erasure of any secular or religious institution separate from the Soviet party/state.

As I discussed earlier, this approach worked only as long as the Soviet regime had the will or capacity to maintain it. With its economy in a shambles, the legitimacy of Communist rule eroded by oppression and corruption, Gorbachev's glasnost policies were a desperate stab at salvaging the Soviet regime. The client states of the Soviet external empire used the new "openness" as opportunity to defect, followed by the all the republics of the Soviet internal empire.

The British approach, which depends on the simultaneous advancement of political legitimacy and physical security, uses the British handling of the Malayan Emergency as its model. The men who headed this campaign, most prominently Lieutenant General Gerald Templer and Sir Robert Thompson, outlined their strategy in eloquent and compelling terms, which is why generations of counterinsurgency specialists have found inspiration in their example.

The British convinced Malayans that the pledge to grant them independence was serious, nullifying the MRLA guerrillas' claim that they were fighting an inevitable conflict against imperialist overlords. At the same time, the government that would replace British colonial rule was representative of the ethnically diverse Malayan population, and it proved effective at governing. The new Malayan government was, in other words, something a lot more attractive than the "running dog lackeys of imperialism" of MRLA propaganda. Not only did Great Britain gracefully exit from Malaya, but it left behind an independent government, resting on a relatively solid foundation.

The British had less success in other colonies, often where the colonial authorities tried to maintain control more through force than legitimacy. The ham-fisted efforts to quash Indian independence in the early 20th century, the Victorian misadventures in Afghanistan, and the catastrophic loss of the American colonies all stand in stark contrast to Britain's success in Malaya—and, therefore, makes the strategy used in the Malayan Emergency that much more credible.

What makes counterinsurgency "doable"
Before concluding this discussion of counterinsurgency, it is important to see the general guidelines in light of this important choice between the Stalinist and British approaches. Counterinsurgency is definitely "doable," but a great deal depends on how a country like the United States chooses to do it. It is entirely possible—and, in fact, necessary—to stick to one's principles while fighting a desperate struggle against tenacious, resourceful opponents.

A good measure of the seriousness with which a great power approaches counterinsurgency is how it makes the organizational and political preparations for this kind of warfare. Although top decision-makers are used to having centralized, hierarchical control of military operations, counterinsurgency demands that they be willing to devolve control to the lower echelons of the military and civilian bureaucracies. At the same time, someone must be able to orchestrate all the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and economic assistance efforts, which is normally cannot be a person close at hand in great power's own capitol. Instead, the best person to put in charge is someone in the theater of operations, granted unusual powers across normal bureaucratic boundaries. In short, the campaign has to be led by someone other than usual military chiefs who plan and execute conventional military operations, a person uncomfortably far away from the capitol for any control freaks among the national leadership.

While this approach to organizing and fighting a war may be unfamiliar to those versed in conventional warfare, a nation that believes in democratic and meritocratic principles constitutionally should have little difficulty embracing it. A society that produces self-governing citizens should, by extension, be able to devolve power, when needed, within the government itself. People who believe that government is an instrument created to serve its citizens should not be intimidated when civilian and military branches of that government need to be re-designed to handle particular exigencies. Just as automobile engineers figured out how to design vehicles that could operate in two-wheel and four-wheel drive, citizens and leaders can craft the institutions needed for both conventional war and its unconventional siblings, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. They may need to exercise a bit of ingenuity to stay within constitutional and legal boundaries, but that is hardly an impossible enterprise. (In fact, argued later in this post, the principles behind the Constitution and the laws are a major source of strength.) Only tyrants fearful of upsetting their grip on power, or subjects who see the government as something greater than themselves, worry about re-engineering government to meet new challenges.

A great power must be just as careful in its dealings with its allied regime, the target of the insurgency, since the great power is simultaneously supporting and undermining that ally. The incumbent regime is the preferred alternative to the guerrillas, or else there wouldn't be any counterinsurgency campaign at all. However, the regime has some serious problems claiming legitimacy or exercising control, or else a guerrilla movement would not exist.

Walking this diplomatic tightrope with the besieged regime requires the freedom to shift political weight one way or another as needed. At the same time, the great power has to provide its ally with enough political latitude to make peace with the insurgents, but not in a way that threatens the great power's interests. The great power's domestic political constraints may render this joint balancing act impossible—which is why it's important for leaders to describe the conflict carefully. Declaring the insurgents to be the scions of ultimate evil closes off the negotiated path to victory. Lavishing praise on an allied government with obvious problems makes the alliance look entirely misconceived. At the same time, too much public rhetoric spent on these defects can complicate the working relationship with that ally.

Again, a great power like the United States should not have a difficult time applying its own rhetoric about democracy to counterinsurgency—as long as Americans truly believe what they are saying. Adherents of democracy believe in the power, over time, to persuade those with whom they disagree, or finding some mutually acceptable compromise. In counterinsurgency, these targets of persuasion include both the guerrillas and the allied regime. The idea of persuading or compromising with insurgents should not be abhorrent to Americans, since a rebellion gave birth to the United States, the "first new nation." There may be particular opponents, or particular moments in an insurgency, when the door is closed to settlement. The hand that closes that door, however, should not be American.

National leaders have to lay the correct political foundation within their own country for the great power's own war effort. Even the best-crafted counterinsurgency strategy will collapse without sufficient political support. National leaders have to define the conflict as being important enough to be a major participant without exaggerating its real significance or the prospects for victory. Leaders must be just as careful when discussing the time required, or the hard choices among morally and practically ambiguous options. In other words, leaders have to trust their citizens, which is a precondition of democracy in any situation.

Counterinsurgency does not pose uniquely intractable problems or difficult choices. Citizens of a democracy face similar challenges dealing with health care, crime, abortion, obscenity, addictions to legal and illegal drugs, and a whole range of other issues. Counterinsurgency may seem unusually difficult only when compared to conventional warfare, for which most great powers like the United States are usually better prepared.

The real test of a country's belief in its own principles happens when it chooses to see counterinsurgency as something normal, like controlling inflation, or abnormal, and therefore beyond the capacity of existing norms and institutions to handle. The event that prompts a great power to intervene in an internal war is either a normal part of international relations, or a mythic " day that changed everything," such as the storming of the Bastille, the arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station, or the fall of Salvador Allende.

The cost of lost principles
The good news about counterinsurgency is that there is a choice between the British and Stalinist alternatives. The bad news is, there is no middle ground between them. Max Weber described the state as the institution wielding the monopoly over the legitimate use of violence in a society. Without legitimacy behind the state itself, the only tool for squelching opposition is violence and intimidation at a massive, overwhelming scale.

Still, anyone interested in counterinsurgency should take comfort in knowing that there is a way to defeat insurgents consistent with their own principles. While messianic fervor or the mission civilisatrice can take these principles to counterproductive extremes, a quiet but confident promotion of them can be the key to victory. No one is asking a great power like the United States to abandon its hard-won experiences with revolution and counter-revolution—in fact, quite the opposite.

Anyone doubting the power of democratic principle need only look at the first great democracy, Athens, whose livelihood depended on a fragile sea lane that extended from the grain-producing regions of the Black Sea to the Greek peninsula. At any point along this route, including the narrow straits of the Bosporus and Hellespont, an enemy could choke off Athens' major food supply. Therefore, as Pericles tartly stated at the beginning of the Peloponnesian Wars, Athens' survival depended on maintaining an empire that protected the grain route. At the time, Pericles was primarily concerned about awakening his fellow Athenians to the cold realities of maintaining this empire, which might require the occasional threat or use of force to keep allies in line. However, Athens' empire equally depended on the appeal of the democratic ideal, of which Athens was the primary champion in the Greek world. Most outsiders understood and sympathized with Athens' arm-twisting to keep allies in line, as long as the violence stayed within reasonable limits. Athens gained many allies in the first place when democratic factions within Greek cities looked to Athens for help. The low point of Athenian power occurred during the oligarchic coup of 411, when Athens lost this political appeal. The oligarchs very nearly concluded a humiliating agreement with Sparta before they were removed in a counter-rebellion. While Athens ultimately lost the Peloponnesian War, the fact that it was able to endure for 27 years, dependent as it was on the fragile grain route, is as much a testament to the power of the democratic ideal as the quality of the Athenian navy.

The oligarchic coup was not the only time a democracy lost faith in its own principles in the midst of war. France abandoned liberté, egalité and fraternité in Algeria, at great political and emotional cost, both in Algeria and France. French leaders failed to formulate anything like the British disengagement strategy in Malaya, in large part because the French regarded Algeria more as another department of France than a mere colony. Consequently, France waged a counterinsurgency war based predominantly on the power to imprison, torture, and kill rebellious Algerians. Not only did this strategy fail to maintain control over Algeria, but it also created a political crisis that was only settled with an overhaul of the French political system.

Losing faith in your own principles is always tragic, whether it happens at a personal or a national level. Of course, Shakespeare's Macbeth applies to both levels simultaneously. At the urging of his infamous wife, Macbeth—by all reports, once a good man and loyal subject—seizes the throne by murdering the current king of Scotland, Duncan, while he is visiting Macbeth's castle. Thus begins a rapid descent into murder—of the king, his heirs, and even Macbeth's friend Banquo—insanity, paranoia, and civil war. Each crime, in turn, requires further crimes to deflect any possible opposition, until violence and oppression become ends in themselves.

Having his discarded his moral compass, Macbeth searches for guidance and justification in the prophecies of the three Weird Sisters, who seem to tell him that he is destined for supreme power ("All hail Macbeth, that shall be King hereafter!"), has nothing to fear from any enemy ("[N]one of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth"), and will be safe in power ("Macbeth shall never be vanquish'd until/Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill/Shall come against him"). However, Macbeth makes the common mistake of anyone who is too eager to seek justification in ambiguous intelligence, including the otherworldly variety. The witches' portents might just as easily have been read as warnings, if Macbeth had not raced to the conclusion he wanted to hear. Macbeth does become king, but the supposedly impossible vehicles of his downfall also occur. The army of Malcolm, a rival claimant for the throne, chops down trees in Birnam Wood to disguise their advance upon the strategic point of Dunsinane Hill. Macduff, the Scottish noble who cuts down Macbeth in battle, was "from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd."

Abandoned by allies, surrounded by enemies, Macbeth is left with nothing but his own nihilism, writ large upon the Scottish throne. His famous "tomorrow and tomorrow" speech is the chilling outburst of someone for whom terror and violence have scoured away every other human quality. Shakespeare's Macbeth is one of the oldest and most convincing depictions of the nihilism behind oppression and terror.

PRACTICE
In Iraq, the United States has not prosecuted a war along the lines of the British approach. In fact, it has broken nearly all the basic rules of counterinsurgency. For example, no local civilian or military leader exercises control over all portions of American counterinsurgency strategy. The US government's attitude toward the insurgency—conflating all groups and labeling them as "terrorists"—cripples efforts to divide the insurgents and entice the least vile among them into a settlement with the government. The political facets of the war often seem missing altogether: US strategy has focused too much on fighting insurgents, and far too little at population control and political legitimacy beyond national elections. In fact, the Bush Administration's approach to creating a new government and holding elections has often proved to be counterproductive.

Clearly, Iraqis support the idea of a new constitution and representative government. However, anyone with even a passing familiarity with recent Iraqi history could discern how important it was to grant the Iraqis greater control over their collective political destiny than the US government allowed. After the creation of Iraq as a reward to the Hashemite monarchy for its support in World War I, the Ba'athist coup, Hussein's consolidation of autocracy and terror, the war with Iran, Operation DESERT STORM, and the international sanctions that further crippled the economy, Iraqis in 2003 were momentarily elated by the prospect of finally having the power to decide their own collective future. Accounts of the occupation like Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near and Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory depict how the Bush Administration's mishandling of the occupation—the indifference to political and economic reconstruction while the search for Hussein and phantom WMDs continued, the dissolving of the army, the exclusion of former Ba'ath Party members from government posts, the dictated terms for building a constitution and holding national elections—led many previously hopeful Iraqis to conclude that the Americans had no intention of granting Iraqis real self-determination.

Meanwhile, two developments damaged the prospects for a British-style approach to counterinsurgency. First, American officials had little information on the insurgency, which led to a great deal of confusion over exactly whom they were fighting. While it was easy to focus on insurgent attacks, it was nearly impossible for US officials to gather effective information on the political messages of the insurgents—the real point of their attacks in the first place—their methods of organization and support, and the differences among groups. Second, US officials imported from Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Airfield, and other detention facilities a militarized, secretive, and coercive counterterrorism strategy that retrofitted to the Iraqi counterinsurgency campaign. Not only did confusion between counterinsurgency and counterterrorism create problems, but as I will argue in later posts, the Bush Administration's approach to counterterrorism was itself ineffective.

The fact that nearly everyone who comments on Iraq still uses the generic term the insurgency to describe several distinct groups, with widely varying goals and methods, shows how much confusion and ignorance still exist. The Iraqi insurgents became a mysterious, frightening Other who used some of the same techniques as Al Qaeda terrorists. (In fact, one group even adopted the name Al Qaeda in Iraq, an effort by a separate organization to appropriate the brand name of the world's most infamous terrorist group.) Lacking a clear understanding of the insurgent groups, facing resistance from Iraqis over elections and the constitution, and staffing the US mission in Iraq with people ignorant of Iraqi history and the Arabic language, American officials had little opportunity to implement the British approach to counterinsurgency. What was left, of course, was the "get tough on the terrorists" policy that has proven incapable of defeating the insurgent groups

If the American implements of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism have disturbing similarity to Stalin's network of secret prisons, indefinite imprisonment for political crimes, and torture, we should not be surprised. In counterinsurgency, there is no middle ground between the Stalinist and British approaches. If the aura of legitimacy cannot surround the exercise of force, then coercion must escalate until the unconvinced are completely silenced. However, the United States lacks the power in Iraq to pursue this approach to its logical extreme. The United States is not sufficiently convincing as a liberator, nor frightening enough to be a conqueror.

George Orwell once said, "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." It's easy to take this quote out of context, if you don't also recognize that Orwell wrote 1984, the most famous attack on both communist and fascist. (Machiavelli often suffers the same misunderstanding, if you don't see The Prince alongside The Discourses, his treatise on republican government.) "Rough men" are always needed in war, including counterinsurgency. The important question, of course, is what principles guide or constrain their activities.

Nearly every counterinsurgency war starts on a bad foot, so the situation in Iraq is not necessarily hopeless. The most dangerous enemy is our own ignorance or indifference to the problems we have created for ourselves. Macbeth's tragic flaw was not mere ambition, but the determination with which he pursued an increasingly murderous path to power. When he stopped long enough to justify the carnage, he used every tyrants' excuse, a combination of providence and necessity.

You might be tempted to conclude that I am dressing George W. Bush in the costume of Macbeth. While we can see tragic tendencies in the current American leadership, including the timorous and feckless Democrats, George W. Bush is not our Macbeth. As long as the United States remains a democracy, the only Macbeth in the room is you and me.

Re-re-re-inventing counterinsurgency

IN THE NEWS
Armchair Generalist provides a pointer to this half-encouraging, half-alarming article about the US Army's efforts to provide counterinsurgency training for officers serving in Iraq. While I'm definitely glad to hear that this instruction exists, there are some details in the article that are troubling. The article provides only a very small window into this training, but little it shows, taken at face value, is a bit odd. For example:

• Why is the Army assigning a book written in 1964, David Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare, when more comprehensive and recent studies exist? Believe me, I have no problem whatsoever in assigning the classic texts, as long as they're supplemented with other books that cover what scholars and practitioners have learned in more recent years.
• Why isn't the Army referring to its own history with counterinsurgency? For example, the course could include books or guest speakers covering the MILGROUP mission in El Salvador, the Vietnam War, and other conflicts.
• How will this training translate into a different theater, operational, and tactical strategies in Iraq? As Andrew Krepinevich's shows in The Army and Vietnam, similar courses existed in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the training had nothing to do with how the conventional-minded US Army chose to fight the "big unit war" in South Vietnam.

At least the Army is working on a new counterinsurgency manual with the Marine Corps and the British Army, both of which have extensive experience in this field. While the course may not change US strategy in Iraq immediately, it may help create enough discontent that eventually, some change will occur.

Still, it sounds as if the US Army is re-inventing counterinsurgency yet again. As frustrating as it is to face that conclusion, I still wish the trainers at Fort Leavenworth all the luck in the world. They have a big, big institution, headed by a Secretary of Defense with no visible knowledge of counterinsurgency, to change.

Counterinsurgency is doable, part IV

THEORY
The important role of militias (sometimes called paramilitaries or local defense forces) in counterinsurgency further illustrates the distinctive qualities of this form of warfare. In conventional wars, local militias are minor players at best, and usually don't appear at all. In counterinsurgency, militias are a central protagonist, frequently struggling with the guerrillas and the government at the same time.

As conventional warfare grew more sophisticated, militias had an increasingly smaller role to play. In the Thirty Years War, Europe's longest revolutionary and counterrevolutionary war during the Age of Reason, Protestant and Catholic armies contained a mix of regular and militia units. Over a century later, the colonists in the American War of Independence fielded both militia and regular units, but the tensions between them became a defining trait of that conflict. Almost another full century later, during the first year of the American Civil War, newly-created regiments in both the Union and Confederate armies had characteristics of local militias. These recruits—who frequently had no military experience—happened to have volunteered from the same state, and often from the same town or county. While Civil War regiments never lost their regional affiliations, they did, over time, become more professional.

However, Civil War regiments never stayed within the geographic confines of the state from which they came. While there were still fears, particularly early in the war, that soldiers would return to their homes once their original terms of service had ended, the Union and Confederate governments used the draft and other measures to keep their standing armies from evaporating as soon as planting or harvest season arrived. In short, by the 1860s, modern warfare was already too demanding for modern armies to depend on locally-recruited and locally-deployed militias.

At the beginning of World War II, when cavalry divisions and other relics endured in the face of the blitzkrieg, militias had disappeared from military tables of organization altogether. They reappeared purely by accident, as the partisan forces that resisted Axis occupation in Europe and Asia. However, as soon as conventional armies liberated a region, the local partisans' term of service effectively ended.

While militias have vanished from conventional warfare, they remain an important part of counterinsurgency through modern times. In fact, the most sophisticated practitioners of counterinsurgency argue for giving these atavistic echoes of pre-modern warfare an important and sometimes central role. In the Vietnam War, militias took a variety of forms, from the ethnically distinct Montagnard units to the more generic Regional Forces (RF) and Popular Forces (PF). In Malaya, the British colonial government rightly insisted on creating Chinese and Malay militias to fight the MRLA insurgents. During the 1980s, the US government worked at various times (and with varied success) with its Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Colombian allies to, on the one hand, dismantle right-wing death squads, while on the other, arm and train new local defense forces.

Militias are a persistent feature of counterinsurgency because they provide a critical lever for separating the guerrillas from the population. Militia commanders know their own community better than any outsider, so they may already have the names of local guerrilla political cadres and fighters. Even if they don't know who the guerrillas are right away, they can build local intelligence networks from the social contacts they already have. Militia commanders also know the local problems and the local community well enough to judge which anti-guerrilla measures will work, and which won't. If the militia commander is already a local notable, he may be able to use his status, authority, favors, money, or connections to work against the guerrillas. The militia plays its part in local counterinsurgency efforts far longer than any other part of the government, from the first day that the regime begins to focus on a particular "enclave," to long after the regular army has left the "liberated" zone behind. More important perhaps than any of these other factors is the stake that the local militia members have in the fate of their own community, something that no regular army unit or national politician can hope to match.

At the same time, the other participants in the counterinsurgency war have reasons to mistrust the militias. A government anxious about its lack of control over major parts of the country usually feels uncomfortable arming independent-minded local militias. Guerrillas may infiltrate the militias, reinforcing any worries that these local forces cannot be trusted. Guerrilla infiltrators or raiders may steal the militias' caches of weapons, ammunitions, and other supplies, sometimes making the militias the inadvertent material supporters of the guerrillas. Young militiamen newly armed with guns and a mandate for killing can easily abuse their positions, particularly when there are already antipathies within the community. In poor, remote regions of the country, where people are not used to receiving any material attention from the central government, the military and economic assistance flowing through into the community can be an irresistible source of graft, corruption, and theft. Integrating the militias into national military, intelligence, or police efforts can be difficult: local and national organizations may not trust each other; and regular military units usually look down on the less "professional" militias.

Taking all these problems into account, militias remain a critical part of counterinsurgency strategy, an expression of the old adage that, "All politics is local." They can be the most important test of a regime's ability to understand how the guerrillas operate, build the political and military tools to fight them, and make the hard choices needed to win. Militias pose the challenge for any great power or other foreign government involved in the war. These outsiders have no smaller obligation to embrace the frequently ragged, parochial, stubborn, under-equipped, and underappreciated militiaman than the regime does.

PRACTICE
Militias are important parts of US counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once again, the story is mixed in both cases, but the situation is somewhat better in Afghanistan than Iraq.

During the first days of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM, American CIA operatives and Special Forces troops had no choice but to work with local militias, who often operated in strategic areas that the Northern Alliance had yet to penetrate. That "militia-friendly" mentality has persisted in the four years since the fall of the Taliban, in spite of distrust and outright hostility that some leaders in Kabul and Washington have occasionally displayed toward these groups.

In contrast, the conventional doctrine and organization responsible for the swift conquest of Iraq now bedevils the occupation. Since dissolving the existing military and security forces, which might have been a foundation for new regular and militia forces, the US effort to build a new Iraqi army has downplayed or dismissed the role that local militias have to play. For example, this State Department report from March 2005 relegates "irregular forces" to a single paragraph at the end of the document. While the police may assume some intelligence-gathering responsibilities, they lack the military training and equipment needed to defend a community from a determined guerrilla attack. That void remains unfilled: the bulk of the new military—purely national, not local, in character—is unready to assume on its own any offensive or defensive role, including local defense.

Meanwhile, the Kurds—who had been effectively governing themselves since the 1990s—kept their independent peshmerga units, many of which, largely intact, now appear within the new Iraqi military's organizational chart. This wholesale incorporation of the peshmerga is not necessarily a bad thing for counterinsurgency—at least in predominantly Kurdish provinces. However, the Kurds will be protecting themselves, not the rest of the country, including the heart of the insurgency, the Sunni Triangle.

One barometer of how well things may be going in Iraq will be the role that militias play in the wider conflict. The longer we hear almost nothing about them, the harder it is to believe that top leaders in Baghdad and Washington are fighting the right war.

Counterinsurgency is doable, part III

THEORY
In the last post, I showed how the levels of strategy clarified the substantial differences between conventional and counterinsurgency warfare. We can use the same lens to bring other important facets of counterinsurgency into focus. The aspect that often needs clarification is the relationship between a besieged government and its great power patron.

Usually, the picture of the two is sufficiently blurred to merge into what appears to be a single effort. However, if you delineate the strategy for each of them at the grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, and technical level, you will find a lot of difference between, say, the current regime in Iraq and its American patron.

Once again, the best way to portray these issues is in a table:

DIFFERENT COUNTERINSURGENCY OBJECTIVES
Level of strategy	Beseiged government	Great power patron
Grand strategy	Survival.	Support regimes under attack by guerrilla movements where great power interests may be at stake. Although nearly all such conflicts occur in nations where the great power peripheral interests, the point of intervention is to prevent problems on the periphery from nibbling away at core interests.
Theater	The first reflex is normally to contain the guerrillas in as quick and violent a way as possible, so that the incumbent elite, existing institutions, and well-understood societal arrangements can be preserved. If possible, get a great power patron to intervene militarily, to help stabilize the situation, or fight the sort of battles the regime would rather not fight. If leaders realize that this theater strategy is counterproductive, they change it significantly, emphasizing the security measures and societal transformations needed to politically and militarily isolate and defeat the guerrillas. Among other obstacles to pursuing this strategy, leaders will have to consolidate civilian and military control under a single authority, rather than just letting the generals handle matters. Preserve the appearance of independence from the great power, even while that ally is pressuring the government and elites to make unwelcome reforms.	Encourage the allied regime to see that long-term security can't be won through short-term repressive measures. Provide the military, economic, and technical support needed to make simultaneous progress in security measures and societal transformations. Withhold the option of direct military intervention until it is strictly necessary. Even after committing combat forces, don't stumble into a situation where the regime stands back and lets the great power's troops do the fighting for them. Help the regime establish unity of civilian and military command, with the recognition that the more the great power directly intervenes, the more complicated this command structure may become.
Operational	Assuming the government has rejected the reflexive approach at the theater level, focus military and civilian assets on re-establishing support and control in a series of enclaves. Establish new enclaves only when the allegiance of the current ones is secure. Encourage resourcefulness, flexibility, and innovation at the tactical level, without giving so much latitude that local commanders have license for corruption, abuses, and atrocities. Do not pressure the military and other security forces in ways that might generate political backlash against the regime, which may range from simple insubordination to a coup. Develop methods that are as varied as the regions in which counterinsurgency strategy will be applied. For example, one enclave may have deep ethnic or sectarian divisions, while in another, the population may be relatively homogeneous. Craft the strategy to fit each of these cases, and communicate it clearly down the civilian and military chains of command.	Use all instruments of leverage to convince civilian and military officials at this level to pursue an enclave strategy. Use gentle persuasion, relationships of trust, re-training, re-organization, and the threat of withholding assistance to help reform the regime's security forces. Leverage is especially important because the regime's military is being asked to reform in ways many commanders may oppose, all while in the middle of fighting a war. Provide meaningful advice, based on past successes and failures, to counterparts in the allied regime. Recognize the differences among regions, and therefore resist the temptation to craft a general-purpose approach to advice, pressure, and support that may not fit the different scenarios that the allied regime faces in each enclave.
Tactical	Emphasize police measures and small-unit military operations to separate the guerrillas from the population.  Ensure that all activity, civilian and military, raises the support and respect the local population feels for the government. Reform or re-build police, judicial, administrative, and political institutions to ensure these gains will survive past the immediate emergency. At the same time, recognize that some reforms may threaten the local elites, whose support is critical in both the short and long term.	Ensure that the representatives of the great power working at this level have the necessary leverage to ensure that their counterparts pursue this strategy. Work within a bureaucratic and political framework that allows these representatives to work at the same small-unit level that the regime should also be emphasizing. Again, provide meaningful advice that has direct impact on the work done at this level. Work hard to overcome the natural inertia at this level, including force of habit with deep cultural and historical roots, old arrangements that benefit local elites, panic in the face of the insurgents' successes, and a natural unwillingness to be lectured by foreigners on how to run their country.
Technical	Gain more than new military hardware. Mass communications, psychological operations, improved irrigation, credit systems for small farmers, and collective bargaining techniques may be just as important at the technical level as new assault rifles. Give military and police units the equipment appropriate to the work at hand: for example, radios and small arms instead of artillery and tanks. Ensure that military and civilian personnel can learn and maintain any equipment, training, or other technical advances. Whenever possible, tailor these technical improvements to fit cultural and historical predilections.	Provide the political, military, and economic assistance needed, but crafted to fit the country and the conflict. For example, an American marketing executive might have a lot to say about "messaging" for an American audience, but someone well-versed in the local language and culture will have a lot more useful things to say about which political messages or media might work, and which won't.

As you can see from this summary, there is often a great deal of daylight between the regime and its great power patron, even when the regime is in mortal danger. You can also see how useless military power can be. Unless the great power is willing to turn its guns on its ally, the only way to convince the regime to make wrenching changes is through the precise, consistent, and patient application of leverage at all levels.

You can also see that, from the very beginning of the alliance, the importance of the conflict itself is different at the grand strategic level for these partners in counterinsurgency. For the regime, the conflict is absolute, and it has to be as wary of attacks from recalcitrant elites as it does of the guerrillas. For the great power, the conflict is never vital. Even when, in the Vietnam War, the United States recklessly staked its credibility as an ally  to other besieged governments on the outcome of that conflict, American leaders eventually decided to cut their losses, as painful as that was to do.

PRACTICE
The frictions between a regime and its patron are so commonplace that we should not misinterpret particular statements or events as the disintegration of the alliance. The regime's leaders may need to make the occasional public statement that appears to vilify or renounce the great power on whom their survival depends. That's really a question of local politics, not necessarily a sign of a diplomatic crisis. While US officials normally navigate these occasionally turbulent waters with few problems, they can only do so if they fully understand the nation with which they're dealing. Such is most definitely not the case in Iraq.

While we might focus on the cultural divide between Americans and Iraqis, that's not the only problem. Other observers of the Iraq war have already described this problem in depth, so it's worth looking at a different aspect of Iraq that is making it hard to bring US and Iraqi strategies into alignment.

Normally, US officials are grappling with a difficult situation in a nation whose politics, culture, economy, and history can be understood readily, if they take the time to learn about them. For example, US officials working in El Salvador in the 1980s understood that the country had been under the dominance of the famous "fourteen families" for decades. Any US policy towards El Salvador had to take these elites into account. In fact, before the Salvadorans made any progress towards holding honest elections, cracking down on the death squads, and building a strategy for defeating the FMLN guerrillas, US officials needed to break the hammerlock that the fourteen families had on the Salvadoran government, military, and economy.

In contrast, there are no well-established arrangements in Iraq. While some enduring characteristics of ethnic, sectarian, and clan groupings survived under the weight of the Ba'athis autocracy, they only represented part of Iraqi society. The rest of the social order ended with the Coalition invasion of 2003, which overthrew the government, compounded the economic chaos that already existed, and disbanded the army and security forces on whom security depended. There was no "devil you know" with whom US officials could work. Instead, there was the possibility of new institutions, and a vast population of Iraqis with varied opinions on what new arrangements were desirable.

Clearly, there was no way American military power—even if the United States had deployed more ground troops to Iraq—would have solved this problem. While American military power may have prevented more insurgent attacks, American officials often had no one on whom they can exert leverage. The problem persists through today, almost three years since the invasion. While the new constitution and nation-wide elections filled in some of the gaps, the picture is far from complete. The new Iraqi regime, in all its facets (elected, bureaucratic, legal, police, and military), and at all its levels (national, province, district, local), remains an unfinished work. Even where you can find something that deserves to be called "the new regime," the Iraqis who staff these institutions are more concerned about other Iraqis than the displeasure of the Americans. With many other parts of the new Iraqi regime still unformed or dysfunctional, there are not many places US officials can turn if they face a problem with a particular mayor or police chief.

If the United States is going to help the Iraqis successfully reconstitute their society and, in the process, defeat the insurgents, American officials must focus on creating enclaves in which new institutions can form and Iraqis can take control of them. As long as the United States spreads its effort across the entire map of Iraq, it will never have a complete portion of the new regime with which it can work. After reaching that goal, American officials can deal with the familiar problems of working with a besieged ally with different views on how to prosecute the counterinsurgency war.

Counterinsurgency is doable, part II

THEORY
If you read through the official posts, you'll have all the pieces needed to build a complete picture of the key differences between counterinsurgency and conventional warfare. Some parts come from the classic principles of strategy that apply to all forms of conflict. Others come from the history and methods of revolutionaries—particularly those pursuing a Maoist or Leninist approach—and their adversaries. The full list includes the following:

• The primacy of war aims, which are, unfortunately, often fuzzy and mutable.
• The different levels of strategy, including the grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, and technical levels.
• Friction.
• The initiative.
• The center of gravity.
• The cycle of measure and counter-measure.
• The indirect approach.
• The critical difference between leverage and power.
• The Maoist strategy for insurgency.
• The Leninist strategy for insurgency.

The best way to see how counterinsurgency and conventional warfare differ is to summarize their different strategies, side by side, at each level of strategy.

 

CONVENTIONAL WARFARE VS. COUNTERINSURGENCY
Level of strategy	Conventional warfare	Counterinsurgency
Grand strategy	Use the threat or application of force to protect core national interests, and in other scenarios only when strictly necessary. Threaten violence wherever possible, while keeping a careful eye on how a particular incident hurts or enhances the credibility of future threats. Fight wars where needed, using pre-positioned forces or strategic "lift" capability to bring overwhelming force into the theater of operations.	Support regimes under attack from guerrilla movements when these peripheral conflicts directly or indirectly threaten core interests. Given the unpredictability and opacity of politics within a country or region, understand that it may be impossible to ignore these threats, even when the relationship to core interests appears very indirect. Frugally invest a small effort in a large number of countries to improve the probability that these investments in toto will prevent threats from nibbling away at the edges of the core interests.
Theater	Keep the political objective clear and diplomatic channels open, but leave operational control in the hands of military commanders. End the enemy's resistance by seizing important geographical objectives, destroying the economic capacity to sustain the fight, and destroying the enemy's military. Alternately, destroy the enemy's willingness to fight, so that victory can be achieved faster than total conquest would require. Break down these objectives into smaller pieces for operational-level commanders to pursue. To accelerate the timetable for victory and reduce losses, bring overwhelming force to bear, either at the center of gravity or at a point of weakness. Work with allies to improve the military power available in the theater of operations. Bypass potential objectives if they're not required to strike at the real center of gravity. Keep a unified military command subordinate to the unified civilian leadership.	Deploy military, economic, and other forms of assistance to keep an allied regime from falling. If and when it becomes possible, move to the offensive, defeating the guerrillas politically and militarily. Preserve the leverage needed to persuade an allied regime to take the right political, administrative, economic, and security measures, even if allied leaders are reluctant to do so. Keep the investment large enough to get the job done, but not so large that the great power assumes more responsibility for the conflict than its ally. Plan for a long campaign, since the timetable for counterinsurgency is always by necessity lengthy. Focus on a succession of regions (or enclaves), moving to the next one only when the current target are secured. Give control over civilian and military activities to a single authority.
Operational	Achieve the objectives set at the theater level through the most efficient use of the largest amount of force possible. Define smaller-scale successes that cumulatively achieve the larger objective: for example, if the geographic objective is a city, seize the outskirts, close off the enemy's avenues of support and retreat, and then advance neighborhood by neighborhood through the city itself. Maintain the hierarchical chain of command needed for efficient military operations. Coordinate ground, naval, and air forces, while keeping operational control of all three in the hands of the great power's military commanders. Use the indirect approach and other military measures to keep the initiative on the battlefield. Expect the enemy to develop military responses to your strategy primarily at the military level, and to a lesser degree on the diplomatic and political planes.	Use security forces to police a given enclave. As soon as security is established, use a mix of intelligence gathering, local development programs, administrative and political reforms, police and military patrols, and all other methods needed to separate guerrillas from their base of support in the population. Ensure that these changes will last after the counterinsurgency effort moves to the next enclave. Keep population security the top priority, to which the destruction of the guerrilla army is subordinate. Coordinate civilian and military actions, with an eye to giving the allied regime increasing responsibility and control over both aspects of the campaign. Mix civilian and military roles, as needed. Since military assets are finite, train and equip local defense units to take over population security once the regular military moves to the next enclave. Break down military activities into team-, squad-, platoon-, or company-sized operations. Devolve operational control down to this small-unit level. Use indirect, unexpected political and military means to rob the guerrillas of their most important tool of survival, the political initiative. Expect the enemy to evolve responses to your strategy at the political and military planes of conflict.
Tactical	Unleash all types of specialized units—infantry, tanks, artillery, fighters, strategic bombers, etc.—to use the maximum amount of firepower at their disposal, in the fashion in which they have been trained. Use intelligence assets (mostly signal intelligence in modern warfare) to identify enemy formations. Use the great power's military units in place of an ally's whenever critical operational objectives are at stake.	Use the minimum force needed to achieve the tactical objective, to avoid the common problems (for example, civilian casualties) created when too much firepower is deployed. Focus all military and civilian assets on a particular village, hamlet, neighborhood, or other sub-division of the current enclave. Use intelligence assets (mostly human) to identify both the military and political arms of the guerrilla movement. Gradually encourage guerrillas or their supporters to defect. Otherwise, capture or kill guerrillas. Keep tight control over police, regular military, and paramilitary forces, to avoid abuses, atrocities, corruption, and other problems beyond the purely military task of shooting their weapons. Give tactical responsibility to the allied regime's civilian and military leaders, whenever possible.
Technical	Develop and deploy the technology necessary to win military objectives. Design this technology to be usable in any environmental condition (different kinds of terrain, night-fighting, etc.) and any tactical scenario.	Design the technology and methods needed to win political objectives, to which military objectives are subordinate. Deploy general-purpose military tools where needed (the exception). Re-shape all other tools to fit the politics, culture, language, and local conditions of the conflict (the rule).

The real challenge of counterinsurgency isn't understanding this strategic framework. In fact, each generation of counterinsurgency practitioners and scholars, grappling with the latest round of revolutionary conflicts, re-discover its basic principles. The hard work begins when you apply this approach a particular conflict. Crafting the methods that work for this conflict, in this country, at this point in history demands far more skill and expertise than reading the best book available on general counterinsurgency strategy. However, if you don't fully understand these strategic essentials, you will likely be very busy doing all the wrong things.

This picture of counterinsurgency suggests the "gentle" variety, used successfully in Malaya, the Philippines, and other places. It does not suggest the "brutal" variety, in which the government uses overwhelming force and repressive measures to crush the armed resistance. While you can argue against the brutal approach on moral grounds alone, it is also not effective in the long term. Repression, which smothers any political resistance, creates a temporary illusion of calm and control. Rather than creating permanent political institutions, perceived to be legitimate, it hides resentments against the regime, where they multiply with each new act of repression. When someone finally lifts the blanket that had been concealing these antipathies, whatever bursts forth is usually a lot more destructive than what could have been achieved through more human measures.

To make the case against the brutal approach, we might look to the most extreme example of it. Soviet totalitarian, as Stalin perfected it, killed more of its own citizens, enslaved more populations, and extended the steel tentacles of repression into more aspects of daily life than perhaps any tyranny in history. It fought many battles against separatist movements in the Baltic States, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus region. The Stalinist regime survived and seemed to prosper, but the totalitarian mask hid the decay slowly consuming the political order. Eventually, the system collapsed in a remarkable way: the simultaneous, peaceful secession of over a dozen different nationalities, none of which wanted to be part of the Russian empire or the Soviet Union in the first place. The notable exceptions—the violence that the Soviet Army unsuccessfully used against the Lithuanians when they made their desire to secede clear, the ongoing separatist movements fought by Chechens and other Caucasian ethnic groups—only make the quiet death of the Soviet Union that much more remarkable. The vast majority of former Soviet citizens,Russians and non-Russians alike, agreed that the Soviet system needed to be taken off life-support.

In contrast, the United States, which significantly re-designed its political institutions as soon as it won its independence from the British Empire, has endured through centuries of internal wars (the Civil War and the Indian Wars), economic upheaval, world wars, waves of immigration, constitutional crises, and other wrenching changes that neither sundered the nation nor deposed its government. Except for the Civil War, the allegiance of Americans to their government was never in doubt. In the end, even the secessionists in the South begrudgingly accepted the Union's forceful re-assertion of national unity. In contrast, the Soviet system only ran as long as someone was willing to staff the gulags and the firing squads.

PRACTICE
The good news is, key elements of the US government—the Defense Department, the State Department, and the CIA most prominently—have taken great pains to ensure that the lessons of past counterinsurgency wars would not be lost. In spite of the Vietnam stigma, many people in government service worked hard to bring the wars the US government prepares to fight in better alignment with the wars the United States actually fights. This arduous effort often cost the parties involved important career opportunities. For example, the US advisors deployed to El Salvador in the 1980s—an unimportant backwater, from the viewpoint of the US military's mainstream—understood that time spent in the Salvadoran MILGROUP represented time not spent in career-enhancing battalion commands, Pentagon rotations, or NATO staff assignments. However, many of them volunteered for El Salvador because of their dedication to bringing a bloody chapter of Central American history to a merciful close.

The bad news is, the Bush Administration's strategy for the Iraq invasion and occupation rendered most of this institutional memory meaningless. Rather than plan to help Iraq through the societal transformations that needed to happen after the invasion, the Bush team—most significantly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—focused on the conventional military operations of the invasion itself. Rather than pursue a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasized "population security, the US military chased insurgent formations across an increasingly insecure landscape. Rather than shifting operational and tactical responsibility to Iraqi security forces, the US occupation authorities disbanded the Iraqi military, leaving the US, British, and other allied units with primary responsibility for police and military operations. The US effort did not focus on building safe enclaves, intelligence networks, effective local governmental, civil affairs projects that weren't destroyed almost as soon as they were completed, and other techniques for separating the insurgents from the population. Instead, US decision-makers made the first mistake of generations of counterinsurgency campaigns past: seeking victory through killing or capturing as many guerrillas as possible. Rather than limiting the amount of firepower, top US officials gave local commanders latitude to use close air support, artillery bombardments, and armored assaults in populated areas. Predictably, American leaders grew frustrated as violence spread, the Iraqi security forces proved to be unready and unreliable, and the political initiative quickly slipped away.

If this situation sounds very Vietnam-like, it is. The mistakes of Iraq mirror the costly errors of the "big unit war" phase of the Vietnam War, from 1965 to 1968. The parallel is so close that even the unheeded warnings are much the same, and even come from the same sources. Here is a quote from Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife, a study of the counterinsurgency wars in Malaya and Vietnam:

With the U.S. Army and its leaders entrenched in an organizational culture that accepted military victory through annihilation as the only way to win a war, it is not surprising that the five British colonial civil servants and senior policemen comprising the British Advisory Mission (BRIAM) from 16 September 1962 through 31 March 1965 were in their turn ignored. BRIAM was Britain's answer to repeated American requests for its assistance in the fight against the Viet Cong; Sir Robert Thompson, who led the mission, had played a large role in the Malayan Emergency, serving as minister of defense in Malaya after independence. Thompson was unable to prevail with his view that the Ameircan focus on firepower and military solutions to political problems was counterproductive and that population control strategies such as those that had worked in Malaya would be more effective.

In 1965, a panel of high-level US officials, the Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam, or the PROVN group, issued a report that reached the same conclusions:

The conclusions of the study were striking; it repudiated the army's current emphasis on search-and-destroy operations and urged a move toward pacification through winning over the population to the government's cause. Most notable is the lack of enthusiasm for fals optimism as practiced by MACV [the theater headquarters for American ground forces].

And here is the first paragraph from an article in this week's Washington Post:

A senior British officer has written a scathing critique of the U.S. Army and its performance in Iraq, accusing it of cultural ignorance, moralistic self-righteousness, unproductive micromanagement and unwarranted optimism there.

If that frightening echo of failures past is not enough to demonstrate that something is seriously wrong with the US strategy in Iraq, I'm not sure what else would convince you.

It's not too late for American officials to change course. However, time is an important factor in counterinsurgency, which for a great power has to take into account the politics in both a foreign country and your own. By 1968, American civilian and military leaders were hurriedly correcting past mistakes, but it was too late for the Vietnam War effort overall. The American public's patience with an indefinite war of dubious strategic merit had run out, just as some of these reforms were reaping their first dividends.

Counterinsurgency is doable, part I

THEORY
In spite of writing five lengthy posts on how difficult counterinsurgency can be, I am most definitely not arguing that counterinsurgency is unwinnable. As I've mentioned repeatedly, guerrillas have often lost—sometimes because of their own mistakes, at other times because of the regime's skill at fighting a counterinsurgency war, and often both. It's entirely possible for both sides to win. To illustrate, the following table lists a few insurgencies that ended in a regime victory, which includes cases when the guerrillas could also claim a victory.

INSURGENCIES: WHO WON?
Conflict	Guerrillas	Regime
Greek Civil War	--	++
Moro uprising (Philippines)	-	+
Huk rebellion (Philippines)	--	++
El Salvador (1979-1992)	+	+
South Africa (anti-apartheid)	++	+
Cambodia (1979-1982)	+	+

Key:
++ = major victory
+  = minor victory
-  = minor defeat
-- = major defeat

While we might argue over the rankings for a particular war (for example, was the way apartheid ended under P.W. Botha's leadership a partial victory for the regime?), the basic points are clear. Governments can beat insurgents, and counterinsurgency isn't necessarily a zero-sum game.

The possibility of a mutual victory usually opens when both sides re-appraise their war aims. As discussed in one of the early "official" posts, war aims change in all forms of armed conflict, and guerrilla warfare is no exception. The combatants may change their objectives when it becomes clear that neither side can totally eliminate the enemy, either by crushing the insurgents or toppling the regime.

This re-appraisal is most likely to happen when one or both sides of the war are internally divided. Different factions in the government may form an alliance of convenience, as long as victory on current terms seems possible. However, coalition members may defect if they become convinced the current war aims or strategy isn't viable. This is, in fact, the norm for counterinsurgency wars, making it important for an ally like the United States to recognize these opportunities when they arise. Similarly, it's rare to find a fully unified guerrilla movement, free of any factionalism. The revolutionaries may have their own falling out, once it becomes clear the insurgency is on the wrong path.

The recent civil war in El Salvador provides a good example. In 1980, the five main guerrilla groups that formed the FMLN, and the guerrillas' political fronts that coalesced into the FDR, were as determined as the government they were fighting to win a total victory. Behind the government was the landed elite, which fostered a murderous paramilitary movement to complement the armed forces. Those two coalitions remained intact through the first few years of the war, though fractures were evident by the mid-1980s. In 1984, Christian Democrat José Napoleón Duarte, who opposed the methods that the Salvadoran military and the death squads were using, was elected president of El Salvador. Although Duarte was often thwarted by the landed elites and his own government, it became clear that at least some leaders were skeptical of the brutal approach the government was taking. Meanwhile, the FDR/FMLN was having its own internal argument, less visible to the outside world, over its strategy. The dispute was temporarily "settled" by the mysterious deaths of two FMLN leaders, which gave strongest leader among the FMLN commanders, Joaquin Villalobos, freedom to pursue a maximalist strategy aimed at a Cuban-style victory. However, the fractures within the guerrilla movement still existed, and would re-open later in the war

By the late 1980s, both coalitions were coming apart. The FMLN's failed 1989 offensive was the final nail in the coffin of both sides' maximalist strategies. The insurgents who were willing to re-enter normal politics, either through a power-sharing arrangement or elections, signaled their willingness to negotiate, as long as the insurgents could claim they had successfully forced the Salvadoran government to reform. On the government side, the advocates of a negotiated settlement pointed to the final offensive as a sign that, as much progress as the government had made in political and military reforms, the FMLN was not beaten. The war concluded with the 1992  Chapultepec peace accords, in which the government promised free and fair elections, including former guerrillas. Soon afterwards, former enemies appeared on a common ballot.

Sometimes, these negotiated settlements are purely cynical. The recent history of Angola is a sad tale of fighting between UNITA and the MPLA, punctuated by temporary cease-fires and contrived displays of a return to "normal" politics, only to see any temporary peace disintegrate into new fighting. While lamentable, these situations underscore the importance of building new political, administrative, economic, police, and military arrangements during the counterinsurgency campaign. If these do not take hold, nothing stops a guerrilla movement from using the peaceful interlude to recruit new members, collect more weapons and other resources, and plan the next phase of violence.

PRACTICE
Once again, it's important to point out the significant differences between the US strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq. This time, it's important to note how, in one case, US leaders have provided an escape route for enemies who may want to settle for something less than total victory in one case, and in the other, almost none at all.

In Afghanistan, the US helped arrange a new government that, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, would include many different factions. Most groups decided to join the new regime, with one major exception: the Hezb-i-Islami, headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. While Hezb-i-Islami originally agreed to be part of the coalition government, it later decided to defect when Hekmatyar decided that his faction wasn't getting enough important posts and other spoils in the coalition government. While Hekmatyar has nominally allied himself with the Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants still fighting the new Afghan government and its NATO allies. However, given the mercurial nature of Afghan politics, the door is always open for Hekmatyar to return to the fold. After all, the government already incorporated many former Taliban members, so it should have the same capacity to absorb Hezb-i-Islami, as long as its leaders believe it's beneficial to do so.

This opening would not be possible had the new government phrased the terms of reconciliation with insurgent groups in less forgiving terms. The Karzai government is willing to accept former Taliban members, as long as they are not still overtly associated with that movement and working against the regime. (Given the clan-based politics of Afghanistan, it's hard for former Taliban fighters to renounce all connections to the Taliban, since other members of the clan may still be found in the Taliban's ranks.) The regime has made its intent to dismantle warlordism clear, but it is not picking on any particular warlord.

In contrast, the new Iraqi government has far less latitude to admit its former enemies into the political fold. The US government bears a great deal of blame for this situation. Having labeled all insurgents as terrorists, US officials have made it harder to support any amnesty that the Iraqi government wishes to grant the less objectionable elements of the insurgency. (However, the Iraqi government has made at least one amnesty offer, with no real success.) The American theater strategy, which emphasizes killing insurgents over population control, gives little hint that the Iraqi government's patron has any interest in letting former insurgents lay down their arms and join the new government. These two aspects of American policy make it harder to reconcile the differences among Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds, or among the clans within these general groupings. While the US and Iraqi governments may invite disgruntled factions to join the new Iraq government, it leaves almost no room for the armed expression of that dissatisfaction to be reconciled. Although most Iraqis do not support the insurgent groups, enough Iraqis support, sympathize with, or are related to particular insurgents to complicate matters.

The conspicuous exception to this rule is Jaish-i-Mahdi (the Army of the Mahdi), headed by Muktada al-Sadr. Although there is no formal reconciliation between the Iraqi government and Jaish-i-Mahdi, it's clear that the cease fire that exists between them has led to a subtle form of normalization. The battles in Najaf, Karbala, Kufa, and Fallujah gave both sides pause. The government realized that it could evict the Mahdists from cities, but only at a very high cost (and only when the US assumed the burden of fighting the insurgents). The Mahdists realized that they could continue to shift fighting from city to city, maintaining the perception that the Mahdists were a force to be reckoned with. However, they also realized that they were far from gaining a major role in the new Iraqi government. Therefore, Muktada al-Sadr is free at large, Jaish-i-Mahdi is the de facto government and police in some communities, but there is no formal recognition of the Mahdists as a legitimate political party.

If there is any lesson to draw from the example of Jaish-i-Mahdi, it is the opposite of the one the United States intends. The road to quasi-normalization, it seems, is the ability to maintain an armed opposition to the Iraqi government and its US patron.

Counterinsurgency is hard, part V

THEORY

The last reason why counterinsurgency is hard, particularly for a foreign patron like the United States, is its political indigestibility. Counterinsurgency wars are long. In the thick of them, it's often hard to determine whether the war effort is going well or poorly. Counterinsurgency wars regularly impale the combatants on the horns of moral dilemmas. "Victory" is often a qualified success, with no climactic moments to celebrate. Counterinsurgency also pushes military professionals into non-military activities, while people not normally involved in warmaking become participants or even leaders in day-to-day military operations. When all parties look to the experts on matters like state-building, governmental legitimacy, and political stability for guidance, the experts often are divided themselves over the proper course of action, or they may have nothing to say that speaks directly to the immediate needs of the professional soldier or civilian official. As noted earlier, the logic of war sometimes dictates counterintuitive choices. For example, as Edward Luttwak notes in Strategy, the most direct road to a geographical objective may be the wrong one to take, simply because the enemy expects you to advance along that road. That particular example may be intellectually surprising, but it isn't morally or politically vexing. Choices in counterinsurgency frequently are. Take the question of political reform, a key tool against the guerrillas. Early in the counterinsurgency campaign, everyone may find it easy to agree on the goals, such as fairness in the courts and a more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity. However, the means taken may appear to run contrary to the spirit of the effort. For example, many societies depend on patron-client networks to handle many important political, economic, and even judicial questions. "Clientelism" runs contrary to what most people would see as a "modern" political system, in which all walks of life, including politics, operate under meritocratic rules. Getting your cousin out of prison should depend on the strength of his case, not the favors or familial ties that you have with the local hetman.  Getting the police to arrest suspected guerrillas should depend on their training, leadership, or professionalism, not the informal network of ties that the police chief has to the families of the insurgents.

Unfortunately, clientelism may be the only platform on which to build a counterinsurgency strategy, at least in the beginning. In Night Draws Near, Anthony Shadid paints a heart-wrenching portrait of how Iraqis want, as they put it, "to live like other people," a modest goal made thus far impossible by the Ba'ath Party tyranny, multiple wars, the crushing economic effects of the UN sanctions, and the chaos of the current occupation has robbed them. However, the Iraqis whom Shadid interviewed clearly want to end their decades-long national tragedy their own way. Whenever possible, they want to liberate themselves—which means, for many Iraqis, making clan-based clientelism, not American-style political institutions, the mechanism for mobilizing and directing the effort to build a new Iraq and defeat the insurgent groups.

Operationally, this approach depends on many techniques that Iraq's American patron will find distasteful. The cost of doing business may include above-board gifts or under-the-table bribes. The real authorities in a town may not be the elected mayor or council, but the local sheik. The pace of the counterinsurgency war may depend on how long it takes for personal ties of mutual ties of trust and favors to develop between US advisors and local authorities—or, more importantly, between the central government and these local officials. The loyalty of a sheik or qadi may be very conditional and mercurial, but good enough for the time being to evict the insurgents from the region.

Not surprisingly, "victory" in counterinsurgency is almost always qualified, which may make nearly every interested party queasy about the results. If President Karzai manages to "cure" Afghanistan of warlordism, not by eliminating the warlord culture, but by making the Kabul government a new "super-clan" that is primus inter pares among all the others, is that a victory? How much does a country have to reject its political, cultural, and economic past for it to be immunized somehow against future insurgencies? Is the expectation of total immunity to high, or is victory really just bringing about a comfortable level of security in most regions, and an acceptable level of insecurity in others? During the immediate aftermath of the Spanish American War, from 1899 to 1903, the US Marines defeated the Islamic separatists and exile the survivors to the far south. In the 1970s, they reorganized as the Moro National Liberation Front, and more recently as Abu Sayyaf, which has collaborated with Al Qaeda. (Some of the planning for the 9/11 attacks occurred in territory that the Philippine government nominally controls.) Did the Marines really defeat the Moros in 1903? Or is it unfair to expect total victory in this type of warfare?

These are questions that most Americans can ponder at leisure because we're not facing a direct threat from a guerrilla movement within our own borders. While a government under attack by guerrillas may have no choice in the matter, their great power allies do—which is why the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, and other countries have, in their imperial history, an on-again, off-again history of involvement in these types of wars. A catastrophe like the Sudan (for Britain) or Vietnam (for France and the United States) can make a great power gun-shy about counterinsurgency. Meanwhile, guerilla movements continue to pose a threat to direct or indirect interests, so it's impossible to swear off counterinsurgency forever. Fourteen years after the rout of General Gordon's troops at Khartoum in 1885, the British army fought the battle of Omdurman to avenge the earlier defeat. Despite its loss of its colonies in Indochina and Algeria, both at a high cost to national prestige and confidence, the French government continues to involve itself in counterinsurgency wars, most recently in the Balkans, the Ivory Coast, and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, between great power interventions, for people living between great power interventions in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Indochina, the Philippines, Colombia, Nicaragua, and many other regions, the fighting never truly stopped.

To summarize the argument I've been making over the course of five major posts, counterinsurgency is hard because…

1. Success often hinges on societal transformations that the besieged regime may not be willing to make.
2. It confounds anyone who pursues a conventional military response, regardless of how battle-tested that military is in other types of warfare.
3. Not only does it have the same unforgiving standard of political success as any form of warfare, but it also requires political action at every level of strategy.
4. Leverage, not raw power, is therefore the measure of how well a great power patron can help an allied government defeat its guerrilla enemy. Unfortunately, great powers normally think in terms of power, not leverage.
5. Institutions organized, trained, and equipped to fight conventional wars therefore face a form of conflict for which they are normally ill-prepared, and for which they are unwilling to shed their conventional approaches.
6. Counterinsurgency has many aspects that are politically distasteful at every level of strategy for great powers accustomed to succeeding at other species of warfare. The moral dilemmas, qualified successes, and frequent unimportance of the embattled country to the great power's strategic interests make it less likely that the patron of the besieged government will see the war through to its conclusion.
7. An embattled regime and its great power patron share a common indifference or even hostility to tried-and-true counterinsurgency techniques. The regime may not want to make the concessions needed to win political victories, and its armed forces may reject unconventional approaches as much as the great power ally, who itself may be edging towards the exit.

None of this means that its impossible to defeat an insurgency. Far from it: in the last century, insurgents have failed in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Spain, Greece, Morocco, Malaya, the Philippines, and many other places and times. Sometimes, the guerrillas proved just as prone to stupidity and pig-headedness as the regimes they were fighting. At other times, the government forces genuinely won a victory on their own, without the unwitting support of the guerrillas. The myth of the all-powerful revolutionary movement in arms, propelled forward by either History with a capital H or a groundswell of popular support, is just a myth. The legend should have died with Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia, after repeated failures to repeat the Cuban foco strategy in other Latin American countries. But, as we all know, legends die harder than people.

PRACTICE
I'll use this occasion of finishing the "counterinsurgency is hard" postings to make a somewhat counterintuitive argument: To win in Iraq, we need fewer Americans there. Between sustaining the current troop levels and withdrawal, the third option isn't necessarily escalating the US presence. It may be necessary to trim and reorganize it, which can prove harder than simply deploying more troops.

Iraq is, in many respects, a replay of the script the US military followed in Afghanistan. The US mobilized enough forces to topple the enemy regime, but not as many as it mustered for Operation DESERT STORM. The regime quickly collapsed, leaving the United States and its allies occupying most of the country. Guerrilla attacks began almost immediately after occupation, confounding expectations that the invasion would decisively defeat the enemies of US interests in the country. Unexpectedly, the US is now engaged in a long, bitter conflict against a tenacious adversary.

There are, of course, many differences between Afghanistan and Iraq, not least of which is the strength of the alliance that the US built before the invasion. However, the other noticeable difference is the size and organization of the US effort. Operation ENDURING FREEDOM began as an almost wholly unconventional effort, with the US Special Forces acting as "the tip of the spear." After the invasion, the various special operations forces (SOFs), CIA operatives and paramilitary units, and other unconventional forces have continued to play a disproportionately large role. However, the "regular military" has escalated its presence and control in Afghanistan, often to the detriment of the counterinsurgency campaign. As Robert Kaplan documents in Imperial Grunts, the regular military's presence has complicated and slowed decision-making, hurting tactical and operational flexibility. Everything from civil affairs operations, such as the visit of a medical team to an Afghan village, to snatch-and-grab raids now take longer to execute. It also takes more persuasion for US commanders to approve risky operations, which has two consequences. First, it makes the lower-level commanders closest to the political realities in the Afghan countryside less capable of taking those risks when they may be merited. Second, American unwillingness to risk casualties makes it harder for US advisors to convince their Afghan partners to take risks themselves.

While not perfect, the ongoing counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan is doing better than its counterpart in Iraq. Again, there are a lot of factors you can invoke other than the one I'm highlighting here, the scale and type of effort. However, what's not automatically true is the contention that more American troops equals more security, or more political progress along the lines that classic counterinsurgency dictates. Large, conventional American units look for the kinds of fights they're best trained and equipped to handle. Therefore, while there may have been a need to respond to the Army of the Mahdi's challenge in Fallujah, the US military did not have to fight that battle the way that it did. In fact, it's not clear whether a battle was merited at all, in the classic Jominian sense of crushing the enemy's military strength in a climactic, military event. Kaplan's book is notably silent on Fallujah, even though he witnessed the first stages of the battle first-hand. US Marines were eager to engage in a "stand-up" fight, but Kaplan's account is missing any sense of whether the battle made any progress in the larger counterinsurgency war. If US decision-makers view Fallujah as the moment when US occupation forces were finally unleashed, they may make all the wrong conclusions about how to win this war.

If a victory in Iraq depends on helping build a viable Iraqi army, Fallujah was either irrelevant or destructive to that effort. Under fire, Iraqi forces froze, and in many cases, retreated. Why, as a soldier, risk your life if American soldiers seem more than willing to risk their own? How, as a commander, do you stop your troops from fleeing the battlefield, particularly the nasty kind of house-to-house fighting that would be required to re-take Fallujah? Once again, the American emphasis on power obscures situations where leverage is far more important. The American advisor in Afghanistan has levers to pull that his colleague in Iraq does not. While the Americans can offer all sorts of incentive for building and fielding a professional Afghan National Army (ANA), American troops will not always take their place.

Truthfully, I think that, to win the war in Iraq, US forces will have to both drop conventional military doctrine and organization, and deploy more forces. Iraq is a much larger country, and the situation is far worse. While news reports might give a sometimes exaggerated view of violence—not only in Iraq, but also in Los Angeles and other American cities—the situation in Iraq is bad, measured by security and politics. Even if we deploy more troops, a single bomb in a market or a mortar attack on a police station can end the perception of security.

However, draw-down isn't necessarily a sign of retreat. To force American commanders to learn the tactics of counterinsurgency, rather than repeating conventional methods, they may be forced into situations where resourcefulness will have to replace resources. The individual soldier or commander needs all the body armor, radio equipment, civil affairs budget, and other tools to get the job done. US commanders also need to give their subordinates more freedom of action and rewards for unconventional methods that bring real results. Bodies, living or dead, are no measure of victory in counterinsurgency.