Soft kill and softer killing, but in the end, it's still all about leaving the place more connected than you found it
Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 12:14PM ARTICLE: "Rice Asks for $75 Million to Increase Pressure on Iran," by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, 16 February 2006, p. A1
ARTICLE: "The Lessons of Counterinsurgency: U.S. Unit Praised for Tactics Against Iraqi Fighters, Treatment of Detainees," by Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 16 February 2006, p. A14
OP-ED: "For Pakistan, American Aid Is All Guns, No Butter," by Helene Cooper, New York Times, 16 February 2006
Rice asks Congress for $75 mil to work the soft kill on Iran's hardliners (media stuff, aid to local opposition, etc.). We spent $10 mil last year, so a significant plus-up, but not one suggesting that the Bush Administration is willing to go beyond such soft kill strategies.
"The United States will actively confront the policies of this Iranian regime, and at the same time we are going to work to support the aspirations of the Iranian people for freedom in their own country," Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a hearing on the administration's foreign affairs budget.
Meanwhile, our units rotating back to Iraq for the second go-around show more and more intelligence in working the counter-insurgency. The second article is about the Third Armored Cav in its second go-around in Iraq. First time around was pretty rough, but a lot of learning occurred among officers, so this time around you have Col. H.R. McMaster, who was Abizaid's chief brain-trust guy (head of his Commander's Action Group cell) working the scene in a manner befitting his PhD in history.
The last time the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment served in Iraq, in 2003-04, its performance was judged mediocre, with a series of abuse cases growing out of its tour of duty in Anbar province.But its second tour in Iraq has been very different, according to specialists in the difficult art of conducting a counterinsurgency campaign -- fighting a guerrilla war but also trying to win over the population and elements of the enemy. Such campaigns are distinct from the kind of war most U.S. commanders have spent decades preparing to fight.
In the last nine months, the regiment has focused on breaking the insurgents' hold on Tall Afar, a town of 290,000. Their operations here "will serve as a case study in classic counterinsurgency, the way it is supposed to be done," said Terry Daly, a retired intelligence officer specializing in the subject.
U.S. military experts conducting an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005 privately concluded that of all those units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment performed the best at counterinsurgency, according to a source familiar with the review's findings.
The regiment's campaign began in Colorado in June 2004, when Col. H. R. McMaster took command and began to train the unit to return to Iraq. As he described it, his approach was like that of a football coach who knows he has a group of able and dedicated athletes, but needs to retrain them to play soccer.
This is the sort of iterative learning process that I sought to capture in "The Monks of War" article: we get smarter over time, they get more desperate. Toppling Saddam was a real System Perturbation, but working the insurgency is a serious, long-term horizontal scenario, requiring people who can see across time. A PhD in history has to help on that score. Doesn't mean you're not still killing bad guys, it just means you do it with more care and discretion, making sure you don't simply create more enemies in the process.
In the end, you get to leave when their economy is working. Jobs kill insurgencies, not soldiers.
The last piece, an op-ed, is a pretty sad statement on how we've waged such Long War stuff in the past. It's mostly told from the perspective of a long-time businessman in Pakistan, who speaks of the good times before all this warring began, remembering a Pakistan that was effectively modernizing and growing ever more economic connectivity with the outside world.
Then the Americans came with their particular wars, not in 2001, mind you, but back in 1979. And ever since we started using Pakistan as a staging area for warfare in Afganistan (back then, against the Sovs), we managed only to do one thing effectively over the years: slowly but surely disconnect Pakistan from the larger world by increasing the amount of hardliner violence that both occurs within its borders and emanates from the country.
As this guy, Syed Jawad Ahsan, puts it:
"Pakistan didn't used to be like this," he said. "All this extremism that you see here now is because of Afghanistan."He meant the Afghanistan war that started in 1979, not the one that came after Sept. 11. The way Mr. Ahsan sees it, Pakistan before 1979 was a much more open society, with wine bars in the cities and a small measure of freedom. But when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, America responded by arming, and largely creating, the Islamist fighters who drummed up religious fire in their war to drive out the Russians. Next door, Pakistan became a front-line state, and American money flooded to the mujahedeen. Ever since, Pakistan has been home to a growing cadre of fundamentalist Islamists, many of them bent on jihad.
With the huge gap here between rich and poor, militants find young boys with nothing to do easy prey. Mr. Ahsan can't fathom why Americans aren't working on the economic conditions that breed discontent.
"We don't need more of your F-16's," he said. "What we need is trade in textiles. We need a free trade agreement, like the one you're going to give Egypt, like the one you gave Jordan, like the one you gave Morocco."
The United States agreed in 2005 to resume sales of F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. The sales had been suspended for more than a decade because Pakistan began developing nuclear weapons. But Washington has refused to grant a bigger and far more important concession: duty-free access for Pakistani imports.
F-16s don't connect your economy up with globalization, do they? The Long War needs to generate a Long Peace, or it never ends. Peace comes with connectivity: people making stuff and not just craving retribution and jihads that create nothing but dead bodies.
You have to ask yourself if we're using Pakistan today any less cynically than we have in the past. If we're not doing better by now, then the moderates and businessmen in both Iraq and Iran have little to look forward to.
Reader Comments (7)
Ah, yes, it's all clear now: the US is responsible for Pakistan's problems. One of the biggest problems with the Muslim world is the unwillingness to engage in self-criticism, it's always someone else's fault. Pakistanis are not robots or Pavlovian dogs, they are human beings and they need to accept responsibility for their own country.
As for the recent efforts to "promote demmocracy" in Iran:
Iranians don't need Rice's $75 million to see the mess that the US has caused in Iraq -- they have access to satellite TV and the Web and can watch BBC, CNN etc. all day long. And for all his faults, Iran's president has better democratic credentials than practically ALL of the US allies in the Mideast. Why not spend that $75 promoting democracy in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, or Egypt (where voters were recently GUNNED DOWN IN THE STREETS BY THE MILITARY for voting the "wrong" way)? Incidentally, we provide BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in aid and arms to these non-democratic governments whilst pointing fingers at Iran.
Is the point being missed? This is long term strategic thinking about the 'Hearts and Minds' aspect---but with positives instead of constant carping. It's Radio Free Europe(sorta) for the twenty first century and modern threats. It's aquanting the ME(and Iran in particular) with the US. It's re-establishing that the US is devoted to liberal democracy instead of empire. What's wrong with that.
The Pakistani has a point 'bout blowback there, maybe overplayed, bt a decent point. Look at the troubles still ongoing because of the paramilitaries we supported down in S. America. He has a point, and it doesn't seem to be anti-Americanism.
hass - In case you missed it, the Egyptions, Kuwaitis, and Saudis recently took some baby steps in the right direction by holding elections (at all in KSA's case) that were broader and more free than past practice. Yes, election violence is deplorable but it does not negate that multiparty elections for president were held in Egypt for the first time in a long time. If you can apply pressure and get results from phone calls and quiet visits over tea, why would we drop $75M on public pressure?
Saying that Ahmadinejad has greater democratic credentials than Mubarak is missing the point entirely. Mubarak is our ally despite his decades of emergency rule, not because of it. President Bush acknowledged that several decades of supporting autocrats in the ME were counterproductive and that we would change. It's very clear that he's kept his word on that.
Phil has a point. Quite a few of my colleagues have been to Iraq and back. One thing they complain about is the lack of work ethic in many of the locals. When given a contract to build sewers, the contractor gets money up front to buy supplies, then never shows up to actually install the sewers. Then the towns people complain. We cannot tell them to complain to the contractor because that would ruin his reputation/diminish his "machismo" effect and then the contractor would not be able to hire workers to do the work he was paid to do in the first place. I use the male pronoun because, from what I have been told, most of the women interacting with the US have operated quite efficiently.
We are struggling mightily with the relations with the Muslim world (and many other Gap countries) because we in America do not accept that money cannot buy a cultural shift. In many ways, we think EVERYTHING is for sale. We need to realize that it is not about money, or guns or butter, but people. We need to spread some of our shared values (read, rule set) around the world. We need to accept some rules from the world. That takes time.
When you talk about improving connectivity in Afghanistan there is the issue that the basic physical infrastructure of connectivity is not there. The roads were never that great to begin with, and although there has been some rebuilding since the end of the war, they are still not back to the state that they were before the Soviet invasion.
So here is my Modest Proposal to improve connectivity both inside Afghanistan and for the whole region.
Build railroads.
Buy the steel rails from Pakistan.
Build a standard gauge railroad from the end of the line at the Khyber pass in Pakistan through Jalalabad to Kabul. Build Russian wide gauge rail lines to each of Afghanistan's three northern neighbors, through Herat to Turkmenistan, through Mazar-e-Sharif to Uzbekistan, through Kunduz to Tadjikistan. Facilities can be built in Kabul to transfer between the different gauge railroads as is done in Poland today. Making Kabul the hub helps connect the rest of the country to the central government.
The US can pay for the railroad either by loans, grants or by steering UN development funds that way.
In the long run a railroad net will help tie Afghanistan together and take advantage of its location to tie the region more closely into the rest of the world.
In the short run, it will bring domestic pressure in Pakistan against Islamic extremists as people working in the steel industry see their jobs threatened by anything that impedes the construction effort.
that's a cool idea, Mark.