KNOWING THE ENEMY
by GEORGE PACKER
Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?
New Yorker
Issue of 2006-12-18
Posted 2006-12-11
Indonesia's failure to replicate in East Timor its victory in West Java later influenced Kilcullen's views about what the Bush Administration calls the "global war on terror." In both instances, the Indonesian military used the same harsh techniques, including forced population movements, coercion of locals into security forces, stringent curfews, and even lethal pressure on civilians to take the government side. The reason that the effort in East Timor failed, Kilcullen concluded, was globalization. In the late nineties, a Timorese international propaganda campaign and ubiquitous media coverage prompted international intervention, thus ending the use of tactics that, in the obscure jungles of West Java in the fifties, outsiders had known nothing about. "The globalized information environment makes counterinsurgency even more difficult now," Kilcullen said.
Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden's public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. "I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?" he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that "this wasn't a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy." Ron Suskind, in his book "The One Percent Doctrine," claims that analysts at the C.I.A. watched a similar video, released in 2004, and concluded that "bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reëlection." Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush's strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance. Indeed, in the years after September 11th Al Qaeda's core leadership had become a propaganda hub. "If bin Laden didn't have access to global media, satellite communications, and the Internet, he'd just be a cranky guy in a cave," Kilcullen said.
In 2004, Kilcullen's writings and lectures brought him to the attention of an official working for Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Wolfowitz asked him to help write the section on "irregular warfare" in the Pentagon's "Quadrennial Defense Review" a statement of department policy and priorities, which was published earlier this year. Under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld, who resigned in November, the Pentagon had embraced a narrow "shock-and-awe" approach to war-fighting, emphasizing technology, long-range firepower, and spectacular displays of force. The new document declared that activities such as "long-duration unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and military support for stabilization and reconstruction efforts" needed to become a more important component of the war on terror. Kilcullen was partly responsible for the inclusion of the phrase "the long war" which has become the preferred term among many military officers to describe the current conflict. In the end, the Rumsfeld Pentagon was unwilling to make the cuts in expensive weapons systems that would have allowed it to create new combat units and other resources necessary for a proper counterinsurgency strategy.
In July, 2005, Kilcullen, as a result of his work on the Pentagon document, received an invitation to attend a conference on defense policy, in Vermont. There he met Henry Crumpton, a highly regarded official who had supervised the C.I.A's covert activities in Afghanistan during the 2001 military campaign that overthrew the Taliban. The two men spent much of the conference talking privately, and learned, among other things, that they saw the war on terror in the same way. Soon afterward, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, hired Crumpton as the department's coördinator for counterterrorism, and Crumpton, in turn, offered Kilcullen a job. For the past year, Kilcullen has occupied an office on the State Department's second floor, as Crumpton's chief strategist. In some senses, Kilcullen has arrived too late: this year, the insurgency in Iraq has been transformed into a calamitous civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, and his ideas about counterinsurgency are unlikely to reverse the country's disintegration. Yet radical Islamist movements now extend across the globe, from Somalia to Afghanistan and Indonesia, and Kilcullen--an Australian anthropologist and lieutenant colonel, who is "on loan" to the U.S. government--offers a new way to understand and fight a war that seems to grow less intelligible the longer it goes on.
Kilcullen is thirty-nine years old, and has a wide pink face, a fondness for desert boots, and an Australian's good-natured bluntness. He has a talent for making everything sound like common sense by turning disturbing explanations into brisk, cheerful questions: "America is very, very good at big, short conventional wars? It's not very good at small, long wars? But it's even worse at big, long wars? And that's what we've got." Kilcullen's heroes are soldier-intellectuals, both real (T. E. Lawrence) and fictional (Robert Jordan, the flinty, self-reliant schoolteacher turned guerrilla who is the protagonist of Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls"). On his bookshelves, alongside monographs by social scientists such as Max Gluckman and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, is a knife that he took from a militiaman he had just ambushed in East Timor. "If I were a Muslim, I'd probably be a jihadist," Kilcullen said as we sat in his office. "The thing that drives these guys--a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that's happening now--that's the same thing that drives me, you know?"
More than three years into the Iraq war and five into the conflict in Afghanistan, many members of the American military--especially those with combat experience--have begun to accept the need to learn the kind of counterinsurgency tactics that it tried to leave behind in Vietnam. On December 15th, the Army and the Marine Corps will release an ambitious new counterinsurgency field manual--the first in more than two decades--that will shape military doctrine for many years. The introduction to the field manual says, "Effective insurgents rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. They cleverly use the tools of the global information revolution to magnify the effects of their actions. . . . However, by focusing on efforts to secure the safety and support of the local populace, and through a concerted effort to truly function as learning organizations, the Army and Marine Corps can defeat their insurgent enemies."
KNOWING THE ENEMY
by GEORGE PACKER
Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?
New Yorker
Issue of 2006-12-18
Posted 2006-12-11
One night earlier this year, Kilcullen sat down with a bottle of single-malt Scotch and wrote out a series of tips for company commanders about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an energetic writer who avoids military and social-science jargon, and he addressed himself intimately to young captains who have had to become familiar with exotica such as "The Battle of Algiers," the 1966 film documenting the insurgency against French colonists. "What does all the theory mean, at the company level? he asked. "How do the principles translate into action--at night, with the G.P.S. down, the media criticizing you, the locals complaining in a language you don't understand, and an unseen enemy killing your people by ones and twos? How does counterinsurgency actually happen? There are no universal answers, and insurgents are among the most adaptive opponents you will ever face. Countering them will demand every ounce of your intellect." The first tip is "Know Your Turf": "Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district." "Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency"--the title riffs on a T. E. Lawrence insurgency manual from the First World War--was disseminated via e-mail to junior officers in the field, and was avidly read.
Last year, in an influential article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Kilcullen redefined the war on terror as a "global counterinsurgency." The change in terminology has large implications. A terrorist is "a kook in a room," Kilcullen told me, and beyond persuasion; an insurgent has a mass base whose support can be won or lost through politics. The notion of a "war on terror" has led the U.S. government to focus overwhelmingly on military responses. In a counterinsurgency, according to the classical doctrine, which was first laid out by the British general Sir Gerald Templar during the Malayan Emergency, armed force is only a quarter of the effort; political, economic, and informational operations are also required. A war on terror suggests an undifferentiated enemy. Kilcullen speaks of the need to "disaggregate" insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan's tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren't mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad. Kilcullen writes, "Just as the Containment strategy was central to the Cold War, likewise a Disaggregation strategy would provide a unifying strategic conception for the war--something that has been lacking to date." As an example of disaggregation, Kilcullen cited the Indonesian province of Aceh, where, after the 2004 tsunami, a radical Islamist organization tried to set up an office and convert a local separatist movement to its ideological agenda. Resentment toward the outsiders, combined with the swift humanitarian action of American and Australian warships, helped to prevent the Acehnese rebellion from becoming part of the global jihad. As for America, this success had more to do with luck than with strategy. Crumpton, Kilcullen's boss, told me that American foreign policy traditionally operates on two levels, the global and the national; today, however, the battlefields are also regional and local, where the U.S. government has less knowledge and where it is not institutionally organized to act. In half a dozen critical regions, Crumpton has organized meetings among American diplomats, intelligence officials, and combat commanders, so that information about cross-border terrorist threats is shared. "It's really important that we define the enemy in narrow terms" Crumpton said. "The thing we should not do is let our fears grow and then inflate the threat. The threat is big enough without us having to exaggerate it."
By speaking of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda in terms of one big war, Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden's job much easier. "You don't play to the enemy's global information strategy of making it all one fight," Kilcullen said. He pointedly avoided describing this as the Administration's approach. "You say, 'Actually, there are sixty different groups in sixty different countries who all have different objectives. Let's not talk about bin Laden's objectives--let's talk about your objectives. How do we solve that problem?' "In other words, the global ambitions of the enemy don't automatically demand a monolithic response.
The more Kilcullen travels to the various theatres of war, the less he thinks that the lessons of Malaya and Vietnam are useful guides in the current conflict. "Classical counterinsurgency is designed to defeat insurgency in one country," he writes in his Strategic Studies article. "We need a new paradigm, capable of addressing globalised insurgency." After a recent trip to Afghanistan, where Taliban forces have begun to mount large operations in the Pashto-speaking south of the country, he told me, "This ain't your granddaddy's counterinsurgency." Many American units there, he said, are executing the new field manual's tactics brilliantly. For example, before conducting operations in a given area, soldiers sit down over bread and tea with tribal leaders and find out what they need--Korans, cold-weather gear, a hydroelectric dynamo. In exchange for promises of local support, the Americans gather the supplies and then, within hours of the end of fighting, produce them, to show what can be gained from coöperating.
But the Taliban seem to be waging a different war, driven entirely by information operations. "They're essentially armed propaganda organizations," Kilcullen said. "They switch between guerrilla activity and terrorist activity as they need to, in order to maintain the political momentum, and it's all about an information operation that generates the perception of an unstoppable, growing insurgency." After travelling through southern Afghanistan, Kilcullen e-mailed me:
One good example of Taliban information strategy is their use of "night letters." They have been pushing local farmers in several provinces (Helmand, Uruzgan, Kandahar) to grow poppy instead of regular crops, and using night-time threats and intimidation to punish those who don't and convince others to convert to poppy. This is not because they need more opium--God knows they already have enough--but because they're trying to detach the local people from the legal economy and the legally approved governance system of the provinces and districts, to weaken the hold of central and provincial government. Get the people doing something illegal, and they're less likely to feel able to support the government, and more willing to do other illegal things (e.g. join the insurgency--this is a classic old Bolshevik tactic from the early cold war, by the way. They are specifically trying to send the message: "The government can neither help you nor hurt us. We can hurt you, or protect you--the choice is yours." They also use object lessons, making an example of people who don't cooperate--for example, dozens of provincial-level officials have been assassinated this year, again as an "armed propaganda" tool--not because they want one official less but because they want to send the message "We can reach out and touch you if you cross us." Classic armed information operation.
Kilcullen doesn't believe that an entirely "soft" counterinsurgency approach can work against such tactics. In his view, winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you--as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe--but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion. Kilcullen met senior European officers with the NATO force in Afghanistan who seemed to be applying "a development model to counterinsurgency," hoping that gratitude for good work would bring the Afghans over to their side. He told me, "In a counterinsurgency, the gratitude effect will last until the sun goes down and the insurgents show up and say, 'You're on our side, aren't you? Otherwise, we're going to kill you.' If one side is willing to apply lethal force to bring the population to its side and the other side isn't, ultimately you';re going to find yourself losing." Kilcullen was describing a willingness to show local people that supporting the enemy risks harm and hardship, not a campaign like the Phoenix program in Vietnam, in which noncombatants were assassinated; besides being unethical, such a tactic would inevitably backfire in the age of globalized information. Nevertheless, because he talks about war with an analyst's rationalism and a practitioner's matter-of-factness, Kilcullen can appear deceptively detached from its consequences.
several reports quoted senior Iraqi officials as saying the execution would take place at 0600 local time (0300 GMT).
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When he is taken to the gallows Saddam Hussein will be nominally transferred to Iraqi custody, but the US will continue guarding him to maintain maximum security.
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Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on 5 November after a year-long trial over the killings of 148 Shias from the village of Dujail in the 1980s.
A trial in a second case, alleging genocide against Kurds, continues against him.
The former Iraqi leader was captured by US troops on 13 December 2004, after a tip-off.
He was found hiding in a tiny cellar at a farmhouse near his hometown of Tikrit.
0 Replies
InfraBlue
1
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Fri 29 Dec, 2006 06:13 pm
ican wrote:
InfraBlue wrote:
Seeing as how the Kurds were, and are closely allied with the US administration, it would be merely a matter of formality for the Kurds to "request the US administration to enter the area of Iraq under the control of the Kurds. The same cannot be said of the relationship between the Kurds and Saddam.
Why not? The Kurds had previously invited Saddam to enter the area of Iraq under the control of the Kurds in 1996.
One group of Kurds, the KDP, were desperate in their struggle against another group of Kurds, the PUK, that they solicited the assistance of Saddam Hussein.
At the time right before the US' invasion and occupation of Iraq, around late 2002, the PUK and the KDP, were in a position to strike at al-Ansar's camp in Kurdish Iraq. Saddam's assistance was unnecessary.
"The Kurds of Iraq are girding for war. Guerrillas, known as peshmergas, are working day and night hauling sandbags, digging trenches and bulldozing mountain roads to their front lines.
In what may be the opening battle of the war for Iraq, the Kurds are preparing to crush an Islamic fundamentalist group which has seized territory on the Iraqi-Iranian border and which some claim provides evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Iraqi Kurdish sources say they need to move quickly to crush the Taliban-inspired Islamists known as Ansar al-Islam because, if a US-led attack on Saddam begins, all peshmerga forces will be needed to surge southwards into government-controlled Iraq. They do not want to face a war on two fronts." (Guardian UK article, "Kurdish guerrillas poised to fire first shots in war on Iraq," August 11, 2002)
"PUK leaders are worried by revenge attacks from Iraqi government troops in the event of a U.S. attack on Baghdad and are unwilling to fight on two fronts at the same. With that in mind, analysts say, it cannot be too long before the PUK moves to eliminate the Islamist thorn in their side."(Kurdistan Observer article from Reuters "Trouble brews between Kurds/Islamic rebels in Iraq" July 31, 2002)
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That is a twist: "One faction of Kurds the KDP, were so desperate in their conflict with another faction of Kurds, the PUK, that they went so far as to solicit the assistance of their hated enemy, Saddam Hussein, in their bid to wrest control of the Kurdish town of Irbil." But they did in fact solicit the assistance of their alleged hated enemy, Saddam Hussein. Clearly a hatred of convenience.
No, what it was was an alliance of convenience that was ended soon after the KDP took control of that town.
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They again needed assistance with permanently removing al-Qaeda from northeastern Iraq, when they were assisted by US special forces to try and accomplish permanently removing al-Qaeda from northeastern Iraq.
This is yet more conjecture. You've provided absolutely nothing to support this claim.
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I have provided you evidence "that US solicitation was [probably] sufficient for Saddam to enter the Kurdish autonomous zone: an area 'outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq." The fact that my evidence does not make that certain proves nothing for certain, because probably we cannot know anything for certain including this statement of mine.
One more time for the visually impaired: US solicitation was [probably] sufficient for Saddam to enter the Kurdish autonomous zone: an area 'outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq.
The "evidence" you've offered concerning these points has been merely your own conjecture.
One more time for the mentally impaired, and devious in argument: "probably" is not synonymous with "surely," which you had originally written, and to which I had repsonded.
ican wrote:
Well then, surely you will agree that the US asking to extradite the leadership of the al-Qaeda in Iraq constitutes a solicitation by the US to extradite the leadership of the al-Qaeda in Iraq. Surely, that US solicitation was sufficient for Saddam to enter the Kurdish autonomous zone: an area "outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq."
0 Replies
ican711nm
1
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Fri 29 Dec, 2006 07:42 pm
InfraBlue wrote:
This is yet more conjecture. You've provided absolutely nothing to support this claim.
Over the last 3 years, I've provided a great deal of evidence to support all my allegations. Here's some more.
"American Soldier," by General Tommy Franks, 7/1/2004
"10" Regan Books, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Chapter 12
A CAMPAIGN UNLIKE ANY OTHER
CENTCOM FORWARD HEADQUARTERS
21 MARCH 2003, A-DAY
Page 479
"On one plasma screen, the Air Picture displayed hundreds of multicolored icons streaming across the digital map toward Baghdad--strike aircraft and their supporting tankers, electronic warfare jammers, and the Special Ops Combat Search and Rescue forces."
Page 483
"The Air Picture changed once more. Now the icons were streaming toward two ridges and a steep valley in far northeastern Iraq, right on the border of Iran. These were the camps of the Ansar al-Islam terrorists, where al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi had trained disciples in the use of chemical and biological weapons. But the strike was more than just another TLAM bashing. Soon Special Forces and SMU operators, leading Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, would be storming the camps, collecting evidence, taking prisoners, and killing all those who resisted."
Page 518-519
As we spoke, the regimental combat teams of the 1 MEF were closing the pincer on the southeast quadrant of the city. The Marines had fought sharp battles with remnants of Republican Guard units that had survived the relentless air attacks.
And they also encountered several hundred foreign fighters from Egypt, the Sudan, and Libya who were being trained by the regime in a camp south of Baghdad. These foreign volunteers fought with suicidal ferocity, but they did not fight well. The Marines killed them all."
"GLOSSARY
Page 573
MEF Marine Expeditionary Force
page 574
SMU Special Mission Unit
Page 575
TLAM Tomahawk Land Attack Missile"
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Steve 41oo
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Sat 30 Dec, 2006 05:22 am
The barbaric end of Saddam after a mock show trial is a fitting tribute to western values used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq.
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Steve 41oo
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Sat 30 Dec, 2006 05:52 am
BBC wrote:
There had been concerns that people might not believe that Saddam was really dead, so the execution was videoed.
...but then Saddam was known to employ a series of doubles. Just hanging someone who looked like Saddam is no proof.
0 Replies
Steve 41oo
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Sat 30 Dec, 2006 06:16 am
I dont get my entertainment from snuff movies, and I'm not about to start.
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xingu
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Sat 30 Dec, 2006 06:46 am
Quote:
That initially small camp was set up by al-Qaeda in Iraq, in December 2001, on the Iranian border, because both Saddam Hussein and the Kurds were expected to tolerate it there and thereby allow it to become a safe location.
Absolute denial of reality. An incredibly dumb statement.
It's a waste of time responding to such drivel.
0 Replies
revel
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Sat 30 Dec, 2006 09:19 am
Ican, Bush had the opportunity to take out Al-Queda in Iraq no less than three times, but chose not to.
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.
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Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
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In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.
The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.
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More on the irony of Zarquawi death and the administrations rhetoric.
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.
Quote:
Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
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In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.
The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.
The Bush administration's failures to attack the al-Qaeda camps in northeastern Iraq on the ground as well as by air prior to its March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq, are well known. These failures are among my many reasons for claiming that Bush screwed up in Iraq.
That same reason is among my many reasons for claiming that Clinton screwed up in Afghanistan. He too failed to attack the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan on the ground as well as by air prior to the end of his term January 20, 2001--nine days less than 8 months before September 11, 2001. His navy cruise missile air assault August 20, 1998 was too late to kill Osama bin Laden along with other terrorist leaders, who had fled the targeted camps when they learned the navy's cruise missles were fired and enroute on their about 2 hour flight from the Arabian Sea.
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The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late --Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. "Here's a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we're suffering as a result inside Iraq"Cressey added.
More on the irony of Zarquawi death and the administrations rhetoric.
Ican, whether you see it or not, this kills your case of our being justified to attack Iraq because of the Al-Queda camp in 2001.
No! Whether you see it or not, this strengthens my case for our being justified to attack Iraq. Before we attacked Iraq, al-Qaeda in Iraq was producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
All that you posted provides evidence that al-Qaeda was based in Iraq and constituted a real danger to the West including America.
Let's examine your quote: "The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late--Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone."
Zarqawi and many of his followers fled their al-Qaeda camps before our and Kurdish ground forces arrived there. That is, Zarqawi saw us coming and decided to flee with others to Iran before we arrived. After all, we know they are not fools. Of course they fled when they saw us coming by air and ground.
However, would they have fled had we not invaded them? Of course not! Had they remained in those camps absent our invasion would they have continued preparing to terrorize the West with deadly ricin and cyanide? Of course they would have!
So inspite of Bush screwing up by not attacking those camps sooner by ground and air, he did attack those camps in March 2003 causing them to finally shut down.
Yes, afterward Bush screwed up more in Iraq. Bush so far has failed to find a way to replace Saddam's regime with a government that could adequately protect the Iraqi people from mass murder. But that is another issue.
0 Replies
revel
1
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Sat 30 Dec, 2006 02:43 pm
The point, O obtuse one, is that we could have taken out that small Al-Queda camp very easily thus sparing countless lives without resorting to an invasion so your case of saying we had to invade because of that small Al-Queda camp is full of crap.
0 Replies
ican711nm
1
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Sat 30 Dec, 2006 02:44 pm
CONTINUED
4
KNOWING THE ENEMY
by GEORGE PACKER
Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?
New Yorker
Issue of 2006-12-18
Posted 2006-12-11
An information strategy seems to be driving the agenda of every radical Islamist movement. Kilcullen noted that when insurgents ambush an American convoy in Iraq, "they're not doing that because they want to reduce the number of Humvees we have in Iraq by one. They're doing it because they want spectacular media footage of a burning Humvee." Last year, a letter surfaced that is believed to have been sent from Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, to the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, nine months before Zarqawi's death; the letter urged Zarqawi to make his videotaped beheadings and mass slaughter of Shiite civilians less gruesome. Kilcullen interpreted the letter as "basically saying to Zarqawi, 'Justify your attacks on the basis of how they support our information strategy.' " As soon as the recent fighting in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israeli troops ended, Hezbollah marked, with its party flags, houses that had been damaged. Kilcullen said, "That's not a reconstruction operation--it's an information operation. It's influence. They're going out there to send a couple of messages. To the Lebanese people they're saying, 'We're going to take care of you.' To all the aid agencies it's like a dog pissing on trees: they're saying, 'We own this house--don't you touch it.' " He went on, "When the aid agencies arrive a few days later, they have to negotiate with Hezbollah because there's a Hezbollah flag on the house. Hezbollah says, 'Yeah, you can sell a contract to us to fix up that house.' It's an information operation. They're trying to generate influence."
The result is an intimidated or motivated population, and a spike in fund-raising and recruiting. "When you go on YouTube and look at one of these attacks in Iraq, all you see is the video," Kilcullen said. "If you go to some jihadist Web sites, you see the same video and then a button next to it that says, 'Click here and donate.' " The Afghan or Iraqi or Lebanese insurgent, unlike his Vietnamese or Salvadoran predecessor, can plug into a global media network that will instantly amplify his message. After Kilcullen returned from Afghanistan last month, he stayed up late one Saturday night ("because I have no social life") and calculated how many sources of information existed for a Vietnamese villager in 1966 and for an Afghan villager in 2006. He concluded that the former had ten, almost half under government control, such as Saigon radio and local officials; the latter has twenty-five (counting the Internet as only one), of which just five are controlled by the government. Most of the rest--including e-mail, satellite phone, and text messaging--are independent but more easily exploited by insurgents than by the Afghan government. And it is on the level of influencing perceptions that these wars will be won or lost. "The international information environment is critical to the success of America's mission," Kilcullen said.
In the information war, America and its allies are barely competing. America's information operations, far from being the primary strategy, simply support military actions, and often badly: a Pentagon spokesman announces a battle victory, but no one in the area of the battlefield hears him (or would believe him anyway). Just as the Indonesians failed in East Timor, in spite of using locally successful tactics, Kilcullen said, "We've done a similar thing in Iraq--we've arguably done O.K. on the ground in some places, but we're totally losing the domestic information battle. In Afghanistan, it still could go either way."
However careful Kilcullen is not to criticize Administration policy, his argument amounts to a thoroughgoing critique. As a foreigner who is not a career official in the U.S. government, he has more distance and freedom to discuss the war on jihadism frankly, and in ways that his American counterparts rarely can. "It's now fundamentally an information fight," he said. "The enemy gets that, and we don't yet get that, and I think that's why we're losing."
In late September, Kilcullen was one of the featured speakers at a conference in Washington, organized by the State and Defense Departments, on bringing the civilian branches of the government into the global counterinsurgency effort. In the hallway outside the meeting room, he made a point of introducing me to another speaker, an anthropologist and Pentagon consultant named Montgomery McFate. For five years, McFate later told me, she has been making it her "evangelical mission" to get the Department of Defense to understand the importance of "cultural knowledge." McFate is forty years old, with hair cut stylishly short and an air of humorous cool. When I asked why a social scientist would want to help the war effort, she replied, only half joking, "Because I'm engaged in a massive act of rebellion against my hippie parents."
McFate grew up in the sixties on a communal houseboat in Marin County, California. Her parents were friends with Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and one of her schoolmates was the daughter of Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. Like Kilcullen, she was drawn to the study of human conflict and also its reality: at Yale, where she received a doctorate, her dissertation was based on several years she spent living among supporters of the Irish Republican Army and then among British counterinsurgents. In Northern Ireland, McFate discovered something very like what Kilcullen found in West Java: insurgency runs in families and social networks, held together by persistent cultural narratives--in this case, the eight-hundred-year-old saga of "perfidious Albion." She went on to marry a U.S. Army officer. "When I was little in California, we never believed there was such a thing as the Cold War," McFate said. "That was a bunch of lies that the government fed us to keep us paranoid. Of course, there was a thing called the Cold War, and we nearly lost. And there was no guarantee that we were going to win. And this thing that's happening now is, without taking that too far, similar." After September 11th, McFate said, she became "passionate about one issue: the government's need to actually understand its adversaries," in the same way that the United States came to understand--and thereby undermine--the Soviet Union. If, as Kilcullen and Crumpton maintain, the battlefield in the global counterinsurgency is intimately local, then the American government needs what McFate calls a "granular" knowledge of the social terrains on which it is competing.
In 2004, when McFate had a fellowship at the Office of Naval Research, she got a call from a science adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had been contacted by battalion commanders with the 4th Infantry Division in a violent sector of the Sunni Triangle, in Iraq. "We're having a really hard time out here--we have no idea how this society works," the commanders said. "Could you help us?" The science adviser replied that he was a mathematical physicist, and turned for help to one of the few anthropologists he could find in the Defense Department.
For decades, the Pentagon and the humanistic social sciences have had little to do with each other. In 1964, the Pentagon set up a program called, with the self-conscious idealism of the period, Project Camelot. Anthropologists were hired and sent abroad to conduct a multiyear study of the factors that promote stability or war in certain societies, beginning with Chile. When news of the program leaked, the uproar in Chile and America forced Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to cancel it. "The Department of Defense has invested hardly any money in conducting ethnographic research in areas where conflict was occurring since 1965," McFate told me. After Project Camelot and Vietnam, where social scientists often did contract work for the U.S. military, professional associations discouraged such involvement. ("Academic anthropologists hate me for working with D.O.D.," McFate said.) Kilcullen, who calls counterinsurgency "armed social science," told me, "This is fundamentally about the broken relationship between the government and the discipline of anthropology. What broke that relationship is Vietnam. And people still haven't recovered from that." As a result, a complex human understanding of societies at war has been lost. "But it didn't have to be lost," McFate said. During the Second World War, anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Geoffrey Gorer, and Ruth Benedict provided the Allied war effort with essential insights into Asian societies. Gorer and Benedict suggested, for example, that the terms of Japan's surrender be separated from the question of the emperor's abdication, because the emperor was thought to embody the country's soul; doing so allowed the Japanese to accept unconditional surrender. McFate sees herself as reaching back to this tradition of military-academic coöperation.
MORE TO COME
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ican711nm
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Sat 30 Dec, 2006 03:46 pm
revel wrote:
The point, O obtuse one, is that we could have taken out that small Al-Queda camp very easily thus sparing countless lives without resorting to an invasion so your case of saying we had to invade because of that small Al-Queda camp is full of crap.
I, "O obtuse one", wrote to you, O brilliant one, that I understood that we could have taken out that small Al-Qaeda camp very easily by invading it on the ground and in the air.
I, "O obtuse one", said to you, O brilliant one, almost exactly that--upto "thus sparing"--in my previous response to you (emphasis added): The Bush administration's failures to attack the al-Qaeda camps in northeastern Iraq on the ground as well as by air prior to its March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq, are well known. These failures are among my many reasons for claiming that Bush screwed up in Iraq.
But I, Ooo, now say to you, Obo, that this statement of yours doesn't deal with all of the consequences of all of Bush's screw ups that now disallow:
"thus sparing countless lives without resorting to an invasion."
Bush invaded Iraq to accomplish these four objectives:
(1) He believed it was necessary to invade the whole of Iraq to rid it of the whole of al-Qaeda in Iraq;
(2) He believed it was necessary to replace Saddam's regime because it possessed ready-to-use WMD;
(3) He believed it was necessary to replace Saddam's regime with a government that would not allow al-Qaeda to again gain sanctuary in Iraq;
(4) He believed it was necessary to replace Saddam's regime with a government that was a democracy in order to eventually democratize the entire middle east and reduce the ability of middle eastern tyrants to mass murder middle eastern non-murderers.
Based on what I believe now, the Bush Administration was not competent to accomplish even one of these four objectives. If I had believed that back in 2003, I would have argued for invading on the ground and in the air all known al-Qaeda sites, and then withdrawing from Iraq. Then whenever al-Qaeda re-established itself in Iraq, invade its sites again.
But because of the consequences of Bush's screw ups, that option is no longer practical. So instead, I now recommend what David Kilcullen, an Australian army officer on loan to the US Defense Department, is quoted as recommending in the article I have been posting in parts because of its length:
KNOWING THE ENEMY
by GEORGE PACKER
Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?
New Yorker
Issue of 2006-12-18
Posted 2006-12-11
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xingu
1
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Sat 30 Dec, 2006 07:18 pm
Quote:
Baghdad Burning
... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...
Friday, December 29, 2006
End of Another Year...
You know your country is in trouble when:
The UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI.
Abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country.
The politicians who worked to put your country in this sorry state can no longer be found inside of, or anywhere near, its borders.
The only thing the US and Iran can agree about is the deteriorating state of your nation.
An 8-year war and 13-year blockade are looking like the country's 'Golden Years'.
Your country is purportedly 'selling' 2 million barrels of oil a day, but you are standing in line for 4 hours for black market gasoline for the generator.
For every 5 hours of no electricity, you get one hour of public electricity and then the government announces it's going to cut back on providing that hour.
Politicians who supported the war spend tv time debating whether it is 'sectarian bloodshed' or 'civil war'.
People consider themselves lucky if they can actually identify the corpse of the relative that's been missing for two weeks.
A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted.
2006 has been, decidedly, the worst year yet. No- really. The magnitude of this war and occupation is only now hitting the country full force. It's like having a big piece of hard, dry earth you are determined to break apart. You drive in the first stake in the form of an infrastructure damaged with missiles and the newest in arms technology, the first cracks begin to form. Several smaller stakes come in the form of politicians like Chalabi, Al Hakim, Talbani, Pachachi, Allawi and Maliki. The cracks slowly begin to multiply and stretch across the once solid piece of earth, reaching out towards its edges like so many skeletal hands. And you apply pressure. You surround it from all sides and push and pull. Slowly, but surely, it begins coming apart- a chip here, a chunk there.
That is Iraq right now. The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The 'mistakes' were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible- from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaffari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional.
The question now is, but why? I really have been asking myself that these last few days. What does America possibly gain by damaging Iraq to this extent? I'm certain only raving idiots still believe this war and occupation were about WMD or an actual fear of Saddam.
Al Qaeda? That's laughable. Bush has effectively created more terrorists in Iraq these last 4 years than Osama could have created in 10 different terrorist camps in the distant hills of Afghanistan. Our children now play games of 'sniper' and 'jihadi', pretending that one hit an American soldier between the eyes and this one overturned a Humvee.
This last year especially has been a turning point. Nearly every Iraqi has lost so much. So much. There's no way to describe the loss we've experienced with this war and occupation. There are no words to relay the feelings that come with the knowledge that daily almost 40 corpses are found in different states of decay and mutilation. There is no compensation for the dense, black cloud of fear that hangs over the head of every Iraqi. Fear of things so out of ones hands, it borders on the ridiculous- like whether your name is 'too Sunni' or 'too Shia'. Fear of the larger things- like the Americans in the tank, the police patrolling your area in black bandanas and green banners, and the Iraqi soldiers wearing black masks at the checkpoint.
Again, I can't help but ask myself why this was all done? What was the point of breaking Iraq so that it was beyond repair? Iran seems to be the only gainer. Their presence in Iraq is so well-established, publicly criticizing a cleric or ayatollah verges on suicide. Has the situation gone so beyond America that it is now irretrievable? Or was this a part of the plan all along? My head aches just posing the questions.
What has me most puzzled right now is: why add fuel to the fire? Sunnis and moderate Shia are being chased out of the larger cities in the south and the capital. Baghdad is being torn apart with Shia leaving Sunni areas and Sunnis leaving Shia areas- some under threat and some in fear of attacks. People are being openly shot at check points or in drive by killings Many colleges have stopped classes. Thousands of Iraqis no longer send their children to school- it's just not safe.
Why make things worse by insisting on Saddam's execution now? Who gains if they hang Saddam? Iran, naturally, but who else? There is a real fear that this execution will be the final blow that will shatter Iraq. Some Sunni and Shia tribes have threatened to arm their members against the Americans if Saddam is executed. Iraqis in general are watching closely to see what happens next, and quietly preparing for the worst.
This is because now, Saddam no longer represents himself or his regime. Through the constant insistence of American war propaganda, Saddam is now representative of all Sunni Arabs (never mind most of his government were Shia). The Americans, through their speeches and news articles and Iraqi Puppets, have made it very clear that they consider him to personify Sunni Arab resistance to the occupation. Basically, with this execution, what the Americans are saying is "Look- Sunni Arabs- this is your man, we all know this. We're hanging him- he symbolizes you." And make no mistake about it, this trial and verdict and execution are 100% American. Some of the actors were Iraqi enough, but the production, direction and montage was pure Hollywood (though low-budget, if you ask me).
That is, of course, why Talbani doesn't want to sign his death penalty- not because the mob man suddenly grew a conscience, but because he doesn't want to be the one who does the hanging- he won't be able to travel far away enough if he does that.
Maliki's government couldn't contain their glee. They announced the ratification of the execution order before the actual court did. A few nights ago, some American news program interviewed Maliki's bureau chief, Basim Al-Hassani who was speaking in accented American English about the upcoming execution like it was a carnival he'd be attending. He sat, looking sleazy and not a little bit ridiculous, his dialogue interspersed with 'gonna', 'gotta' and 'wanna'... Which happens, I suppose, when the only people you mix with are American soldiers.
My only conclusion is that the Americans want to withdraw from Iraq, but would like to leave behind a full-fledged civil war because it wouldn't look good if they withdraw and things actually begin to improve, would it?
Here we come to the end of 2006 and I am sad. Not simply sad for the state of the country, but for the state of our humanity, as Iraqis. We've all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.
Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn't believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.
Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so.
Just because Americans die in smaller numbers, it doesn't make them more significant, does it?
Iraq poll: U.S. troops departure is asset
BAGHDAD, Dec. 29 (UPI) -- About 90 percent of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before the U.S.-led invasion than it is today, according to a new ICRSS poll.
The findings emerged after house-to-house interviews conducted by the ICRSS during the third week of November. About 2,000 people from Baghdad (82 percent), Anbar and Najaf (9 percent each) were randomly asked to express their opinion. Twenty-four percent of the respondents were women.
Only five percent of those questioned said Iraq is better today than in 2003. While 89 percent of the people said the political situation had deteriorated, 79 percent saw a decline in the economic situation; 12 percent felt things had improved and 9 percent said there was no change. Predictably, 95 percent felt the security situation was worse than before.
The results of the poll conducted by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies and shared with the Gulf Research Center, has a margin error of +/- 3.1 percent.
The ICRSS is an independent institution "which attempts to spread the conscious necessity of realizing basic freedoms, consolidating democratic values and foundations of civil society."
Nearly 50 percent of the respondents identified themselves only as "Muslims"; 34 percent were Shiites and 14 percent, Sunnis.
Ican, for at least two years you have been saying that because of that small Al-Queda camp and the possiblity that it could have grown we were justified in invading Iraq regardless of WMD or lack thereof. I am glad that you finally admit that he could have gotten rid of that small Al-Queda had he chosen to do so without an all out invasion. If you said so before and I missed, my apologies.
However, all of this is also crap.
Bush invaded Iraq to accomplish these four objectives:
(1) He believed it was necessary to invade the whole of Iraq to rid it of the whole of al-Qaeda in Iraq; He didn't either unless he just ignored the detailed plans Pentagon had set up to get rid of those camps.
(2) He believed it was necessary to replace Saddam's regime because it possessed ready-to-use WMD; He had enough pre-war intellegence to know that was not the case of which proof has been left here numerous times. He just chose to ignore that as well.
(3) He believed it was necessary to replace Saddam's regime with a government that would not allow al-Qaeda to again gain sanctuary in Iraq;
Saddam hardly did that and like others have said if he was so concerned with Al-Queda he would have left our resources in Afghanistan and continued to search for Osma bin forgotten.
(4) He believed it was necessary to replace Saddam's regime with a government that was a democracy in order to eventually democratize the entire middle east and reduce the ability of middle eastern tyrants to mass murder middle eastern non-murderers.
It possible he might very well had believed this, however, he was living in fool's paradise which has been proved with the results. You can't force democracy by the barel of the gun and not get a load of resentment for it.
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ican711nm
1
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Sat 30 Dec, 2006 08:56 pm
revel wrote:
Ican, for at least two years you have been saying that because of that small Al-Queda camp and the possiblity that it could have grown we were justified in invading Iraq regardless of WMD or lack thereof. I am glad that you finally admit that he could have gotten rid of that small Al-Queda camp had Bush chosen to do so without an all out invasion.
Yes, I admit that. But after the US left Iraq, that small Al-Queda camp would have been reconstituted and would have again grown rapidly.
...
(4) Bush believed it was necessary to replace Saddam's regime with a government that was a democracy in order to eventually democratize the entire middle east and reduce the ability of middle eastern tyrants to mass murder middle eastern non-murderers.
It's possible he might very well have believed this, however, he was living in fool's paradise which has been proved with the results. You can't force democracy by the barel of the gun and not get a load of resentment for it.
On the contrary, we did successfully force democracy by the barrel of the gun after WWII thanks to MacArthur's and Eisenhower's leadership. And we did not get a load of resentment for it. We did that successfully in both Germany and Japan.
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revel
1
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Sun 31 Dec, 2006 12:25 pm
Quote:
On the contrary, we did successfully force democracy by the barrel of the gun after WWII thanks to MacArthur's and Eisenhower's leadership. And we did not get a load of resentment for it. We did that successfully in both Germany and Japan.
Democracy did not spread because of WW11, remember the cold war and the Berlin Wall which divided the communist block of nations from the democratic block of nations. The cold war ended without a shot being fired.
I, "O obtuse one", wrote to you, O brilliant one, that I understood that we could have taken out that small Al-Qaeda camp very easily by invading it on the ground and in the air.