Antiquated COIN
- Whatever happens, we have got
- The Maxim gun, and they have not.
Hilaire Beloc
Shafts of Light
From the blog of Hayder Al-Khoei — grandson of Grand Ayatollah Abdul-Qasim Al-Khoei — I found this post on hearing the music of Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram in what was the heartland of Sadrist Iraq really affecting:
Things just arn’t the same as they were in Kufa. When the US and Iraqi armies battled Moqtada’s army in 2004 most of the people that wandered the streets of Kufa were militiamen. Even in times of peace this town was a bastion for the Mehdi Army. Historically, Kufa has always been the heart of the Sadrists in southern Iraq.
The local police were either sympathetic to the Sadrists, indifferent when it came to their crimes or Sadrists themselves. In many instances the police would man checkpoints together with the militia. If the Sadrists needed police cars or equipment they would either steal them from the police or be given them by the police. Anyone wearing jeans, having the wrong haircut or playing music loud from their cars would be humiliated, taken out of their cars and beaten with sticks in the middle of the street.Those days are long gone. Now commandos and Rapid Intervention Forces patrol the streets alongside the police, there is no room for the Sadrists to breathe. Yesterday we had to drive over a mile to find a space to park alongside the river bank. The river was lined with families and teenagers laughing, enjoying dinner, drinking tea, playing backgammon or smoking sheesha. Every few minutes a car would drive past with Arabic music on full volume blaring out of the windows and there was not a single Sadrist there to shut them up. Some of the older men even encourage the teenagers, with beads swinging in their hands they shout “hele, hele” as they hear the sweet voice of Nancy Ajram.
Al-Khoei’s pleasure at the relaxed atmosphere in Kufa reflects the broader improvements in security that led Stephen Biddle, Michael E. O’Hanlon, and Kenneth M. Pollackto proppose, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, a strategy for troop withdrawal from Iraq that doesn’t come at the cost of stability.
COIN in Review
Perspectives on Politics roundtable review on “The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis“, featuring Stephen Biddle, LTC Doug Ollivant, Professor Stathis Kalyvas, and Professor Wendy Brown.
Mapping Iran’s Secret War
Bill Roggio has an timely and in-depth analysis of Iranian involvement in the Iraqi insurgency via the Ramazan Corps, Qods Force’s operational command in Iraq. The Ramazan Corps provides arms, advice and basic training, distributed along a series of “ratlines” that run into the country from Iran’s western border.
Inside Iran, Qods Force manufactures and distributes weapons, provides training for Iraqi recruits, then facilitates the movement of weapons and fighters inside Iraq. Iraqi recruits, largely radicalized Shia from Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, are sent to Iran for what one US military officer described as “basic jihadi training.” The recruits receive several weeks of training with small arms and, depending on the units assigned, mortars and the use of explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs.
American commanders also dispute reports that Iran has reduced its involvement in Iraq, and that it has helped to curb the violence:
“I don’t know what this Iranian pledge is, but the number of munitions has increased,” Lynch said on November 11. “It could be that we are finding them more. But it is still troublesome. I have no idea when these EFP munitions came … before or after the pledge. I don’t know.”
“Iraq’s Natural State” – Some thoughts
Arnold Kling, drawing on the work of Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, says in a January 2007 article for TCS that Iraq “under Saddam Hussein was a limited-access order, or “natural state.” And, furthermore, that “Iraq was never on the “doorstep” of becoming an open-access order.”
His analysis uses a model of macro-socio-economic development that begins with the simplest type of hunter-gatherer societies, referred to as “primitive orders”, progresses through “limited access orders” or “natural states”, the first and most enduring civilisational mode, and finishes with the historically recent advance of “open access orders”. A “limited access order” is North et al’s term for a society that “strictly limits access to positions of power within political, economic, and religious systems.” An “open access order”, on the other hand, is a society “characterized by open political and economic competition, rather than the limited political and economic privileges enjoyed solely by elites in natural states.” Transition between the two is rare (Spain, Ireland and Taiwan are some of the latest), because “the state’s foremost task is securing its own survival”, and so it feels the process of change as a threat to its very existence – and the existence of the elites it serves – which, of course, it is.
For that reason, Kling concludes that the US will never succeed “in its objective of establishing an open-access order in Iraq.” At present, the country is barely any kind of order, limited access or otherwise, and the thought of creating a liberal democracy with a vibrant market economy seems faintly ridiculous, certainly premature. Start with a limited access order, he advises, which can provide security and can establish and consolidate the necessary preliminary stage of economic development. Without the self-interest of an elite who feel that they have “a stake in peace”, Iraq will stall and remain a failed state.
I have previously wondered whether it is wise to be resuscitating, or helping to resuscitate, ethnic, tribal identities to shore up the fall-out from the destruction of the Iraqi state. Perhaps we are simply facilitating, entrenching and developing sectarianism. However, the implications of Kling’s article are that progression to a democratic market economy is impossible without first developing as a natural state, as unpalatable as that may be to westerners. “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” and as such we will have to give elites preferential access to political and economic power, or deny them at the cost of state failure and realising Iraq’s potential as an eventual open access order.
Robert Kaplan wrote a recent op-ed for The Atlantic, in which he noted that,
Iraq has had three elections that have led to chaos. Bringing society out of that chaos has meant a recourse not to laws or a constitution, but to blood ties. The Anbar Awakening has been a rebuff not only to the extremism of al-Qaeda, but to democracy itself. Restoring peace in Anbar has been accomplished by a lot of money changing hands, to the benefit of unelected but well-respected tribal sheikhs, paid off with cash and projects by our soldiers and marines. Progress in Iraq means erecting not a parliamentary system, but a balance of fear among tribes and sectarian groups.
It seems that a year since Kling wrote “Iraq’s Natural State” in TCS, the US military is acting out his suggestions. Petraeus, and the new COIN-as-anthropology approach he implemented, seeks to work with the grain of existing cultures rather than attempting to impose new rule-sets from the top down. As the natural state develops out of the centralisation of power in the hands of dominant groups, a natural state is precisely what is developing in Iraq with the empowerment of the tribes. Given a stake in the maintenance of order, i.e. they feel they have more to gain by participating, they uphold the state.
Perhaps this might even aid the state moving up the order-type value chain. Pluralism or plurality of access to economic and political power is, after all, part of what makes open access orders what they are. Such a situation is doubtless more fragile – Saddam found it easier to be a tyrant than the US is finding it to be a liberator – but also more worthwhile: for greater risk (and associated cost), there is greater return.
The still unanswered question is whether the various tribal powers, religious factions and ethnic groups can all be reconciled to the natural state of Iraq. Can be power be centralised and dispersed at the same time? Federalism is probably the most realistic and sustainable solution.
4GW vs. NCW
Reading the recent exchange between Noah Shactman and Tom Barnett, it seems to me that both are right in some sense, or at least, both have useful contributions to make.
Shactman’s thesis (published in WIRED) is only partially explained by its title: How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic. In the article he describes how the focus of the American military, as an institution, on fighting large, WWII-scale battles against peer (or almost peer) opposition armed forces, occluded them and left them unable to recognise or divine the looming mess of post-conflict Iraq urban insurrection.
Except, that’s not quite what he says. It’s probably what he should have said, but as Tom Barnett points out, Shactman’s article, in effect, excuses the US Administration for any mistakes made or lack of foresight, and instead blames it all on… Arthur Cebrowski, John Garstka and the theory of Network Centric Warfare as they developed it.
However, although he initially proposes a strangely simplified dichotomy (further reduced by me to 4GW vs. NCW), as the piece progresses the two supposedly opposing sides don’t seem quite so exclusive. For instance, though Shactman is unimpressed by the Fourth Division’s ultra-modern telecommunications and networked tracking systems, the actual users appear to feel differently. “No commander at his level has ever been able to see so many of his men so easily. “It increases the unit’s combat power, no question,” Prior says.” The potential of the NCW doctrine is ignored, even as its successes are recounted: “When the US went to war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, its forces achieved apparent victory with lightning speed.” Garstka even tells him directly that “you have your social networks and technological networks. You need to have both.” But Shactman either can’t see the obvious positive uses for the networked, advanced-tech, quantitative analysis approach which emerge from his writing or, perhaps more probably, doesn’t want to because it contradicts his idea.
It’s almost funny when Shactman interviews Petraeus towards the article’s end. “I’m expecting a frontal assault on network-centric warfare,” he writes. “Instead, he sings me a love song.”
Zenpundit sums it up well:
The crux of the problem with Shachtman’s article is that his opener gives the impression that the botching of the occupation in Iraq should be laid at the door of two men who articulated strategic ideas with impressive intellectual celerity and subtlety, one of whom is no longer able to defend himself.
Indeed, Shactman would do better to look at institutions rather than an idea because,
whenever a theory is accepted by a large and powerful bureaucratic organization- like, say, the Pentagon – it collides with reality.
Cometh the hour…
General Petraeus reports to Congress:
As a bottom line up front, the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met. In recent months, in the face of tough enemies and the brutal summer heat of Iraq, Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces have achieved progress in the security arena. Though the improvements have been uneven across Iraq, the overall number of security incidents in Iraq has declined in 8 of the past 12 weeks, with the numbers of incidents in the last two weeks at the lowest levels seen since June 2006.
One reason for the decline in incidents is that Coalition and Iraqi forces have dealt significant blows to Al Qaeda-Iraq. Though Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq remain dangerous, we have taken away a number of their sanctuaries and gained the initiative in many areas.
We have also disrupted Shia militia extremists, capturing the head and numerous other leaders of the Iranian-supported Special Groups, along with a senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative supporting Iran’s activities in Iraq.
Coalition and Iraqi operations have helped reduce ethno-sectarian violence, as well, bringing down the number of ethno-sectarian deaths substantially in Baghdad and across Iraq since the height of the sectarian violence last December. The number of overall civilian deaths has also declined during this period, although the numbers in each area are still at troubling levels.
Iraqi Security Forces have also continued to grow and to shoulder more of the load, albeit slowly and amid continuing concerns about the sectarian tendencies of some elements in their ranks. In general, however, Iraqi elements have been standing and fighting and sustaining tough losses, and they have taken the lead in operations in many areas.
Additionally, in what may be the most significant development of the past 8 months, the tribal rejection of Al Qaeda that started in Anbar Province and helped produce such significant change there has now spread to a number of other locations as well….
The post at SWJ includes the full transcript and briefing slides for both General Petraeus’ and Ambassador Crocker’s Congressional testimonies.
Additional Assessment:
Col. Pat Lang – Petraeus and Crocker – Intersting
B. Smith & J. Martin – The Candidates Respond to Petraeus
E.J. Dionne – The Surge Has Succeeded… in Washington
Michael Yon – Don’t Ask Me What I Think about the Petraeus Report
Thomas P.M. Barnett – Petraeus’ report was everything we were told it would be
Karen DeYoung & Thomas Ricks – The General’s Long View Could Cut Withdrawal Debate Short
Jonathan Rauch – Be Angry… but Patient
Jacob Laksin – Surgin’ General
Frederick W. Kagan – No Middle Way
Tony Bey – Gen. Petraeus on Iran, Hezbollah and Syria in Iraq
The Times editorial – Listen to Petraeus
Gerard Baker – General Petraeus polarises Washington
Babak Dehghanpisheh & John Barry – The Brains Behind the Petraeus Iraq Report
Recommended Reading
Paul Berman has written a long, almost book-length article on Tariq Ramadan, the French Islamist and Muslim intellectual, examining what he represents within his own current of so-called “salafi reformism” and what his widespread feting by liberal European intellectuals tells us about society today. It’s very much in the spirit of Terror and Liberalism and, as such, is not so much recommended reading as required. The article was published in The New Republic and is called The Islamist, the Journalist, and the defence of Liberalism.
The Observer, not normally a newspaper I rate very highly, published a brilliant and very brave article by Hassan Butt recently, My plea to fellow Muslims: you must renounce terror. Butt was, at one time, the spokesman for a proscribed British Islamist organisation, Al-Muhajiroun, an involved feature of what he terms the “British Jihadi Network”, and even, following his arrest under the Terrorism Act, a minor celebrity of Muslim extremism. Hassan has renounced his past positions and is using his platform to now call for an Islamic response to Islamist terror, specifically, one grounded in Islamic law.
In the July edition of Reason Magazine, Brink Lindsey has a new article, The Aquarians and the Evangelicals, which discusses the split in what he calls the “postwar liberal consensus” in American society. The split, which gave birth to the oppositional yet curiously complementary left/right political spectrum of today, severed the American polity into the socially liberal anti-capitalists, who enjoyed modern freedoms yet hated the engine of capital that generated them, and the fiscally conservative religious right, who protected the market economy yet despaired of the freedoms it created. Lindsey notes that,
On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by the unprecedented mass affluence of the postwar years but at the same time were hostile to the social institutions—namely, the market and the middle-class work ethic—that created those possibilities. On the right rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing. One side denounced capitalism but gobbled its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.
Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser in the Multi-National Force – Iraq, Dave Kilcullen, has a very revealing and timely post at the Small Wars Journal Blog, Understanding Current Operations in Iraq. Kilcullen explains the rational behind the surge and the MNF’s strategy for defeating the insurgency. The strategy will not focus on chasing clandestine cells of jihadists around the desert, but will instead look to protect the Iraqi population and cutting off support (be it moral or logistical) for the terrorists. Despite the ever more shrill shouts of “failure” in the press, Kilcullen advises his readers to wait and see, because in fact the surge proper is only just starting. The activity of the previous months was merely the prepapration of forces. “This is the end of the beginning,” he writes. If you want to understand what the MNF is doing in Iraq at present, you really need to read this. Links to related commentary (Kilcullen is always worth discussing) here.
Reasons to be cheerful
There are plenty of things to be depressed about, at present. However, there are occasional chinks of light amidst the darkness. Here are two:
