those of a certain age have seen this before

[don]

3 COINs in the fountain

Is insurgency Afghanistan’s only problem?

May 22, 2015

By Salman Rafi Sheikh

In a recent report by Washington Post, Attiquilah Amerkhil — a Kabul-based political and military analyst — was reported to have said, “This is the worst fighting season in a decade … there is now fighting in every part of the country.” The report went on to say that “in the first spring fighting season since the U.S.-led coalition ended combat operations in Afghanistan, heavy clashes are being reported in at least 10 Afghan provinces. The provinces are in every corner of the country, creating widespread unease about whether the Afghan government and army can repel the threat.”

It is quite clear that the Taliban are still fighting (as we also showed in our previous article on Afghanistan), and that they have intensified their so-called “final victory” campaign in their quest for re-establishing their supremacy in Afghanistan. A glimpse of their spring offensive can be had from their latest attack on May 18, 2015. Reportedly, a Taliban attack on a district government headquarters in Afghanistan`s southern Uruzgan province on Monday killed at least seven people, an Afghan official said. Among those killed in the pre-dawn attack in Khas Uruzgan district were five policemen, a former district chief and a school principal, according to Abdul Kareem Karimi, the district chief administrative official. A few days ago, a rest house in Kabul, where foreigners used to stay, was also attacked (May 13, 2015) resulting in five casualties at least. The five dead also included an American and two Indian nationals.

This heightened insurgency is a continuation of the spring offensive the Taliban launched in April. They have since rolled out a fierce battlefield strategy across the country`s north and east, forcing the government to spread its security forces thin on many fronts. Targeted assassinations of government and judicial officials have also been on the rise.

While all this is true and constitute the gravest problem Afghanistan is faces today; it is also a fact that the Taliban are by far only one of the many problems Afghanistan is currently facing. Among other grave problems is political instability. Such reports as published by Washington Post tend to reduce Afghanistan’s problems to insurgency alone. While there is no doubt that the insurgency is continuing, political instability is by no means an “automatic” outcome of it. It has its own dynamics too.

For instance, the newly installed government in Afghanistan, notwithstanding the troubles this coalition had in forming its Cabinet, is critically dependent upon foreign aid. A government capable of generating acutely less than sufficient revenue and, conversely, hugely dependent upon foreign aid and assistance, cannot be expected to deliver. As we showed in another previous article, a huge portion of “development aid” provided by the U.S. is actually been spent upon military preparations. How effective and stable will this coalition be once the foreign aid dries out? Will not lack of development, employment opportunities and, most importantly, lack of peace render this government vulnerable enough to succumb to both local (the Taliban) and regional power brokers?

As a matter of fact, Afghanistan has been one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid in this part of Asia. So far, only the U.S. has provided “aid” to the tune of $100 billion. However, notwithstanding the amount of aid spent, the U.S. aid program has failed to establish even a single sustainable institution or development program. The USAID handed over, out of convenience, almost every project to independent contractors, and consequently failed to monitor those projects’ progress. On the other hand, corrupt government officials, too, find ways and means to hoard profits from aid for their own use. Examples are “declaring trailers and non-motorized conveyances in a list of vehicles needing fuel supplied by the U.S.” The amount of money being squandered in Afghanistan perhaps led Heather Barr of the Human Rights Watch, to argue that Afghanistan is a “perfect case study of how not to give aid.

A number of documents released by the U.S. on the “progress” of Afghanistan, ironically enough, demonstrates the acute “lack of progress.” An important document, in this behalf, was disclosed by Special Inspector General of Afghanistan Reconstruction’s (SIGAR). It highlights considerable delays and mismanagement in ongoing projects. Regarding energy sector projects, it mentions, “Our reports have found that the U.S. government’s efforts to execute large-scale energy sector projects in Afghanistan have frequently resulted in cost and schedule over-runs, contractor default, questionable or undefined sustainment methods, and wasted U.S. dollars”; and mentioning overall, it also cautions, “the scale of most projects means that these agencies will not achieve the planned contributions to the COIN strategy … ,” and “in some instances, these projects may result in adverse COIN effects because they create an expectations gap among the affected population or lack citizen support.”

Similarly, the poor state of Kajaki Dam in Helmand province and Tarakhil power plant built outside of Kabul — two important pillar-projects in the U.S. Counter-Insurgency Strategy — are highly symbolic of the grand failure of the U.S. and its allies in “reconstructing” and “developing” Afghanistan. Disputes between the central government and Helmand province officials regarding the construction of this dam are also highly symptomatic of the disease the Afghan political system is afflicted with: lack of financial resources to build Afghanistan. Provincial Council officials in the southern Helmand province claimed, in April 2015, that continued negligence on the part of the central government could further delay construction of the Kajaki Dam, which they warned, could prompt the project’s funders in the United States to withdraw their support. It is ironic to see the provincial administration blaming the central government for “negligence” while the fact is that this project is in ruins due to lack of interest by the U.S. in its materialization. As late as 2014, the Special Inspector General had to write a letter to the U.S. Congress in which he was found “questioning” the very logic behind the dam’s construction.

This dam in Helmand province, which is by far the most restive region in Afghanistan, was initially meant to serve a very real strategic purpose against the Taliban. Primarily, it was meant to provide employment to the local youth in order to wean them away from militant groups. In other words, the political-economy the dam represented was conceived of as a direct attack on the Taliban’s strong recruiting base. Not only does this failure signify the U.S.’s overall failure in Afghanistan, it also shows how fragile the Afghan government is without foreign aid. Hence, the question: Will it be able to survive once the aid money dries up? The most probable answer, given Afghanistan’s revenue capacity, can only be in the negative.

As a matter of fact, Afghanistan will need more than $7 billion annually for the next decade to sustain a functional government, build infrastructure and fund the army and police, according to the World Bank. But there are strong indications that foreign donors will not relish such a commitment. In 2014, the Obama administration requested $2.1 billion in financial assistance for Afghanistan, but Congress approved only half that amount. Hinting on Afghanistan’s extremely precarious economic situation, Alhaj Muhammad Aqa, director general of the treasury at the finance ministry, said in 2014, “If we do not receive extra funds in the next two months, we will face a problem with the operating budget, which is mostly salaries.” In 2014, Afghanistan could only pay roughly 20% of its budget; and in 2015, it could muster only 29% of its budget from domestic revenue sources. As it stands today, no funds were allocated in fiscal year 2015 for new development projects.

Afghanistan’s extremely precarious situation is quite evident from the two aspects we have presented here: On the one hand, the Taliban have greatly intensified their insurgency, on the other hand, the Afghan government is too weak, both financially and militarily, to checkmate the Taliban. However, what adds additional fuel to the fire is the continued existence of numerous warlords in and around Kabul, in addition to other parts of Afghanistan, who form a potential defense line of Kabul against an attack by the Taliban.

Given this phenomenon, how can this coalition be expected to “deliver” and provide safety of life and property when numerous warlords (and their well-armed militias) are operating freely and unscathed? In fact, it is they who are going to play a central role in the final fight against the Taliban; for, as is evident from a number of sources on ground, they were brought out of exile (after the Taliban were ousted), armed and funded by the U.S.-led coalition and used as an effective hedge against the Taliban.

Now that the coalition is “withdrawing,” and that Afghan security forces’ condition is far from hopeful (in 2014 alone, more than 5,000 security personnel were killed), only warlords can provide the assistance the government and foreign forces need to contain the insurgents. As such, these warlords are politically better-off than, say, Afghanistan’s parliament. It is an irony that many a warlord is actually part of the current parliament and are already better off than the government itself. Their power can easily be experienced on the streets and roads of Kabul. Heavily armed men, bullet-proof trucks, and long convoys define their position within the socio-political milieu of Afghanistan.

Most of the problems as highlighted here are a direct outcome of the US’s failed counter-insurgency strategy, and as such, they fail to capture the attention of the mainstream western media, which tends to focus only on insurgency, number of attacks conducted and soldiers killed by the Taliban. However, the reality is that the “Afghanistan project” — which was meant to firmly establish the U.S. militarily in the Western and Central Asian regions — just like ‘Vietnam project’, is a grand failure in all respects: political, economic and, most importantly, military. By merely focusing on insurgency, the mainstream western media attempts to over-simplify and reduce the extent of this grand failure. Ground realities, however, continue to tell us a very different story.

Salman Rafi Sheikh is a freelance journalist and research analyst of international relations and Pakistan affairs. His area of interest is South and West Asian politics, the foreign policies of major powers, and Pakistani politics.

[don]

COIN's HTS Cashes In Its Chips

The Rise and Fall of the Human Terrain System

by ROBERTO J. GONZÁLEZ

The most expensive social science program in history–the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS)–has quietly come to an end. During its eight years of existence, the controversial program cost tax payers more than $725 million. The Pentagon distributed much of the funding to two large defense firms that became the HTS’s principal contractors: BAE Systems and CGI Federal.

HTS supporters frequently claimed that the program would increase cultural understanding between US forces and Iraqis and Afghans–and therefore reduce American and civilian casualties. The program’s leaders insisted that embedded social scientists were delivering sociocultural knowledge to commanders, but the reality was more complex. HTS personnel conducted a range of activities including data collection, intelligence gathering, and psychological operations. In at least one case, an HTS employee supported interrogations in Afghanistan (Weinberger 2011).

The program also served a more insidious function: It became a propaganda tool for convincing the American public–especially those with liberal tendencies–that the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were benevolent missions in which smart, fresh-faced young college graduates were playing a role. It appeared to demonstrate how US forces were engaged in a kinder, gentler form of occupation. Department of Defense photos portrayed HTS personnel sitting on rugs while drinking tea with Afghan elders, or distributing sweets to euphoric Iraqi children. Here was a war that Americans could feel good about fighting.

When HTS was first announced in late 2006, I followed its development with concern. Along with many other anthropologists, I opposed the program because of the potential harm it might bring to Iraqi and Afghan civilians–and to future generations of social scientists who might be accused of being spies when conducting research abroad.

Apart from anthropologists, HTS had other critics. A small but vocal group of military officers publicly criticized the program, noting that it was “undermining sustainable military cultural competence” (Connable 2009) and that in practice, “the effectiveness of the HTTs [human terrain teams] was dubious at best” (Gentile 2013). Yet despite these criticisms, the program grew exponentially. At its peak in 2010, HTS employed more than 500 people ranging from career academics with PhDs to retired Special Forces personnel. Over the next few years, more than 30 “human terrain teams” (HTTs) were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the program’s annual budget exploded to more than $150 million.

Then in 2014, an odd thing happened. News reports and official statements about HTS virtually disappeared. Its slick website was no longer updated. HTS’s boosters fell silent. And when I tried phoning its headquarters at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas earlier this year, no one answered the phone.

I became curious about the fate of HTS. I heard conflicting accounts from military social scientists, former employees, and journalists who had written about it in the past. A few claimed that the program had ended–as did Wikipedia’s entry on the Human Terrain System. However, none of these sources included concrete evidence confirming its termination.

In an effort to verify the program’s official status, I contacted the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), which was HTS’s home since its inception. I had resisted contacting TRADOC because in the past, my inquiries had gone unanswered. But earlier this month, I decided to try once more.

To my surprise, I received a response from Major Harold Huff of TRADOC’s Public Affairs Office. In a two-line email message sent to me last week, Huff confirmed that HTS had indeed ended on September 30, 2014. In order to get a better understanding of HTS’s hasty demise, let us review its history.

Embedded Social Science

HTS was launched in June 2006 as a program designed to embed five-person teams with Army combat brigades. According to the original HTS blueprint, each team would combine military personnel with academically trained cultural specialists–preferably social scientists with graduate degrees. Early in 2007, the first HTT was deployed to Khost, Afghanistan where it was attached to the 82nd Airborne Division’s 4th Brigade. By the end of the year, four more teams were deployed across the country.

The program’s principal architect was cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate. For the first four years of the program, she and retired Army Colonel Steve Fondacaro (who was hired as HTS’s manager) tirelessly promoted the program. Their PR blitz included front-page stories in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and dozens of articles in magazines and newspapers. The corporate media generally described HTS in glowing terms, and occasionally journalists portrayed McFate as a bohemian bad girl. One infatuated reporter described her as a “punk rock wild child. . .with a penchant for big hats and American Spirit cigarettes and a nose that still bears the tiny dent of a piercing 25 years closed” (Stannard 2007). McFate was the perfect shill.

HTS’s meteoric ascent paralleled and was accelerated by the rise to power of General David Petraeus, who was a staunch supporter. As a commander in Iraq, Petraeus became known for an unusual strategy that relied upon “securing” the population by interacting with civilians and paying off local tribal leaders in exchange for political support. This “population-centric” approach became known as the Petraeus Doctrine and was welcomed by some Army officers. Many Pentagon officials (particularly Defense Secretary Robert Gates) were impressed with the strategy, which was soon codified when Petraeus oversaw the publication of a new Army field manual, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency warfare had an air of theoretical legitimacy–indeed, Petraeus surrounded himself with a team of advisors with doctoral degrees in political science and history. These men referred to counterinsurgency as “the graduate level of war.”

Many brigade commanders fell into line once the Petraeus Doctrine was established as the Army’s preferred method for fighting insurgents. Criticizing counterinsurgency–or HTS for that matter–was a bad move for officers seeking to advance their careers. Congressmen and women generally liked the new approach because it appeared to be succeeding (at least in Iraq) and because many viewed it as less lethal. And HTS fit perfectly with the narrative that Petraeus had crafted with the help of compliant reporters: counterinsurgency is the thinking man’s warfare.

However, HTS encountered a series of obstacles. As mentioned above, the program met organized resistance from academic anthropologists. Less than a year after the first HTT was deployed to Afghanistan, the American Anthropological Association issued a sharply worded statement in which it expressed disapproval of the program. An ad hoc group, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, succeeded in gathering the signatures of more than 1,000 anthropologists who pledged to avoid counterinsurgency work.

HTS was also beset by tragedy. Between May 2008 and January 2009, three employees of the program–Michael Bhatia, Nicole Suveges, and Paula Loyd–were killed in action. Some suggested that in its rush to supply the Army with social scientists, BAE Systems (which had been granted large contracts to manage HTS) was not providing personnel with sufficient training.

It soon became clear that BAE Systems was on a hiring binge and was inadequately screening HTS applicants. Most of the academics who were hired had no substantive knowledge of Iraqi or Afghan culture. Very few could speak or understand Arabic, Pashto, Dari, or Farsi. But the pressure was on–the Army needed “human terrain analysts” ASAP and was willing to pay top dollar to get them. Vanessa Gezari nicely summarizes the results of these bizarre hiring patterns:

Some were bright, driven, talented people who contributed useful insights–but an equal number of unqualified people threatened to turn the whole effort into a joke. The Human Terrain System–which had been described in the pages of military journals and briefed to commanders in glowing, best-case-scenario terms–was ultimately a complex mix of brains and ambition, idealism and greed, idiocy, optimism, and bad judgment. (Gezari 2013: 197)

As early as 2009, reports of racism, sexual harassment, and payroll padding began to emerge, and an Army investigation found that HTS was plagued by severe problems (Vander Brook 2013). To make matters worse, the investigators found that many brigade commanders considered HTTs to be ineffective. In the wake of these revelations, Fondacaro and McFate resigned from the program. Army Colonel Sharon Hamilton replaced Fondacaro as program manager, while anthropologist Christopher King took over as chief social scientist.

But by this point, HTS was making a transition from “proof-of-concept” to a permanent “program of record”–a major milestone towards full institutionalization. As a Pentagon correspondent told me, once such programs become permanent, “these things never really die.” This makes HTS’s recent expiration all the more perplexing.
Downward Spiral

Given its spectacular growth and the Army’s once insatiable demand for embedded social scientists, one might ask: Why did HTS fall into a downward spiral?
One reason had to do with the scheduled pullout of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. As early as 2012, HTS’s management team was desperately searching for a way to market the program after a US troop withdrawal:

With Iraq behind it and the end of its role in Afghanistan scheduled for 2014, the operative term used by US Army Human Terrain System managers these days is “Phase Zero.” The term refers to sending small teams of Army human terrain experts to gather information about local populations–their customs and sensitivities–perhaps in peacetime and certainly before areas boil over into a conflict that might require a larger number of US forces. Human Terrain System advocates see Phase Zero as a way for the program to survive in a more austere military (Hodges 2012).

Apparently, none of the military’s branches or combatant commands were interested in funding the program beyond fiscal year 2014. Perhaps HTS’s reputation preceded it. In an email message, an Army reserve officer told me that “like the armored vehicles being given to police departments, they [HTS personnel] are sort of surplus. . .mostly looking for customers.”

Others employed by the military have recounted similar stories. For example, an anthropologist who works in a military organization (who asked not to be named and was not speaking in an official capacity) noted, “many military personnel did express objections to the program for a variety of reasons. They just expressed their critiques internally.”

Another factor that undoubtedly damaged HTS’s long-term survival was Petraeus’s spectacular fall from grace during his tenure as CIA director. “From Hero to Zero,” reported the Washington Post after his extramarital exploits and reckless handling of classified information were publicized (Moyer 2015). In the aftermath of the Petraeus-Broadwell affair, some journalists began to acknowledge that their enthusiasm for counterinsurgency warfare was due in large part to “hero-worship and runaway military idolatry” centered around Petraeus’s personality cult (Vlahos 2012). In a remarkably candid confession, Wired magazine’s Spencer Ackerman (2012) admitted:

the more I interacted with his staff, the more persuasive their points seemed. . .in retrospect, I was insufficiently critical [of counterinsurgency doctrine]. . .Another irony that Petraeus’s downfall reveals is that some of us who egotistically thought our coverage of Petraeus and counterinsurgency was so sophisticated were perpetuating myths without fully realizing it.

The Petraeus-Broadwell scandal ripped away the shroud of mystique that had enveloped counterinsurgency’s promoters. Perhaps HTS unfairly suffered from the collateral damage–but then again, the program’s architects had conveniently cast their lot with the Petraeus boys. (Mark Twain might have said of the situation: You pays your money and you takes your choice.)

By 2013, a fresh wave of criticism began to surround HTS. Anthropologists continued their opposition, but HTS’s newest critics were not academics–they were investigative journalists and an irate Congressman. USA Today correspondent Tom Vanden Brook published a series of excoriating articles based upon documents that the newspaper had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Independent reporter John Stanton cultivated a network of HTS insiders and published dozens of reports about the program’s seedier aspects. Journalist Vanessa Gezari was another critical observer. After several years of careful research, she published a riveting exposé in 2013, entitled The Tender Soldier. In it, she tells readers: “I wanted to believe in the Human Terrain System’s capacity to make the US military smarter, but the more time I spent with the team, the more confused I became” (Gezari 2013: 169). And later in the same chapter: “The Human Terrain System lied to the public and to its own employees and contract staff about the nature of its work in Afghanistan. . .[it] would prove less controversial for what it did than for its sheer incompetence” (Ibid.: 192).

As if these critiques were not enough, US Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee, launched a one-man crusade against the program. His frustration was palpable: “It’s shocking that this program, with its controversy and highly questionable need, could be extended. It should be ended,” he said in early 2014. The pressure was mounting.

Another problem facing HTS was the broad shift in Pentagon priorities, away from cultural intelligence and towards geospatial intelligence. As noted by geographer Oliver Belcher (2013: 189), the latter “marks a real move towards conducting human terrain intelligence at a distance within strategic centers of calculation in Washington, DC and Virginia.” Counterinsurgency was a passing fad. “The US military has a strong cultural aversion to irregular warfare and to devoting resources to sociocultural knowledge,” according to researchers at National Defense University (Lamb et al. 2013: 28). This, combined with HTS’s record of incompetence, undoubtedly emboldened those opposing the idea of incorporating social science perspectives in the military.

By 2014, the rapidly growing fields of computational social science and predictive modeling had become fashionable–they aligned neatly with the Obama administration’s sweeping embrace of “big data.” Many Pentagon planners would prefer to collect data from mobile phone records, remote sensors, biometric databases, and drones equipped with high-resolution cameras than from human social scientists with dubious credentials. (For fuller coverage of predictive modeling programs, see my article “Seeing into Hearts and Minds” in the current edition of Anthropology Today). In the words of Oliver Belcher (2013: 63), “It’s algorithms, not anthropology, that are the real social science scandal in late-modern war.”

Postscript: Life After Death for HTS?

The final days of HTS’s existence were ugly. By one account, its last moments were tumultuous and emotional. It seems that HTS still had true believers among its ranks–employees who were in denial even as the plug was being pulled. Someone familiar with the situation described those on the payroll at the time of closure as “angry, shocked, bitter, retaliatory. . .The last 3-4 months involved some of the most toxic culture of embittered people I have ever witnessed.”

Although HTS has officially ended, questions still remain about its future. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2015 allows the Army to carry out a “Pilot Program for the Human Terrain System. . .to support phase 0 shaping operations and the theater security cooperation plans of the Commander of the United States Pacific Command. . .this section shall terminate on September 30, 2016” (US Congress 2014: Section 1075).

Furthermore, a March 16, 2015 letter from Army General Ray Odierno to US Representative Nita Lowey includes HTS on a list of unfunded requirements for fiscal year 2016. Odierno’s letter describes HTS as an unfunded program to be used by the Pacific Command as suggested in the NDAA. Yet no job advertisements have been posted to recruit employees for the program. Only time will tell if HTS will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes, or if it has truly disintegrated.

Some argue that HTS was a good idea that was badly mismanaged. It would be more accurate to say that HTS was a bad idea that was badly mismanaged. Cultural knowledge is not a service that can be easily provided by contractors and consultants, or taught to soldiers using a training manual. HTS was built upon a flawed premise, and its abysmal record was the inevitable result. The fact that the program continued as long as it did reveals the Army’s superficial attitude towards culture.

Viewed with a wide-angle lens, it becomes clear that HTS had broader social significance. The program encapsulated deep cultural contradictions underlying America’s place in the world after 9/11–contradictions that continue haunting our country today. In Vanessa Gezari’s words:

[HTS] was a giant cultural metaphor, a cosmic expression of the national zeitgeist: American exceptionalism tempered by the political correctness of a postcolonial, globalized age and driven by the ravenous hunger of defense contractors for profit. If you could have found a way to project on a big screen the nation’s mixed feelings about its role as the sole superpower in a post-Cold War world, this was what it would have looked like. (Gezari 2013: 198)

A great deal can be learned by examining the wreckage left behind in the wake of HTS. From one perspective, the program can be interpreted as an example of the ineptitude, incompetence, and hubris that characterized many aspects of the US-led invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As historian Niall Ferguson has observed, the US is an empire in denial. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that wars of imperial conquest would be couched in terms of “cultural awareness” and securing “human terrain.” From another perspective, HTS represents the perverse excesses of a military-industrial complex run amok, a system that caters to the needs of the defense industry and celebrity generals rather than the needs of Iraqis or Afghans.

We would be far better off if more government-funded social science was used to build bridges of respect and mutual understanding with other societies, rather than as a weapon to be used against them.

[Woodsman]

Re: COIN's HTS Cashes In Its Chips

...We would be far better off if more government-funded social science was used to build bridges of respect and mutual understanding with other societies, rather than as a weapon to be used against them.

Oh yeah. How many gun-totin' Margaret Meades and Napoleon Chagnons did we have in Vietnam?



http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/3932.htm

I think the AAA wanted a piece of the war dollar action and is looking to airbrush history. Check out this piece from the Nation. It seems the AAA never missed an opportunity to "enlist" its services to the struggle for hegemony. The interests of the cloak and dagger boys trumps professional and personal ethics then, now and forever.

Anthropologists as Spies

Collaboration occurred in the past, and there's no professional bar to it today.

By David Price
http://www.thenation.com/article/ant...spies?page=0,0

On December 20, 1919, under the heading "Scientists as Spies," The Nation published a letter by Franz Boas, the father of academic anthropology in America. Boas charged that four American anthropologists, whom he did not name, had abused their professional research positions by conducting espionage in Central America during the First World War. Boas strongly condemned their actions, writing that they had "prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies." Anthropologists spying for their country severely betrayed their science and damaged the credibility of all anthropological research, Boas wrote; a scientist who uses his research as a cover for political spying forfeits the right to be classified as a scientist.

The most significant reaction to this letter occurred ten days later at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), when the association's governing council voted to censure Boas, effectively removing him from the council and pressuring him to resign from the national research council. Three out of four of the accused spies (their names, we now know, were Samuel Lothrop, Sylvanus Morley and Herbert Spinden) voted for censure; the fourth (John Mason) did not.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: COIN's HTS Cashes In Its Chips

The Rise and Fall of the Human Terrain System

by ROBERTO J. GONZÁLEZ

The most expensive social science program in history–the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS)–has quietly come to an end. During its eight years of existence, the controversial program cost tax payers more than $725 million. The Pentagon distributed much of the funding to two large defense firms that became the HTS’s principal contractors: BAE Systems and CGI Federal.

HTS supporters frequently claimed that the program would increase cultural understanding between US forces and Iraqis and Afghans–and therefore reduce American and civilian casualties. The program’s leaders insisted that embedded social scientists were delivering sociocultural knowledge to commanders, but the reality was more complex. HTS personnel conducted a range of activities including data collection, intelligence gathering, and psychological operations. In at least one case, an HTS employee supported interrogations in Afghanistan (Weinberger 2011).

The program also served a more insidious function: It became a propaganda tool for convincing the American public–especially those with liberal tendencies–that the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were benevolent missions in which smart, fresh-faced young college graduates were playing a role. It appeared to demonstrate how US forces were engaged in a kinder, gentler form of occupation. Department of Defense photos portrayed HTS personnel sitting on rugs while drinking tea with Afghan elders, or distributing sweets to euphoric Iraqi children. Here was a war that Americans could feel good about fighting.

When HTS was first announced in late 2006, I followed its development with concern. Along with many other anthropologists, I opposed the program because of the potential harm it might bring to Iraqi and Afghan civilians–and to future generations of social scientists who might be accused of being spies when conducting research abroad.

Apart from anthropologists, HTS had other critics. A small but vocal group of military officers publicly criticized the program, noting that it was “undermining sustainable military cultural competence” (Connable 2009) and that in practice, “the effectiveness of the HTTs [human terrain teams] was dubious at best” (Gentile 2013). Yet despite these criticisms, the program grew exponentially. At its peak in 2010, HTS employed more than 500 people ranging from career academics with PhDs to retired Special Forces personnel. Over the next few years, more than 30 “human terrain teams” (HTTs) were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the program’s annual budget exploded to more than $150 million.

Then in 2014, an odd thing happened. News reports and official statements about HTS virtually disappeared. Its slick website was no longer updated. HTS’s boosters fell silent. And when I tried phoning its headquarters at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas earlier this year, no one answered the phone.

I became curious about the fate of HTS. I heard conflicting accounts from military social scientists, former employees, and journalists who had written about it in the past. A few claimed that the program had ended–as did Wikipedia’s entry on the Human Terrain System. However, none of these sources included concrete evidence confirming its termination.

In an effort to verify the program’s official status, I contacted the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), which was HTS’s home since its inception. I had resisted contacting TRADOC because in the past, my inquiries had gone unanswered. But earlier this month, I decided to try once more.

To my surprise, I received a response from Major Harold Huff of TRADOC’s Public Affairs Office. In a two-line email message sent to me last week, Huff confirmed that HTS had indeed ended on September 30, 2014. In order to get a better understanding of HTS’s hasty demise, let us review its history.

Embedded Social Science

HTS was launched in June 2006 as a program designed to embed five-person teams with Army combat brigades. According to the original HTS blueprint, each team would combine military personnel with academically trained cultural specialists–preferably social scientists with graduate degrees. Early in 2007, the first HTT was deployed to Khost, Afghanistan where it was attached to the 82nd Airborne Division’s 4th Brigade. By the end of the year, four more teams were deployed across the country.

The program’s principal architect was cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate. For the first four years of the program, she and retired Army Colonel Steve Fondacaro (who was hired as HTS’s manager) tirelessly promoted the program. Their PR blitz included front-page stories in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and dozens of articles in magazines and newspapers. The corporate media generally described HTS in glowing terms, and occasionally journalists portrayed McFate as a bohemian bad girl. One infatuated reporter described her as a “punk rock wild child. . .with a penchant for big hats and American Spirit cigarettes and a nose that still bears the tiny dent of a piercing 25 years closed” (Stannard 2007). McFate was the perfect shill.

HTS’s meteoric ascent paralleled and was accelerated by the rise to power of General David Petraeus, who was a staunch supporter. As a commander in Iraq, Petraeus became known for an unusual strategy that relied upon “securing” the population by interacting with civilians and paying off local tribal leaders in exchange for political support. This “population-centric” approach became known as the Petraeus Doctrine and was welcomed by some Army officers. Many Pentagon officials (particularly Defense Secretary Robert Gates) were impressed with the strategy, which was soon codified when Petraeus oversaw the publication of a new Army field manual, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency warfare had an air of theoretical legitimacy–indeed, Petraeus surrounded himself with a team of advisors with doctoral degrees in political science and history. These men referred to counterinsurgency as “the graduate level of war.”

Many brigade commanders fell into line once the Petraeus Doctrine was established as the Army’s preferred method for fighting insurgents. Criticizing counterinsurgency–or HTS for that matter–was a bad move for officers seeking to advance their careers. Congressmen and women generally liked the new approach because it appeared to be succeeding (at least in Iraq) and because many viewed it as less lethal. And HTS fit perfectly with the narrative that Petraeus had crafted with the help of compliant reporters: counterinsurgency is the thinking man’s warfare.

However, HTS encountered a series of obstacles. As mentioned above, the program met organized resistance from academic anthropologists. Less than a year after the first HTT was deployed to Afghanistan, the American Anthropological Association issued a sharply worded statement in which it expressed disapproval of the program. An ad hoc group, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, succeeded in gathering the signatures of more than 1,000 anthropologists who pledged to avoid counterinsurgency work.

HTS was also beset by tragedy. Between May 2008 and January 2009, three employees of the program–Michael Bhatia, Nicole Suveges, and Paula Loyd–were killed in action. Some suggested that in its rush to supply the Army with social scientists, BAE Systems (which had been granted large contracts to manage HTS) was not providing personnel with sufficient training.

It soon became clear that BAE Systems was on a hiring binge and was inadequately screening HTS applicants. Most of the academics who were hired had no substantive knowledge of Iraqi or Afghan culture. Very few could speak or understand Arabic, Pashto, Dari, or Farsi. But the pressure was on–the Army needed “human terrain analysts” ASAP and was willing to pay top dollar to get them. Vanessa Gezari nicely summarizes the results of these bizarre hiring patterns:

Some were bright, driven, talented people who contributed useful insights–but an equal number of unqualified people threatened to turn the whole effort into a joke. The Human Terrain System–which had been described in the pages of military journals and briefed to commanders in glowing, best-case-scenario terms–was ultimately a complex mix of brains and ambition, idealism and greed, idiocy, optimism, and bad judgment. (Gezari 2013: 197)

As early as 2009, reports of racism, sexual harassment, and payroll padding began to emerge, and an Army investigation found that HTS was plagued by severe problems (Vander Brook 2013). To make matters worse, the investigators found that many brigade commanders considered HTTs to be ineffective. In the wake of these revelations, Fondacaro and McFate resigned from the program. Army Colonel Sharon Hamilton replaced Fondacaro as program manager, while anthropologist Christopher King took over as chief social scientist.

But by this point, HTS was making a transition from “proof-of-concept” to a permanent “program of record”–a major milestone towards full institutionalization. As a Pentagon correspondent told me, once such programs become permanent, “these things never really die.” This makes HTS’s recent expiration all the more perplexing.
Downward Spiral

Given its spectacular growth and the Army’s once insatiable demand for embedded social scientists, one might ask: Why did HTS fall into a downward spiral?
One reason had to do with the scheduled pullout of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. As early as 2012, HTS’s management team was desperately searching for a way to market the program after a US troop withdrawal:

With Iraq behind it and the end of its role in Afghanistan scheduled for 2014, the operative term used by US Army Human Terrain System managers these days is “Phase Zero.” The term refers to sending small teams of Army human terrain experts to gather information about local populations–their customs and sensitivities–perhaps in peacetime and certainly before areas boil over into a conflict that might require a larger number of US forces. Human Terrain System advocates see Phase Zero as a way for the program to survive in a more austere military (Hodges 2012).

Apparently, none of the military’s branches or combatant commands were interested in funding the program beyond fiscal year 2014. Perhaps HTS’s reputation preceded it. In an email message, an Army reserve officer told me that “like the armored vehicles being given to police departments, they [HTS personnel] are sort of surplus. . .mostly looking for customers.”

Others employed by the military have recounted similar stories. For example, an anthropologist who works in a military organization (who asked not to be named and was not speaking in an official capacity) noted, “many military personnel did express objections to the program for a variety of reasons. They just expressed their critiques internally.”

Another factor that undoubtedly damaged HTS’s long-term survival was Petraeus’s spectacular fall from grace during his tenure as CIA director. “From Hero to Zero,” reported the Washington Post after his extramarital exploits and reckless handling of classified information were publicized (Moyer 2015). In the aftermath of the Petraeus-Broadwell affair, some journalists began to acknowledge that their enthusiasm for counterinsurgency warfare was due in large part to “hero-worship and runaway military idolatry” centered around Petraeus’s personality cult (Vlahos 2012). In a remarkably candid confession, Wired magazine’s Spencer Ackerman (2012) admitted:

the more I interacted with his staff, the more persuasive their points seemed. . .in retrospect, I was insufficiently critical [of counterinsurgency doctrine]. . .Another irony that Petraeus’s downfall reveals is that some of us who egotistically thought our coverage of Petraeus and counterinsurgency was so sophisticated were perpetuating myths without fully realizing it.

The Petraeus-Broadwell scandal ripped away the shroud of mystique that had enveloped counterinsurgency’s promoters. Perhaps HTS unfairly suffered from the collateral damage–but then again, the program’s architects had conveniently cast their lot with the Petraeus boys. (Mark Twain might have said of the situation: You pays your money and you takes your choice.)

By 2013, a fresh wave of criticism began to surround HTS. Anthropologists continued their opposition, but HTS’s newest critics were not academics–they were investigative journalists and an irate Congressman. USA Today correspondent Tom Vanden Brook published a series of excoriating articles based upon documents that the newspaper had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Independent reporter John Stanton cultivated a network of HTS insiders and published dozens of reports about the program’s seedier aspects. Journalist Vanessa Gezari was another critical observer. After several years of careful research, she published a riveting exposé in 2013, entitled The Tender Soldier. In it, she tells readers: “I wanted to believe in the Human Terrain System’s capacity to make the US military smarter, but the more time I spent with the team, the more confused I became” (Gezari 2013: 169). And later in the same chapter: “The Human Terrain System lied to the public and to its own employees and contract staff about the nature of its work in Afghanistan. . .[it] would prove less controversial for what it did than for its sheer incompetence” (Ibid.: 192).

As if these critiques were not enough, US Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee, launched a one-man crusade against the program. His frustration was palpable: “It’s shocking that this program, with its controversy and highly questionable need, could be extended. It should be ended,” he said in early 2014. The pressure was mounting.

Another problem facing HTS was the broad shift in Pentagon priorities, away from cultural intelligence and towards geospatial intelligence. As noted by geographer Oliver Belcher (2013: 189), the latter “marks a real move towards conducting human terrain intelligence at a distance within strategic centers of calculation in Washington, DC and Virginia.” Counterinsurgency was a passing fad. “The US military has a strong cultural aversion to irregular warfare and to devoting resources to sociocultural knowledge,” according to researchers at National Defense University (Lamb et al. 2013: 28). This, combined with HTS’s record of incompetence, undoubtedly emboldened those opposing the idea of incorporating social science perspectives in the military.

By 2014, the rapidly growing fields of computational social science and predictive modeling had become fashionable–they aligned neatly with the Obama administration’s sweeping embrace of “big data.” Many Pentagon planners would prefer to collect data from mobile phone records, remote sensors, biometric databases, and drones equipped with high-resolution cameras than from human social scientists with dubious credentials. (For fuller coverage of predictive modeling programs, see my article “Seeing into Hearts and Minds” in the current edition of Anthropology Today). In the words of Oliver Belcher (2013: 63), “It’s algorithms, not anthropology, that are the real social science scandal in late-modern war.”

Postscript: Life After Death for HTS?

The final days of HTS’s existence were ugly. By one account, its last moments were tumultuous and emotional. It seems that HTS still had true believers among its ranks–employees who were in denial even as the plug was being pulled. Someone familiar with the situation described those on the payroll at the time of closure as “angry, shocked, bitter, retaliatory. . .The last 3-4 months involved some of the most toxic culture of embittered people I have ever witnessed.”

Although HTS has officially ended, questions still remain about its future. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2015 allows the Army to carry out a “Pilot Program for the Human Terrain System. . .to support phase 0 shaping operations and the theater security cooperation plans of the Commander of the United States Pacific Command. . .this section shall terminate on September 30, 2016” (US Congress 2014: Section 1075).

Furthermore, a March 16, 2015 letter from Army General Ray Odierno to US Representative Nita Lowey includes HTS on a list of unfunded requirements for fiscal year 2016. Odierno’s letter describes HTS as an unfunded program to be used by the Pacific Command as suggested in the NDAA. Yet no job advertisements have been posted to recruit employees for the program. Only time will tell if HTS will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes, or if it has truly disintegrated.

Some argue that HTS was a good idea that was badly mismanaged. It would be more accurate to say that HTS was a bad idea that was badly mismanaged. Cultural knowledge is not a service that can be easily provided by contractors and consultants, or taught to soldiers using a training manual. HTS was built upon a flawed premise, and its abysmal record was the inevitable result. The fact that the program continued as long as it did reveals the Army’s superficial attitude towards culture.

Viewed with a wide-angle lens, it becomes clear that HTS had broader social significance. The program encapsulated deep cultural contradictions underlying America’s place in the world after 9/11–contradictions that continue haunting our country today. In Vanessa Gezari’s words:

[HTS] was a giant cultural metaphor, a cosmic expression of the national zeitgeist: American exceptionalism tempered by the political correctness of a postcolonial, globalized age and driven by the ravenous hunger of defense contractors for profit. If you could have found a way to project on a big screen the nation’s mixed feelings about its role as the sole superpower in a post-Cold War world, this was what it would have looked like. (Gezari 2013: 198)

A great deal can be learned by examining the wreckage left behind in the wake of HTS. From one perspective, the program can be interpreted as an example of the ineptitude, incompetence, and hubris that characterized many aspects of the US-led invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As historian Niall Ferguson has observed, the US is an empire in denial. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that wars of imperial conquest would be couched in terms of “cultural awareness” and securing “human terrain.” From another perspective, HTS represents the perverse excesses of a military-industrial complex run amok, a system that caters to the needs of the defense industry and celebrity generals rather than the needs of Iraqis or Afghans.

We would be far better off if more government-funded social science was used to build bridges of respect and mutual understanding with other societies, rather than as a weapon to be used against them.

The merit of an entity such as HTS is absolutely valid.

The basis of understanding another language and culture is to learn it.

It's not rocket science.

But it's also not a massive profit driven corporate contracted manufacturing facility.

And most importantly it's about diplomacy(relationships assisted with map reading) NOT cartography(maps writing).

There is a military analog to Moore's Law called SOF Truths which I'll paraphrase related to article:

Humans are more important than Hardware.

Quality is better than Quantity.

They cannot be mass produced.

They cannot be created(easily/quickly) after emergencies occur.

-----

In my opinion, and in my personal experience with coal face level diplomacy in the developing world, human terrain mapping of the developing world(and the developed world) is a critical support function for the analysis, planning, and execution of sovereign state foreign policy.

For the US, I would think human terrain mapping and analysis as a support function would probably be better falling under Bureau of Intelligence and Research or Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations acting in support of Embassy/Consulate operations or as part of interagency/fusion task force cells.

Not as some just in time corporate contract profit factory pumping out non subject matter expert irrelevance like something from the movie Brazil.

Anthropology, demography, sociology, ethnography, history, etc are all important in helping to draw more accurate maps.

Map writers are important, but map(or ground IF no maps) readers are "importanter".

[Woodsman]

Re: COIN's HTS Cashes In Its Chips

... was built upon a flawed premise, and its abysmal record was the inevitable result.

Somebody ought to take the "human terrain" of the MIC. Maybe it will help us understand why their culture consistently produces failure, disaster, and tragedy everywhere and every time it acts. It's become axiomatic. The moment they choose war is the moment they lose it.

The things we fight against cannot be defeated by war.

Why? Because drug addiction and abuse can’t be conquered by waging a war. Neither can poverty. Neither can terror. Neither can radical Islam be defeated through armed nation building. Indeed, radical Islam thrives on the very war conditions that Washington helps to create. By fighting in the now familiar fashion, you merely fan its flames and ensure its propagation.

It’s the mindset that matters. In places like Iraq and Afghanistan, places that for most Americans exist only within a “war” matrix, the U.S. invades or attacks, gets stuck, throws resources at the problem indiscriminately, and “makes a desert and calls it ‘peace’” to quote the Roman historian Tacitus. After which our leaders act surprised as Hell when the problem only grows.

Let’s Face It, America — We’re Addicted to War

[photon555]

Re: COIN's HTS Cashes In Its Chips

Somebody ought to take the "human terrain" of the MIC. Maybe it will help us understand why their culture consistently produces failure, disaster, and tragedy everywhere and every time it acts. It's become axiomatic. The moment they choose war is the moment they lose it.

The things we fight against cannot be defeated by war.

The failure described is irrelevant to the actual goals and very real success of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, which success is its own continued existence, growth and profit. The relatively few in charge and in ownership positions of the MICC have proven that death and suffering can be financialized to a hitherto unattainable degree. It's been a great success for them. The things we should be fighting against; greed, corruption, incompetence, and willful evil are mostly organized and led by those in the corridors of power. The MICC not only enriches them, it provides a necessary distraction from their war against the rest of humanity.

[don]

Re: COIN's HTS Cashes In Its Chips

U.S. Base Seen as Monument to Futility as Afghans Watch Kunduz Fall

By JAMES DAOSEPT. 30, 2015


The base was not much to behold when the American soldiers arrived in Kunduz in 2010. Nestled atop a vast plateau, it was little more than a collection of stucco buildings with chipping paint, a small airstrip on one side, a graveyard of rusting Soviet vehicles on the other. And everywhere was the Afghan dust, so fine it would puff like dry mountain snow with every step.

In the months to follow, the Americans greatly expanded the base. Seabees, members of the Navy’s construction unit, used heavy equipment to build walls from containers of dirt that encircled an area large enough to hold a second airstrip.

A small city of yellow, air-conditioned tents, with a basketball court and a chapel, rose in the field of dust. So did a sprawling maintenance bay for the armada of armored trucks.


The soldiers of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry out of Fort Drum, N.Y., could never quite fathom the reason behind the expansion, and by 2013 American forces were being withdrawn from the province.

Today, the airstrip has become a refuge for hundreds of Afghan soldiers and civilians besieged by the Taliban forces that now control the city of Kunduz.

Looking back at photos of the base, it is hard not to think of it as anything but a monument to futility.

I had gone to Kunduz with the battalion to chronicle its experiences as part of the American troop increase in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s strategy for quelling a resurgent Taliban. Provinces like Kandahar and Helmand in the south were focal points for the American push.

But Kunduz in the north was nearly as important, the capital of a lush — by Afghan standards — region of rice and wheat fields, a gateway for trade in petroleum, manufactured goods, drugs and weapons to Tajikistan and other former Soviet republics to the north.

It was my second time in Kunduz. I had spent a week there in early 2002 after the American invasion of Afghanistan. Kunduz had been the Taliban’s last stand. Just hours before the city fell to marauding militias commanded by local warlords and aided by American air power and Special Forces, Taliban commanders were airlifted to safe havens.

The city I saw then was battered and frightened, ringed by cratered roads that took hours to navigate.

But it was also hopeful: I watched as local teachers opened a school for girls, its buildings refurbished thanks to American money.

Eight years later, Kunduz was a new world. Small stores and coffeehouses lined its streets; the bazaars brimmed with locally grown produce and fresh meat. The city felt secure.

Yet the insurgency showed its face now and again. Girls at a local school were sickened by what the police said was poison gas. A hotel that was home to Western aid workers was briefly seized by militants. Late in the battalion’s deployment, a suicide bomber killed the provincial governor.


Outside the city center, evidence abounded that the Taliban and their allies were waiting patiently in the shadows. The province of Kunduz is one of Afghanistan’s most ethnically diverse, with nearly equal numbers of Tajik, Uzbek and Pashtun residents, and scatterings of Turkmens and Hazaras.

Yet loyalties to the Pashtun-led Taliban remained strong in enclaves like Archi, Chardara and Gor Tepa. For months, American patrols would not venture into those districts without mine-sweeping trucks, and when they did, firefights often ensued.

I met an American farming expert whose story said much about the region’s simmering fears of its once and perhaps future overlords.

The expert, Eric Imerman, a child of Iowa, had gone to Kunduz to teach modern growing techniques. I met him at a meeting between Ministry of Agriculture officials and local farmers to discuss planting winter wheat. But when Mr. Imerman pulled up in a convoy of American armored trucks, the government officials became nervous and left.

He told me later that he was stunned by the backwardness of Afghan farmers; so much knowledge seemed to have been lost during decades of war.
Yet because he had to travel under the protection of American soldiers, and because local farmers were afraid the Taliban would kill them if they were seen with Americans, he was repeatedly frustrated.

He said that while serving in the Peace Corps in the Philippines in the 1980s, “Some of the best meetings I ever had with farmers was when you sit down under a shade tree and just talk with them. No agenda, just sit and talk. And you can’t do that here.”

In the final months of 2010, soldiers from the battalion pushed deeper into Chardara, Gor Tepa and Taliban enclaves near the far northern city of Imam Sahib. By spring 2011, they declared much of the province cleared of insurgent fighters.

I was dubious, but one experience made me believe that perhaps they were right.

Shortly before the battalion was to return home, a friendly officer took me on a day trip with a few of his soldiers. We piled into small green pickup trucks driven by Afghan police officers and sped off onto dirt back roads I had never traveled before.

Just as we crossed a small wooded stream that seemed perfect for an ambush, we entered a wide, rolling plain.

In the distance, we could see scores of men on horses, kicking up dust in a roiling scrum. They were playing buzkashi, the Afghan national sport, in which horsemen on competing teams vie for control of a headless goat.

The contest was being run by the local police commander, who the Americans believed profited handsomely from the region’s thriving weapons and drug trade. But he was the host that day, and he graciously offered us horses and a place in the game.

The hillside was lined with families who had made a daylong picnic out of the event. As I watched two soldiers trot off — one at Sancho Panza pace, the other whipping and wheeling his animal with the skill of a Texas cowboy — I could not help thinking: Maybe, just maybe, this place might find its way to peace.
In the years since their deployment, the soldiers from the First Battalion, 87th Infantry have returned to American life.

One died in a shootout with the police outside a bar. Others went to graduate school or wrote books. A wisecracking private became a tough-guy sergeant. Another recently buried a child. Some have tried to ignore the news out of Kunduz. Many others are watching in dismay.

“It’s difficult to not feel a sense of meaninglessness,” one former soldier wrote to me on Facebook this week. “The feeling was already there regarding Iraq. My area of operations in Iraq is under ISIS control and now Kunduz via the Taliban. You wonder what all that effort and sacrifice was for.”

He paused, and then continued writing. “I always hated the GWOT/Vietnam comparison in the past,” he said, referring to the Pentagon’s official shorthand for the global war on terrorism. “But, now I can’t help but draw parallels. I wonder if this is the same feelings Vietnam vets felt watching as the South collapsed.”

Members of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry, tending to a wounded comrade

[don]

COIN: the Reset

Wars Past and Wars to Come

John Newsinger is Professor of Modern History at Bath Spa University. His books include The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, Fighting Back: The American Working Class in the 1930s, and most recently a new, revised, and expanded edition of his British Counterinsurgency.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, elements within the U.S. ruling class came to believe that their country was militarily invincible. Indeed, they believed this newfound military superiority over any potential rival was something new in human history. So great was its technological advantage, the United States could destroy its enemies with complete impunity. A long-heralded Revolution in Military Affairs was taking place, enabling the United States to reshape the world. New smart technologies would disperse the “fog of war,” making it possible for the United States to kill its enemies without their being able to strike back, and the “Vietnam syndrome” could be overcome once and for all. The first Gulf War was a good demonstration of U.S. military superiority. According to military historian Keith Shimko, the U.S. casualty rate in the war was so low that male soldiers were statistically safer in the Gulf War zone than back in the States.1

Even so, at this point in time, the U.S. government proceeded with considerable caution. The then-secretary of defense, Dick Cheney no less, made clear that the United States did not invade and occupy Iraq at this time because of the danger of finding itself in a “quagmire” where it would be taking casualties while the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunnis fought it out. The administration decided not to involve itself in “that civil war.” Such a commitment would have had to involve the use of “overwhelming force” for an extended period if it was to have any chance of success.2 This was in 1991. Ten years later such caution had been replaced by an overweening self-confidence, by a belief that the United States could completely reshape the Middle East, starting with Iraq, and then moving on to Syria and Iran. And, moreover, this could all be achieved with a comparatively small invading and occupying army.

The pretext for invading Iraq was, of course, provided by the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration’s immediate response was to take down the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but this was always a sideshow compared to the real objective which was to reshape the Middle East. The Taliban were overthrown by the use of special forces and CIA operatives together with U.S. air power supporting a proxy army provided by the Northern Alliance. In many respects this was a very traditional intervention with the United States supporting an alliance of drug traffickers and warlords. It was as if the United States had invaded Columbia to install the drug cartels in power. One thing that was or should have been clear was that the Northern Alliance was only able to overthrow the Taliban with U.S. support and consequently would require continued U.S. support to hold power. Instead, U.S. attention switched to the Middle East, leaving a brutal, corrupt gangster government in power in Afghanistan, making a Taliban revival inevitable.3

When it came to the invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi Army was indeed destroyed with relative ease, falling victim to U.S. technological supremacy, but, as was generally predicted, the forces that accomplished this task were completely inadequate to effectively occupy the country. Resistance to the U.S. occupation was inevitable, but the situation was made considerably worse, first by the lack of troops, but second by the policies implemented by the U.S. occupiers. George Tenet, the CIA director, was to later claim that his organization had an accurate assessment of the dangers present in Iraq, but, “where we ran into trouble was in our inability to foresee some of the actions of our own government.”4 The decision to ban senior Baath members from employment and to disband the Iraqi Army and the national police were guaranteed to ensure that the insurgents had a mass base. Colonel John Agoglia, military liaison with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), described May 23, 2003, the day the Iraqi Army and police were disbanded, as the day “we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and created an insurgency.”5 According to another U.S. officer, John Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert, the CPA’s policies provided “a perfect recipe for an insurgency.”6Certainly, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has earned itself a place in military history as the great example of how not to conduct an occupation.

The Turn to Counterinsurgency

The scale of the insurgency in Iraq, where the CPA had succeeded in provoking simultaneous Sunni and Shia insurrections, a truly remarkable achievement, confronted the United States with the very real prospect of military defeat. Confronted with this deteriorating situation, attention turned to counterinsurgency (COIN) as a solution. This turn is most closely associated with General David Petraeus, but it involved a number of Army and Marine Corps officers. One key figure was Nagl, who in his memoirs described his own experience in Iraq: “We’d controlled the streets as long as we stood on them, but after we left, it was as if we’d never been there. It was like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water and hoping you’d made a lasting impression.”7 He was the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, a comparative study of the British experience in Malaya with the U.S. experience in Vietnam, and urged the U.S. Army to learn the lessons of the British experience in order to succeed in Iraq.8 His book was taken up by Newt Gingrich, who used his influence to ensure it appeared in a paperback edition, and pressed it on senior officers as showing the way forward.

The advocates of counterinsurgency characterized themselves as the COINdinistas, insurgent rebels within the U.S. military, attempting to overthrow a conservative status quo. This was really part of Petraeus’s strategy for getting the media onside. He was always very much aware of the need to cultivate good relations with the media. Under his tutelage, the new 282-page field manual Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24) was produced. It was, as one commentator observed, “a work of extraordinary influence, discussed on television and in newspapers and bought in quantities normally reserved for airport thrillers.”9 Quite unprecedentedly, it was published by a university press in paperback in December 2006, a nice demonstration of the military-industrial-academic complex at work.10 As well as being a print bestseller, it was, Nagl proudly tells us, “downloaded more than a million times in the first month after it had been published.” Even more impressive, “copies were found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan, and it was translated and critiqued on jihadi websites.”11 For a time, counterinsurgency was “the new religion” and FM 3-24 was “its sacred text.”12

The British Experience

One compelling irony about the British experience in Malaya being mined for lessons by the U.S. military is that, at exactly the same time, the British Army was suffering a humiliating defeat in Basra. The British Army’s reputation for expertise in defeating insurgencies had always been largely fraudulent. In Malaya, it had taken a twelve-year emergency to encompass the defeat of poorly armed Communist guerrillas who were cut off from outside help and who faced opposition from most of the local population. In Northern Ireland, it had taken thirty years to bring the Provisional Republican movement to the negotiating table, once again, even though a majority of the province’s population were militantly hostile to the insurgency. Elsewhere the British had suffered humiliating defeats in Palestine and South Arabia (South Yemen). Nevertheless, the British had convinced both themselves and others that counterinsurgency was something they excelled in. Indeed, the U.S. military in Iraq for many months had British officers lecturing them on what they were doing wrong and on how much they could learn from the British experience. This all turned to dust as it became clear that the British were losing control of Basra and the south of the country.

The problem for the British was that Tony Blair’s New Labour government was absolutely determined to prove itself the United States’ most faithful and reliable ally, although satellite seems a more appropriate term, but was not prepared to commit the necessary resources to the military effort. This was, at least, partly because the politicians had been wilfully misled by the generals who had volunteered the British Army for duties beyond its capacity. What prevented the Blair government from committing the necessary resources was that the war was unpopular in Britain. It had been opposed by a Stop the War movement of unprecedented strength (in one London demonstration alone, well over a million people were on the streets), and British involvement was regarded as based on lies and deception. British soldiers were dying on behalf of a U.S. President who was generally regarded as a joke in Britain and Blair’s courting of him almost amounted to a national humiliation. The Iraq War seriously damaged both the Labour Party, which lost thousands of members, and Blair himself, who became widely known as “Bliar.”13
With too few troops, and those few being continually reduced in number, the British were first of all forced out of the southern provinces that they had taken responsibility for, and then effectively driven out of Basra itself. Where New Labour was successful was in keeping the scale of the defeat from the British people. What is remarkable is that even as the disaster in Basra was unfolding, the British volunteered to take responsibility for Helmand province in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had revived and were mounting an increasingly serious insurgent challenge. The thinking behind this quixotic decision seems to have been that war in Afghanistan in support of Karzai’s regime of drug-trafficking gangsters could be successfully portrayed as a war for women’s rights and against drug trafficking! This might be made into a popular war. The outcome was to be another debacle with the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband eventually having to privately ask the United States to relieve Britain of responsibility for Helmand before the rising level of casualties precipitated a crisis back home.14

Privatizing War

One feature of the Iraq War that marks it out as a turning point in military affairs is the extent to which the United States and British privatized the conflict. Whereas at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991 there had been one private contractor for every hundred soldiers, by the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq there was one contractor for every ten soldiers, and by 2008, there was at least one contractor for every soldier. Most of this privatization involved the contracting out of logistics, maintenance, and training to such an extent that both the U.S. and British armies were dependent on private contractors. By 2008 there were more than 30,000 armed contractors and mercenaries operating in Iraq, providing security for individuals, installations, and supply lines, working for both the U.S. and British governments as well as for private companies. Private contractors were even involved in the torture at Abu Ghraib! This is a “military revolution” of considerable significance. Indeed, the implications of a partly privatized military for the institutions of bourgeois democracy have not as of yet been seriously explored.

The most notorious mercenary outfit involved in Iraq was, of course, Blackwater, at the time headed up by Erik Prince, a right-wing Christian fundamentalist and son of a billionaire businessman. The firm got its first security contract in 2002, protecting the CIA headquarters in Kabul. By 2006, its security contracts were worth $593 million. Blackwater provided security for CPA head Paul Bremer and, on at least one occasion, for British Prime Minister Tony Blair. They did not provide conventional body guards but rather military escorts made up of heavily armed men, armored vehicles, and helicopter escorts. They routinely fired on Iraqi vehicles that came too close, rammed them and forced them off the road, set up road blocks, and generally behaved without any concern for the safety of Iraqi civilians. This conduct was ignored, indeed condoned, up until the Nisour Square massacre of September 16, 2007 when Blackwater gunmen, fearing attack, opened fire and killed seventeen unarmed Iraqi men, women, and children.

Since this public relations disaster, Blackwater has cunningly changed its name a number of times, from Xe Services to Academi and, most recently, to Constellis Holdings. It still has security contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including for the protection of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which was awarded by the Obama administration.15

Holding Operation

Under the command of Petraeus, and equipped with the new counterinsurgency strategy, the U.S. military was apparently able to turn the tide in Iraq. The Surge, together with the Sunni Awakening, supposedly laid the basis for victory. Iraq was to be no Vietnam. This was more a testimony to Petraeus’s media handling skills than anything else. The reality was somewhat different. A serious counterinsurgency strategy would have involved a large-scale U.S. military commitment in Iraq that lasted another decade or longer and even then there was no guarantee of success. This was not politically possible. Indeed, by now it was becoming clear that the United States was in fact caught in the middle of a proxy war being waged between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In these circumstances, the Surge was little more than a “holding operation,” designed to get the situation under control, at least temporarily, so that U.S. forces could be pulled out without suffering any great public humiliation. From that point of view, the exercise was a success because when disaster inevitably came, the United States had already withdrawn.

One of the pretexts for invading Iraq had been Saddam Hussein’s supposed links with al-Qaeda. It was purportedly part of the War on Terror. This was pure fiction of course. The War on Terror was from the beginning nothing more than an ideological construct intended to provide popular justification for the U.S. attempt to reassert itself in the Middle East, rather than an attempt to deal with what was only a marginal security problem posed by terrorism. The only way to justify an unprovoked attack on Iraq was to somehow implicate Saddam Hussein in the 9/11 attacks. He was certainly guilty of terrible crimes, all of which the United States had condoned, but had no involvement in 9/11. But now his non-existent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction had to be destroyed or the next terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland would be chemical, biological, or even nuclear. Instead of eliminating a terrorist threat from a terrorist state, the Iraq invasion successfully created a terrorist threat from a terrorist state. At the time, many people had pointed out that the invasion would create a terrorist problem where one did not already exist. This quickly proved to be the case, although no one foresaw the unprecedented scale that the phenomenon was to eventually assume with the rise of the Islamic State.16

A similar “holding operation” was mounted in Afghanistan with a temporary “surge” stabilizing the situation so that U.S. forces could be withdrawn. How successful this will be remains to be seen with fighting still continuing.

Wars to Come

Already there are those constructing a “stab in the back” myth to explain away the U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. In their story, the military had gotten on top of the insurgency in Iraq and the Surge was working, but the Obama administration threw it all away with a premature withdrawal. Similarly in Afghanistan, a counterinsurgency strategy was producing results, but was cut short by political expediency with consequences that still remain to be seen. The soldiers were “stabbed in the back” by the politicians just like they were when they lost the Vietnam War. The politicians threw victory away.17 The reality is somewhat different. What we have seen is a significant shift in U.S. strategy, from full-scale invasion and occupation—which proved too costly, too unpopular, and positively counter-productive—to going back to more traditional methods of intervention. The counterinsurgency turn has proven to be remarkably short-lived, an intellectual revolution that crashed and burned almost as soon as it took flight. Instead of committing large numbers of troops on the ground, the United States is waging war across the world by means of special forces and aerial bombardment, whether carried out by drones and conventional aircraft, or by supporting proxy armies in the fight against U.S. enemies. This is more cost-effective and invites less political fallout. These are the wars to come.18

Notes

1. ↩Keith Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010), 77.
2. ↩Adam Cobb, “A Strategic Assessment of Iraq,” Civil Wars 9, no 1 (2007): 55.
3. ↩The installation of Hamid Karzai as President provided this gangster regime with a presentable figurehead, but no more than that. Sarah Chayes describes how on one occasion, Karzai announced his intention to root out corruption at a press conference, but made clear the emptiness of the promise by having his two notoriously corrupt warlord Vice Presidents, both “war criminals” according to her, standing alongside him. According to Chayes, even David Petraeus on one occasion described the Karzai government as a “criminal syndicate.” But it was, of course, America’s criminal syndicate; indeed, many of its personnel—including Karzai himself—were on the CIA payroll. See Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), 61, 135.
4. ↩George Tenet, At the Centre of the Storm: My Years in the CIA (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 426.
5. ↩Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin 2006), 163.
6. ↩John Nagl, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice (New York: Penguin, 2014), 65.
7. ↩Ibid, 80.
8. ↩John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
9. ↩Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 265.
10. ↩The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication no. 3-33.5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
11. ↩Nagl, Knife Fights, 156–57.
12. ↩Emma Sky, The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (London: Atlantic Books, 2015), 160.
13. ↩Blair’s vaunted electoral successes were in fact predicated on the weakness of the Conservative opposition and the cultivation of the right wing press, in particular of the Murdoch press.
14. ↩David Miliband is the son of the eminent Marxist academic, the late Ralph Miliband, author of one of the best books on the British Labour Party, Parliamentary Socialism, first published as long ago as 1961. His eldest son seems to have embraced every one of his father’s most damaging criticisms of the Labour Party as positive virtues. He was the Blairite candidate for the Labour Party leadership in 2010 and after his defeat moved to the United States to head up the International Rescue Committee, a charity supported by a cross section of the U.S. ruling class and with strong State Department and CIA links. Its committee of Overseers includes such well-known humanitarians as Madelaine Albright, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Henry Kissinger.
15. ↩For Blackwater see Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2008). Erik Prince has recently urged that private contractors be used to overthrow the Islamic State.
16. ↩The U.S. fight against Islamic State is compromised by the covert support that America’s allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, continue to provide for that regime. When considering IS it is worth adopting the old adage of following the money. Who is helping produce, sell and distribute the Islamic State’s oil? It is certain that Western intelligence agencies know the answer to this question, but obviously those assisting IS are too important to be named, let alone be sanctioned for their actions.
17. ↩Leading the way is Mark Moyer. See his Strategic Failure: How President Obama’s Drone Warfare, Defense Cuts and Military Amateurism Have Imperiled America (New York: Threshold Editions, 2015).
18. ↩See Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (London: Serpent’s Tale, 2014).

[Woodsman]

Re: COIN: the Reset

Wars Past and Wars to Come

John Newsinger is Professor of Modern History at Bath Spa University. His books include The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, Fighting Back: The American Working Class in the 1930s, and most recently a new, revised, and expanded edition of his British Counterinsurgency.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, elements within the U.S. ruling class came to believe that their country was militarily invincible. Indeed, they believed this newfound military superiority over any potential rival was something new in human history. So great was its technological advantage, the United States could destroy its enemies with complete impunity. A long-heralded Revolution in Military Affairs was taking place, enabling the United States to reshape the world. New smart technologies would disperse the “fog of war,” making it possible for the United States to kill its enemies without their being able to strike back, and the “Vietnam syndrome” could be overcome once and for all. The first Gulf War was a good demonstration of U.S. military superiority. According to military historian Keith Shimko, the U.S. casualty rate in the war was so low that male soldiers were statistically safer in the Gulf War zone than back in the States.1

Even so, at this point in time, the U.S. government proceeded with considerable caution. The then-secretary of defense, Dick Cheney no less, made clear that the United States did not invade and occupy Iraq at this time because of the danger of finding itself in a “quagmire” where it would be taking casualties while the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunnis fought it out. The administration decided not to involve itself in “that civil war.” Such a commitment would have had to involve the use of “overwhelming force” for an extended period if it was to have any chance of success.2 This was in 1991. Ten years later such caution had been replaced by an overweening self-confidence, by a belief that the United States could completely reshape the Middle East, starting with Iraq, and then moving on to Syria and Iran. And, moreover, this could all be achieved with a comparatively small invading and occupying army.

The pretext for invading Iraq was, of course, provided by the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration’s immediate response was to take down the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but this was always a sideshow compared to the real objective which was to reshape the Middle East. The Taliban were overthrown by the use of special forces and CIA operatives together with U.S. air power supporting a proxy army provided by the Northern Alliance. In many respects this was a very traditional intervention with the United States supporting an alliance of drug traffickers and warlords. It was as if the United States had invaded Columbia to install the drug cartels in power. One thing that was or should have been clear was that the Northern Alliance was only able to overthrow the Taliban with U.S. support and consequently would require continued U.S. support to hold power. Instead, U.S. attention switched to the Middle East, leaving a brutal, corrupt gangster government in power in Afghanistan, making a Taliban revival inevitable.3

When it came to the invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi Army was indeed destroyed with relative ease, falling victim to U.S. technological supremacy, but, as was generally predicted, the forces that accomplished this task were completely inadequate to effectively occupy the country. Resistance to the U.S. occupation was inevitable, but the situation was made considerably worse, first by the lack of troops, but second by the policies implemented by the U.S. occupiers. George Tenet, the CIA director, was to later claim that his organization had an accurate assessment of the dangers present in Iraq, but, “where we ran into trouble was in our inability to foresee some of the actions of our own government.”4 The decision to ban senior Baath members from employment and to disband the Iraqi Army and the national police were guaranteed to ensure that the insurgents had a mass base. Colonel John Agoglia, military liaison with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), described May 23, 2003, the day the Iraqi Army and police were disbanded, as the day “we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and created an insurgency.”5 According to another U.S. officer, John Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert, the CPA’s policies provided “a perfect recipe for an insurgency.”6Certainly, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has earned itself a place in military history as the great example of how not to conduct an occupation.

The Turn to Counterinsurgency

The scale of the insurgency in Iraq, where the CPA had succeeded in provoking simultaneous Sunni and Shia insurrections, a truly remarkable achievement, confronted the United States with the very real prospect of military defeat. Confronted with this deteriorating situation, attention turned to counterinsurgency (COIN) as a solution. This turn is most closely associated with General David Petraeus, but it involved a number of Army and Marine Corps officers. One key figure was Nagl, who in his memoirs described his own experience in Iraq: “We’d controlled the streets as long as we stood on them, but after we left, it was as if we’d never been there. It was like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water and hoping you’d made a lasting impression.”7 He was the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, a comparative study of the British experience in Malaya with the U.S. experience in Vietnam, and urged the U.S. Army to learn the lessons of the British experience in order to succeed in Iraq.8 His book was taken up by Newt Gingrich, who used his influence to ensure it appeared in a paperback edition, and pressed it on senior officers as showing the way forward.

The advocates of counterinsurgency characterized themselves as the COINdinistas, insurgent rebels within the U.S. military, attempting to overthrow a conservative status quo. This was really part of Petraeus’s strategy for getting the media onside. He was always very much aware of the need to cultivate good relations with the media. Under his tutelage, the new 282-page field manual Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24) was produced. It was, as one commentator observed, “a work of extraordinary influence, discussed on television and in newspapers and bought in quantities normally reserved for airport thrillers.”9 Quite unprecedentedly, it was published by a university press in paperback in December 2006, a nice demonstration of the military-industrial-academic complex at work.10 As well as being a print bestseller, it was, Nagl proudly tells us, “downloaded more than a million times in the first month after it had been published.” Even more impressive, “copies were found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan, and it was translated and critiqued on jihadi websites.”11 For a time, counterinsurgency was “the new religion” and FM 3-24 was “its sacred text.”12

The British Experience

One compelling irony about the British experience in Malaya being mined for lessons by the U.S. military is that, at exactly the same time, the British Army was suffering a humiliating defeat in Basra. The British Army’s reputation for expertise in defeating insurgencies had always been largely fraudulent. In Malaya, it had taken a twelve-year emergency to encompass the defeat of poorly armed Communist guerrillas who were cut off from outside help and who faced opposition from most of the local population. In Northern Ireland, it had taken thirty years to bring the Provisional Republican movement to the negotiating table, once again, even though a majority of the province’s population were militantly hostile to the insurgency. Elsewhere the British had suffered humiliating defeats in Palestine and South Arabia (South Yemen). Nevertheless, the British had convinced both themselves and others that counterinsurgency was something they excelled in. Indeed, the U.S. military in Iraq for many months had British officers lecturing them on what they were doing wrong and on how much they could learn from the British experience. This all turned to dust as it became clear that the British were losing control of Basra and the south of the country.

The problem for the British was that Tony Blair’s New Labour government was absolutely determined to prove itself the United States’ most faithful and reliable ally, although satellite seems a more appropriate term, but was not prepared to commit the necessary resources to the military effort. This was, at least, partly because the politicians had been wilfully misled by the generals who had volunteered the British Army for duties beyond its capacity. What prevented the Blair government from committing the necessary resources was that the war was unpopular in Britain. It had been opposed by a Stop the War movement of unprecedented strength (in one London demonstration alone, well over a million people were on the streets), and British involvement was regarded as based on lies and deception. British soldiers were dying on behalf of a U.S. President who was generally regarded as a joke in Britain and Blair’s courting of him almost amounted to a national humiliation. The Iraq War seriously damaged both the Labour Party, which lost thousands of members, and Blair himself, who became widely known as “Bliar.”13
With too few troops, and those few being continually reduced in number, the British were first of all forced out of the southern provinces that they had taken responsibility for, and then effectively driven out of Basra itself. Where New Labour was successful was in keeping the scale of the defeat from the British people. What is remarkable is that even as the disaster in Basra was unfolding, the British volunteered to take responsibility for Helmand province in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had revived and were mounting an increasingly serious insurgent challenge. The thinking behind this quixotic decision seems to have been that war in Afghanistan in support of Karzai’s regime of drug-trafficking gangsters could be successfully portrayed as a war for women’s rights and against drug trafficking! This might be made into a popular war. The outcome was to be another debacle with the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband eventually having to privately ask the United States to relieve Britain of responsibility for Helmand before the rising level of casualties precipitated a crisis back home.14

Privatizing War

One feature of the Iraq War that marks it out as a turning point in military affairs is the extent to which the United States and British privatized the conflict. Whereas at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991 there had been one private contractor for every hundred soldiers, by the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq there was one contractor for every ten soldiers, and by 2008, there was at least one contractor for every soldier. Most of this privatization involved the contracting out of logistics, maintenance, and training to such an extent that both the U.S. and British armies were dependent on private contractors. By 2008 there were more than 30,000 armed contractors and mercenaries operating in Iraq, providing security for individuals, installations, and supply lines, working for both the U.S. and British governments as well as for private companies. Private contractors were even involved in the torture at Abu Ghraib! This is a “military revolution” of considerable significance. Indeed, the implications of a partly privatized military for the institutions of bourgeois democracy have not as of yet been seriously explored.

The most notorious mercenary outfit involved in Iraq was, of course, Blackwater, at the time headed up by Erik Prince, a right-wing Christian fundamentalist and son of a billionaire businessman. The firm got its first security contract in 2002, protecting the CIA headquarters in Kabul. By 2006, its security contracts were worth $593 million. Blackwater provided security for CPA head Paul Bremer and, on at least one occasion, for British Prime Minister Tony Blair. They did not provide conventional body guards but rather military escorts made up of heavily armed men, armored vehicles, and helicopter escorts. They routinely fired on Iraqi vehicles that came too close, rammed them and forced them off the road, set up road blocks, and generally behaved without any concern for the safety of Iraqi civilians. This conduct was ignored, indeed condoned, up until the Nisour Square massacre of September 16, 2007 when Blackwater gunmen, fearing attack, opened fire and killed seventeen unarmed Iraqi men, women, and children.

Since this public relations disaster, Blackwater has cunningly changed its name a number of times, from Xe Services to Academi and, most recently, to Constellis Holdings. It still has security contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including for the protection of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which was awarded by the Obama administration.15

Holding Operation

Under the command of Petraeus, and equipped with the new counterinsurgency strategy, the U.S. military was apparently able to turn the tide in Iraq. The Surge, together with the Sunni Awakening, supposedly laid the basis for victory. Iraq was to be no Vietnam. This was more a testimony to Petraeus’s media handling skills than anything else. The reality was somewhat different. A serious counterinsurgency strategy would have involved a large-scale U.S. military commitment in Iraq that lasted another decade or longer and even then there was no guarantee of success. This was not politically possible. Indeed, by now it was becoming clear that the United States was in fact caught in the middle of a proxy war being waged between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In these circumstances, the Surge was little more than a “holding operation,” designed to get the situation under control, at least temporarily, so that U.S. forces could be pulled out without suffering any great public humiliation. From that point of view, the exercise was a success because when disaster inevitably came, the United States had already withdrawn.

One of the pretexts for invading Iraq had been Saddam Hussein’s supposed links with al-Qaeda. It was purportedly part of the War on Terror. This was pure fiction of course. The War on Terror was from the beginning nothing more than an ideological construct intended to provide popular justification for the U.S. attempt to reassert itself in the Middle East, rather than an attempt to deal with what was only a marginal security problem posed by terrorism. The only way to justify an unprovoked attack on Iraq was to somehow implicate Saddam Hussein in the 9/11 attacks. He was certainly guilty of terrible crimes, all of which the United States had condoned, but had no involvement in 9/11. But now his non-existent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction had to be destroyed or the next terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland would be chemical, biological, or even nuclear. Instead of eliminating a terrorist threat from a terrorist state, the Iraq invasion successfully created a terrorist threat from a terrorist state. At the time, many people had pointed out that the invasion would create a terrorist problem where one did not already exist. This quickly proved to be the case, although no one foresaw the unprecedented scale that the phenomenon was to eventually assume with the rise of the Islamic State.16

A similar “holding operation” was mounted in Afghanistan with a temporary “surge” stabilizing the situation so that U.S. forces could be withdrawn. How successful this will be remains to be seen with fighting still continuing.

Wars to Come

Already there are those constructing a “stab in the back” myth to explain away the U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. In their story, the military had gotten on top of the insurgency in Iraq and the Surge was working, but the Obama administration threw it all away with a premature withdrawal. Similarly in Afghanistan, a counterinsurgency strategy was producing results, but was cut short by political expediency with consequences that still remain to be seen. The soldiers were “stabbed in the back” by the politicians just like they were when they lost the Vietnam War. The politicians threw victory away.17 The reality is somewhat different. What we have seen is a significant shift in U.S. strategy, from full-scale invasion and occupation—which proved too costly, too unpopular, and positively counter-productive—to going back to more traditional methods of intervention. The counterinsurgency turn has proven to be remarkably short-lived, an intellectual revolution that crashed and burned almost as soon as it took flight. Instead of committing large numbers of troops on the ground, the United States is waging war across the world by means of special forces and aerial bombardment, whether carried out by drones and conventional aircraft, or by supporting proxy armies in the fight against U.S. enemies. This is more cost-effective and invites less political fallout. These are the wars to come.18

Notes

1. ↩Keith Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010), 77.
2. ↩Adam Cobb, “A Strategic Assessment of Iraq,” Civil Wars 9, no 1 (2007): 55.
3. ↩The installation of Hamid Karzai as President provided this gangster regime with a presentable figurehead, but no more than that. Sarah Chayes describes how on one occasion, Karzai announced his intention to root out corruption at a press conference, but made clear the emptiness of the promise by having his two notoriously corrupt warlord Vice Presidents, both “war criminals” according to her, standing alongside him. According to Chayes, even David Petraeus on one occasion described the Karzai government as a “criminal syndicate.” But it was, of course, America’s criminal syndicate; indeed, many of its personnel—including Karzai himself—were on the CIA payroll. See Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), 61, 135.
4. ↩George Tenet, At the Centre of the Storm: My Years in the CIA (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 426.
5. ↩Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin 2006), 163.
6. ↩John Nagl, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice (New York: Penguin, 2014), 65.
7. ↩Ibid, 80.
8. ↩John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
9. ↩Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 265.
10. ↩The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication no. 3-33.5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
11. ↩Nagl, Knife Fights, 156–57.
12. ↩Emma Sky, The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (London: Atlantic Books, 2015), 160.
13. ↩Blair’s vaunted electoral successes were in fact predicated on the weakness of the Conservative opposition and the cultivation of the right wing press, in particular of the Murdoch press.
14. ↩David Miliband is the son of the eminent Marxist academic, the late Ralph Miliband, author of one of the best books on the British Labour Party, Parliamentary Socialism, first published as long ago as 1961. His eldest son seems to have embraced every one of his father’s most damaging criticisms of the Labour Party as positive virtues. He was the Blairite candidate for the Labour Party leadership in 2010 and after his defeat moved to the United States to head up the International Rescue Committee, a charity supported by a cross section of the U.S. ruling class and with strong State Department and CIA links. Its committee of Overseers includes such well-known humanitarians as Madelaine Albright, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Henry Kissinger.
15. ↩For Blackwater see Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2008). Erik Prince has recently urged that private contractors be used to overthrow the Islamic State.
16. ↩The U.S. fight against Islamic State is compromised by the covert support that America’s allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, continue to provide for that regime. When considering IS it is worth adopting the old adage of following the money. Who is helping produce, sell and distribute the Islamic State’s oil? It is certain that Western intelligence agencies know the answer to this question, but obviously those assisting IS are too important to be named, let alone be sanctioned for their actions.
17. ↩Leading the way is Mark Moyer. See his Strategic Failure: How President Obama’s Drone Warfare, Defense Cuts and Military Amateurism Have Imperiled America (New York: Threshold Editions, 2015).
18. ↩See Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (London: Serpent’s Tale, 2014).

Phenomenal piece, Mr. Don. One more book to put on the stack. Good to see you back.

Speaking of books, do check out Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. Thinking you'll appreciate it.