8.
Counterinsurgency Revisited
Learning from Our Mistakes
My military life began in Operation Desert Storm, a war that was heavily influenced by perceived lessons of Vietnam: fight with overwhelming forces, win the military conflict decisively, then withdraw rapidly regardless of the mess you leave behind. Desert Storm was the war that the Pentagon had wanted to fight ever since Vietnam—a war against a conventional enemy on a battlefield all but devoid of civilians and without jungles, mountains, or cities in which her enemies could hide from America’s overwhelming firepower. My first war was, on the surface, an enormous success, as tanks and airpower reduced the Iraqi Army from the fourth largest in the world to the second largest in Iraq in just one hundred hours. Satisfying as it seemed at the time, however, Desert Storm was a military triumph without a political victory; Saddam Hussein remained in power to threaten his neighbors, a low-level air war continued for a decade, and ultimately America chose to fight again to topple him from power, adding another decade of war with Iraq to the historical ledger.
The costs of the second Iraq war were staggering: nearly 4,500 Americans killed and more than 30,000 wounded, many grievously; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians wounded or killed; more than $2 trillion in direct government expenditures, with the possibility of another $2 trillion in indirect costs over the generations to come, and the significant weakening of the major regional counterweight to Iran and consequent strengthening of that country’s position and ambitions. Great powers rarely make national decisions that explode so quickly and completely in their faces, and the nation and the world will pay a heavy price for our arrogance and hubris for many decades.
The first Iraq war, in which I led a tank platoon, was necessary; the second one was not. The second Iraq war was one that we did not need to fight but fought for dubious reasons that were eventually proved false. Iraq was not, as we were repeatedly told, developing weapons of mass destruction; even if it had been, deterrence, which prevented war with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, might have worked against a nuclear Iraq. There was no substantive link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and no Al Qaeda presence in Iraq until the American invasion, which caused social order to collapse and provided the terrorist group with a powerful recruiting message and a dangerous new base from which to attack.
The invasion of Iraq and its bitter aftermath should remind politicians for generations of the high cost and unpredictable results for those who roll what Otto von Bismarck called “the iron dice,” and it should forever discredit the notion of “preventive war.” Reluctance to send American ground troops to intervene in Libya and Syria, while providing different levels of political and military support, gives some hope that the country will think more than twice before fighting another unnecessary war. Good intentions do not always lead to favorable outcomes.
In Vietnam, the U.S. military was typically slow to recognize and adapt to the demands of the counterinsurgency campaign it confronted. Over time it improved its performance under the command of General Creighton Abrams, who took command from William Westmoreland and changed his search-and-destroy strategy to clear, hold, and build too late, after the American people had already given up hope. But the lessons learned too late in Vietnam recur again and again in the pages of successful counterinsurgency campaigns, from the Philippines to the Malayan Emergency. They include the importance of building capable local forces, linking political and military lines of effort, conducting information operations, protecting the population rather than focusing exclusively on killing insurgents, and holding the terrain you’ve cleared rather than allowing the insurgents to reoccupy it. These old lessons had been codified in the Marine Corps Small Wars Manual of 1940, painful learning drawn from the Marines’ experience in the Banana Wars that had to be learned again in Vietnam at an enormous cost in blood and treasure.
Tragically, all these lessons were forgotten yet again in the wake of the Vietnam War. In fact, after Vietnam, the United States intentionally turned away from the counterinsurgency lessons it had repurchased, certain that it would never again fight a counterinsurgency campaign and instead deciding to focus on a kind of war it knew how to fight well, conventional tank wars against another tank Army. The American military can be justly proud of its renaissance after the debacle of Vietnam and subsequent triumph in the Cold War, but its historical amnesia left it grievously unprepared for the wars of this century.
The British historian Michael Howard noted that it is impossible to perfectly prepare military forces for the next war; what is important is to make sure that you have not gotten the preparations so wrong that the military cannot quickly adapt when it is next needed. The Department of Defense failed that test in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It ignored preparations for counterinsurgency operations and was all but criminally unprepared for the demands of occupying Iraq after the invasion caused its government to collapse and Saddam Hussein to disappear into hiding. American actions, including the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and excessive use of force early in the occupation, contributed to the raging insurgency that threatened to pull Iraq down into civil war.
After the American people made clear their displeasure with this state of affairs in the midterm elections of 2006, transferring both the House and the Senate from Republican to Democratic control, President George W. Bush made the bravest decision of his presidency, firing Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and doubling down on Iraq under the leadership of Bob Gates and David Petraeus. Petraeus, who had written his doctoral dissertation on Vietnam and had prepared his whole career in case America needed him to conduct an irregular warfare campaign, applied the lessons of Vietnam to the Iraq campaign. The Army, which had too long neglected the need for a deep understanding of languages and cultures, changed its spots in a remarkable example of organizational adaptation under extreme pressure. Winston Churchill said that you can always count on the United States to do the right thing when it has exhausted all possible alternatives; with Petraeus’s selection to command in Iraq under Gates’s leadership in the Pentagon, it adapted in the nick of time.
As history would suggest, the principles of counterinsurgency worked, albeit at great cost and just as American patience with the war effort in Iraq was about to expire. American support for the Sunni Awakening proved crucial in rebalancing the forces on the ground that eventually changed the course of the Iraq conflict, and Petraeus received well-justified accolades for turning around a war that had seemed destined to be America’s second consecutive loss in the irregular warfare category. The cost was excessive, the pleasure momentary, and the posture ridiculous, as British diplomat Lord Chesterfield is reputed to have described another activity, but the outcome was far better than could have reasonably been expected.
Petraeus later had the chance to practice counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, which had been starved of resources for many years by the overwhelming demands of the debacle in Iraq. Counterinsurgency worked where it was resourced, particularly in southern Afghanistan, albeit slowly and at great cost, as T. E. Lawrence and any other student of counterinsurgency would have thought likely to be the case.
The question is not whether the classic counterinsurgency principles of clear, hold, and build work; the fact that they do has been demonstrated repeatedly. The question is whether the extraordinary investment of time, blood, and treasure required to make them work is worth the cost. The answer to that question depends on the value of long-term stability in the country afflicted by an insurgency, and that answer varies by time and place.
The attempt to unify Vietnam under the North’s leadership was not, as the Kennedy and Johnson administrations argued, an attempt to expand Communism across all of Southeast Asia; it was instead largely a nationalist expression of anticolonialism and a desire for independence that should have sounded familiar to Americans who were themselves products of such emotions a scant two centuries prior. Ho Chi Minh quoting from the Declaration of Independence in 1945 should have been an indication that perhaps we were backing the wrong side. But the Democrats, who had absorbed the blame for “losing” China to Communism under Harry Truman, were not about to let another domino fall on their watch. Ironically, when South Vietnam did ultimately fall to North Vietnamese tanks, it was Democrats on Capitol Hill who refused to uphold obligations in the Paris Accords that we would come to the aid of our South Vietnamese allies in their hour of need.
The fall of Vietnam, despite its horrible repercussions throughout Southeast Asia, did not signal the triumph of global Communism, and ironically it was a similar counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan that ultimately exhausted the Soviet Union. Stability in Afghanistan was not as essential to Soviet security as the Politburo had believed it to be, but the costs of the war in blood and treasure were crippling. Afghanistan fell when the Soviet Union could no longer pay the bills to support Afghan security forces some three years after the last Soviet soldier had left the country, a lesson that should resound as we contemplate the future of our own efforts in Afghanistan twenty-five years later.
Unlike Vietnam for us or Afghanistan for the Soviet Union, a degree of stability in Iraq was a vital national interest for the United States. Even with the threat of Saddam Hussein’s bellicosity confined to the dustbin of history, Iraq’s impact on the pre-fracking global oil market and its position in the heart of the Muslim world meant that America could not simply withdraw her forces and hope for the best when a civil war erupted in the power vacuum we had inadvertently created. After invading the country and toppling the government, not just morality but hard national interest demanded a degree of stability in Iraq that appeared unachievable in 2006 but that was clearly visible in the streets when I visited in the summer of 2008. It was hard to comprehend the change. The curbstones that had been shattered by bombs were already rebuilt and painted jaunty colors, and the guardrails we’d ripped out with tanks after an IED planted behind one killed Roger Ling and Jeff Graham had been reinstalled. Iraq mattered a lot, and although the invasion had been unnecessary and the subsequent occupation was a debacle, cleaning up the mess we’d made was the least bad option available.
Afghanistan is a rather different case. Sitting next to me before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, Steve Biddle had testified that continuing to invest in stability in Afghanistan after the toppling of the Taliban and scattering of Al Qaeda was a close call on the merits. An unstable Afghanistan would not disturb the global oil markets, and the neighborhood was not as susceptible to the contagion of Sunni- Shia conflict as had been Iraq’s. There was and is a danger that absent American support, Afghanistan could again be conquered by the Taliban and provide a new home for terrorists, including ones who might further destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan. That danger was worth making an investment in counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, but the case was never as clear as had been the decision to surge in Iraq in 2007, and even that had been something of a long shot.
Still, candidate Obama had campaigned on Afghanistan as the good war, and to demonstrate his seriousness about national security despite his criticism of the Bush administration’s conduct in Iraq, he could hardly allow the Afghan presidential elections scheduled for the summer of 2009 to fail. During Obama’s first term, Democrats were still tainted with weakness by the long shadow of Vietnam. Determined to escape those ghosts and make the Democrats seem strong on national security, President Obama judged counterinsurgency to be the least bad option available during two separate rounds of White House deliberations over Afghanistan strategy in his first year. He nearly tripled U.S. forces committed to the war but simultaneously imposed a definite deadline of summer 2011 as the endpoint of the Afghan surge.
Much to the surprise of the U.S. military, he meant it. Obama was willing to give counterinsurgency a try, but the costs of the war clearly weighed on him, and he began the drawdown as scheduled. He was able to do so over the resistance of Secretary Gates and General Petraeus in no small part because of the killing of Osama bin Laden by a SEAL team in April 2011, the climax of an intensive counterterrorism campaign that had effectively defeated Al Qaeda as a strategic threat to the United States. Although Al Qaeda’s affiliates in Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq still had the ability to conduct local strikes of some significance, they had proven unable to replicate the effects of the September 11, 2001, attacks. They were unlikely to be able to regain that global reach given the more effective American intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities we had developed in the decade that followed.
Obama had proven his national security bona fides, and the Democrats actually earned an advantage on the issue over their Republican adversaries during the presidential campaign of 2012. The president was free to overrule his military advisers who recommended a larger and longer-term troop commitment to Afghanistan, and American-led counterinsurgency in that country came to an end early in his second term. Even at its peak the counterinsurgency campaign had not been sufficiently resourced to be applied across all of Afghanistan, and where the main effort was made in the south, American forces were withdrawn and Afghan troops thrust into the lead more rapidly than many would have recommended. Whether the Afghans will be able to hold what Americans and NATO troops have cleared of insurgents at such cost will depend largely on the American commitment to Afghanistan after the formal transfer of authority in 2014.
The endgame remains unclear. Will Afghanistan end like Vietnam—in an abject, helicopters-flying-out-of-Kabul, people-hanging-on-the-skids defeat—or in an unsatisfying and untidy sort-of victory like Iraq? While neither option seems particularly attractive, President Obama would welcome an Iraq-like end to Afghanistan. America can live with the current Iraqi government and its policies, and Iraq’s increasing oil output will help the global economic recovery. This is an unsatisfying return on the blood and treasure we poured into Iraq, but it is not a complete loss—and it is far better than we could have imagined in 2006, when Iraq was descending into civil war and Al Qaeda had established an important foothold there.
It is not unlikely that 2015 will see a similarly reasonable Afghan government that will hold together with American money and advisers—an unsatisfying end, but not a failure, and not without promise of greater stability to come. Like any successful counterinsurgency, Afghanistan’s is likely to end somewhat unsatisfyingly for Americans, with a corrupt but gradually improving government in Kabul, advisers helping Afghan security forces fight a weakening but still dangerous Taliban, and a schizophrenic Pakistan alternately helping Afghan and Taliban fighters. If not a good return on our huge investment in the country, it would be a reasonable outcome given the advantage we gave our enemies by taking our eye off the ball in Afghanistan for eight years while Iraq burned.
A reasonable outcome in both wars, unsatisfying as it seems, is about the best we can hope for in what is likely to remain an age of unsatisfying wars. This unsatisfying but not catastrophic outcome, however, is one of the reasons that modern critics of counterinsurgency have such an uphill battle in front of them, and why their critiques have failed to take hold of the military imagination the way Colonel Harry Summers’s book On Strategy did after the Vietnam War.
Summers argued that the reason the United States lost the Vietnam War was that it had practiced too much counterinsurgency in Vietnam, fighting with one hand tied behind its back; “A War is a War is a War,” he thundered, and only the complete use of all available force was acceptable. This attitude ignored the changes in the character of warfare since the deployment of nuclear weapons and the Cold War context in which the Vietnam War had been fought, as a smaller proxy war in a longer and larger global conflict against the Soviet Union. Never mind; it was a simple answer that made sense to Army officers, and On Strategy became for many years the Army’s answer to itself to why it had lost a long, hard war in Southeast Asia.
There are modern applicants to fill Harry Summers’s role for the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are hobbled not just because the outcomes of those wars are much more likely to be unsatisfying sort-of wins rather than abject defeats—indeed, the Army is rightly proud of its turnaround in Iraq after a horrible start that was largely bequeathed to it by its political leadership, and Afghanistan’s outcome is still too close to call—but also by the intellectual incoherence of their own arguments.
Thus Army Colonel Gian Gentile, the most strident voice against modern counterinsurgency doctrine and implementation, alternately claims that his own battalion was already implementing classic counterinsurgency principles in Baghdad in 2006 and that counterinsurgency is an inherently flawed policy in which the United States should never again engage. While he is certainly correct that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and that the United States has reaped a most meager return on the extraordinary investment of lives and treasure it made there, he has never said what the United States should have done once the decision to invade Iraq had been so unwisely made and so poorly implemented. The counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, once comprehensively implemented under the leadership of General Petraeus, was imperfect and left behind a deeply troubled country that remains violent and unstable, but absent the implementation of counterinsurgency best practices, it would have been far, far worse. Large-scale counterinsurgency is rarely a great option—it is in fact messy and slow and hugely expensive—but it may sometimes be the least bad option available.
Critics of counterinsurgency must do better than say that they would not have invaded Iraq in March 2003; I argued against the invasion as stridently as a serving officer could. But once Iraq had been invaded against my wishes, its government destroyed, its security forces disbanded, and fundamental splits in Iraqi society exposed and exacerbated by the occupation’s incompetence and willful blindness, there was no better alternative than a full-blown counterinsurgency campaign. As the great historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., liked to say, the right question is often, “Compared to what?” No critics of counterinsurgency have examined the situation in Iraq in early 2007 and presented an alternative answer that can be subjected to a cost and benefit comparison.
That absence matters, because there is every chance that America will fight another full-scale counterinsurgency campaign, in a generation or perhaps much sooner. This is true despite and perhaps even because of the Defense Department’s Strategic Guidance released at the Pentagon on January 5, 2012. Standing with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who had recently replaced Gates at the Pentagon, President Obama held a press conference to emphasize the importance of the Strategic Guidance. The document, titled Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, explicitly ordered “the end of long-term nation building with large military footprints.”
That goal seems laudable, but it ignores the reality that the United States is currently involved in a number of counterinsurgency campaigns: fighting insurgents in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the Horn of Africa, and rather halfheartedly supporting insurgents in Syria after having recently helped other insurgents topple the government of Libya. Insurgency and counterinsurgency are not going away, and it is essential that the Pentagon remembers that postinvasion stability operations, including counterinsurgency, are core military tasks for which America’s armed forces must always be prepared.
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Iraq and Afghanistan were not the only insurgencies to challenge the United States during the first decades of the twenty-first century. In fact, in the wake of the asymmetric September 11 attacks, challenges to state power in much of the world increasingly took the form of insurgencies, as conventional state-on-state warfare receded further into the realm of history. As rebellion and insurgency roiled the planet, the United States supported some insurgents and engaged in counterinsurgency campaigns against others, often by supporting the host nation in its efforts to defeat the rebels. There is no sign that the future holds anything but a continuation of this trend toward less conventional conflict and more insurgency and counterinsurgency.
The reasons are multifaceted and mutually reinforcing. They begin with a single big idea: that the information revolution is changing our world as dramatically as did the agricultural revolution of some five thousand years ago and the industrial revolution of 250 years ago. Both these revolutions strengthened the state against the individual, and for the three hundred years following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the state became the dominant force in international politics and in organizing the affairs of human beings.
However, that power dynamic changed with the beginnings of the information revolution in the wake of the Second World War. The rapid growth of computing power at an ever-decreasing cost—as described in Moore’s Law, which notes that computing capabilities double and costs are cut in half every eighteen months—shows no sign of diminishing and has given individuals and small groups a degree of power that has formerly been restricted to states. The ability of lone wolves like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to single-handedly damage international relations between the United States and her allies and expose intelligence operations and operatives worth billions of dollars is just one indication of the changing direction of the balance of power between the individual and state for the first time in three centuries.
The impact of the information revolution on the relative power of the state and the individual is not yet clear. Technologically sophisticated states can use digitized information to track the actions and locations of individuals within and sometimes even outside their borders; the raid that killed Osama bin Laden inside Pakistan was made possible only because some of his intermediaries were sloppy with their use of cell phones. But information technology also gives power to individuals who are wise in its use to apply that power against their own state or others in the international system; the Vietcong and North Vietnamese used the power of television to undermine U.S. support for the war in Vietnam, and the Green Revolution in Iran used Twitter and other social media to organize powerful (although ultimately unsuccessful, at least for now) demonstrations against the Iranian regime.
In fact, the entirety of the so-called Arab Spring revolutions against authoritarian or semiauthoritarian regimes can be seen as a consequence of the information revolution. With easy access to personal, demand-pull rather than command-push information technology, it became increasingly hard for regimes like Mubarak’s in Egypt, Qaddafi’s in Libya, and Assad’s in Syria to control their populations’ access to information about the performance of their government. Once they knew the truth, the Egyptian, Libyan, and Syrian publics could use that same information technology to mobilize demonstrations against the regimes they had detested for years but had never had the power to effectively confront. An earlier form of information technology, the photocopier, contributed to public discontent against the Soviet regime throughout the Communist bloc in the 1970s; photocopied samizdat versions of dissident manifestos like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago fermented discontent in an earlier spring of rebellion against autocracy, and the trend has only accelerated as technology to rapidly disseminate information has improved.
But globalization—the essentially instantaneous, essentially free transfer of information around the globe—is just one of the factors driving the new era of insurgencies around the globe. Others include nuclear weapons, conventional U.S. military superiority over any conceivable state enemy, urbanization and population growth, climate change, and resource depletion. Judged against the backdrop of the information revolution, this series of factors strongly implies a period of rapid strategic change, of which the Arab Spring is only the beginning.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker argues that human-on-human violence of all kinds has been declining over the course of history, particularly since the end of the Second World War. One does not have to fully buy into his argument to note that the seventy years since the end of that conflict have seen an impressive decrease in the number of conventional, state-on-state wars that saw their climax in the First and Second World Wars. In fact, since V-E and V-J days, the United States had engaged in only two significant primarily conventional wars against other states—the Korean War against North Korean and Chinese armed forces, and Desert Storm against Iraqi armed forces. Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Bosnia, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom have all included significant combat against irregular nonstate actors.
At least one reason behind the decrease in conventional combat has been the existence of nuclear weapons, which impose a kind of force cap on how far great powers are willing to pursue military objectives. It was his request for nuclear weapons that led to the relief of Douglas MacArthur by Harry Truman, who knew something about the employment of those systems; Dwight Eisenhower similarly refused to employ nuclear weapons in support of the French at Dien Bien Phu. John F. Kennedy’s refusal to face nuclear Armageddon correctly limited U.S. options during the Cuban Missile Crisis; LBJ similarly refused to escalate the Vietnam War to a point that threatened nuclear war with North Vietnam’s backers in the Soviet Union. In short, nuclear weapons have put a cap on how far nuclear powers have been willing to push the use of conventional force and have in some ways made the world safe for irregular war. There are now those who believe that the United States should turn away from the lessons of the past decade and focus on preparing to invade other great powers’ sphere of influence, despite their improved anti-access area-denial capabilities (A2AD in Pentagon parlance), using our Air Force and Navy comparative advantages in a strategy called AirSea Battle. They ignore the lessons of the Cold War, in which nuclear weapons made impossible conventional conflicts that would result in thousands of casualties directly attributable to another great power; instead, the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in expensive but indirect proxy wars. China and the United States are far more likely to do the same than to fight a single climactic battle in the Strait of Taiwan, no matter how much more the Pentagon and military-industrial complex would benefit from World War III in the Pacific.
Similarly, conventional U.S. military superiority has reduced the incidence of conventional state-on-state wars like Operation Desert Storm, which cast a heavy shadow across the military capabilities of lesser powers that realized conclusively that they could not compete with the United States in tank-on-tank warfare. Ironically, this very superiority of U.S. military muscle made the world safe for irregular warfare, particularly in the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union after its own foray into irregular warfare in Afghanistan. The triumph of American arms in Desert Storm demonstrated the likely result of any conventional military aggression against American desires anywhere in the world. The very fact that we are so good at the American way of war makes it almost impossible for anyone to compete against us on a conventional battlefield—another factor behind the decrease in conventional combat in the decades since the end of the Cold War, and another factor making AirSea Battle more of a dream of defense planners than a real challenge worthy of primacy in Pentagon war planning.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that a number of factors are increasing the likelihood of irregular war, and those trends will only increase in years to come. A number of them have contributed to the uprisings of the Arab Spring. In addition to the information revolution that has empowered individuals worldwide with more and more easily accessible knowledge than has ever been available in human history, populations continue to increase in urban areas as people flock to cities for employment and the hope of a better life. However, living in cities exposes people to vast inequalities that mark the globalized world, and increased concentrations of humanity put more pressure on governments and make demonstrations larger, more frequent, and more dangerous.
Population growth continues in many of the least developed parts of the world, putting yet more pressure on governments that have to feed and house them or risk rebellion. The increased environmental energy infused into the global climate system by global warming is increasing the frequency and violence of weather patterns, further pressuring some of the world’s least capable governments; Bangladesh is likely to be a victim of all of these mutually reinforcing trends, but it is only the most obvious site of future unrest. Pakistan is another, with far more serious implications for global stability as a result of its nuclear weapons.
So, in a classic good news/bad news scenario, the world is less likely to see conventional conflict of uniformed armies clashing with peer or near-peer forces for the foreseeable future. Instead, we are likely to experience more of the kinds of rebellions and insurgencies that have marked the Arab Spring.
In this world, one of the critical questions the United States will face is when, whether, and how to intervene in the varieties of insurgencies and rebellions that are likely to be the face of conflict in this century. The complicated answer is “sometimes” with nonlethal assistance and advisers, and “seldom” with U.S. combat forces and then only when vital U.S. national interests are affected. The Afghanistan and Iraq interventions are instructive on this point, but so are the more recent conflicts in Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.
Afghanistan was, to use Richard Haas’s excellent construction, a war of necessity. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the leaders of Afghanistan refused to hand over the members of Al Qaeda responsible for the costliest foreign attack on U.S. soil, the United States had no choice but to use force to capture or kill the Al Qaeda leadership in simple self-defense. Because the Taliban resisted American efforts to accomplish those tasks, and could not be trusted to prevent Al Qaeda from using its territory to plan and execute future attacks, the Taliban also had to go and be replaced by a government that would pursue policies more supportive of U.S. interests, with the minimum standard being one that would fight rather than support Al Qaeda. This intervention was legal and necessary and remains likely to accomplish its core objective of preventing Afghan territory from again being used to attack the United States or her interests, although the campaign has been longer and harder than anyone would have predicted when it began more than a dozen years ago.
The two factors that have prolonged the Afghan campaign are instructive as the U.S. contemplates future interventions, hopefully with a “once bitten, twice shy” attitude. They are the presence of sanctuaries in Pakistan and the endemic corruption of the Afghan government that was established in the wake of the Taliban’s initial defeat. These two factors are historically among the most important in predicting the success or failure of a counterinsurgency campaign; both have a strong negative correlation with success, with invulnerable foreign sanctuary that shares a difficult-to-control border the single factor that is most likely to promote the success of an insurgency.
Still, important as foreign sanctuaries are, there are reasons to believe that the sanctuary Pakistan provides to the Taliban and to Al Qaeda central will not be decisive in determining the final outcome in Afghanistan. Pakistan, which created the mujahedeen who expelled the Soviet Union from Afghanistan with U.S. and Saudi Arabian help (including Osama bin Laden) in the 1980s, is paying a heavy price for allowing the Taliban to use its territory to continue attacks inside Afghanistan; indeed, it has lost more of its own soldiers to the Pakistani Taliban than has the government of Afghanistan. Pakistan has made some efforts to regain control of the Frankenstein’s monster it unleashed, with enthusiastic if not particularly sophisticated counterinsurgency efforts in places like the Swat Valley that have at least complicated the efforts of the Taliban to seize control of the nuclear-armed country.
The United States and her NATO allies in Afghanistan have not been able to conduct ground operations inside Pakistan but have used airpower in new ways to take on the Pakistani Taliban and, especially, Al Qaeda central. Drone strikes have decimated Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, rendering it essentially irrelevant as a global threat able to plan, prepare, and conduct strikes outside Pakistan’s borders. Drone strikes have not been as effective against the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban but have limited their effectiveness and imposed additional complicating factors on their ability to recruit, train, and conduct operations in both countries. Thus, as important as the Pakistani sanctuary has been for the insurgent groups based there that threaten regional stability, the new technologies being used to identify, locate, track, and disrupt their operations have essentially stalemated the insurgents at the strategic level. The Pakistani-based insurgent groups can continue to operate and cause casualties, but they are unable to mass in attacks of true strategic significance that threaten the government of Afghanistan. As long as the United States provides airpower in support of that government, even after the withdrawal of U.S. ground troops, the Pakistani- based insurgents will be limited to guerrilla attacks that are unlikely to lead to the fall of Kabul. It is worth remembering that Saigon fell in 1975 not to insurgents but to North Vietnamese tanks that would have been easy pickings for American airpower had it still been on station; in the forty years since, the advent of precision weapons empowered by the information revolution has only increased the costs of conventional invasions and attacks for lesser powers.
The corruption of the Afghan government is another factor that has complicated the counterinsurgency campaign there, but it is also unlikely to be strategically decisive. Corrupt and ineffective host-nation governments are the stock in trade of counterinsurgency campaigns; effective governments regarded as legitimate by their population do not give rise to insurgencies in the first place. And as bad as the Afghan government under President Karzai is by Western standards—often ranking as the worst or next to worst in the world—it is more effective and better regarded by the Afghan population than the despised and repressive Taliban regime that preceded it. Partly because Afghanistan was in such a dire place when the September 11 attacks occurred, life there has improved dramatically for most people despite twelve years of war. A country that had fewer than one thousand telephones in 2001 now has more than ten million, and the population in school has exploded, particularly among girls and young women. The people of Afghanistan do not hate their government, and as long as it remains able to pay its security forces—a question much more for the international community than for the Afghans themselves—the state will hang together. The people do not want to return to the days of the Taliban; bad as the Karzai government is, the Taliban, within the living memory of most Afghans, was far worse.
The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was a necessary war, and the need for continued counterterrorism operations to be conducted from Afghan territory for the foreseeable future required a counterinsurgency campaign to build and strengthen an Afghan government to a degree sufficient to protect American bases in the country. Operation Desert Storm was also a necessary war, required to prevent Iraq from controlling Kuwaiti oil supplies and to demonstrate that the international community would not tolerate changing borders by the open use of conventional force; if international law is to mean anything, than the occupation of Kuwait could not and did not stand.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003, on the other hand, was an unnecessary war of choice, fought on intelligence that proved to be false and on logic that was prima facie flawed even if the intelligence had been correct. If Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, the American-led invasion force should have been large enough to secure those weapons sites rather than barely large enough to topple Saddam’s government, much less police the postwar chaos that many, including Conrad Crane, predicted. As a result of inadequate postwar planning and insufficient troop strength, when my battalion arrived in Al Anbar in September 2003, we found acres of weapons depots completely unguarded. The United States was fortunate that all that escaped from the weapons depots—which Saddam had guarded far better than we did in the immediate wake of his fall—were artillery shells to make roadside bombs; if there had been chemical weapons in the storage sites, the invasion of Iraq could have been far more of a disaster than it proved to be.
Worst of all, because it was a war of choice, the United States had extraordinary freedom of action to choose when, where, with what forces, and how to conduct the invasion, making the failure to plan for the subsequent occupation even more inexcusable. Iraq presented no imminent threat to U.S. or allied interests in March 2003, and I opposed the invasion at the time, as did most serious students of U.S. foreign policy; John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are just two of the political scientists who published articles arguing that the planned invasion was not in the American national interest. They were right, and the costs of the operation to topple Saddam Hussein will constrain American foreign policy and affect intervention decisions for decades to come, in the United States and among our allies, as the reluctance to intervene in Syria even by the British has shown.
Some defenders of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 argue that the invasion and the subsequent creation of an admittedly flawed democracy there contributed to the popular uprisings across the Middle East sometimes collectively referred to as the Arab Spring. This claim is hard to conclusively support or refute; as with the relationship between global warming and individual disasters like Hurricane Sandy, putting more energy into a complex system is likely to have extreme and unpredictable results, but it is hard to draw a direct line to any individual event in a complicated region that the United States struggles to understand.
However, it is not hard to make a connection between the shattered expectations of quick success in Iraq and subsequent American reluctance to use force to accomplish U.S. national security objectives abroad. The Obama administration’s foreign policy has been marked by reluctance to intervene abroad with ground forces, but even the final days of the George W. Bush administration showed some welcome learning about the uncertain consequences and heavy costs of military intervention, as President Bush refused to support Israeli plans for a strike on Iran.
Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, was elected to the presidency in no small part because of his predecessor’s poor decisions on Iraq, and because Hillary Clinton, his primary opponent, had voted in favor of the invasion. The extraordinary energy that the Iraq fiasco injected into the American political system was a once-in-a-generation event; America had not been so riven over a foreign policy issue since Vietnam. But even Barack Obama, elected because of his opposition to the invasion, could not afford to overlearn the lesson about the costs of foreign intervention.
A cat that sits on a hot stove once learns not to sit on any stove, hot or cold. But the United States is too important an actor in the international system, with global interests and global responsibilities, to sit out hard foreign policy choices for the next generation. Indeed, expensive as was the Iraq intervention for his predecessor, President Obama spent much of the first year of his first term focused on two separate decisions to increase troop strength in Afghanistan—unpopular decisions that cost him support from his political base, a fact that contributed to his decision to announce the date of the drawdown of the Afghan surge simultaneously with its commencement. That announcement undercut the effectiveness of the troop surge and betrayed the president’s profound unease with the deployment of military forces to achieve national security objectives abroad in the wake of Iraq—a “half pregnant” attitude that marked many of his subsequent foreign policy decisions as well.
He would have plenty of decisions to make (or avoid). Population growth and resource scarcity in much of the developing world continued to stir discontent among the populations of poorly governed countries, but the burgeoning information revolution gave new tools to people who in decades past would have suffered in silence and isolation. Thus when Tunisian merchant and frustrated college graduate Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself on December 18, 2010, just over a year after the Afghan surge announcement at West Point, Tunisian revolutionaries were able to seize the moment to protest their inadequate government’s policies. The resulting electronic-enabled protests led not only to the fall of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali barely a month later but, in quick succession over the following year, to changes of government in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. All were driven by popular protests against corrupt and inefficient governments; all posed varying dilemmas to American foreign policy.
Tunisia had relatively little impact on American policy other than as a tinderbox that sparked the revolutions that shook the foundations of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Egypt was an entirely different issue; it is the largest and most important country in the region and has been a pillar of American policy in the Middle East for decades. Hence the Obama administration initially hesitated when popular rebellion broke out against the administration of President Hosni Mubarak after thirty years of repressive rule that had been one of the driving forces behind the ideology of Al Qaeda—but that also had permitted Mubarak, for all his manifest flaws, to run a foreign policy that was not broadly supported by his population but that was in the interests of the United States and Israel. Mubarak’s fall was a victory for democracy, but democracy in the absence of institutions is merely mob rule—and the mob in Egypt did not support Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel. After initially supporting Mubarak against the popular rebellion, President Obama’s team eventually shifted against him in a move that shocked the other rulers of the Middle East who had longtime alliances with the United States but repressive tendencies toward their own population, chief among them the Al Saud family that governs Saudi Arabia.
Washington harbored no such concerns about Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, who had committed the fatal error of demobilizing his WMD program in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, believing that his country was next. Having given up the invasion insurance that protected North Korea and that Iran was desperately seeking, Qaddafi was vulnerable to outside pressure when a revolt against his regime garnered international support. A coalition led by Britain and France, but with significant support from the United States, operated under a UN Security Council mandate to support the rebellion with airpower. It proved decisive in a country where the vast majority of the population lives within fifty miles of an international seacoast, and Qaddafi’s regime fled the capital city of Tripoli (but continued fighting) on September 1, 2011. The dictator was himself killed on October 20, but the air campaign was longer and more difficult than Britain or France had expected, and only American logistical support, refueling planes, and ammunition stores allowed it to continue through to completion. Both European powers were chastened by the difficulty of the endeavor, with Britain in particular, decreasing her armed forces for budgetary reasons, demonstrating less inclination to intervene in future military operations abroad.
If Libya showed the difficulty of small-footprint, no-boots-on-the-ground military interventions in support of insurgents, international unwillingness to intervene in Syria was proof that the lessons had been internalized. Protests against the regime of President Bashar Al Assad began in January 2011, a few weeks before those in Libya, but Syria was a much tougher nut to crack than Libya had been. Assad proved willing to use indiscriminate violence against his own people, including even violating the long-standing international prohibition on the use of chemical weapons, in order to remain in power, while an exhausted international community remained indecisive about whether to intervene in support of the rebels as it had in Libya or even to punish the use of chemical weapons in support of that international norm.
The Obama administration’s foreign policy team, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and Director of Central Intelligence David Petraeus had recommended a program to arm and train the Syrian rebels in the summer of 2012, but President Obama, facing an election in which his own base was already disenchanted with the surge of American military force into Afghanistan, decided against this limited intervention. The rebels suffered mightily as a result, not just from attacks by the Assad regime but also from internecine warfare within their own ranks. As often happens in these cases, the most violent and best-organized groups scramble to power over the bodies of their rivals, and by the time the question of arming and training the rebels had risen to the top of the American policy agenda again a year later, in the summer of 2013, that window had closed. The rebels were now led by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, many linked with Al Qaeda, and there were no good policy options left for the United States: it didn’t want Assad to remain in power, but it had no guarantee that what replaced him would be better—and the real risk that it might be worse.
President Obama, who was elected to the presidency in no small part because he had opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, retained an ambivalence toward the use of military power in the service of U.S. interests throughout his tenure. While willing to use remotely piloted aerial vehicles, or drones, to attack members of Al Qaeda wherever they presented themselves, but particularly in Pakistan and Yemen, and even to authorize the Navy SEAL team mission to kill Osama bin Laden, Obama had internalized lessons about the effectiveness of American power to protect populations and build good governance in countries afflicted by insurgency that were not dissimilar to those learned by T. E. Lawrence a century before, in another war in the Middle East: counterinsurgency operations are messy and slow and extremely expensive.
And yet insurgency remained a vibrant force in the international system, perhaps the dominant factor in the international relations of the early twenty-first century. The counterexample may appear to be China, the rising power of East Asia, whose ascent carries with it a promise of a return to primacy of the diplomacy empowered by ships and planes that the United States understood so well when it confronted the Soviet Union’s armed forces around the globe. But even China faces significant internal rebellions and the prospect of widespread protests against the legitimacy of its government. The anger and frustration that incited the protests in Tiananmen Square twenty- five years ago have been temporarily diminished by two decades of double-digit economic growth, but when that slows, the barricades will return, made more potent by information-sharing devices that are, ironically, often “Made in China.” It is to protect her own ability to use whatever degree of force is necessary that China so often vetoes interventions in the internal affairs of states like Syria; allowing the Libyan intervention to pass the UN Security Council was a mistake that China will not soon make again.
The age of counterinsurgency cannot be over as long as insurgencies roil the globe. And so the challenges of insurgency and counterinsurgency will continue. The United States should intervene in them with ground forces as seldom as possible, only when vital national interests are threatened, and only when she can be confident that the peace that will follow the conflict will be an improvement over the prewar situation. Whenever possible, the United States should follow a light-footprint policy, sending advisers and equipment in support of people fighting for freedom rather than putting large numbers of American combat troops on the ground.
Humanitarian intervention to protect people from harm when vital U.S. national interests are not involved should be conducted only when there is an international coalition willing to intervene and a UN Security Council resolution in support of the operation—and even then only when there is a commitment to build a better peace in the wake of the war. Both the 2011 Libyan intervention and the planned but not implemented Syrian punishment strikes fail to rise to this standard, as does the 2003 invasion of Iraq; of recent American military operations, only the Afghan War is justified by this test.
And yet the need for future large-scale counterinsurgency operations may arise again. The United States may again be attacked from a country that harbors terrorists, need to topple the government that supported them, and be determined to prevent that ground from again being used to attack the homeland. In that case, the options are unpalatable, but it is unlikely that the nation will choose the Roman technique of making a desert and calling it peace. We must, therefore, retain the ability to conduct counterinsurgency operations among the peoples, with all the requirements for cultural competence, linguistic skills, and organizational learning that that implies, even as we strive to avoid the messy, slow operations that have cost us so much over the past decade.
Saint Augustine taught that the purpose of war is to build a better peace, but we have not built the capacity to create that better peace in the American national security establishment. The historical record reveals that the United States engages in ambiguous counterinsurgency and nation-building missions far more often than it faces full-scale war. Similar demands will only increase in a globalized world, where local problems increasingly do not stay local and where, as Secretary of Defense Gates once noted, “the most likely catastrophic threats to our homeland . . . are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states.”1
Trends such as the youth bulge and urbanization in underdeveloped states, as well as the proliferation of ever more lethal weaponry into more hands and the radicalization of individuals and small groups over the Internet, point to a future dominated by chaotic local insecurity and conflict rather than to confrontations between the armies and navies of nation-states. This future of persistent low-intensity conflict around the globe suggests that American interests are at risk not from enemies who are too strong, which was the case throughout the twentieth century (Germany in two world wars and then the Soviet Union during the Cold War), but from states that are too weak to control what happens inside their borders, with Pakistan as the most obvious and dangerous example.
As a result, the U.S. military is more likely to be called upon to counter insurgencies, intervene in civil strife and humanitarian crises, rebuild nations, and wage unconventional types of warfare than it is to fight mirror-image armed forces. We will not have the luxury of opting out of these missions because they do not conform to preferred notions of the American way of war. Insurgency against governments has existed as long as men have governed others; the United States was itself born in the crucible of insurgency. The final tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan would occur if we again forget the many lessons we have learned about counterinsurgency over the past decade of war, and have to learn them yet again in some future war at the cost of many more American lives.
Both state and nonstate enemies will seek more asymmetric ways to challenge the United States and its allies. America’s conventional military superiority, which remains substantial, will drive many of them to the same conclusion: when they fight America conventionally, they lose horribly in days or weeks. When they fight unconventionally, by employing guerrilla tactics, terrorism, and information operations, they have a better chance of success. It is unclear why even a powerful enemy would want to risk a costly head-to-head battlefield decision with the United States. As Gates has said, “Put simply, our enemies and potential adversaries—including nation states—have gone to school on us. They saw what America’s technology and firepower did to Saddam’s army in 1991 and again in 2003, and they’ve seen what [improvised explosive devices] are doing to the American military today.”2 When they decide to fight against us, they are much more likely to choose insurgency than to merely provide targets for our superior firepower by fighting conventionally.
The developing strategic environment will find state and nonstate adversaries devising innovative strategies to counter American military power by exploiting widely available technology and weapons and integrating tactics from across the spectrum of conflict.
The resulting conflicts will be protracted and will hinge on the affected populations’ perceptions of truth and legitimacy rather than on the outcome of tactical engagements on the battlefield. This is the kind of war we have struggled to understand in Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, and Egypt; it is the kind of war we are most likely to face in the future. The learning curve is not going to get any easier.
Counterinsurgency campaigns are messy and slow. I thought I understood that idea when I first read it in T. E. Lawrence’s book in Oxford in 1996, but having the personal experience of fighting in a bitter counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq myself underlined just how grinding and exhausting they can be. The classic principles of counterinsurgency do work, but success in these wars is unsatisfying at best, and even then comes at a price higher than many would consider acceptable. The final calculation depends on how important are the national security objectives at stake. If they are vital, essential to the protection of the homeland or our national survival, then counterinsurgency may continue to be the least bad option available, and remembering the hard-earned lessons of counterinsurgency is a worthwhile insurance policy—like all insurance policies, one that we hope we will not have to call upon.
Long, hard, and slow as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been, there is at least one silver lining among the clouds for the American people at large. In the wake of Vietnam, the United States began its grand experiment of an all-volunteer military. And it was most certainly an experiment: no one could have expected that the system would hold together in a major war, and for two generations young men have been required to register with the Selective Service in case general conflict erupted. But after two such grinding, protracted wars over the past decade, the all-volunteer force has come through these crucibles of blood and fire with enormous distinction.
Tempered by the Great Depression, the Greatest Generation of World War II fame helped defeat fascism on two continents and save civilization. As loudly as their contributions resound in history, two-thirds of them were drafted. This new greatest generation has fought longer if not harder than its grandparents did, and all have been volunteers.
Visiting Todd Bryant’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery with artist Jesse Small, April 25, 2009.
My own tank task force lost twenty-two fine young men during the Second Iraq War and earned well over one hundred Purple Hearts. The nation owes its volunteer service members a debt of gratitude it can never fully repay. But it can begin by ensuring that we care for those who have borne the battle, and for their spouses and their orphans, to paraphrase America’s greatest wartime president. The traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder that are the signature wounds of these wars are invisible and hard to heal; as many as a fourth of those who fought in Iraq will suffer the ravages of these injuries for decades to come.
It would devalue the sacrifices of the many who have suffered if we were not to read these lessons written in blood, if our politicians did not approach future interventions with greater humility, if our military did not prepare for all possible wars rather than only for the ones that it wants to fight. We must hope that from such peril and toil, this great young generation, tempered by war and hardened by what its members have seen and done, will build a better future for a wiser and chastened America that may yet learn from her mistakes.