[News] Kilcullen's Long War

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Kilcullen's Long War

October 23, 2009 By Tom Hayden
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22938
Source: The Nation

(definitely worth the read despite the faith ultimately expressed in 
Obama and "democracy")

Let us say, hypothetically, that American forces kill or capture 
Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, enabling President Obama to declare 
victory and bring our troops home. Would he? Not according to the 
Pentagon's plan for a fifty-year "Long War" of counterinsurgency 
spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, the 
Philippines and beyond.

Military intellectuals envision a prolonged cold war against Al 
Qaeda, with hot wars along the way. It happens that the Long War is 
over Muslim lands rich with oil, natural gas and planned pipelines. 
The Pentagon identifies them as hostile terrain where Al Qaeda and 
its affiliates are hidden.

Among the top experts responsible for this fifty-year war plan, 
concocted in 2005 in windowless offices in the Pentagon, is Dr. David 
Kilcullen, a former Australian soldier, an anthropologist, former top 
adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and current aide to Gen. Stanley 
McChrystal. Kilcullen is a media favorite, the subject of a long New 
Yorker profile by George Packer, glowing columns by David Ignatius in 
the Washington Post and weighty late-night conversations with Charlie Rose.

Kilcullen's recent book, The Accidental Guerrilla, presents the case 
for a Long War of fifty or even 100 years' duration, with chapters on 
Iraq (a mistake he believes was salvaged by the military surge he 
promoted in 2007-08), Afghanistan (where he recommends at least a 
five-to-ten-year campaign), Pakistan (whose tribal areas he sees as 
the center of the terrorist threat) and even Europe (where, he says, 
human rights laws create legislative "safe havens" for urban Muslim 
undergrounds).

Kilcullen testified recently before the Senate that Afghanistan and 
Pakistan will require two more years of "significant combat," plus 
another decade of nation building at an additional cost of $2 billion 
per month. Given the current military cost of $4 billion per month, 
that could mean more than $80 billion annually for Afghanistan alone, 
or $1 trillion if Obama serves two terms, not counting long-term 
costs like veterans' healthcare.

"Significant combat" and "hard fighting" (the phrase of Adm. Mike 
Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) are euphemisms for the 
highest American casualty rates in the war's eight-year history, 
about fifty per month since Obama's surge began in July. Another two 
years of this hard fighting could mean 1,200 American dead beyond the 
approximately 630 who were killed in Afghanistan during the Bush 
years. (American mercenaries working for private security companies 
are not included in the body count.) Unless he changes course, Obama 
will have to justify 2,000 American deaths, thousands more wounded 
and $500 billion in budget expenditures for Afghanistan going into 
his 2012 re-election campaign. Continuing costs for Iraq and rising 
costs for Pakistan will inflate those numbers considerably.

Civilian casualties strewn across these battlefields have been 
obscured by the fog of war, but hundreds of thousands of people, 
mainly civilians, could ultimately die in Iraq, Afghanistan and 
Pakistan, each of them leaving a legacy of vengeful violence.

These projections reveal a staggering audacity--not Obama's audacity 
of hope but an audacity of martial commitment. A fifty- to 100-year 
military campaign--the subtitle of Kilcullen's book is Fighting Small 
Wars in the Midst of a Big One--will span thirteen presidential terms 
and twenty-five Congressional sessions, casting a long shadow over 
generations of politicians not yet running for office. The Long War 
assumes either perpetual democratic approval by many voters not yet 
alive or that democracy will simply be circumvented by the national 
security state. Bin Laden will be dead of natural causes or otherwise 
long before it's over.

The audacity becomes ever more dangerous without checks and balances. 
Without his acknowledging it, Kilcullen's plan plays directly into 
what he believes is Al Qaeda's strategy of exhausting the United 
States militarily and economically. And yet he thinks the Long War is 
inevitable.

There has been little public discussion of the Long War. The term is 
attributed to Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command from 2003 to 
2007; it is endorsed by counterinsurgency theorist John Nagl, who 
heads the Center for a New American Security; and it has been 
critically reviewed only in a collection, The Long War, edited by 
Andrew Bacevich.

The world counterterrorism community that is planning the Long War, 
Kilcullen has said, is "small and tightly knit." This is precisely 
Bacevich's complaint. In the preface to his book he writes, "National 
security policy has long been the province of a small, 
self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists...dedicated to 
the proposition of excluding democratic influences from the making of 
national security policy. To the extent that members of the national 
security apparatus have taken public opinion into consideration, they 
have viewed it as something to manipulate." The fraternity of 
counterinsurgency specialists is an even smaller bubble insulated 
from civic society. They bear a distinct resemblance to the 
Vietnam-era elite described by David Halberstam as "the best and the 
brightest," the New Frontiersmen who were propelled to the "dizzying 
heights of antiguerrilla activity and discussion," revived the Green 
Berets and ultimately crashed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Today's special operatives may track down and kill Osama bin Laden, 
as they did Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. But the process of 
revolutionary nationalism will go on under the Taliban or its 
successors, as it did in Latin America, resulting in Evo Morales's 
2005 election amid banners extolling Che's memory. Kilcullen's 
counterinsurgency model, while giving lip service to winning hearts 
and minds, ultimately relies on exterminating revolutionaries, 
whether they are known as outside agitators, conspiratorial 
communists or, to use Kilcullen's label, takfiris (Muslim terrorists).

The counterinsurgency doctrine is promoted as being 
"population-centric" as opposed to "enemy-centric," leading some to 
think it means a combination of Peace Corps-style development and 
community-based policing. Indeed, counterinsurgency differs sharply 
from "kinetic" war, which is based on conventional use of combat 
troops and bombardment. This is why Kilcullen disapproved of the 
ground invasion of Iraq and is critical of the current use of 
Predator strikes from the air, which alienate the very civilian 
populations whose hearts and minds must be won.

The central flaw in Kilcullen's model is his belief in the 
"accidental guerrilla" syndrome. Drawing partly on a public-health 
analogy, he defines Al Qaeda as a dangerous virus that grows into a 
contagion when its Muslim hosts face foreign intervention. The real 
enemy, he thinks, is the global network of hard-core Al Qaeda 
revolutionaries who want to bring down the West, overthrow Arab 
regimes and restore a centuries-old Islamic caliphate. Like Obama, 
Kilcullen hopes to "disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al 
Qaeda" without provoking the contagion of resistance from the broader 
Muslim world. The "accidental guerrillas" who fight us, he writes, do 
so not because they hate the West and seek our overthrow but because 
we have invaded their space to deal with a small extremist element 
that has manipulated and exploited local grievances to gain power in 
their societies. They fight us not because they seek our destruction 
but because they believe we seek theirs.

But of course, these accidental guerrillas are no accident at all. 
They inevitably and predictably emerge as a nationalist force against 
foreign invaders. Their resistance to imperialism stretches back far 
before Al Qaeda. In fact, Al Qaeda was born with US resources, as a 
byproduct of resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and 
earlier oppression of hundreds of Islamic radicals in Egyptian prisons.

Kilcullen would like to believe that the "accidental guerrilla" 
syndrome can be avoided by a surgical counterinsurgency combined with 
Western liberal reform, as opposed to a ham-fisted, 
knock-down-the-doors combat approach. But he admits that imposing law 
and order American-style in Afghanistan is a "temporary" form of 
neocolonialism that will produce violent popular resistance.

The strategic dilemma is created when this neocolonialism fosters a 
corrupt regime of warlords, drug lords and landlords, as it has in 
Kabul. The first priority of Kilcullen's counterinsurgency doctrine 
is "a political strategy that builds government effectiveness and 
legitimacy while marginalizing insurgents, winning over their 
sympathizers, and coopting local allies." Obama's recent surge in 
Afghanistan, whose purpose was to protect Afghanistan's presidential 
election process, had the opposite result: sending Americans to fight 
for an unpopular Kabul machine that committed fraud on a massive scale.

The counterinsurgency in Pakistan, while killing a score of Taliban 
leaders, has contributed to an even worse public reaction. America's 
client president, Asif Ali Zardari, has a 25 percent approval rating, 
against his opponent's 67 percent. Fully 80 percent of Pakistanis 
polled in July and August were opposed to US assistance to their 
government's fight against terrorism and Al Qaeda; 76 percent opposed 
Pakistani cooperation with US drone strikes. The polling excluded the 
country's tribal areas, where the opposition would be even greater.

When faced with massive popular opposition, does the 
counterinsurgency model call for strategic retreat? Apparently not. 
Instead, the fallback military option is ratcheted up in hopes of 
either defeating the guerrillas or dissuading the accidental 
guerrillas from growing in number. That is why 95 percent of this 
year's budget for Afghanistan is still devoted to the military 
campaign, the exact opposite of the ratio that Kilcullen recommends 
as the best practice for counterinsurgency. Instead of pulling the 
plug, he favors soldiering on until the Taliban and Al Qaeda are 
defeated in the "hard fighting" and a decade of "nation building" can 
commence in the rubble. This is a faith-based doctrine if there ever was one.

Adherence to the model also forces Kilcullen and other 
counterinsurgency devotees to downplay the secretive and violent 
underside of their approach. The cult of clandestinity is symbolized 
by General McChrystal, whose entire career in Iraq remains a 
classified secret. What we do know about McChrystal comes from the 
leading mainstream narrator of the Iraq War, Bob Woodward, in his 
book The War Within. Woodward writes that the key to the Iraq surge, 
in addition to buying off the Sunni insurgency, was a top-secret 
program of extrajudicial executions run by McChrystal, which was 
"possibly the biggest factor in reducing" Baghdad's violence during 
that election year. One US adviser in charge of tracking down and 
killing insurgents, according to Woodward, said the efficiency of the 
program gave him "orgasms." This secret program may have been what 
Kilcullen had in mind when he described the surge as "a truly 
decisive action" to "comb out the insurgent sleeper cells," as if 
they were lice. Kilcullen later told the Post's admiring Ignatius 
that America needs "black" as well as "white" special-ops to 
implement his strategy of "overt de-escalation; covert disruption." 
So much for hearts and minds.

That Kilcullen may be the true progeny of the "best and brightest" is 
evident from his attempt--in 2004 writings--to salvage the US Phoenix 
program from its discredited image in histories of the Vietnam War. 
Kilcullen has written that he favors a "global Phoenix program" 
against insurgents today. "Contrary to popular mythology," he 
believes that the "maligned" Phoenix program was "highly effective" 
in disrupting the Vietcong infrastructure. Under Phoenix, according 
to the 1971 Congressional testimony of William Colby, the former 
pacification director in South Vietnam, more than 20,000 Vietcong 
suspects--many of them the civilian infrastructure in 
Vietcong-controlled areas--were killed from 1968 to 1971. Run by the 
CIA through South Vietnamese police units, the program employed 
methods of torture including electric shocks to testicles and 
vaginas, and truncheons to the ears. Tens of thousands of South 
Vietnamese villagers were uprooted and resettled in fortified 
"strategic hamlets," in accordance with the counterinsurgency 
doctrine of protecting the civilian population. Thirty years later 
the Iraq surge seems to have included another version of the Phoenix 
program, directed by McChrystal. Countless Iraqis were targeted and 
killed, while others were rounded up and surrounded in concertina 
wire under watchtowers in what the Pentagon and Kilcullen call "gated 
communities."

This may be the part where an inbred secrecy ultimately leads to a 
brilliant but delusional Apocalypse Now sensibility, expressed in the 
Joseph Conrad character Kurtz's exclamation "Exterminate all the 
brutes!" The further tragedy of counterinsurgency is that it does not 
stop in the face of failure but starts all over again from its own 
ashes. In the end, its secrets will not be kept from its victims in 
Afghanistan and Pakistan, who suspect and know all too well who is 
killing them, but from well-meaning Americans living in our own gated 
communities amid democratic structures that seem unable to save us 
from a remote-controlled, engineered ignorance.

To his credit, President Obama and his White House advisers see the 
quagmire ahead, with the majority of Democrats opposing escalation in 
Afghanistan, with Iraq teetering and Pakistan sliding over the edge, 
and with no funding for a Long War. There is no short-term way to 
repair the self-inflicted dysfunctions of the Kabul regime, nor is 
there any plan likely to win public approval in Pakistan. The 
military and the Republicans will accuse Obama of failure if he tries 
to withdraw, and of a quagmire if he stays. Instead of treating 
counterinsurgency as a holy text, he needs to study the hardest 
maneuver of all, strategic retreat (like John F. Kennedy in Laos, 
Ronald Reagan in Lebanon or Bill Clinton in Mogadishu), in order to 
avoid greater losses that threaten the very promise of his presidency.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20091023/a3372860/attachment.htm>