The question of how to measure progress in counterinsurgency, once the sole concern of a tiny group of military theorists and academics, has now taken center stage in the increasingly acrimonious Iraq war debate. The Bush administration and its defenders claim that Iraqi security is improving. However, continuing instability and the bloody strife wrought by Iraq's sectarian factions belies this optimistic assessment. How does one measure victory -- or defeat -- in a war without fixed lines and armies? How does one avoid mistaking a shaky moment of calm for an unqualified victory, or a temporary setback for a defeat? Counterinsurgency experts counsel that the most basic factor is legitimacy. The counterinsurgents are winning if the target population accepts them as a legitimate authority and shun the rebels as bandits.
Unfortunately, discussions of counterinsurgency in the Iraq war avoid discussing the most important kind of legitimacy: the basic soundness of the war's political and military objectives. Instead, political commentators prefer to debate over the efficacy of various political-military strategies and the competence of the government officials and soldiers tasked to carry them out. There is an assumption that those goals are inherently correct, and that the only thing needed to be divined is whether or not the government has been successful in reaching them. This isn't just shortsighted -- it's self-defeating. One cannot hope to build legitimacy is if the very purpose for doing so is itself illegitimate.
Past and present insurgencies show that tactical successes by talented (or ruthless) soldiers and statesmen rarely compensate for the basic disadvantages of an illegitimate occupation and delusional political objectives.
Fifty years ago in Algeria, it seemed that the French had crushed a vicious nationalist insurgency with a ruthless but efficient counterinsurgency campaign. In the rural countryside and mountains, French counterinsurgents isolated the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) from both external and internal support through a combination of massive static defenses, search-and-destroy missions, and the employment of shotgun-toting native irregular forces nicknamed "harkis." In the colonial capitol of Algiers, the brilliant General Jacques Massu, the General David Petraeus of his day, crushed the FLN's urban terrorist cells.
Analysts usually ascribe blame for the eventual French loss on their policies of torture and collective punishment, which alienated the population and turned the French public, weary of war after the ravages of World War II and the loss of Indochina, against the war effort. This is undoubtedly true. French military atrocities did, in fact, alienate the population. And the domestic crisis triggered by the Algerian war destabilized France itself, which was what motivated General Charles De Gaulle, no squeamish liberal, to enter peace talks with the FLN. But as Saint Joseph's University Professor Anthony James Joes relates in his study Urban Guerrilla Warfare, the FLN also lacked popular legitimacy. Its radical Marxist ideology and indiscriminate terrorism, the majority of which was directed at non-Europeans, did not make it popular with ordinary Algerians.
The real lesson of Algeria is that the basic political foundation of the French colonial control could not be sustained. Algeria was a French colony dominated by a minority of European colonists in an era of decolonization and the primacy of Third World anti-colonial nationalism. Quite simply, it was considered abnormal and tyrannical for a European power to maintain its colony. Regardless of whether or not the French counterinsurgency was successful or not, France would have eventually relinquished Algeria. The inequality of the French colonial regime and the hospitable intellectual climate for postcolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi only sped up the process. Thus, the French objective -- to retain Algeria through force of arms -- was not only illegitimate but also impossible.
A more recent example in Chechnya also demonstrates the fallacy of ignoring legitimacy. The breakaway republic, unhappily married to imperial Russia by conquest in the 19th century, is engaged in an insurgency against Moscow. Russia's political objectives in the conflict have been to prevent the emergence of an independent Chechen state that would serve as an example to other Caucasus states in the Russian Federation and give Islamic extremists a base of operations. Needless to say, the Chechens do not see such objectives as legitimate.
The current insurgency is only the latest in a long series of revolts that go back as far as 1877. Each time, the rebels were put down with brute force. However, the pattern was broken in 1994 when Russian forces were defeated in a bruising guerrilla campaign. In 1999, Russia invaded again to finish the job. This time, it seems that they have been successful.
The Chechen insurgency has been weakened by a massive wave of violent repression, and politically marginalized itself with gruesome acts of terror such as the Beslan school massacre. Additionally, the increasingly radicalized insurgents' goal of a trans-Caucasus Islamic dictatorship has not motivated ordinary Chechens. The Russian-backed Chechen regime has compounded this marginalization with its willingness to invest time and effort into co-opting its opponents and social spending money on public works. Chechen President Ramzan A. Kadyrov has skillfully co-opted Chechen nationalism and Sufi Islam in order to cement his power. However, his power, like that of Russia itself, remains somewhat tenuous.
Kadyrov's public policies have been characterized by massive graft and corruption. Additionally, Kadyrov's security forces, as well as his Russian backers, have taken a toll on the Chechen population. Amnesty International estimates 25,000 civilian dead since the start of hostilities in 1999 and between 2,000 to 5,000 civilians disappeared by security forces -- although Amnesty admits the real number is surely higher. Untold thousands are buried in unmarked graves. Not admired as much as accepted by a war-weary and fearful populace, Kadyrov's authority comes from Russia's political establishment and the fickle allegiances of the former rebels he has corralled into his government.
The Islamic nationalist insurgency, though at a low ebb in Chechnya following the deaths of Beslan hijackers Shamil Basaev and Abdul-Kalim Sadulaev, remains active in neighboring Russian territories, carrying out terrorist attacks and guerrilla raids against security officials. In Chechnya itself, the south still remains a hotbed of guerrilla activity. The rebels move freely throughout the Caucasus, both in Russian territories and foreign safe zones such as Georgia's Panski gorge.
It is clear that while brute force and bribery have temporarily quieted the Chechen insurgency, but they are not sufficient to accomplish the larger Russian political objective of returning Chechnya to the fold. The Russians have, through the aid of a strong man, imposed order on chaos. But the history of Chechnya shows that this order will not last.
Similarly, the larger political objectives in Iraq cannot be achieved. One can still praise General Petraeus' attempts to control Iraq while still pointing out the obvious: the American occupation remains essentially illegitimate and the Iraqi government and security forces are a squabbling patchwork of ethnic/religious factions. It is true that General Petraeus' insistence that American soldiers work with the population is a step above his predecessors' confused and incoherent strategies. But one cannot lose sight of the overall intellectual deficiency under-girding the entire enterprise.
The Bush administration sought from the beginning to transform Iraq from troublesome rogue nation to a pro-Western client state. The new Iraq would back the President's agenda of Middle Eastern transformation and enhance America's military and economic power in the Middle East. Had Bush followed the advice of his generals and State Department advisors, the post-conflict phase would surely be much less horrific -- but the overall problem would have stayed the same. Iraqis would never accept the idea of an American-backed client regime, permanent military bases, and unequal trade arrangements. And the ethnic and factional fissures opened by the invasion were inevitable. All of this was, in fact, predicted by a 1999 CENTCOM wargame.
The wargame, Operation Desert Crossing, simulated a possible post-Saddam Iraq. A post-game report noted that even with 400,000 soldiers, there was still a significant risk of ethnic/religious fragmentation, meddling from powerful regional actors, and regional instability. Most importantly, the report argued that creating a secure Iraq would be impossible if the government was perceived as weak, dominated by foreigners, and out of step with regional politics. This was precisely the kind of Iraq that the Bush administration sought to build.
At best, the improved counterinsurgency tactics do not change the war's larger political problems. At worst, they exacerbate them. The famous empowering of native Sunni auxiliaries in Anbar province undercuts the overall goal of strengthening the central government against ethnic factions and warlords. Those Sunni auxiliaries, many of them hostile to both U.S. forces and the central government, are in an alliance of convenience with the Army against Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Arming the Sunnis to deal with the minor threat posed by the militarily insignificant AQI allows them to challenge the Shiite-led Iraqi government, worsening Iraq's already horrific sectarian civil war.
And as much as Petraeus have changed U.S. strategy, the worst aspects of his predecessors' plans remain the same. Arbitrary detentions and the employment of unaccountable private contractors, as well as the collateral damage from airpower, artillery, and heavy-handed raids still alienate ordinary Iraqis. Additionally, as public diplomacy specialist Matt Armstrong observes, the Bush administration thinks little of the messages sent to the Iraqi population by the mistakes such as the massive and wasteful new American embassy under construction. Built with "borderline slave labor," the imposing Baghdad embassy soaks up water and power in a city where many residents routinely go without the most basic amenities. It is, as Armstrong argues, also one of the few reconstruction projects whose construction has stayed on schedule, as opposed to more basic facilities such as water treatment plants, electrical plants, and hospitals.
Such gaffes are not just the normal consequences of war. They flow from the basic insanity of the White House's political objectives and the overriding injustice of an illegitimate occupation. It is thus darkly humorous to see pundits discussing how to best achieve "legitimacy" among the Iraqi population when the mission itself has none. But unlike the French and Russians, who at least managed to create a semblance of stability in Algiers and Grozny, Washington's new strategy has not created even illusory calm in Baghdad.
But the Operation Desert Crossing thing is very interesting. BUSHCO was told in advance that doing what we are doing would create chaos, and chose exactly that course of action. And the military heriarchy knew exactly the mess that these slimeballs were going to get this country, and sat silent on the information.
What I want to know is, did they betray us?