The Blue Voice

Friday, June 29, 2007

Rethinking insurgency, redefining success and providing "strategic methadone"

Steven Metz, who has previously provided analysis of counterinsurgency in papers like The Future of War (1993), Counterinsurgency: Strategy and the Phoenix of American Capability (1995), Learning from Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategy, and others,
has a new monograph called Rethinking Insurgency (US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute; June 2007).

Metz calls for "a radically different way of thinking about counterinsurgency" from that which currently shapes US political-military thinking. Unfortunately, the amount of this discussion that leaks out into the general public is limited, which is more than unfortunate, because the decisions made around this question will shape our future in major ways.

Defining success

He also advances what I would describe as a reality-based approach to military intervention that focuses on the particular situations of the country and - critically - includes a far more pragmatic concept of success that the one that currently prevails in our political culture and military assumptions.

He summarizes the categories of situations and the broad approach this way (directly quoted here):

A functioning government with at least some degree of legitimacy is suffering from an erosion of effectiveness but can be “redeemed” through assistance provided according to the Foreign Internal Defense doctrine.
There is no functioning and legitimate government, but a broad international and regional consensus supports the creation of a neo-trusteeship. In such instances, the United States should provide military, economic, and political support as part of a multinational consensus operating under the authority of the United Nations.
There is no functioning and legitimate government and no international or regional consensus for the formation of a neo-trusteeship. In these cases, the United States should pursue containment of the conflict by support to regional states and, in conjunction with partners, help create humanitarian "safe zones" within the conflictive state.

Conflicts like these, even the first category, are unlikely to end with the enemy laying down their arms and surrendering to be shipped off to Guantánamo for the rest of their lives. As he puts it:

[T]he U.S. goal should not automatically be the defeat of the insurgents by the regime (which may be impossible and which the regime may not even want), but the most rapid conflict resolution possible. In other words, a quick and sustainable resolution which integrates insurgents into the national power structure is less damaging to U.S. national interests than a protracted conflict which leads to the complete destruction of the insurgents. Protracted conflict, not insurgent victory, is the threat. (my emphasis)

This will be a hard sell with military strategists, I would imagine. For politicians who must contend more immediately with the general public's conception of "victory", it may be an even harder sell.

Dealing with that aspect of war-making is beyond the scope of his new monograph. But as one can easily hear in the campaign speeches of Mitt Romney, Rudi Giulani, Fred Thompson and Maverick John McCain, they all assume that their party base demands "tough" talk of victory, torture (whatever euphemisms they pick) and the destruction of evildoers.

And on the Democratic side, for all their criticisms of the Iraq War, most of them remain leery about exposing themselves now or in the distant future to a charge that they may have shown insufficient martial spirit on some foreign policy issue.

But Metz argues that we should be willing to accept less-desirable but acceptable outcomes. He notes that sometimes the best option may even be "to deliberately encourage the insurgency to mutate into something less dangerous such as an organized criminal organization" because "there may be rare instances where organized crime is less of a threat than sustained insurgency". He suggests we could call such an approach "strategic methadone".

Rediscovering "classical" insurgency

We might say at this point in time that the military started into the Iraq War hoping to avoid fighting a counterinsurgency war at all. Now that we're well into the fifth year of that war, and even further into the (now-)NATO intervention in Afghanistan, the generals have relearned the lessons of the Vietnam War counterinsurgency.

The problem is, the assumption that seems to prevail among the officer corps is that the US military won that war. After the Vietnam counterinsurgency experience, the military re-concentrated its focus on conventional warfare. The basic approach to counterinsurgency was, "avoid it". Metz describes the approach this way:

During the 1970s, American national security strategy was shaped by what became known as the "Vietnam syndrome." The disastrous outcome of the war in Southeast Asia made Americans reluctant to intervene in Third World conflicts. Americans, it seemed, were ill-suited for participation in morally ambiguous, complex, and protracted armed struggles, particularly outside the nation’s traditional geographic area of concern. Better to eschew them than to become embroiled in "another Vietnam." (my emphasis)

Metz describes how drastic this turn away from thinking about or preparing for counterinsurgency was:

From the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s until 2001, the U.S. military and defense community paid scant attention to insurgency and counterinsurgency. It faded from the curricula of professional military education. There was little interest in developing new doctrine, operational concepts, or organizations. The general sense seemed to be that American involvement in counterinsurgency was a Cold War phenomenon, irrelevant with the demise of the Soviet Union and the mellowing of China.

Now that counterinsurgency (COIN in the military abbreviation) is of necessity a leading concern again for military leaders, much attention has been focused on previous counterinsurgency conflicts, like the Phillipine War, the Algerian War, post-Second World War British colonial wars and, inevitably, the Vietnam War. Metz calls attention to the irony of what he calls a new Vietnam syndrome:

When insurgency and counterinsurgency again became important elements of the global security system and American strategy after 2001, many American policymakers, political leaders, and defense strategists used Vietnam as a model. The Viet Cong were treated as the archetypical insurgency. Insurgents who did not use the Maoist strategy stood little chance of success (defined as seizing the state and becoming the new regime). The tendency was to seek new ideas from old conflicts, preparing, as so often happens, to fight the last war. (my emphasis)

This approach was recently incorporated into what is known in Pentagonese as "FM 3-24", aka, Counterinsurgency, the Army's new manual on the subject, the final version dated 12/15/06. This is the manual that Gen. David Petraus, now chief US commander in Iraq, is often mentioned as having presided over its development.

Metz is part of a debate that goes beyond the question of whether the military needs to give a longer-term emphasis on counterinsurgency rather than conventional warfare - a debate that is also raging and will for a while. He's challenging the model on which current COIN doctrine, including that of FM 3-24, are built. As he said, the Vietcong (National Liberation Front) have been "treated as the archetypical insurgency." Maoist "people's war" is the framework (leaving aside here what differences there were between the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutionary approaches). Frank Hoffman, who was part of the writing team for FM 3-24, has suggested the term "neo-classical counterinsurgency" for this approach. (Neo-Classical Insurgency? Parameters Summer 2007). Thomas Marks calls this approach, which he supports, "classical counterinsurgency", in Modelo de counterinsurgencia: La Colombia de Uribe (2002-2006) versus las FARC Military Review Julio/Augusto 2007.

Whether the "neo-classical" term sticks or not, the framework assumption is a problematic one. As Hoffman writes:

The classicists ignore the uniqueness of Maoist or colonial wars of national liberation, and over-generalize the principles that have been drawn from them. Today’s insurgent is not the Maoist of yesterday. In point of fact, there is not as much common ground among the “masters” as the classicists would have you believe. The so-called classical principles are really a commonly accepted set of key principles and practices that have emerged over time. Some of the classical principles are just blatant flashes of the obvious, such as Robert Thompson’s somber advice "the government must have an overall plan." (Given our experience in Iraq, perhaps this principle is not so obvious after all).

Metz' monograph discusses some of what the "neo-classical" approach misses, with reference to more recent experience in countries such Angola, Bosnia, Colombia, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Croatia, East Timor, Kosovo, Lebanon, Liberia, Papau New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, and Uganda. He discusses Lebanese Hizbullah at some length. And, of course, Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Third" and "Fourth" Forces

The "neo-classical" school of counterinsurgency thinking views insurgency largely in terms of an established state versus a more-or-less unified insurgency. This model would provide a decent description of the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Algerian and a number of other well-known revolutions.

But Metz discusses some of the ways in which globalizaation of information and commerce have changed the framework in which the US needs to udnerstand insurgency. As I've discussed before, the Cold War view understood terrorism as a problem of state sponsorhip of terrorism. The same was largely true of guerrilla warfare and insurgency more generally. And there was some strategic logic in this, however much the idea led policymakers to inflate threats, e.g., the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954. Because if a government deemed unduly sympathetic to the Soviet Union or China came to power in a country, to some degree it was likely to augment their strategic clout, even if only in a miniscule way. And a hostile government coming to power could in turn become a state sponsor of terrorism and insurgency in its turn.

Metz argues that today it is not state sponsorship that presents the main threat of terrorism but failed states:

The strategic context for 20th century insurgency was the political mobilization of excluded groups, rising nationalism, and proxy conflict between the superpowers. The strategic context of contemporary insurgency is the collapse of old methods of order and identity leading to systemic weakness and pathology. This creates failure or shortfalls in the security domain. One of the dominant characteristics of the contemporary global security environment is that it continues to give nation states responsibility for systemic maintenance and stability at the very time that they are increasingly incapable of providing acceptable levels of security, prosperity, and political identity. A variety of sub- and supra-state organizations are filling the vacuum. (my emphasis)

This means that insurgencies today co-exist with other results of the weaknesses of states, such as "militias, powerful criminal gangs and syndicates, informal economies, the collapse of state services, humanitarian crises or disasters, crises of identity, and transnational terrorism."

This proliferation of sub-state organizations that are competing to take advantage of the vacuum left by failing states allows insurgents to make extensive links to other groups, like organized crime gangs, in order to raise funds and secure weapons. One implication of this is that present-day insurgencies have less of a need to win active or passive public support than the "classical" Maoist insurgencts:

Like their forebears, contemporary insurgents still seek acquiescence from the populace - an unwillingness to provide information to the regime. But they rely less on the general population for information, money, and labor. This allows them to devote fewer resources to "carrots" designed to develop a mass base - social programs, administration, patronage, and so forth - and more to “sticks” which generate passivity (but not active support). Twentieth century insurgencies, particularly those based on the Maoist model, sought to balance carrots and sticks. Contemporary insurgencies (like contemporary organized crime) are more focused on violence, on coercion rather than patronage.

I can imagine the advocates of the most hardline methods of counterinsurgency seizing on this kind of argument to say, oh, forget all this "hears and minds" stuff, let's just crack down on the bad guys! But the real significance is that different situations require a different approach. In the case of a functioning state with established legitimacy facing an insurgency, a change of policies to compete for "hearts and minds" could be effective. But in a situation where such a viable state does not exist, an insurgency can prove to be intractable even its basis of popular support is relatively narrow compare to the "classical" insurgencies.

A large part of Metz' monograph is devoted to analyzing what he calls "third" and "fourth" forces, organizational players other than insurgents and governments that have acquired far greater significance in the context of fighting insurgencies.

Among "third" forces he includes militias, which he defines as opportunistic organizations that are distinguished from organized crime groups by having both service-providing as well as self-aggrandizing roles. He gives a good background on Lebanese Hizbullah, which he uses as an example of a successful militia group. In the context of Lebanon, Hizbullah does not seek to lead an insurgency to overthrow the Lebanese government. Rather, it operates as a military and service organization for the Shi'a Muslims concentrated in southern Lebanon.

Militias can arise in a variety of ways:

Some militias are based on personal patronage. In Congo-Brazzaville, for instance, the three major militia groups—the Ninja, Cobra, and Cocoye—are the private armies of powerful politicians (Denis Sassou Nguesso, Pascal Lissouba, and Bernard Kolelas). Similarly, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) is the personal militia of Thomas Lubanga and Floribert Kisembo, and the Party for Unity and Safeguarding of the Integrity of Congo is the private army of Chief Kahwa Mandro Kisembo. Alternatively, militias can be based on group identity such as clan, ethnicity, or sect.

Militias, he writes, can be dealt with in a variety of ways by a government fighting an insurgency in a country where independent militias also operate, including simply treating them the same as insurgents, coopting them with money or other incentives, or even working together with them. His caution on the latter approach are very relevant to the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq: "Tolerating militas ... condemns a state to perpetual weakness, increasing the likelihood of future conflict."

That proved to be the case in Afghanistan, where the rapid US/Northern Alliance victory over the Taliban was facilitated by massive payoffs to local militias, not to mention the fact that the Northern Alliance itself was mostly a coalition of militias. Hamad Karzai's government has never been able to establish clear national state authority throughout the country, in part because the method of dealing with militias in ousting the Taliban bolstered their power and status.

Another important "third force" types of groups are criminal organizations and private military companies (PRCs). Insurgents can cooperate with criminal gangs in profitable activities like drug smuggling to fund themselves. And while PRCs can provide flexibility and expertise to governments - or other belligerants - immediately in need of them, they present their own kinds of problems. Metz uses as an example the PRC Sandline, which was employed by oil and minerals firms to protect their facilities and personnel in various harzardous locations. But it was badly discredited when it got involved in an illegal gun-running scheme in Sierra Leone, eventually being driven out of business due to this and other legal problems.

And, as we've seen with PRCs in Iraq, their methods and priorities may conflict with those of the government or the government's allies.

I did a double-take on one of his points about organized criminal groups. Referring to Iraq immediately after the US invasion, he writes that corruption tolerated under Saddam's rule provided the kernel for some such groups. And he continues:

Since former regime members played a major role in the early days of the insurgency, it was easy for the insurgents to capitalize on the criminal connections and procedures already in place. Iranian based criminal gangs added to the problem. A good portion of the looting that took place in March and April 2003 was engineered or funded by these gangs. (p. 31)(my emphasis)

This is the first mention I recall seeing of Iranian gangs playing such a significant role in the looting at that time. Metz sources the point to an interview with Col. Martin Stanton of the Civil-Military Affairs section of the Coalition Forces Land Component Command on 05/14/03. Given that Iraqi Sunnis are said to often refer to Iraqi Shi'a as "Iranians", I wonder if this information could have come originally from Sunni sources who were coding Iraqi Shi'a gangs as "Iranian".

The "fourth forces" Metz treats briefly include multinational corporations, international media and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I want to mention his discussion of the media, in particular.

This is obviously a massive subject and he doesn't pretend to treat it in more than brief form in this monograph. He focuses largely on the usefulness of publicity for insurgents, e.g., when setting off a bomb in Baghdad can instantly become news all over the world, and particularly in other parts of Iraq. The point of terrorism is to terrorize, and when such an event occurs and is widely reported, it can spread fear and the apprehension that the government is unable to insure basic security far beyond the location of the attack.

Here's how he puts it:

International media and other sources for the transmission of information level the psychological playing field. In the 20th century, insurgents struggled to reach external audiences. Only bold and intrepid reporters would venture to the difficult, dangerous areas where insurgents operated. It was the paradoxical logic again: insurgents protected themselves by remaining in remote regions, but this made it difficult to publicize their cause. Now the global media, satellite communications, cell phones, the Internet, and other information technology gives insurgents instant access to national and world audiences. Once the communications channels opened, the flexibility of insurgents and their lack of ethical and legal constraints gave them advantages in the psychological battlespace.

His discussion on this is general enough that it's hard to say whether I agree with his particular perspective on this or not. He mentions the Egyptian state-owned broadcaster Nilesat, which "is considered the semi-official voice of the Sunni insurgents" operating in Iraq, and also Al Jazeera. The latter, he writes, at a minimum "complicated counterinsurgent information operations [in Iraq] and provided the insurgents publicity (and hence legitimacy) they would not otherwise have had."

Here, I'll mention two considerations that need to be a part of the discussion on the effect of "the media" in wars involving insurgencies. One is that just as state armed forces worry about their public relations, so do insurgent groups. And insurgent groups can be as bone-headed about their propaganda as government armies. For instance, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was alive and leading "Al Qaida in Mesopotamia", the Internet and various other forms of media helped them publicize their dramatic beheadings of captives. But while such videos may be useful in firing up young recruits to jihad groups, they seem to have done Zarqawi's group more harm than good. To the point where Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri reportedly even told them to back off with the beheading videos. When a group's PR is too brutal for even Bin Laden, it's hard to say their cause was strengthened by that PR approach.

The other consideration has to do with the US armed forces' approach to public relations and news managment. I've been amazed and dismayed during the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars at the extent to which the lesson the military learned from media coverage of the Vietnam War was, let's do a better job of persuading reporters to use images and story-lines that we dream up. So you get incredible gaffes, like the Jessica Lynch dramatic-rescue story. Or the lies about Pat Tillman's death.

What they failed to understand was that stunts like those, combined with years of stock, repetitive declarations of progress in those wars, would wreck their credibility. Our generals don't need to be convinced that media coverage can help the enemy in some cases. They're already so convinced of that that the Secretary of Defense felt it necessary recently to remind a military audience that the press is not the enemy. And they're never going to get their approach to media right until they realize that dishonest PR can work in the short term, but that it's major-league counterproductive in the longer term. Censorship and happy-face stories can only do so much.

Can "we the people" handle a more pragmatic view of Victory?

Metz' monograph is directed primarily toward a military audience. It's significance for a broader public is that it reminds us that Insurgency is not a static concept or a stable reality. As he notes in the introduction, the essence of war - "the use of violence for political purposes" - does not change, but its nature or character does. The same is true of the insurgency form of warfare.

And globalization, along with changing organizational forms (e.g., less central command-and-control for insurgent organizations), has produced changes in how insurgencies function. Perhaps even more critically, there are no magic counterinsurgency formulas that will prevent "another Iraq". Because any formula wrongly applied, or applied without a realistic idea of conditions in a particular country, can lead to disaster. Metz argues that such analysis should allow war planners to distinguish between three broad categories of insurgent situations, each of which calls for a different approach.

And though he doesn't put it exactly like this, his argument requires that the US government, armed forces and the public be willing to accept "good-enough" outcomes in such wars as opposed to Victory with a capital "V". Part of the peril of dressing up every war as a re-run of the Second World War and making every opponent into a new Hitler is that it creates an expectation of complete victory, with an equivalent of a V-E Day and a huge parade in Times Square where handsome soldiers smooch with pretty women.

But, however accurate Metz' analysis of contemporary civil conflicts may be, political ideology and the contingencies of electoral politics will present real barriers to acceptance of his analysis. Particularly since it points toward a definition of Success as "good enough" rather than unconditional surrender of the enemy.

The experience of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as the experiences of other other "failed states" and countries with intractable civil conflicts is telling us, screaming in our faces really, that we need a different approach when it comes to the necessity to intervene in such countries.

And whether or not the US in the future has leaders that adopt "realist" or "liberal internationalist" or Kissingerian cynicism as their foreign policy approach, we definitely need a more reality-based approach to understanding the countries in which we may see the need to intervene, one that doesn't assume an absurd best case like the "cakewalk" analysis on Iraq.

I didn't include the neoconservative foreign policy outlook in that list of foreign policy approaches, because it's been clearly proven to be a disaster. And, ultimately, no amount of country-specific understanding, or informed counterinsurgency strategy, or careful preparation for contingencies can prevent another disaster from occuring if another President embarks on a reckless, faith-based foreign policy like that of the Cheney-Bush administration.

The brand of "strategic methadone" that Metz recommends would be far preferable to the kind of hard drugs with which the neocons injected us in producing the Iraq War.

Tags: afghanistan war, steven metz, rethinking insurgency, iraq war

posted at 4:33:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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