Authors: James R. Arnold
Vietnam was a failed counterinsurgency with terrible consequences for the vanquished. During the war, the U.S. military had
numerous opportunities to conduct the war in a different way, to build and utilize classic components of successful counterinsurgency
campaigns. Instead, it always chose to expend most of its resources on the big-unit war, the war of attrition that it thought
it understood and could win. What might have happened had it instead focused on the “Other War” and committed to securing
the population against Communist control and terror? Certainly the human and financial costs would have been much lower and
presumably the erosion of American popular support for the war would have been much slower. But regardless of American strategy
and tactics, there remains the question of whether the South Vietnamese government and the army could have overcome its internal
rivalries, elitist attitudes toward their own people, and chronic corruption to achieve meaningful popular support.
Memories of the Vietnam War’s horrors fade, replaced by images of more recent conflicts. Even with the advantage of more than
forty years of hindsight, the lessons of Vietnam remain contentious. The counterinsurgency strategy finally adopted after
the 1968 Tet Offensive arguably points the way toward a strategy superior to that employed earlier in the war. However, such
a “winning strategy” would have required a sustained effort lasting an unknowable amount of time and entailed a steady loss
of blood and treasure. Given that the foe was willing and able to sacrifice its own youth—recall the words of a North Vietnamese
officer who acknowledged the terrible losses suffered during Tet: “We had hundreds of thousands killed in this war. We would
have sacrificed one or two million more if necessary”—it is hard to conceive that the war could have been won at an acceptable
price.”
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In A.D. 6 Roman proconsul Quintilius Varus led a brutal but successful campaign into Germany to suppress tribal rebellion.
Three years later he tried to repeat this campaign. This time tribal warriors ambushed and destroyed the Roman legions. Before
his death, Varus was heard to lament in reference to his previous victory, “Not like yesterday.”
1
The Challenge
THE CONTEMPORARY FACE OF WAR is undergoing a startling transformation. On September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists hijacked
four commercial jets, deliberately crashed them into three iconic buildings, killed 3,000 people, and triggered invasion,
occupation, and an ongoing counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Seven years later, on November 27, 2008, ten men inflicted
a three-day reign of terror in Mumbai, bringing India’s business capital to a standstill. This book’s point of departure was
a metaphor used by the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, James Woolsey, that likened the conflict against
insurgents to trying to survive in a jungle full of poisonous snakes. Today those snakes show the capacity to emerge from
their hideouts to strike worldwide with lethal fury.
From Roman times to the present day, history records an explosive increase in the destructive power available to combatants.
Technological advances shape this irregular, but always upward, path of lethality. Insurgents—people who rebel violently against
established governmental rule—wield weapons possessing vastly more firepower than ever before. The first time American soldiers
entered combat in Asia occurred in the Philippines. By 1901, the peak of the guerrilla war, Filipino guerrillas were lucky
if they had a bolt-action rifle. Many carried only machetes. Sixty-four years passed before American soldiers again entered
a guerrilla war in Asia. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong’s weapon of choice became the AK-47, a Russian-designed, rugged automatic
rifle that turned a single man into the firepower equivalent of a World War II light machine gunner.
Now the AK-47 is everywhere. Mozambique honors its iconic status as an implement of national liberation by displaying it on
its national flag. For the purchase price, as little as $100 from a Bulgarian factory, a drug lord’s bodyguard in Colombia,
a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan, or a twelve-year-old child soldier in Africa becomes a formidable foe. And it is only one
part of the arsenal available to today’s insurgents. A foreign correspondent described an arms bazaar in Mogadishu, Somalia,
in 1991: “Behind the stalls were stacked artillery rounds and mortars of all sizes like a selection of candy. There were oily
boxes of screw-in detonators, banks of rocket-propelled grenades and launchers—some still packed in their factory grease—and
long, slender missiles for big spenders. There was enough firepower to repel an invasion.”
2
Two years later, militiamen followed the training they had received from Al Qaeda advisers and shot down a U.S. Army Black
Hawk helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade, killing three Americans. They later ambushed Task Force Ranger, killing another
nineteen Americans and wounding eighty-four more. The image of a fallen American soldier being dragged through the streets
of Mogadishu by jubilant militiamen altered the American appetite for intervention, thereby inflicting a major political defeat
leading to the United States’ and United Nations’ exit from Somalia.
In Iraq, small-arms fire ranked third as the killer of American soldiers and marines. Roadside bombs were number one, and
here too we see technology’s contribution to dramatically enhanced lethality. An Iraqi civilian setting an Iranian-manufactured
improvised explosive device with an explosively formed penetrator deployed a weapon that surpassed the destructive capacity
of a mine laid by a combat engineer in any previous war. As stupendous as they are, advances in weapons technology do not
provide today’s insurgents with their most important tool. The Mumbai terrorists wielded AK-47s, but they coordinated their
operations using cell phones and BlackBerry devices, and the horrified world followed the ensuing mayhem via the Internet
and satellite television.
Modern telecommunications transmits the images and sounds of conflict from anywhere on the globe regardless of how remote.
In times past, commanders understood the value of controlling perceptions of combat. Napoleon’s field headquarters included
a mobile printing press to allow him first crack at shaping how his own army, the enemy, civilian populations, diplomats,
and rulers perceived a battle’s outcome. T. E. Lawrence, known to history as Lawrence of Arabia, observed that the printing
press was a modern commander’s greatest weapon. In their time, printed descriptions were a powerful tool. But as the bolt-action
rifle gave way to the AK-47, so print gave way to photographs and then moving imagery. With the advent of satellite communications,
insurgents can rely upon a single violent event becoming known if not seen by every concerned actor within a short time span.
In military terms, modern communications are a force multiplier, enabling a handful of insurgents to spread terror like never
before.
David Kilcullen, an insurgency expert whose advice has influenced General David Petraeus, one of the American architects of
the Iraq counterinsurgency strategy, has said, “The globalized information environment makes counterinsurgency even more difficult
now.”
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Kilcullen illustrates this with the example of two insurgencies confronted by the Indonesian government. In West Java during
the 1950s and 1960s, the Indonesian government defeated a separatist Muslim insurgency that was bigger than the Communist
insurgency in Malaya. In 1975, a Christian separatist insurgency began on East Timor. The Indonesian government again intervened
and used the same approach: forced population concentration, conscription of the local population into a militia, heavy coercion
applied to civilians to persuade them to back the government. The conflict continued through the late 1990s. By that time
a Timorese international propaganda campaign had generated enough media coverage to prompt condemnation of Indonesian methods
and bring in the United Nations’ involvement. East Timor became independent in 2002.
Counterinsurgency methods that had worked in obscurity in West Java were unacceptable when exposed to international scrutiny.
Looking back, it is easy to see that practices commonly employed in the two successful counterinsurgencies described in this
book, ranging from the concentration zones in the Philippines to Operation Starvation, the British food denial program in
Malaya, would have brought worldwide scrutiny in today’s globalized media.
In contemporary conflicts, including Iraq and Afghanistan, American forces have followed the common pattern of history by
heavily focusing on killing terrorists and insurgents. The Americans have brought an impressive technological prowess to this
aspect of the fight. However, Al Qaeda’s resilience is predicated not on its current numerical strength but rather on its
capacity to continue to recruit and inspire future fighters, supporters, and sympathizers; in other words, its resilience
hinges on its success in the information fight. Again it must be emphasized that modern insurgents understand the importance
of the media and manipulate it with great skill. Meanwhile, the United States continues to struggle in its efforts to explain
to the world why a global war on terror is necessary. Moreover, U.S. attempts to justify the way it conducts this war have
too often been inept. If, as has been asserted, the war on terror is at heart an information war, it is hard to see that the
United States is winning.
One hallmark of successful counterinsurgencies is a willingness to learn and adapt on both the individual and institutional
levels. Here the future looks brighter. After the successful invasion of Iraq and subsequent capture of Saddam Hussein, President
George W. Bush’s administration was very slow to recognize accurately what the United States confronted. By the beginning
of 2007, it appeared that Iraq was lost to the insurgents. Insurgent suicide bombers had triggered a deadly cycle of escalating
sectarian violence for which the American occupation forces seemed to have no answer. Many of the problems in Iraq were familiar
to students of counterinsurgency: unsecured borders that allowed the insurgents a free flow of men and supplies; a suspicious
civilian population who resented the presence of foreign forces; a lack of security that prevented any except the bravest
from providing the Americans with useful intelligence; an American public growing ever more discouraged.
Finally, staring defeat in the face, Bush made the politically unpopular decision to send more combat soldiers to Iraq, the
so-called Surge, to confront the insurgents. The employment of those troops was informed by an essential institutional adaptation.
In December 2006 the Department of Defense published Field Manual 3-24,
Counterinsurgency
. It was a collaborative effort between the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps involving many of the nation’s brightest military
minds. The result was a short distillation of the lessons of history that yielded a set of “principles and imperatives” to
fight and win a counterinsurgency and a guide for the way forward. It began with a statement that with hindsight may seem
obvious but at the time injected into the strategic discussion a much-needed call for change: “You cannot fight former Saddamists
and Islamic extremists the same way you would have fought the Viet Cong.”
4
It takes exceptional officers to overcome the institutional bias of military cultures. In 1840, at a time when France was
embroiled in its fifteen-yearlong war against Algerian insurgents, a new commander arrived on the scene. Marshal Thomas Bugeaud,
the man who would eventually win the war, said upon first meeting his officers, “Gentlemen, you have much to forget.” Lieutenant
General David Petraeus had been closely involved in the production of Field Manual 3-24. Assigned at the beginning of 2007
as the commanding general in Iraq, Petraeus and his chief subordinates proved willing to change and adapt. They committed
their forces to a counterinsurgency campaign featuring new practices, including sending American troops to live among the
Iraqi people for whom they were trying to provide security. Given the difficult circumstances—a stressful and dangerous physical
environment, a mysterious cultural environment rife with sectarian and tribal conflict—the American soldiers performed their
duties with surpassing courage and skill.
However, any amount of intelligent doctrine or good leadership probably would not have ultimately mattered had not a fundamental
change occurred among the Iraqis. Quite simply, the Al Qaeda leadership in Iraq overplayed their hand. The indiscriminate
terror of foreign fighters—young Muslim zealots recruited from the entire span of the Muslim world, from Saudi Arabia to Chechnya
to North Africa—and their stern demand that Iraqis live under a hard, fundamentalist version of Islam turned an important
element of Iraqi society against the insurgents. This was the so-called Sunni Awakening, a movement that began among the Sunnis
of An-bar Province, a population that heretofore had been the sympathetic base of the insurgency, and steadily spread elsewhere.
In congressional testimony on September 10, 2007, Petraeus observed that tribal leaders were beginning to reject Al Qaeda.
He called this trend one of the most significant developments in Iraq in the past eight months.
By any measure—reduction in the number of terror acts, substantial decline in civilian and military casualties—the Surge accomplished
its goals. In recognition of nineteen months of progress in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates promoted Petraeus. Of
course, the “Endless War” was not over. Gates emphasized the importance of Petraeus’s posting to head the Central Command
and explained that Islamic extremism within the Central Command, an area that encompassed the Middle East, South Asia, and
Africa, still posed a special challenge “characterized by asymmetric warfare,” a conflict among professional national militaries
and insurgents and other guerrilla fighters.
5
As a new administration prepared to enter office in 2009, President-elect Barack Obama promised to reduce the American presence
in Iraq and intensify the fight against the insurgents in Afghanistan. What this portends is unknowable. The American presence
on the street corners of restive Baghdad slums dramatically tamped down sectarian violence, but would not American soldiers
operating in the slums of Chicago or Detroit also reduce criminal gang violence? And when they left would security endure?
As a result of the Surge, daily life in many Iraqi urban neighborhoods features comprehensive disruption with security provided
by concrete barriers that divide Shiite from Sunni. Entry to one’s own neighborhood is through a fortified gate guarded by
armed men, formerly Americans, as of early 2009 Iraqis backed by American soldiers, but in the near future Iraqis alone.
Meanwhile the insurgents in Afghanistan have risen from defeat to control large areas of the countryside. The American-backed
president, Hamid Karzai, is derisively known as the “mayor of Kabul” because his rule does not extend beyond gun range of
his foreign benefactors who provide security in his capital. A glance at the map of Afghanistan shows that the “secure” areas
match the areas held by Soviet forces during their failed attempt to dominate a country whose most cherished history is a
tale of opposition to foreign occupation. And then there are the familiar problems of counterinsurgency: unsecured borders;
insurgent sanctuaries off-limits to the counterinsurgent force; a bewildering array of family and tribal relationships that
trump an outsider’s understanding of the Afghan power structure; intelligence so uncertain that in spite of years of effort
Osama bin Laden’s hideout somewhere along the Afghan border cannot be found. History informs us that foreign powers try to
control Afghanistan at their peril. Yet apparently this is to be the task of the American military.