DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Disasters of war By Tom Engelhardt
Recently, we've been flooded with news stories and debate about the "rules of
engagement" for United States troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war
commander General Stanley McChrystal, we've been told, instituted fiercely
restrictive rules to lessen the number of Afghan civilians being killed or
wounded at the hands of American forces, and to "protect the people", just as
the "hearts and minds" part of counter-insurgency doctrine tells us should be
done.
Specifically, he made it far harder for US troops under fire to call in air
strikes or artillery support if civilians might possibly be in the vicinity of
any firefight. Grumbling about this among those troops, according to Michael
Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter whose
article contributed to McChrystal's downfall, had already reached something
close to fever pitch by the time the general and his special ops cronies began
mouthing off in frustration to Hastings.
Articles in which troops or mid-level officers claim to be "handcuffed by our
chain of command" are now almost as common as implicitly critical stories about
the dismal failure of McChrystal's counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan.
General David Petraeus, on being given command of the war effort, turned
immediately to those rules of engagement, promising not to change them, but to
thoroughly review and "clarify" their "implementation and interpretation".
What this means, we don't yet know, but we should know one thing: the present
discussion of counter-insurgency and of those rules of engagement makes little
sense. They are being presented as a kind of either/or option - kill us or kill
them - when it would be more accurate to say that it's a neither/nor situation.
After all, in another, less protective part of McChrystal's counter-insurgency
war, he was bulking up special operations forces in the country and sending
them out on night raids searching for Taliban mid-level leaders. These raids
continue to cause a cascade of civilian casualties, as well as an increasing
uproar of protest among outraged Afghans. In addition, even with McChrystal's
tight rules for normal grunts, stories about the deaths of civilians, private
security guards, and Afghan soldiers from air strikes, misplaced artillery
fire, checkpoint shootings, and those night raids continue to pour out,
followed by the usual American initial denials and then formulaic apologies for
loss of life.
Whatever the rules, civilians continue to die in striking numbers at the hands
of guerrillas and of American forces, and here's the thing: tighten those
rules, loosen them, fiddle with them, bend them, evade them, cancel them - at
some level it's all still neither/nor, not either/or.
In any counter-insurgency war where guerrillas, faced with vastly superior fire
power, fight from cover and work hard to blend in with the populace, where the
counter-insurgents are foreigners about as alien from the land they are to
"protect" as humanly possible, and fight, in part, from on high or based on
"intelligence" from others about a world they can't fathom, civilians will die.
Lots of civilians. Continually. Whatever rules you make up. The issue isn't the
"rules of engagement." No rules of engagement will alter the fact that civilian
death is the central fact of such wars.
It's time to stop talking about those rules and start talking about the madness
of making counter-insurgency the American way of war. It wasn't always so. Not
so long ago, after all, it was considered a scandal that, post-Vietnam, the US
military rebuilt its all-volunteer force without rewriting or reconsidering its
counter-insurgency manual.
The high command, in fact, let counter-insurgency go to hell, exactly where
they thought it deserved to rest in peace, and were focused instead on
preventing Soviet armies from pouring through Germany's Fulda Gap (something
they were conveniently never likely to do). After the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the US military would continue to focus for some years on former
secretary of state Colin Powell's doctrine of overwhelming force, decisive
victory, and quick exit.
Then Iraq happened and decisive victory ("mission accomplished") soured into
decisive disaster. It was at this moment, in 2006, that Petraeus and James "Mad
Dog" Mattis (now respectively Afghan war commander and head of US Central
Command) dusted off the old, failed Vietnam-era counter-insurgency doctrine and
made it sexy again. They oversaw the writing of a whole new guidebook for the
army and marines, 472 pages of advice that even got its own (University Press)
trade edition, and became the toast of Washington and the Pentagon.
So, after being buried and disinterred, COIN, as its known, is once again the
reigning monarch of American war-fighting doctrines as the Pentagon prepares
for one, two, three Iraqs or Afghanistans - and the scandal is that (surprise,
surprise!) it's not working. This should hardly have been news.
The history of counter-insurgency warfare isn't exactly a success story, or our
present COINistas wouldn't have taken their doctrine largely from failed
counter-insurgency wars in Vietnam and Algeria, among other places. It's not so
encouraging, after all, when the main examples you have before you are defeats.
Our generals might have better spent their time studying the first modern war
of this sort. It took place in early 19th century Spain when the Islamic
fundamentalists of that moment - Catholic peasants and their priests - managed
to stop Napoleon's army (the high-tech force of the moment) in its tracks. Just
check out the "Disasters of War" series by Spanish painter Francisco de Goya
(1746-1828) if you want to see how grim it was. And it's never gotten much
better.
Looked at historically, counter-insurgency was largely the war-fighting option
of empires, of powers that wanted to keep occupying their restive colonies
forever and a day. Past empires didn't spend much time worrying about
"protecting the people". They knew such wars were brutal. That was their point.
As English author George Orwell summed such campaigns up in 1946 in his essay
"Politics and the English Language":
Defenseless villagers are
bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the
cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is
called pacification.
The rise of anti-colonialism and
nationalism after World War II should have made counter-insurgency history.
Certainly, there is no place for occupations and the wars that go with them in
the 21st century.
Unfortunately, none of this has been obvious to Washington or our leading
generals. If they can rewrite the army's counter-insurgency manual for a new
century, any of us can, so let me offer my one-line rewrite of their 472 pages.
It's simple and guaranteed to save trees as well as lives: "When it comes to
counter-insurgency, don't do it."
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