Northman's Fury

In the latest of William Lind’s ongoing On War series at the DNI site, he takes a look at Martin van Creveld’s latest book, and in particular, Chapter Six’s summary of how the British were able to prevail in Northern Ireland.

First, unlike President Bush in 2001, the British did not declare war, which would have removed a whole series of legal constraints and put the entire conflict on a new footing. Instead, from beginning to end the problem was treated as a criminal one…

Note that, in contrast to what we hear from the Bush administration and the U.S. military, van Creveld sees the removal of restrictions on what troops can do as a disadvantage. He understands that in Fourth Generation war, the counter-intuitive is often correct.

Second, much of the day-to-day work was left to the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary). Its members, having been locally recruited and assigned lengthy stays at their posts, knew the area better than anyone else. Accordingly, they were often able to discriminate among the various factions inside the IRA as well as between terrorists and others…

For the most part, this isn’t even a possibility any more in Iraq, and the same is often true in Afghanistan. The local police forces in both countries are corrupt, underpaid, under-equipped, and either sectarian (in Iraq), or tribal (in Afghanistan). The local military is usually better on the first part, but worse in the second. For the most part, the US doesn’t trust the local forces and has stopped training them for fear that they are training their opponents, which is too often the case.

Third, never again (after Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972, when British troops fired into a crowd and killed thirteen people) did British troops fire indiscriminately into marching or rioting crowds

Even today, Bloody Sunday is an incident that lives in infamy. The anger it caused is a large part of why the “troubles” continued for as long as they did. The British recognized this and did what they could to de-escalate the situation.

It’s an incident almost identical to this that started the bad feelings in Fallujah, and the situation simply grew continually worse. Add to that other reports of US troops firing indiscriminately into passers-by after sniper attacks or roadside bombings.

Fourth, and in marked contrast with most other counterinsurgents from the Germans in Yugoslavia to the Americans in Vietnam and elsewhere, not once in the entire struggle did the army bring in heavy weapons such as tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, or aircraft to repulse attacks and inflict retaliation…

Even the Germans rarely used heavy weapons. This point also has some relevance to Canadians, buying a bunch of newer tanks to replace the aging fleet of Leopards we sent to Afghanistan.

We’ve suffered a number of casualties from badly aimed US air support, how much more so the Afghan people?

Fifth, never once did the British inflict collective punishment such as curfews, the cutting off of electricity and water, demolishing houses, destroying entire neighborhoods. . . As far as humanly possible, the police and the army posed as the protectors of the population, not its tormentors. In this way they were able to prevent the uprising from spreading.

They probably didn’t build many walls either.

Sixth and most important of all, by and large both the RUC and the army stayed within the framework of the law. . .From (1972) on, the British refrained from arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and illegal killings…

The most important insight of all, though, (came) over dinner in Geneva in 1995. My partner on that occasion was a British colonel, regiment of paratroopers, who had done several tours of duty in Northern Ireland. What he said can be summed up as follows…

the struggle in Northern Ireland had cost the United Kingdom three thousand casualties in dead alone. Of the three thousand, about seventeen hundred were civilians….of the remaining, a thousand were British soldiers. No more than three hundred were terrorists, a ratio of three to one. Speaking very softly, he said: And that is why we are still there.(Emphasis mine)

In a nutshell, the reason the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are doomed can be summed up in two words, “Force Protection”. How often have you heard stories of troops firing on vehicles at checkpoints because they failed to stop on time and the troops felt threatened? The idea is to protect the troops from suicide bombers, and it’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing. Sometimes they’re right and stop suicide bombers. Other times they are tragically wrong and slaughter innocent civilians.

The message is that our troops’ lives are far more important than the civilians that they are supposedly there to protect. Look at the casualty figures in N. Ireland again. The reason the British suffered greater losses than the terrorists, is because they ignored “force protection” and put civilian life above their own. Part of the fifth point above, they were there as protectors, not tormentors. Shooting up innocent civilians turns their families against the occupiers and to the terrorists. Not shooting them up means some real terrorists get through and you suffer greater casualties.

The reason the latter case works, is because taking the casualties yourself and not inflicting them on the civilian population means the terrorists have far more difficulty increasing their support and numbers. With limited support and numbers, they can be dealt with. “Force Protection” means fewer casualties for you in the short term at the cost of creating more enemies and suffering far more casualties long term and ultimately, leads to defeat.

The Iraqis are learning from the Bush Administration how best to keep people from focusing on the unpleasant consequences of their actions, stop releasing the reports that show them.

The Iraqi government withheld recent casualty figures from the United Nations, fearing they would be used to present a grim picture of Iraq that would undermine the coalition's security efforts, UN officials said Wednesday.

Working with its own figures, the UN released a new human rights report saying that sectarian violence continued to claim the lives of a large number of Iraqi civilians in both Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods of Iraq's capital, despite the coalition's new Baghdad security plan.

. . .

The Iraqi government announced in a statement its deep reservations about the report that it says is "inaccurate in presenting information" and "lacks credibility in many of its points. Also, it lacks balance in presenting the situation of the human rights situation in Iraq."

"The publication of this unbalanced report … puts the credibility of the UN office in Iraq on stake and it aggravates the humanitarian crisis in Iraq instead of solving it," the statement said.

And there’s no better way to show how lacking in credibility your detractors are than to refuse to show the figures that could prove things one way or the other.

Since Iraq just keeps spiralling into ever worse destruction, it always nice to see a new source of destabilization

Unidentified gunmen have killed at least 74 people in an attack on an oil field in Ethiopia's remote Ogaden region, the Ethiopian government says.

Sixty-five Ethiopians and nine Chinese oil workers were killed in the incident early on Tuesday, an adviser to the prime minister told the BBC.

And

Ethiopian tanks are pounding parts of the Somali capital, stepping up a week-long campaign against insurgents and fighters of the Hawiye clan.

Heavy shelling is also taking place near the presidential palace - guarded by Ethiopian and African Union troops.

Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi said the government forces were winning the war against insurgents.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has called for an end to clashes in which more than 250 people have died in the past week.

Ethiopian forces and insurgents are exchanging heavy fire. Mortar and other artillery shells are also landing, Khalid Haji, a resident at Fagah in the north of the capital told AFP news agency.

Rotting bodies have been left on the streets for days according to witnesses.

Another burgeoning success in the “War on Terror"!

So that whole war in Iraq that's sucking the Republican's poll numbers down the drain, along with American credibility and, oh yeah, the US Army, whose idea was that again?

Rove was asked whose idea it was to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq.

"I think it was Osama bin Laden's,'' Rove replied.

Man, where to begin?

Does Rove think following the advice of Osama bin Laden is a good idea?

I mean, if somebody who I thought was trying to destroy my way of life started coming up with ideas of what he'd like me to do, I would guess that those ideas might not be in my best interest and refuse to do them.

Michael Scheuer said that Bush had become bin Laden's "indispensible ally". I know most experts figure bin Laden has to be quite happy with the way the Iraq War has turned out and that it is bringing thousands of new recruits to his cause. I just never thought a guy like Rove would admit that they actually are helping him.

How do you think the conversation went when bin Laden phoned the White House?

OBL: Yo, big guy, what’s up?

Bush: Hey man, things are great! Thanks to 9/11, I’ve got to start a war and swagger around talking tough and people think it’s great! I’ve got pretty much the whole world on-side and the whole Afghan campaign looks like its going great!

OBL: Yeah about that. It’s going much better for you folks than I’d thought it would. My followers are being driven right out of the country and I’m going to have find someplace to lie low for a while. In the meantime, I was wondering if you could do me a favour?

Bush: No sweat man, whatever you want!

OBL: Great! I was thinking you should take out that dick Hussein in Iraq. I know you guys have a bit of a love/hate relationship with him, but he’s been a real pain in our ass. That secular government of his has kept my guys from making any headway in Iraq at all. I mean, sure, he provides a counter-weight to Iran, but who’s really afraid of them anyway?

Anyway, if you could pull a bunch of your troops from Afghanistan and give me some breathing room to rebuild Al Qaeda, you can put together an invasion of Iraq. Your old man already destroyed his army, so you should be able to breeze through to Baghdad in a couple weeks. Of course, you’ll probably lose all that international support you have now, get stuck fighting an increasingly brutal and multi-sided insurgency/civil war, and seriously degrade your military into a broken shell of its former self to the point it will be unable to respond to any other crisis for years to come, but you should be able to get some decent photo ops out of it, at least in the beginning.

Bush: Hey, that’s a great idea! Always wanted to one-up the old man. Boy, I can picture some really good photo ops already. Some Tom Cruise, Top Gun thing!

OBL: Great! I really appreciate it! Probably best you don’t tell anybody this was my idea, though.

Bush: Sure, sure, I’ll write an e-mail to the staff or something.

OBL: Don’t you have to keep those? People will find out.

Bush: Heh, heh, don’t worry. We have ways around that whole archiving thing.

OBL: Cool! And thanks a bunch.

From an interview with retired US General Anthony Zinni:

What has disappointed me is there hasn’t been this debate on the strategy, on the policy, a regional strategy on policy, let alone an Iraq policy. We’re, we’re debating the tactics. The, the surge is a tactic. In what context is the surge? You can make an argument for a surge if you were going to withdraw, to cover the withdrawal, for example, or to contain, to reposition forces or to re-engage in a different way or a stronger way. And why we got caught up in the tactical debate, in my mind, is an indication that we don’t understand what we want to do. What should our Middle East policy be? What should our policy be in terms of Iraq and, and the war against the extremists out there or the conflict against extremists? We seem to be strategically adrift, in my view.

In war, the strategic always trumps the tactical. The US can use its overwhelming firepower to win any number of tactical victories, but if they don't involve a strategic component, they won't affect the outcome. Given that the US apparently doesn't even have a strategy, its little surprise that they're heading to a major strategic defeat.

Two more Canadian soldiers were killed yesterday, and reports are two additional NATO soldiers were killed today. In and of itself, this isn't too surprising. When you go to war, you have to expect casualties. What did strike about the Canadian story was this:

Col. Mike Cessford, the deputy commander of the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan, has denied suggestions that an apparent spike in violence is an early indication of a planned Taliban spring offensive.

"Obviously, we will examine that closely, but again I am not convinced that this is a Taliban offensive," Cessford said.

Now he may be making this statement in an attempt to play down the Taliban's resurgent strength. A sort of, "they're not really as tough as they say they are" sort of rhetoric. But to me, what he's saying is that as bad as things have been this week, we should expect them to get a lot worse once the offensive really gets going. That doesn't make me feel better.

I guess because the surge is working so well, they just have to keep on surging. Too bad they don't have the troops to do it.

US troops will now serve up to 15 months in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of the usual 12-month tours under new Defence Department rules.

The move is designed to help the military supply enough troops for ongoing operations.

Soldiers will be allowed a minimum of 12 months at home bases upon return.

And if you believe that last sentence, I have a friend in Nigeria with a business proposition for you.

This is just getting sad. McCain made an absolute fool of himself strutting around Baghdad in a bullet-proof vest and with over a hundred soldiers and five helicopters guarding him, not to mention the security sweep of the area that preceded him. He partly came back to reality when he said he "misspoke" on the weekend, but he's back into ridiculous mode again.

Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain said he would have taken his tour of an Iraqi market last week even if he had not been accompanied by heavily armed U.S. soldiers.

You know, I almost wish he would take that stroll. Watching a guy I once admired so completely destroy his credibility is as painful as watching a guy like Holyfield keep getting into the ring long past the point that he has what it takes to be a competitive boxer. Please stop!

The cost of the Iraq war is filtering down to state and local budgets, forcing cuts in transportation funding, Medicaid, education and other federally subsidized programs, according to analysts and lawmakers.

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When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, the men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be dampened. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength, and if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the state will not be equal to the strain.

. . .

In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. - Sun Tzu - The Art of War