Northman's Fury

I came across this article sometime back which gives empirical evidence that terrorism for the most part doesn't actually work. The author also attempts to explain why this is the case. Basically, terrorism doesn’t work because people infer the consequences of actions are the purpose behind the action.  Therefore when terrorists kill and maim large numbers of civilians, people infer that the slaughter of civilians is what the terrorists are after, and not some specific policy objective.

But wait a minute!  Wouldn’t such a theory work in reverse?  When the US and its allies carry out airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan that cause large numbers of civilian casualties, is it not reasonable to assume that the people there will judge that the purpose of these airstrikes was to kill and maim civilians?  After all, we’ve caused more civilian deaths this year than the terrorists have.

This doesn’t just explain why terrorists so rarely achieve their objectives, but why the current counterinsurgency strategy continues to fail as well.

Years before the war began, Pentagon officials knew of the effectiveness of another type of vehicle that better shielded troops from bombs like those that have killed Kincaid and 1,500 other soldiers and Marines. But military officials repeatedly balked at appeals — from commanders on the battlefield and from the Pentagon's own staff — to provide the lifesaving Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP, for patrols and combat missions, USA TODAY found.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates late last month, two U.S. senators said the delays cost the lives of an estimated "621 to 742 Americans" who would have survived explosions had they been in MRAPs rather than Humvees.

The letter, from Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Kit Bond, R-Mo., assumed the initial calls for MRAPs came in February 2005, when Marines in Iraq asked the Pentagon for almost 1,200 of the vehicles. USA TODAY found that the first appeals for the MRAP came much earlier.

As early as December 2003, when the Marines requested their first 27 MRAPs for explosives-disposal teams, Pentagon analysts sent detailed information about the superiority of the vehicles to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, e-mails obtained by USA TODAY show. Later pleas came from Iraq, where commanders saw that the approach the Joint Chiefs embraced — adding armor to the sides of Humvees, the standard vehicles in the war zone — did little to protect against blasts beneath the vehicles.

I could add this to the body-armour issue, the Walter Reed mess, the cuts to veteran’s health care, and numerous other failings of the Bush Administration when it comes to actually doing something to “Support the Troops” and not just spout the words.  Certainly they do deserve a fair bit of the blame for this. Particularly Rumsfeld, who let his vision of what he wanted the military to look like interfere with what it needed to be.  But the truth goes beyond the Bush Administration and right to the core of the current US military culture.

This is a military that is trying to fight a war while maintaining a peace-time culture. Part of that is the fault of the administration over it, but the responsibility also lies within the Pentagon itself. Acquisition of new equipment is being done at a peacetime pace. Sitting behind desks and looking at powerpoint slides doesn't grant someone much of a sense of urgency. The senior commanders got to where they are because they were successful bureaucrats and they don't want to upset things too much and risk losing lucrative retirements in the defense industries. As a result, they are always on the lookout for new and expensive toys to buy from their prospective future employers and are not bothered by long lead times for shiny new toys, if they even get to the production stage.

And like most effective military solutions, the MRAP’s are neither new nor expensive.

The MRAP was not new to the Pentagon. The technology had been developed in South Africa and Rhodesia in the 1970s, making it older than Kincaid and most of the other troops killed by homemade bombs. The Pentagon had tested MRAPs in 2000, purchased fewer than two dozen and sent some to Iraq. They were used primarily to protect explosive ordnance disposal teams, not to transport troops or to chase Iraqi insurgents.

. . .

McGriff foresaw some of the turmoil over vehicles in a prophetic 2003 paper for the School for Advanced Warfighting in Quantico.

"Currently, our underprotected vehicles result in casualties that are politically untenable and militarily unnecessary," his paper read. "Failure to build a MRAP vehicle fleet produces a deteriorating cascade of effects that will substantially increase" risks for the military while "rendering it tactically immobile." Mines and IEDs will force U.S. troops off the roads, he wrote, and keep them from aggressively attacking insurgents.

The words were strong and the conclusions were damning. Rhodesia, a nation with nothing near the resources of the U.S. military, had built MRAPs more than a quarter-century earlier that remained "more survivable than any comparable vehicle produced by the U.S. today," McGriff wrote.

If you ever wonder how a bunch of seemingly poorly-equiped, massively underfunded insurgents can fight the US military to a standstill, this last point is as good as any in illustrating the reasons.

Part of the myth of the US military is that it is the best in the world at everything, and has or will find a high-tech solution to anything the enemy can come up with, and if you don’t believe that, Tom Clancy will be happy to explain it to you.  And of course if it isn’t really expensive, it’s not worth looking at.

Truthfully, the US isn’t even the leader in many war-fighting technologies, but even more to the point, the philosophy of finding high-tech and expensive solutions to every problem creates an institutional blindness to cheaper and simpler solutions.

The Joint IED Defeat Organization has spent at least $3 billion on defeating IED’s by creating signal jammers, remote detonators, and so forth.  In the meantime an off-the-shelf solution was sitting right in front of them.

Of course, now that they have delayed for so long, even these new MRAPs will be insufficient.  They’ve been successful so far because of their rarity.  The article notes that the newer Explosively Formed Penetrator type bombs the insurgents have begun using are effective against this type of vehicle.  Once the MRAPs start to be deployed in large numbers, you can bet that large numbers of EFPs will be there to great them.

Once again, the insurgents are several decision cycles ahead of the US military.

Britain's most senior generals have issued a blunt warning to Downing Street that the military campaign in Afghanistan is facing a catastrophic failure, a development that could lead to an Islamist government seizing power in neighbouring Pakistan.

. . .

The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognise,' Inge told peers. 'We need to face up to that issue, the consequence of strategic failure in Afghanistan and what that would mean for Nato... We need to recognise that the situation - in my view, and I have recently been in Afghanistan - is much, much more serious than people want to recognise.'

. . .

'The consequences of failure in Afghanistan are far greater than in Iraq,' he said. 'If we fail in Afghanistan then Pakistan goes down. The security problems for Britain would be massively multiplied. I think you could not then stop a widening regional war that would start off in warlordism but it would become essentially a war in the end between Sunni and Shia right across the Middle East.'

That's an incredibly bleak assessment. A fair number of rightwing blogs and pundits use similar nightmare scenarios of what will happen after the US leaves Iraq to justify a continued presence, even if that presence isn't actually accomplishing anything to make those scenarios less likely. What worries me about this scenario, is that I have rarely heard British generals make such claims lightly, and they have a long history of involvement in the region to back up their assessments with.

The reason this worries me is because much like Iraq, I think Afghanistan has already moved past the point where we are capable of salvaging victory. The article even helpfully points out why:

Ashdown said two mistakes were being made: a lack of a co-ordinated military command because of the multinational 'hearts and minds' Nato campaign and the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom offensive campaign against the Taliban. There was also insufficient civic support on, for example, providing clean water.

Ashdown warned: 'Unless we put this right, unless we have a unitary system of command, we are going to lose. The battle for this is the battle of public opinion. The polls are slipping. Once they go on the slide it is almost impossible to win it back. You can only do it with the support of the local population.

'There is a very short shelf life for an occupation force. Once that begins to shift against you it is very very difficult to turn it round.'

The warnings from Ashdown and the generals on Afghanistan will be echoed in a report this week by the all-party Commons defence select committee. MPs will say that the combination of civilian casualties, war damage and US-led efforts to eradicate lucrative poppy crops risk turning ordinary people towards the Taliban.

Calls for greater reconstruction and resources from NATO countries that have been light on the ground so far sounds great, but there is little real prospect in getting any of it done. Not only has Iraq diverted resources from the US and UK which could have been used in Afghanistan, but the two wars are being linked into one broad US struggle. The unpopular and illegal Iraq War is therefore taking down the Afghan campaign by association. Pouring troops and resources into Afghanistan so the US can continue its focus on Iraq is of dubious worth to most people.

The simple fact remains that there are nowhere near enough forces in Afghanistan to wage a proper counterinsurgency campaign. Troops are so thin on the ground, and the countries that provide them are so casualty conscious, that there is a greater and greater reliance on air strikes to deal with threats real or perceived, which is among the worst ways to fight a counterinsurgency campaign.

The ridiculousness of the situation was brought to me the last time I read part of a briefing from the Canadian military spokesperson, saying that their mission was reconstruction, not combat, but that they couldn't get the reconstruction projects under way until things were more secure, which meant they had to participate in combat operations until things were secure enough to start reconstruction.

I read that as, "We'd like to be building stuff, but there are people around who shoot at us, so instead of building stuff up, we're going to keep blowing everything apart until there's nobody left shooting at us. At which point we'll start building things, assuming there's anybody left for us to build for."

There is no way we're going to win following that logic, and with the situation in Pakistan I noted earlier looking as though its about to get worse, and adding the warning from Inge above, I'd say we're going to be paying for the legacy of this war for a lot longer than I originally thought.

Newly released figures put the number of Private Military Contractors at more than the number of uniformed military personnel in theatre, and the article indicates that even that number is lower than the real total because certain categories of PMC's aren't included in the count.

Dave at The Galloping Beaver (and I love that name) has a good post up on the consequences and implications of so many mercenary forces in Iraq. The only point he doesn't cover is a question I posed a few weeks ago:

The point that worries me about these companies is what is going to happen after the US eventually leaves Iraq. That is going to leave a very large pool of individuals well-trained in counterinsurgency operations, used to quite sizable paycheques, all looking for work, or at least new "business opportunities".

There's a lot of places where such talents could be put to use. Hell, they've already turned up in New Orleans after Katrina, and there's lots of places they'd be under much less scrutiny. And there's a lot of people, both those representing governments and those on the other side, as well as a number of multi-national corporations, who will probably be hiring. That, to a large extent, is normal.

The real interesting part to me, is whether or not some of the less scrupulous of these folks decide that the best way to go, is to create some of those business opportunities for themselves.

Turkey has prepared a blueprint for the invasion of northern Iraq and will take action if US or Iraqi forces fail to dislodge the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) from their mountain strongholds across the border, Turkey's foreign minister Abdullah Gul has warned.

"The military plans have been worked out in the finest detail. The government knows these plans and agrees with them," Mr Gul told Turkey's Radikal newspaper. "If neither the Iraqi government nor the US occupying forces can do this [crush the PKK], we will take our own decision and implement it," Mr Gul said. The foreign minister's uncharacteristically hawkish remarks were seen as a response to pressure from Turkey's generals, who have deployed some 20,000-30,000 troops along the borders with Iraq, and who are itching to move against the rebels they say are slipping across the border to stage attacks inside Turkey.

Among other things, Turkish military planners have been working on a scheme to establish a buffer zone on Iraqi soil to try to stop the rebels' movements.

This for me is the most worrying aspect for a widening Mideast war.  Most people focus on the US attacking Iran, and there certainly has been an uptick in the rhetoric there as well, but there has not been a corresponding increase in US military presence in the region.  Saber-rattling aside, that leaves the possibility of a US attack on Iran at a low level.

Turkey, on the other hand, has matched its rhetoric with the military means to back it up.  Not only have they beefed up its troop presence, they have brought in additional heavy artillery and tanks, and set up security zones along the border to further limit access and hide any additional preparations they may be making.

Turkey has already been testing the waters with cross-border incursions and shelling, (reconnaissance in force?).  Without some action by either the US or the Kurdish authorities in the region to at least appear as though they’re doing something, a Turkish invasion is beginning to seem inevitable.

One other point from the Guardian story:

Washington is nervous of any military operations by its Nato ally that could destabilise Iraq's Kurdistan region. There are fears too that any instability in the north could play into the hands of Iran, facing growing problems with its own Kurdish population.

You can bet that Iran’s Kurdish problems are encouraged and supported by Washington.  That giving Kurdish terrorists a safe haven to attack Iran would also give them a safe haven to launch strike in Turkey doesn’t seem to have entered the White House calculations.

Following the dictum, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” makes a mockery of the “freedom” and “democracy” rhetoric the Bush Administration spouts, since a fair number of these “friends” are as bad or worse than the enemies the White House is targeting.

More importantly, they tend to forget that “the enemy of my enemy” still has his own interests, and particularly in the Middle East, may only be acting as your friend so that he can keep his enemies occupied with each other and pursue his own interests unencumbered.