| Experts examine the past and future of U.S.
counterinsurgency efforts BY MIKE UNGER Hours before three military experts sat down Thursday night in Washington, D.C., for a 90-minute town hall meeting on counterinsurgency, cosponsored by WAMU, an Arabic satellite television station broadcast an audiotape from the purported new leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, in which he called on insurgent groups to unite against the American
occupation. The declaration, buried in newspapers among the seemingly daily rundown of bombings, killings, and kidnappings in Iraq, was just the latest signal that more than three years after the fall of Baghdad, a burgeoning insurgency threatens to plunge the country into a civil war. Marvin Kalb of American Abroad Media, who cohosted “Counterinsurgency in the Post-9/11 World” with WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi, began the evening by asking a simple yet complex question that got right to the heart of the matter. “Why has the American military had so much trouble dealing with these insurgencies?” Deconstructing that question was Max Boot, senior fellow for national security at the Council on Foreign Relations, Kalev Sepp, assistant professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, and retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson. Throughout the program, which was aired Sept. 11 on WAMU, they shared their insights on factors that have fueled the insurgency and what the United States must do to combat it. “Iraq has always been a nation at war with itself,” Sepp said. “There’s artificialness to this country of Kurds, Sunni, and Shii’a. This is not one simple war between two sides. It’s more of a mosaic war.” Anderson, who served in the Marine Corps for 29 years, also was a special advisor to the deputy secretary of defense on counterinsurgency operations. He said that while by definition insurgencies are protracted, he did not anticipate the staying power of the one in Iraq. “I thought if we got in and applied some of the lessons [we learned in the past], we could have nipped it in the bud,” he said. “I did not see it spinning this far out of control.” Time after time the panelists opined that the U.S. military, while the strongest conventional force in the world, has not been prepared adequately to fight the types of conflicts now raging in Iraq and Afghanistan. “There is a sense of impatience,” in the Army, Boot said. “They want to get the job done and go home. What you see time and again is this desire to short-circuit the process. The kinds of qualities and mind-sets you need to deal with insurgency are not the qualities [necessarily present] in the military.” Sepp pointed to the initial success of Army Rangers and U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan as proof that the United States can be successful in fighting these kinds of battles. “Afghanistan began with so much promise, but the effort it would have taken to follow up was taken away immediately in order to prepare for Iraq,” he said. Throughout the evening, all three panelists revisited historical examples of insurgencies, dating from the Spanish resistance to Napoleon, in which the term “guerilla warfare” was coined, through Vietnam. In all these conflicts the advantage rests with insurgents, fighting in their homeland, over the occupying force, which eventually hopes to leave. “We could have been having this conversation 250 years ago during the American Revolution,” Sepp said. “George Washington understood that all he had to do was not lose the war.” As the program at the Ronald Reagan Federal Building wound to a close, the panelists looked to the future. Boot pointed to Colombia as an example of a country that has been battling an insurgency since the mid-1960s, yet still maintains a relatively stable government. “If you have a real stable democratic regime at home, it can prevail [over an insurgency] and you still can have a good quality of life for most people,” he said. “The key is not to think that we can defeat the insurgency, that’s not going to happen. We have to transfer the fight to the Iraqis so they can fight for their own country.” Sepp did not hesitate to reply “yes” when asked whether the United States would still be in Iraq five years from now, and Anderson said he hopes the United States will begin to use lessons it has learned from the past in structuring a new plan to fight the insurgency in Iraq. “When it becomes about us we’re in trouble,” he said. “Isn’t it about us?” Kalb asked. “Well, we’re in trouble,” Anderson replied. “[But] every successful counterinsurgency in the twentieth century the Brits and Americans won, it took us longer than we’ve been in Iraq.” |
