A Bright Shining Showdown

Give the picture above a close look; it's the first time the President of the US and the commander of his ground forces in Afghanistan met 1-1. Today is the Year Eight of the war they're conferring over, and their body language is telling. Obama's posture is patient, explanatory, verging on remonstrative; Stanley McChrystal's is taut, defensive, and tilting to one side. The general looks like he might be struggling to maintain his composure while thinking, "I could spatter his head like a bug."

Obama's intellectual training was primarily by Socratic method, which emphasizes dialectical questions designed to get one party in a debate to tellingly contradict themselves, strengthening the inquirer's point. I have been very critical of the President for asking for a report he knew would, in a word, suck. In his defense, maybe he didn't know it would suck this badly, and didn't expect it to collapse so easily upon an amateur's inquiries. For example, BHO may have asked self-contradicting questions like these:

"Are you telling me that 40,000 more troops are enough to decisively defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, once and for all?"

"How will these new troops limit al-Qaeda's continuing growth in Pakistan, where we know it's becoming a deadlier domestic and international threat?"

Stanley A. McChrystal is a Crusader, a third-gen Military Industrial Complex product deeply in the pocket of the NeoCons, and Fred Kagan, who authored the bribe-the-Sunni-insurgents-and-leave plan known as The Surge in Iraq, is his strategy advisor. He has gone on 60 minutes to tout his plan. He has given a speech to an international crowd in London. His allies, one would hope not his own office, leaked his classified troop request report to the press. His disdain for Obama, his commander-in-chief, is visible, quotable, and wholly insubordinate. Obama is likely too smart to fire him, and McChrystal is probably too dumb to resign. I suspect McC's superior, Gen. David Petraeus, has masterfully set up a good soldier to take a fall for him.

When it comes to making war or anything else, Fred Kagan and the NeoCons are turds in a picnic cooler. One must assume the questions, simple questions above were put to their report, and no good answers were blurted. Obama today announced, as expected, that there will be no withdrawal. That sounds bland and depressing enough, but he also set no timeline on a decision for escalation, no numbers on additional troops at all. In other words, it is the omission which speaks loudest, and he's breaking the news to the NeoCons softly. Refer again to the body language in the picture above.

In D.C. Newspeak, Obama's announcement today signifies No Buildup. There may be a token compromise (a.k.a. Operation Kevlar Chandelier), but bottom line, this is an infuriating hog-tying for the NeoCons and their Generals, and they're off in basements and bars this evening uttering vile oaths, making pacts and desperately sharpening knives. Having been brilliantly stalemated, the best they can do is cry, "leisurely," and "too deliberate!" For once since his election, I stand in admiration and applaud: Barack Hussein Obama didn't give them the satisfaction of a clear "No."

Iraq: It's The August Place To Be!

It's 117 degrees in Baghdad, and the water pumps are silent. No running water. Typhus and cholera cannot withstand the power of The Surge, but if those peaceful maladies claim any victims, they won't count. We won't hear about them. We also won't hear what the ground commander in Iraq, David Petraeus, really thinks. Because the White House is going to write his report on the Surge effects for him.

The video attached above, "Inside The Surge,"tells the story from the ground, with troopers in A Company of a Stryker battalion in Baghdad. If you want to see reporting like the best of what came out of Vietnam, watch. Soldiers speak, complete with their names and rank. They speak of being pushed beyond maximum endurance and giving out. (Their suicide rate just hit an all-time modern high.) As a reminder, Vietnam ended not because of civilian resistance at home, but because US regular Army and Marine units could no longer function as effective fighting forces in the field. They did not want to be there, and could see they were doing no good. The mission was too muddled, the fantasy was too far gone.

One can only wonder what the Iraqis are feeling as their proto-government has its August vacation. More than a vacation. In truth, many of their representatives have fled for the hills like caged badgers, and will never set foot in a parliament building again. In the video above, a taxi driver is killed, shot through the throat while looking for his fare's address because the soldiers of 2nd Platoon were nervous about snipers. They thought he might be spotting for the enemy.

I read a news article on the Huffington Post this weekend in which a journalist interviewed a disaffected PR unit and got them to go off-script. The Press Affairs Team blurted out stuff like this:

Lieutenant X: "We're just keeping beat-down soldiers in-theatre. It's a numbers game. And Jee-zus, it's hot! This war makes absolutely no freakin' sense anymore."

Specialist Y: "They keep telling us to write positive stories. But why can't we just tell you the..IED!! GO, GO, GO, GO! HIT THE HORN. HIT 'EM. DON'T STOP!!" (Fires machine gun.)

Captain Z: "No, it's ok, we're past it. OK. Calm down. Everybody ok? OK. Pull over to the shade. Over there. That building there. On the right. Whee-ooo. I'm fixin' to get heat stroke again. Where the hell's my hemorrhoid cream?"

Ok, it was a little different than that. A lot different. But having just blown a half-hour unsuccessfully Googling for the story, you can treat the quotes as apocryphal. The point is, the grunts are feeling burnt out and hopeless. The writer of the article even got some officers to go on record describing the condition of the troops. (In short: pretty damned bad.) The PR team assigned to the reporter was supposed to refer to their positive talking points, not tell him how crappy things really are. The press team just didn't give a damn, and conveyed an attitude of extreme disaffection. You can imagine how pissed the troops are if the Fobbits are at the end of their tethers. Kilroy isn't there anymore.

(Update: Found it. Originally published by the Guardian UK, it is titled "Fatigue Cripples US Army in Iraq." The Free Republic has issued an 'MSM Treason Alert' over it and their commenters are having seizures so severe two of them spilled bottles of Miller High Life across their keyboards. (You can tell by their spelling.) I highly recommend reading the article if you haven't already. It's a crack in the curtain, and that's how the light gets in. Here's a short quote:

This is a different kind of war,' says [Major Stacie] Caswell. 'In World War II it was clear who the good guys and the bad guys were. You knew what you would go through on the battlefield.' Now she says the threat is all around. And soldiering has changed. 'Now we have so many things to do...'

'And the soldier in Vietnam,' interjects Sergeant John Valentine from the same unit, 'did not get to see the coverage from home that these soldiers do. We see what is going on at home on the political scene. They think the war is going to end. Then we have the frustration and confusion. That is fatiguing. Mentally tiring.'

'Not only that,' says Caswell, 'but because of the nature of what we do now, the number of tasks in comparison with previous generations - even as you are finishing your 15 months here you are immediately planning and training for your next tour.' Valentine adds: 'There is no decompression.'

The Army is being ground to bits, grunt by grunt, while twits like Tim Casey from the Heritage Foundation are going on media offensives saying, "Wow. It's a great thing for soldiers to serve their country. The Surge is working. And it was their free choice!" Ah-ah--reality check--the surge is not working. It's 117 degrees in Baghdad, and there's no running water. We can fill in the blanks.)

Quadrillage & The New "Gated Communities," Pt. III

By announcing Baghdad as the focus of the surge, Bush has given the insurgents ample time to prepare fixed defenses which feature ambush, fluid withdrawal to the next prepared defenses, and then full withdrawal to the countryside. These insurgents also happened to run army units, and their commanders fought the third-bloodiest war in the twentieth century (against Iran, which had about three times the population of Iraq). Their largely Sunni insurgency has demonstrated ongoing cohesion, with the ability to recruit and strike all over central Iraq. Here is all they need to do to defeat the Surge:

1) maintain communication links
2) avoid annihilation or capture
3) inflict casualties on US and Iraqi patrols within "gated communities"
4) sabotage or otherwise disrupt government services financed by the US
5) maintain safe havens outside Baghdad, and continue ambushes there.

One angle on the Surge which might work would be to say to the insurgents, "We don't care about your weapons. Take them. We'll give you safe passage, and find you new housing that's better. But we need you to move out of this area to where your support is." This would be a non-violent ethnic cleansing approach applied to Baghdad with a "Blood Borders" logic behind it (see Ralph Peters, Armed Forces Journal, June 2006 at link) to speed the inevitable partition along. But I doubt such an approach is politically palatable, and thus it's as good as impossible.

The Surge will probably make things look better in the press for a few months. There may well be talk of milestones met and progress made in Baghdad. Meanwhile the insurgency in the country as a whole will likely gather even more centrifugal force, and the atrocities on all sides will become more unforgivable. The Bush Administration's goal is to create a Western-friendly region. (Bush no longer drinks. Notice how he avoids all mention of nitrous oxide?) The Army's goal is to be able to say, "We followed sound strategy, but were saddled with flawed rules of engagement." The MIC's (military-industrial complex) goal is to keep the whole thing going. Two out of three ain't bad.

It is also possible that the Sunnis keenly sense a "Tigris Offensive" in their grasp, with all intentional reference to the Tet Offensive. The insurgents have amply demonstrated their effectiveness and determination, and if they're willing to strap bombs on their bellies, you can guess they're probably willing to blow up an entire building in Baghdad to take out a squad or two of soldiers inside. If they are able to inflict heavy casualties on either the Iraqi Army or US forces, they can break the will not only of Congress, but the Generals running this grisly horror show and the soldiers unlucky enough to act it out. Vietnam wasn't lost because of a sudden realism or humility on the part of US leadership. It was lost because soldiers and their commanders saw no more point to what they were doing. They just started going through the motions. When asked to drive around in Humvees to search the same roads and houses over and over, all the while waiting for an IED to explode next to them, they must be nearing that epiphany in Iraq. Booby-trapping apartment buildings would be technically much easier than booby-trapping roads. It's the sharpening of a decision already made.

The movie "The Battle of Algiers" is the story of quadrillage, and how the French used brutality to quell a stubborn insurgency in the Casbah for a few years. It ends with the insurgent youth Ali La Pointe huddling in the crawlspace of a house with three younger children who trust him. Having learned not to trust the French, they refuse to heed a French colonel's appeals to come out, and soldiers blow the building to the ground. The movie was considered required viewing among the officer elite, presumably for the harsh measures which must be taken to win. They seem to have overlooked a few things: a few years after the events depicted, the insurgents had won and France was putting down a military coup by the officers who ran the counterinsurgency, which claimed upwards of 10% of the population. Decades later, many of the muslim kids burning cars in Paris suburbs were quite literally the children of counterinsurgency, with parents who came from North Africa. They were shouting "Vive Algiers," and writing "Ali La Pointe" on walls. A main street in Algiers is named for a 19-year old girl, Hasiba ben Bouali, who died in the crawlspace with him. A university is also named after her.

Who will the streets and universities in tomorrow's Iraq be named for? My bet is there won't be a David Petraeus Avenue. Quadrillage isn't a model of what to do in Iraq. Based upon many, many outcomes of history, it's a powerfully proven model of what NOT to do.

Quadrillage & The New "Gated Communities," Pt. II

Remember the Vietnam euphemism "Strategic Hamlet?" It's funny how ideas are recycled in different market-ese. Strategic Hamlets refer to counterinsurgency efforts in South Vietnam which relied on massive population transfers. Peasants were relocated into self-constructed walled forts in order to identify, isolate, and kill Viet Minh insurgents. The program enjoyed considerable initial advantages, including almost unlimited funding and expert leadership under Robert Ker Thompson, who had a record of success against communists in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. 8.5 million peasants were re-housed into more than 7,000 hamlets in 28 months, with CIA-trained death squads killing untold numbers of Viet Minh sympathizers. Except the tried-and-true method didn't work, and Vietnam's President Diem was assassinated in 1963.

So now it's called "Gated Communities." This is a big gamble. If the game were Texas Hold 'Em, it's a bet on drawing an inside straight flush on the last card. Long odds. To recap, the idea behind the "Surge" follows classic counterinsurgency doctrine as re-hashed by the new ground commander in Iraq, the intellectually inclined General David Petraeus, whose name oddly befits a Roman prelate. The idea is to cleanse Baghdad of insurgents by sectioning off its neighborhoods, putting gates around them, then going through them house by house to identify insurgent families. Quadrillage is the term the French used for it in Algiers and early South Vietnam. Insurgents will be isolated, then neutralized by shipping them and their supporters to camps, prisons, or graveyards. A mixed local command is set up of mixed Iraqi troops and police backed by a central core of US forces with responsibility over their gated section. The local command begins to employ people to pick up garbage, make repairs, and put snitches on payroll, in this way winning over the populace, who in turn make the insurgents unwelcome. If anything gets out of control, overwhelming firepower will be called down on the trouble.

In Part I of this post, I promised to explain why quadrillage probably won't work now. It probably would've worked if employed immediately after the invasion, especially if it relied on the Baathists who had run the country for 40 years. At this point, however, it's going up a steep hill, and alerting the insurgents to the strategy 3 months in advance doesn't help. And I said General Petraeus isn't the genius people think he is; for example, he is fond of holding up Tal Afar as a shining example of successful counterinsurgency. Tal Afar was the patrol area of one of the military's leading lights, Colonel H.R. McMaster, who wrote the provocative book "Dereliction of Duty," and is credited for coming up with the template for taming the bad guys. While Petraeus and McMaster are letting people give them attaboys and manly pats on the toosh, here's what Matt Taibbi quotes the mayor of Tal Afar as saying last summer, in his Rolling Stone article, "Waiter, There's A Surge In My Soup" (hat tip to Bruce of The River Blog for surfacing it):

I was in Tal Afar's "genuine success" story over the summer. It was such a success story that the city's neurotic, hand-wringing mayor, Najim Abdullah al-Jubori, actually asked American officials during a meeting I attended if they could tell President Bush to stop calling it a success story. "It just makes the terrorists angry," he said. At the meeting he pointed to a map and indicated the areas where the insurgents held strong positions.

"Here," he said. "Oh, and here. And here. Here also...."

Due to length, I'll follow up with a Part III. Graphic above is of Afrikaner commandos in the Boer War, just as a reminder that not all insurgents are brown-skinned communists.

Quadrillage & The New "Gated Communities" Pt. I

The Bush Administration actually does have a plan for taming Iraq. They, and I, have just been too scared to tell you what it is. The creation of "Gated Communities" (euphemism du jour) is an updated, Americanized translation of "Quadrillage," a tactic the French employed heavily in Algeria and had begun to employ in Indochina. Pat Lang over at Sic Semper Tyrannis has a community of high-quality commenters hotly discussing this topic. A quicker boil-down on counterinsurgency "best practices" follows below.

Occupations provoke insurgencies, and an insurgency is an invisible army, or a defeated army which has become so, melted almost inseperably into a civilian population. Regardless of counter-insurgency tactics applied in the last century, and there were a wide variety of them, insurgents won almost every time against foreign occupation forces: 147 out of 149 times, as calculated by Israeli Defense Forces instructor Martin van Creveld. I would probably dispute the 149th instance (the British in post-WWII Malaysia) if I knew more about it, as others have. Yet there were many successful counter-insurgency efforts before the modern age, and if you care to include domestic dictators as counter-insurgents, there were many successful efforts in the 20th century as well. Interestingly, van Creveld doesn't count Israel's occupation of Palestine in his calculation.

The 148th case is an example of successful employment of population removal, which just barely made it into the 20th century count. In the late 1800s, the Boers (white farmers) in the Transvaal (South Africa) rebelled against England. The British sent troops, which were beaten senseless by the farmers. These actions are known as The Boer Wars. England was defeated in the First Boer War, but then gold was found at Johannesburg in 1885, and the conflict got hot again. Regime change was tried, it failed, and war was declared. It devolved into guerilla warfare. Tired of getting killed and run ragged by farmers who were excellent shots, well-supplied and horse-mounted on their home territory, the British devised a few simple, brutal expedients. Whatever prisoners they captured, they sent to camps overseas. They followed a "Scorched Earth" policy, systematically burning the farms. Then they took the wives and children of the farmers, put them into concentration camps, and starved them. Rumors of routine rape were widespread. 25% of the women and children died. The farmers surrendured, South Africa became part of the British Empire, and London was draped in diamonds and gold. The British would also intern a large, sympathetic population in "The Malayan Emergency," Kreveld's 149th example, but did so for the purpose of bribing and not brutalizing them. Possibly the purest example of population-removal was applied by US forces in the late nineteenth century against tribes in the American West, which proved to be a nearly permanent solution.

Now, let's combine the concept of population removal with quadrillage. Quadrillage, or quartering, is to divide an insurgency into sections, allocate a garrison in each section and back it with domestic troops. The section is closed off and swept for insurgents with an overwhelming number of home-grown troops. Combat-age males are killed or forcibly removed, as is anyone who shows support for them. If they cannot be dislodged or be made to surrendur, the buildings which shelter them are levelled to the ground. All villages and neighborhoods in the section are turned into ghettos, and residents who enter or leave must show the required papers. Bribes are given in return for reporting suspiscious activities, and transgressors are "turned" into spies. The idea is for indigenous forces to provide the muscle, to "stand up so we can stand down," and for the occupying forces to provide the firepower. Should an insurgency re-emerge which threatens to overwhelm the garrison, a central strike force is called in to crush it. The houses of suspected of harboring insurgents are blown up. The French used this method all over Algieria in the late 50's, and managed to temporarily quiet insurgent activity and largely secure its border with Morocco, which had supported the FLN (National Liberation Front). Roughly a million Algerians died in five years, the vast majority non-combatants who never touched a weapon.

So in Iraq, as the now-promoted and congressionally confirmed ground commander General Petraeus states in his new field manual FM 3-24 DRAFT, insurgent-supporting population will be selectively removed as necessary, either eliminated or held in distant, secure locations. Areas of garrison responsibility will be assigned to insurgent quarters until security is established in each, rebuilding projects will be undertaken to employ local residents and jump-start the economy, and the path to pacification will be ensured. The video above provides an idea of what the policy will look like on a routine, daylight basis.

In Part II, I'll outline why Petraeus is not the genius he is thought to be , and why his plan probably isn't going to work.

Mythbusting, Pt. VI: The Urge To Surge

Whom the Gods would destroy
They first make mad.
Euripides, ca. 440 BC

The White House is desperate enough to employ ignorant, pie-in-the-sky think tank pukes to go around the Pentagon in order to seek politically palatable options, and it is once again violating the very fundamentals of sound military operational planning by advocating a "surge" in occupation troop levels.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff apparently resent having their advice ignored, and are publicly NOT on board with the think-tankers' hare-brained scheme to pacify Baghdad. The Chiefs of Staff have stated the obvious points, i.e., the insurgents will simply go make trouble elsewhere, because that's what insurgents do, and that sending in another 30,000 combat personnel will definitively break the army. They didn't mention that the plan to disarm and disband the Mahdi Army (the 50,000-strong militia in Sadr City) might hit a few snags, such as heavy casualties in house-to-house fighting, a general uprising in Baghdad, a truce of co-belligerent convenience between the Sunni insurgency and the Shia Iraqi defense forces currently waging a civil war, and probably a direct assault on the Green Zone.

The Troop Surge Plan will make even more Coalition troops more vulnerable. It's downright crazy. Above left is the map of the US military bases along the Iraqi road networks as of 3-4 months ago. The 7 major supply depots are circled in black. Look at the base in the southeast just over the Kuwaiti border and the next depot just south of Baghdad. That's a long way between major bases, over 200 kilometers, and there are only two major routes connecting Baghdad to Kuwait. Most supplies are trucked in not by the military, but by private military contractors. Any significant action against Al Sadr's forces in Baghdad will result in those supply lines being cut, re-opened, and re-cut, and the battle will quickly devolve from "disarming terrorists to secure Baghdad" to a desperate fight to preserve the US army's carotid artories carrying its life's blood into the heart of Iraq. Oh, and disarming the Shia militias puts the permanent kibosh on the Death Squad Option (translation: attaching US advisors to Shia units which then seize and murder suspected Sunni insurgents) currently being followed as the path to Iraqi sovereignty.

Halliburton and KBR, the army's main suppliers, do not have significant facilities in Turkey; their supplies come by sea into Kuwait, and are carried north from there. Neither private companies nor the Army are ready to conduct supply from the opposite direction. Recently an entire convoy was lost when "men wearing Iraqi Defence Forces uniforms" put up a roadblock on the road northwest of Kuwait and seized drivers and trucks. It was that simple. If the Shia majority determines to get rid of US forces in Iraq, they have the ability to do so, and so far they have stopped short of active resistance, preferring to use our troops as tools to settle old grievances with the Sunnis. Far from securing anything, the urge to surge will precipitate a multi-level disaster and put an end to Shia cooperation. To put it mildly, control over the Southeast Shia rump of Iraq would be lost in short order. We'll see how incoming Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, an old Washington hand, referees this debate, or if he can bring some measure of sanity to the rats running this shit-house. Right now no one seems capable of dealing with a raging, delusional Rat King; at stake is the choice between a stinging defeat in Iraq and a decisive defeat in the world. Good luck, Bob.