Counterinsurgency

We have just ended our direct military involvement in Iraq.  We have a plan to wind down our involvement in Afghanistan.  Neither has gone well.  To understand why it is necessary to understand how insurgencies work.

My introduction to the subject came with the war in Vietnam.  At that point insurgencies were called Guerrilla wars and everyone, professional and amateur alike were confused.  This was understandable at the time.  In 1832 Carl Von Clausewitz wrote the greatest single book on military tactics called "On War".  He had little or nothing to say about how to fight and win a Guerrilla War.  If the acknowledged master was clueless then what chance did the rest of us stand?

Unfortunately, Vietnam turned out to be the first in a long string of Guerrilla wars.  In the intervening period I have come to understand how Guerrilla Wars work and, more importantly, how to win them.  This did not seem that great an achievement to me.  But judging from the rhetoric that surrounds Iraq/Afghanistan (and Vietnam) to this day the subject is still a mystery to most.  Fortunately, only a few easily understandable key ideas are necessary to understand the subject.

Guerrilla wars are not primarily military problems.  They are political problems with a substantial military component.

Guerrilla armies are not strong.  They are weak.  If you placed a conventional army and a guerrilla army of roughly the same size in a dessert and let them fight it out, the conventional army would win easily.  The problem for a conventional army is not how to beat the guerrillas.  It is to find the Guerrillas.  Guerrillas are adept at hiding themselves.  If they weren’t then they would be wiped out quickly.  So the problem is not to come up with some military strategy to defeat the guerrillas.  The problem is to come up with a strategy to find them.  If conventional military strategies or technology worked for finding guerrillas we would have been done long ago.  But they don’t.

We only have a Guerrilla problem where we have a government that has a legitimacy problem

Where do Guerrillas hide?  There are only two types of places.  They can hide in extremely rugged terrain like mountains (Afghanistan) or jungles (Vietnam).  Essentially what we have is land that is not really controlled by the government the land is nominally a part of.  By going into the wilderness the Guerrillas are safe from the government because the government, for whatever reason, is not capable of controlling all of its territory.  If you can not control all of your own territory are you truly the legitimate government of all your territory?

More commonly guerrillas hide among the populace of the country.  In Vietnam there was a lot of talk about black pajamas.  In Afghanistan the costume is different but the problem is the same.  If you look at a bunch of Afghanis, you can’t tell the Guerrillas from the regular citizens.  Now this is not a problem in countries with a legitimate government.  This is because the general populace knows who the insurgents are.  The problem is that they don’t pass the information on to the government.  Why?  Because they do not trust the government?  I call this distrust of the government by its own citizens a legitimacy issue.  A significant part of the population sees its own government as being illegitimate, as not deserving of the citizen’s support and trust.

The key to fighting Guerrillas is street level intelligence

As indicated above, guerrilla armies are weak, not strong.  They are also typically divided up into many small cells.  This is critical to their survival where they are opposing a much larger more powerful enemy.  Cells are isolated so that if one is captured only a tiny part of the guerrilla resource is lost.  And there is little or no path from the small unit to other and larger units.  This is the Guerrilla’s strength.  But it is also his weakness.

A single cell has an insignificant amount of military power at its disposal.  If you can find it you can easily take it out.  This is not a military problem.  It is a police problem.  And the key to success is finding the cell.  How do you find the cell?  The answer is street level intelligence.  You can’t find a particular cell by examining satellite photos or by flying reconnaissance sorties.  Tapping overseas phone calls using the NSA is not going to work.  You need someone on the ground who knows the players in a specific small neighborhood.  They will know who the good guys and the bad guys are, if the bad guys come from that neighborhood.  They will know who the strangers are if the bad guy comes from somewhere else.  Identifying the bad guys, who they are and where they are is the whole game.  The rest is easy.

Winning a Guerrilla war – the first way

There are actually two ways to win a Guerrilla war.  First I will discuss the Saddam way.  It could also be called the Stalin way or it could be named after a number of others.  It has been used successfully over and over.  So it’s known to be a proven winner.

As indicated above the secret of success is street level intelligence.  One way to get this street level intelligence is to install a large, pervasive Secret Police organization.  With the Secret Police everywhere, there is a local operative for each neighborhood.    Once he has identified a bad guy, he calls in the goons, the bad guys are picked up and taken care of.  Do this enough times in enough neighborhoods and eventually there are no more bad guys left and your Guerrilla problem is solved.

Of course you also need to make sure you actually control all of your territory.  If your secret police are not up to the task then you may need to supplement them with police, paramilitary and regular military.  But what needs to be done and how to do it is not a secret.  It is just a matter of having the will and having the resources.

Winning a Guerrilla War – the second way

This way is much harder to pull off.  The British pulled it off in Malaysia in the late ‘50s.  There are other successes but there are also many failures.  The U.S. effort in Vietnam is an obvious example of a failure.  Many other examples of failure come easily to mind.  The second way is to fix the government, to turn it from illegitimate to legitimate in the eyes of its population.  This is hard to do.  Boiled down to its essentials this business of changing an illegitimate government into a legitimate one is what counterinsurgency entails.

It is much easier to envision what a success looks like after it has been achieved.  Here the populace trusts the government and the government is competent and capable.  If there are bad guys in a neighborhood then the people in the neighborhood know who they are.  If there are strangers, again the local people know who they are.  So a member of the neighborhood contacts the local police.  The police investigate and conclude the complaint is legitimate.  They pick up the bad guys and the criminal justice system takes care of them.

A competent and capable government will have the will and resources to take control and keep control of all of its territory.  So the bad guys will have nowhere to hide.

Politics, Politics, Politics

We have seen that by itself, the military can’t win a Guerrilla war.  But they can lose one.  If the military resources available to the government are weak enough or incompetent enough it may be possible for the Guerrillas to win a military victory.  If the Guerrillas can sow enough chaos and discord for long enough the populace will give up completely on the government.  The military can help hold things together for long enough to give one of the winning strategies time to be implemented.  But the winning strategies are essentially political and not military.  So the military’s role is important but not paramount.

Politics, however, is paramount.  Even someone like Saddam must at some point gather enough political power to be able to implement his Secret Police solution.  It is possible at least in some cases for some period of time to impose a Saddam type solution from the outside.  But as the Soviet experience in Eastern Europe showed, Saddam type solutions imposed from outside have a way of not lasting as long as people think they will.

And there is the competence issue.  Even a Saddam type solution requires a certain amount of skill.  And it’s political skill.  The government must be able to impose some combination of fear and acquiescence on the populace to remain in power.  This is actually harder than it looks from outside.  The Shah of Iran was eventually overthrown, in spite of his large and effective Secret Police organization.  In those later years he failed to display sufficient skill at garnering enough fear or acquiescence.

And the second solution is vastly more difficult to pull off.  I know of no example where it has been pulled off solely from the outside.  You must have competent insiders in charge.  Certainly outside assistance can be helpful.  But highly competent insiders with little or no help from the outside stand a much higher chance of success than incompetent insiders with tremendous help from the outside.

The second solution – it’s all in the details

To see why let’s take a harder look at what must be done.  The reason there is an insurgency in the first place is because the government is not doing its job.  It needs to field a police force.  If there is no local cop there is no local cop to “rat on a rat” to.  The populace has to have faith that the police are fair and competent.  If you think they are all crooks or that they are in the pocket of someone else are you going to take the risk of dealing with them?  They might just decide that you are the problem, not the bad guy.

The police must be backed up with a trustworthy court system.  You want to be confident that when the cop you trust turns over the bad guy over to the court system then the court system can be trusted to do the right thing.  You don’t want to bad guy to be able to buy his way out of trouble whether with money or influence.  You also want to have some confidence that if you get involved with the court system you will not just arbitrarily be tossed into a hole and forgotten about even if you are manifestly innocent.  Finally, the courts need to be backed up with a trustworthy prison system.

These specific questions must be asked in the environment of the general question of how competent and effective the government as a whole is.  If the government as a whole is rife with corruption and incompetence then people are far less likely to trust the justice system.  Also an ineffective government will often lack resources because the local economy is in poor shape.  So it may not be capable of controlling all of its territory.  An incompetent government may also fail to deliver needed services like power, water, sewage, streets, etc., engendering more distrust.

To implement the second solution we must fix what’s wrong and there is usually a lot wrong.  People must be put in charge of the government who are both competent and honest.  They must be competent in the machinery of government, in the delivering of services.  They must also be competent in a purely political sense.  They are going to tell the people “Trust me.  Things are bad now but we are going to fix them.  You won’t see progress for a while but later they will get better”.  This is a lot to ask.  So you need people with the communications skills and the charisma to pull this off.

I can’t prove that the new people need to be honest.  But what they are trying to pull off is extremely difficult.  My belief is that if people see their leaders lining their pockets or handing out favors to their friends they will quickly lose faith in their leaders.  And I believe faith in the new leaders is critical to success.

Success factors

The lesson to be learned from the second half of the twentieth century is the strength of nationalism.  Time after time someone who was less competent or less honest was able to defeat someone who was more honest and competent by saying “I’m one of us.  He’s one of them.”  People want desperately to be led by one of their own.  The British ran reasonably competent and effective governments in many countries all around the world.  In many cases these governments were replaced by less competent and less honest locals.  Even after the local populace had experienced the incompetence of the government run by locals there is no case where a populace wanted to go back to British rule.  An Afghan government with a U.S. face is a recipe for disaster.  And local perceptions are critical.  The reality is far less important.

Street level intelligence is critical.  If the U.S. military is handling security then it is critical that the local people trust and be able to communicate with the average U.S. soldier.  Yet U.S. soldiers have no language training and no cultural training.  And the military tends to move units in and out of the country or around within the country.  I make take months for a unit to develop a communications channel with the local people and build up some level of trust.  Just when this is starting to produce some results the unit is moved or withdrawn and the process must be started all over.  And how well are the Afghanis doing as we hand this function over to them?  They have the advantage of speaking the language and knowing the culture.

Government services are critical.  I think everyone knows how badly things are going with security.  But what about power, sewage, the mails, the justice system, any of the services traditionally provided by government?  Unfortunately, there is a coherent pattern that extends across all government services and the news is bad.  Finally, what is the state of the economy?  There is no functioning economy in Afghanistan.  If you are a good Afghani business man how would you rate your chances of starting or maintaining a successful business in Afghanistan?

The simple test

The U.S. has not gone with the Secret Police option in either Iraq nor Afghanistan.  In this "second way" environment all of the above can be boiled down to a simple test.  I call it the “willing and able” test.  As I have shown above, the key to defeating the Insurgency is getting locals to rat on a rat.  The effectiveness of our rat on a rat program can be broken down into two stages.  Once an Afghani has identified a rat how willing is he to rat him out?  If he fears for his safety or doesn’t trust the government to respond effectively he is likely to be unwilling.  Now let’s assume our Afghani is willing, how able is he to do so?  Someone must be within reach that he can communicate with to receive the information about the rat.  That’s it.

I will be making a separate post applying this perspective to Iraq and Afghanistan.