A Side Note on Counter-insurgency and Leadership

Before I went on to the next topic I wanted to touch briefly on the third condition for an insurgency - leadership.

Just as you can put out a fire by targeting any one of the three parts of the fire triangle, so you can try to fight an insurgency by targeting leadership.  This, however, has some serious drawbacks and I don't recommend it as the sole course of action.

The basic problem is that if you get rid of leaders without addressing the underlying grievances all you are doing is postponing the problem until another leader crops up.  Spending resources constantly looking out for that next leader is exhausting, and any potential leader only has to succeed once.

I think that's what some of the more tyrannical rulers try to do.  Some may even be aware that it's only a temporary fix, and may try to address the underlying issues...but it's hard to say whether or not they will succeed.

Going this route seems a bit like catching a tiger by the tail. 

What Threatens America - Some Background Info

I promised specifics, what we can do to hasten or halt a decline, what specifically is threatening America today.  But my first attempt was still too broad, and I have to narrow this down to something reasonable.  (I don't want to get stuck postulating and philosophizing on a grand scale, not right now.)


So I'll think I'll start with terrorism, actually.  One of my classes asked a question I still sometimes think over - what's the difference between terrorism and an insurgency?  This isn't the age old "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" type of statement, though I do believe there's a difference between the two.  (Terrorism is, in some ways, a tactic.  They deliberately target civilians in an attempt to create terror).  This question is less about the tactical differences and more about what the difference is between the two, when both can involve violent attempts to overthrow a government.


Every society has it's tensions.  Every. Single. One.  That's part of why it's such a miscalculation to assume the 'enemy other' is somehow monolithic and perfect.  (Communist China and Communist Russia had cleavage points.  China itself is hardly monolithic, though I'm sort of ashamed to admit it took a while before I realized that.  It's not just the Uighurs to the west, either.)


How a society resolves those tensions has a lot to do with whether it's a success or failure.  When we talked about what creates an insurgency (as opposed to a terrorist), there were a couple of elements required.  There had to be grievances felt by the population, those grievances were not being addressed through accepted channels, and there had to be leadership for the insurgency.  Kind of reminds me of the fire triangle, actually.  Grievances are the fuel.  The inability to address those grievances through accepted channels is the oxidizing agent...and leadership adds the heat (obviously, different leaders can take the insurgency in different directions...away from violence and towards civil rights, for example.  Or away from terrorist tactics and more towards military and government targets).


So the difference between a terrorist and an insurgent may have something to do with the success (or failure) of their efforts.  A terrorist is basically operating from weakness.  There aren't really enough of them to act in a conventional way...so they do these dramatic acts in order to gain attention to their cause, provoke a counter-reaction, and recruit more people.  Sometimes the government forces add more oxygen to the fight, like France in Algeria.  Rounding up the innocent in an attempt to get a small portion of the guilty led to the radicalization of people who were previously neutral, and created more support for Algerian independence.


When a group reaches the limit of their support, they're faced with a choice - accept that they don't have the support they need?   Accept, basically, that they've lost?  Or decide that their goal is too important to give up on now, and to push on.  This is when a proto-insurgency may move more towards terrorism.  Let's say they don't have enough support, refuse to give up, and thus resort to dramatic and violent attacks.  (And so the dividing line between one and the other is fluid, and throughout history an organization may change from one to the other and back again.)


The founding basis for our democracy is that we had a system that allowed grievances to be addressed through accepted channels.  Don't like what you see?  Vote.  Feel like your needs aren't being addressed?  Vote.  Have a grievance?  Vote.


Your ability to make a difference is not guaranteed.  Not everyone will agree with you, and you may lose an election or ballot proposition.  But there's always next election, next year.  And if you're tapping into a real cause, more and more people will be persuaded.  (Without disruptive and painful things like insurgencies and terrorists.)

Counter-Terrorism, ISIS, Paris, Etc.

I am ashamed and horrified at the news these days.  It seems to me that it is the easiest thing in the world to capitalize on fear, to give in to the pressures of the day.  Like all these governors claiming they will reject Syrian refugees.  Like the facebook posts arguing we should close our hearts and homes, give in to the fear that they're all somehow terrorists.

This bothers me, for two reasons.  First - because I know Muslims are a group like any other.  That is, I (as a rather lapsed Catholic) am very different from a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, even though we all might nominally be called Christian. So even though there are some jihadists mixed in with the community, I know that the vast majority are people just like you and me.  People who want to live in peace, and security.  People who are refugees because they are NOT terrorists.

Second.  Well, the second reason gets more at the mystery at the heart of human nature.  It's easier to explain with a story:

A facility had tools go missing, so the manager decided to put all the tools in a room with a chain and a padlock, so only he or his designated people could get to the tools.  His CEO came to visit and heard about this.  The next day, he dropped the chain and the padlock (which had been cut through with bolt cutters) on the manager's desk. 

I think the appeal here is immediately obvious.  There might have been one person in the entire plant stealing tools, but locking them up made it seem like everyone was untrustworthy.  Who wouldn't want to work for a CEO who made it clear he trusted his people, even at the risk of losing some tools? 

At the same time, if you were the manager whose tools were missing, what would you do?  Or rather - what would you have done differently?  (This rings especially true for me, because we recently bought a cage to store some of the equipment at work.  Not saying they were stolen, precisely.  Its more like people on a shift who knew they had a 'good' one might happen to leave it in their locker or put it somewhere hard to find so that they could easily use the same one the next day.  I personally would have preferred to spend the money to buy everyone their own, and have them sign for it and be accountable for it...but I digress.)

The point here is that sometimes we make choices that sound good at the time.  That are clearly a reaction to a specific situation, and seem like the best/easiest response to that situation.  But in the long run?  You've got employees who know they aren't trusted.  That fuzzy thing called morale drops.  The more you try to control, the more resentful people get, the more morale drops...the less people want to work there. 

So some terrorists, who happen to be Muslim, are committing  horrific attacks.  Part of the strategy of terrorism is to do that...to provoke an overreaction, one that feeds dissent and fuels your side.  (Algeria, for example, where the French rounded up the innocent as well as the guilty, thereby pushing the innocent into the arms of the insurgents/terrorists.)

And here we've got people immediately saying "Let's stop letting refugees in".

It's understandable.  And it's a short-sighted reaction entirely based on fear. 

"Fear is the mind-killer."

So let's try to think about this without fear, without that little voice saying 'if we accept these refugees we'll open ourselves up to attack'.  After all, who is more likely to become a terrorist - someone who found welcome and safety in European lands?  Or someone who has been shuffled off, rejected, abandoned, and left with nowhere to go?

That little voice, btw, is the voice I feel the New Testament repeatedly says is wrong.  Where is the notion of the Good Samaritan?  Of the person who would give the shirt of their back?  Or is charity only for people 'like us'?

Hell.  I have a house, and a spare room.  Sort of.  I'd have to move some things out, and it'd be kind of cramped.  But if there's any organization out there looking for a temporary home for a refugee family in the States I'm willing to take them in.

It's the right thing to do.

Baltimore, Counterinsurgency, and Why I am an Independent, Part II

I made the comparison between insurgents in Iraq and gangs.  Yes, I am aware that there are differences, very real differences.  But there are times when I think we should pay attention to the similarities.  This, btw, creates a similar parallel between counterinsurgency and policing.  (Since many African American communities feel like the police are an alien, invading force it's sometimes more apt than I'd like.)

Our classes on counterinsurgency talked about what makes a nation vulnerable to an insurgency.  There have to be grievances that the insurgent can exploit.  If the majority of the population doesn't have a grievance, then they are less likely to aid and abet an insurgent.  This, btw, is supposed to be one of the great strengths of a democracy.  Our first amendment specifically says we have the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

For a little more graphic detail - in the Algerian war for independence, the nationalists committed horrific acts.  The French were horrified, and reacted so strongly that they imprisoned and alienated Algerians who were previously neutral.  In so doing, they basically created the insurgency that would eventually defeat them.  (Opened up a whole bunch of issues that trouble the Algerians today, but that's a different story.) 

This isn't just wishful thinking, or naivety.  One of David Galula's famous laws of counterinsurgency is that "Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority."  Bad decisions on the part of a counterinsurgent can and will turn those neutral masses into outright hostiles.  Getting the population on your side, however, makes it harder and harder for the insurgent to hide.

Ferguson, Baltimore - these things could not have blown up the way they did if there weren't grievances to exploit.  The rioting seems to give people (who are unwilling to address those grievances in the first place) an excuse to ignore those grievances.  To blame it all on bad parenting, or stupid criminals.  

Now, I've heard questions about the Baltimore riots.  People saying it was instigated (whether by professional agitators or an overreacting police force, who knows?  I wasn't there.)  I've also heard that the vast majority of the protests were peaceful, and that it was the media hunt for a certain kind of story that has made the riots the face of Baltimore protest.  Again, I wasn't there.  I don't know.  The people saying these things seem to be locals, and seem likely to know more than I do.  And, let's face it, after seeing the media mangle Iraq I could totally believe that they'd focus on a few rioters and ignore the majority that didn't.

What I do know is this - yet again grievances are not being addressed.  They are sidelined.  Marginalized.  Ignored.  Stories about riots overshadow, by a great degree, the question of how someone who was arrested without force or incident could be dead a week later.

Whether or not someone has a criminal record should not affect whether he's alive a week after he was arrested.  It is not justice for a cop to rough someone up because they 'know' he's a bad guy...

Any more than it would be okay for a soldier to beat a detainee that they 'know' is al Qaeda.

Baltimore, Counterinsurgency, and Why I am an Independent, Part I

I would post about Baltimore, but I already put something up on Facebook and I don't feel like repeating myself.  I will say, however, that this article nails what I think pretty well.

I am blogging instead, because something I want to dig a little deeper into a passing thought.  My experiences in Iraq have turned me off the political parties (and the echo chamber of television news) pretty bad.

I like to call myself an independent. I believe I'm focused more on solutions...in public affairs we discussed evidence-based public policy, and I'm all for that.  I turned away from the political parties because I think they are so caught up in their rhetoric, their worldview, and promoting certain ideologies that they've lost touch with the real world and no longer represent the average American.

I can go into long explanations on the reasons why, but that would take too long and I don't have any good solutions to offer.

I could discuss this with almost any topic, but this is about my experiences in Iraq, so I'll stick with that.

It felt like both parties were trying to make Iraq a Vietnam II.  The same rhetoric, the same competing world views.  "Stay the course".  "Why keep losing American lives needlessly?"  "Violence begets violence, you can never win if you resort to violence" "We have to fight terrorists with overwhelming force"

Each statement is packed with all sorts of assumptions and beliefs.  Again, it would take too long to address them all.  Let me start with a few:

"Stay the course" - this goes back to the belief that we won every single battle in Vietnam but lost the war.  Why?  Because the American people lost the will to keep fighting.  If we had just stuck with it, we could have won.

From what I've read, there is *some* evidence for this.  The North Vietnamese lost a lot of people in the Tet Offensive.  But I don't think we lost because we 'were betrayed at home'.  We lost because of bad leadership.  We lost because our leaders lost credibility.  The American people did not believe there was a viable plan, they felt we were stuck in a quagmire, and there was no real counterargument.  To bring this back to Iraq - "Stay the course" was a stupid leadership strategy.  Especially when any soldier over there could see that we were playing 'whack a  mole', losing areas as soon as we left.  The Iraq forces were a joke, and the great plan involved ignoring their weaknesses in order to prop them up and get the hell out.  The surge, as well as the changes in strategy, all constituted changes that should have been done even earlier.  And I think could have, if leadership wasn't stuck in a bubble and unwilling to consider alternatives.

"Violence begets violence, and never wins" - this was something I used to agree with, actually.  It made sense - you hit me, I get angry and hit you back.  We wind up starting a personal feud.  Heck, maybe it even grows to be a family feud.  Or a tribal one.  Or even national.  But I heard so many people use that argument to claim that the situation in Iraq was hopeless.  That there was nothing we could do.  That we should just cut our losses and leave.  Now, this may be hard to convince people of when we're back in Iraq again...but that is BS.  Let's start at a macro level.  If violence didn't appear to work, people would have stopped fighting millenia ago.  Don't get me wrong - I think it's sad to lose any culture, I think every different culture offers new insights into what it means to be human.  New ideas to play with.  I think it's sad for any culture to really die out.  But the modern world was created, in part, by the violence of the past.  Tribal migrations that displaced others.  These things are so far in the past, now, that it's hard to relate to the losses involved...but do you think the Duke of Normandy, if he knew what the history of England would be, would think invading England was a bad idea? This world view is the kind of thing that appeals to people who already believe, and will be completely ignored by the ones who don't.

I think what sticks in my craw, here, is the belief that violence never wins. On a personal level, I still kind of agree...but I didn't think the situation in Iraq was hopeless.  I do think there are situations where an army, with good strategy and good leadership, can make a difference.  I feel like pretending that isn't so actually makes it harder to be effective, because your refusal to understand and learn about warfare leaves you vulnerable to the ones who don't.  The issue, to me, was not that we were doomed to failure.  It was that the horrible decisions made by people who were supposed to know better had very real, and deadly, consequences.

Even worse...we had invaded a country, disrupted the established order, let loose chaos and violence...and then the people who believed this felt that the only answer was to abandon everything.  I find myself struggling to explain why this was so horrifying to me, so here's another way of putting it -

One of the articles I read discussed the viewpoints of Iraqis in a town that US forces repeatedly had cleared.  To them, the real crime was when we came in, cleared out the bad guys and then left.  Why?  Because the bad guys came back, and they killed anyone they thought collaborated with us.  And the next time we came around, there was no reason to believe we were there to stay, or that they wouldn't face threats from the bad guys as soon as we left again.

And these were bad guys.  This wasn't some nice little insurgency where the Iraqis were all working together to oust the evil imperialists.  The Iraqis were not rejoicing when we left, and welcoming back the insurgents with open arms.  (Or not everywhere, at least.  Obviously they had supporters and bases.)  This was Iraqis who were terrified of what the insurgents would do to them if they didn't go along.

I don't know if I could have morally supported us in Iraq, if we had been facing the Iraqi equivalent of a George Washington.  But all too often the ones we were fighting acted more like gangs.

Which brings me to Baltimore.  Since this has gotten long, I'll go into that in Part II.