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| U. S. needs regional specialists in terror war |
| 2004-04-14 |
| On April 9, 2003, Baghdad fell far faster than most media commentators, and even most military commanders, had expected. The U.S. armed forces looked invincible. A year later, the perception is very different. The carnage in Iraq is front page news week in, week out. U.S. forces in Iraq are beleaguered on two fronts and appear unable to vanquish their foes. They have suffered three times more casualties since the fall of Baghdad than they did during the war itself. What accounts for this? The answer to that question was provided by political scientist Barry Posen in the scholarly journal International Security last summer. His thesis was that âthe United States enjoys command of the commons â command of the sea, space and air.â No other country has naval, space or air forces remotely capable of challenging ours. But this edge slips away the closer U.S. forces get to the enemy. In âcontested zonesâ â âbelow 15,000 feet (altitude), within several hundred kilometers of the shore, and on landâ â even relatively unsophisticated foes have a good chance of inflicting serious harm on our troops. This is precisely what weâve seen in Iraq, where American soldiers have proved enticing targets for enemies armed with cheap, simple weapons like rocket-propelled grenades and homemade bombs. All the high-tech weapons in the U.S. arsenal are of little use against a foe you canât find. U.S. troops have little choice but to venture into such messy âcontested zonesâ if they want to win the war on terrorism. Otherwise they will be limited to ineffectual gestures such as cruise missile strikes against terrorist training camps (like the ones Bill Clinton launched against Afghanistan in August 1998). Unfortunately, winning the close-in fight against guerrillas requires skills that the U.S. armed forces donât possess in abundance. It requires, above all, the ability to generate âactionableâ intelligence about who and where the terrorists are. The only way to get good information in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq is to spend a lot of time there, drinking tea with the locals and earning their trust. But not many U.S. officials do that. All of the U.S. soldiers who spent the last year in Iraq have gone home or are about to. They are being replaced by an entirely new crew that will need months to figure out which sheiks and mullahs to cultivate. Likewise, in Afghanistan the military starts virtually from scratch every six to 12 months as new units rotate in and old ones leave. The situation is no better among the diplomats and spies who are supposed to support military operations. As Greg Miller and Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times reported in February, many CIA agents who âtake sensitive overseas assignments are willing to serve only 30-to-90-day rotations, a revolving-door approach that has undercut the agencyâs ability to cultivate ties to warlords in Afghanistan or collect intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency.â The CIA and the State Department allow officers to specialize in a particular region, but they can rarely spend too long actually living there without hurting their chances of promotion. Thatâs also true in the Army. Moreover, itâs common for CIA, military and State Department officers to be reassigned to a region far outside their expertise â a Latin America specialist being sent to Asia, for instance. For a better approach, we should emulate what the British did when they were engaged in many of the same places that currently bedevil us. Look at the example of Col. Robert Warburton, who spoke fluent Persian and Pashto and spent 18 years (1879-97) as the political officer in the Northwest Frontier Province of what is today Pakistan. He kept this volatile region (now a Taliban and al-Qaida stronghold) quiet through his personal influence. âIn an area where every male was habitually armed at all times,â historian Byron Farwell wrote, âhe went about with only a walking stick.â Within a month of his retirement, the area was swept by an Islamic fundamentalist revolt that took thousands of British soldiers to put down. The U.S. military has the best âsmartâ weapons in the world. But unless we get more smart, knowledgeable people like Warburton, we will always be at a major disadvantage in the war on terrorism. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #12 It seems that the author omits one very crucial fact: Most terror and underground Arabic operations rely heavily upon familial relationships. It matters not if you speak pashto and farsi better than the natives, if you don't have a blood tie, you will not penetrate these organizations very often. For this reason, it is often more productive to work with intelligence intercepts and glean profiles from cell phone usage, Internet activity and laptop drives. Language is useful for these analysis methods and family trees don't enter into it. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-04-14 11:33:31 PM |
| #11 Right o, Old Patriot. Tikrit it was. And BTW, that place has been out of the news in the past couple of weeks. Think LTC Steve's vodka sessions had anything to do with that? |
| Posted by: Michae 2004-04-14 4:54:01 PM |
| #10 Speaking of al Dourhi - anyone want to speculate on just who that important person catured a few days ago in Fallujah might have been? Am away from my main computer, so don't have the link to the article - it was either Kimmit speaking or a CPA briefing .... |
| Posted by: rkb 2004-04-14 3:36:20 PM |
| #9 I think Steve Russell was in Tikrit, not Fallujah. The problem with Fallujah is that it's al Dourhi's home town, and he's still on the lam. We really need to collar him. As for diplospeak, I like the saying of a 2nd Century BC Roman legion commander: It's better to be feared than treated with contempt. I think the people of Fallujah are going to learn what it means to fear the US Marines. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2004-04-14 2:50:11 PM |
| #8 rkb, the writer is spot-on in many aspects. Right, our military is there to fight, but why not try to fight just the ones who will never agree with the mission? Cull the bad ones from the good, give the good ones a reason to work with our guys. Remember, LTC Steve Russell? Wasn't he in Fallujah? He said proudly how much vodka he had drunk with the sheiks. Those who did not work with Steve were shot at. It seemed to work, not 100%, of course, but look at the place now. The sole reason? I don't know, but you can be sure, the Terrorists knew about the rotation and it would only be smart of them to test the new guys. The Marines and other new arrivals have a huge learning curve. Re diplomats. Yeah, based on my foreign experience and knowing these guys form coaching Little League and soccer, but still, at the same time, from the outside looking in (the kids differentiated it as "commisary", i.e. the kids whose parents worked at the embassy and "not comissary, i.e. the kids whose parents worked for contractors and private firms), many State people look at postings as another place to enjoy the pool, SUV, maids, hotel discounts, and diplomatic passports before being rotated to DC for 2 years. Then it's on to the next adventure. Couldn't ask for a better job. But get down and dirty? Yeah, there are a few who do, but most are in the diplo business for the ass-kissing they receive. We definitely need diplos who can be counted on for more than 60-90 days. |
| Posted by: Michael 2004-04-14 2:18:06 PM |
| #7 As the body counts and who is in charge in both Iraq and Afghanistan shows, the US has the most intelligent weapon ever that is tough and durable beyond degree...the average 19 year old trooper |
| Posted by: TopMac 2004-04-14 12:22:59 PM |
| #6 I always read a lot of carping about how the State Department is a bunch of wimps. In my opinion they are supposed to be wimps. I hear the same thing in my job. Sales are wimps. They always roll over for the customer. They're working for company X, not us. I've run three major intellectual property acquisitions in the past five years. In two, we dealt directly with the management of the selling company. Both were disasters. In one, we dealt with a sales intermediary. It went smoothly and has been the most successful one we've had so far. The sales guy I worked with, helped us with three key compromises. If we didn't have those compromises, the deal would have been as screwed up as the other two. From his boss's point of view was he rolling over? Probably. But the result is that he got his boss a lot of revenue that he wouldn't have if he had been confrontational. Now I know that this post is out of character for me since I am usually baying for blood, but my experience in my military and civilian careers is that the times for confrontation and for compromise are distinct and generally need to be run by different people. My problem with Fallujah and Sadr has been that we've been trying to compromise when we should be confronting. "Punch them! Don't tickle them!" as the great Heinz Guderian once said. Once they're dead or on their knees, then it's once again time for diplomacy and compromise. Odierno and Petreus seemed to understand that. Unfortunately, there's been other commanders and a lot of politicians who don't. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2004-04-14 12:17:09 PM |
| #5 excellent points - well said! |
| Posted by: B 2004-04-14 8:17:32 AM |
| #4 Well, in fact many of our officers in Iraq have indeed sipped a great deal of tea with Iraqi leaders over the past year. Major General Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, has estimated that his officers averaged nearly 300 hours a WEEK in the Sunni Triangle area doing precisely this. And it worked in most places. He also has said that where it didn't work, firm military action was both necessary and productive. Remember Samarra? Convoys with the new Iraqi currency were ambushed. Hotbed of Sunni resistance. The 4th ID fired every Iraqi policeman from the chief on down, then made armed sweeps for about 12 hrs. After that, they broke off operations to have discussions with friendly Iraqi leaders (who were friendly in part because of all that tea drinking). A day later, they began a tough operation throughout that region ... it lasted 3 weeks and included armor in the city streets, arrests, raids, missile strikes etc. Once the operation was over and the key attacker network destroyed, dozens of really good intel tips came pouring into the Coalition camp. At the same time, Odierno released $25 million (yes, you read that right) in commander's funds for city infrastructure and other projects. Result: you haven't heard much about Samarra lately because it is peaceful, prosperous and run by an Iraqi administration. So I agree, B, that tea drinking isn't the only step required. And the tone of the article is obnoxious. The fact is, our officers have been doing an incredible job of outreach even though that isn't the main job they trained for. Source for this info: I attended an hour+ briefing Odierno gave yesterday, but the facts can be gathered from news stories and CPA briefings from last November. |
| Posted by: rkb 2004-04-14 8:13:47 AM |
| #3 Weapons?? We don't need no stinking weapons! We need tea, we need Col Robert Warburton. Silly Americans, weapons are for kids!!! WOW! I was surprised this wasn't written by a Euro weenie...as it is almost a primer of the Euro weenie belief system on how to win a war. It's not a worthy piece to fisk entirely, however canât resist sharing with you all this view into the window into the workings of a Euro weenie/NATO/ diplomat's mind. DISCLAIMER: it's not that I disagree with any particular point that the author is making, so please don't come back and argue any particular point with me. Rather, I'm simply pointing out that this reflects the typical Euro weenie/Liberal/Elite/NATO mindset that there simply wouldn't be any "messy contested zone", if we just sipped more tea and engaged in more witty repartee. The only way to get good information in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq is to spend a lot of time there, drinking tea with the locals and earning their trust. Ah..sip tea..have a party, have a meeting, have a conference... Get the UN and everyone go to lunch on the taxpayer's dime. But whatever you do....make NO decisions on a course of action that requires leadership. Just mingle with wit and you too can pretend to be a part of something big and doing something important...without actually having to do anything specific about a problem. But not many U.S. officials do that. Maybe that's because they are too busy actually fighting the war that rid Iraq of Sadaam, you know...rather than just having lunch and making witty quips about how stupid the Americans are. All of the U.S. soldiers who spent the last year in Iraq have gone home or are about to. I suppose this is as opposed to past techniques of the British or French, who made it a habit of moving in and colonizing the place. It's an ARMY for heaven's sake. It's a WAR. But here it is right here, my friends, a clear view into the Euro weenie/liberal/intellectual mind. Never will you find it more clear than this statement, NO make that BELIEF than is expressed by this following paragraph : Look at the example of Col. Robert Warburton, who spoke fluent Persian and Pashto and spent 18 years (1879-97) as the political officer in the Northwest Frontier Province of what is today Pakistan. He kept this volatile region (now a Taliban and al-Qaida stronghold) quiet through his personal influence. âIn an area where every male was habitually armed at all times,â historian Byron Farwell wrote, âhe went about with only a walking stick.â Within a month of his retirement, the area was swept by an Islamic fundamentalist revolt that took thousands of British soldiers to put down. There it is. That's it in a nutshell. All you need to do to win a war is to sip tea, make friends among the locals and send in a Col. Robert Warburton, intellectual-pacificst, to walk among the people and you can have peace in our time. It's just THAT simple, you simple minded Americans. |
| Posted by: B 2004-04-14 7:57:11 AM |
| #2 badanov - agreed!! But I like this line...ooohhh ouch - even his friends are willing to use Clinton's total ineptitude to wack Bush on the head. Oh the sweet irony. Otherwise they will be limited to ineffectual gestures such as cruise missile strikes against terrorist training camps (like the ones Bill Clinton launched against Afghanistan in August 1998) |
| Posted by: B 2004-04-14 7:14:18 AM |
| #1 * Yawn * More defeatist bullshit. And from an American media outlet. What a surprise. I think the writer should apply to Sadr for a job in writing propoganda. Lord knows that man can't cash any checks his mouth is writing. Oh wait, but the time Sadr gets your resume, he will be dead or wearing his very own toe tag |
| Posted by: badanov 2004-04-14 6:47:42 AM |