“The Insurgents, David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War.” By Fred Kaplan, 2013.
According to the book jacket, “The Insurgents is the inside story of the small group of soldier-scholars, led by General David Petraeus, who plotted to revolutionize one of the largest, oldest, and most hidebound institutions – the United States military. Their aim was to build a new Army that could fight the new king of war in the post-Cold War age: not massive wars on vast battlefields, but ‘small wars’ in cities and villages, against insurgents and terrorists. These would be wars not only of fighting but of ‘nation building, often not of necessity but of choice.”
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“[John] Nagl’s research project was evolving into a sort of case study as well, examining why, after a few years of failure, the British succeeded in crushing the Malayan Insurgency in the 1950s – and why, despite a decade of trying the United States failed to defeat the Viet Cong in the 1960s.. .. he wondered if a key factor might have been the two empires military leaders and the contrasting ways in which they learned…
“The conclusion Nagl wound up reaching confirmed his suspicion: the difference between the victory in Malaya and the defeat in Vietnam, he wrote, was ‘best explained by the differing organization cultures of the two armies; in short, that the British army was a learning institution and the American army was not.’ ”
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“The idea, [Petraeus] made clear to his staff many times was not to get the people of northern Iraq to love America; rather, it was to get a critical mass of these people to develop a vested interest – to feel a stake of ownership – in the new Iraq, because unless that happened, the country would spin out of control.”
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“Barely a week into his tenure as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the formal title of his office, [L. Paul] Bremer promulgated two directives – at whose behest is still unclear – that all but guaranteed disaster.
“CPA Order No l issued May 16, [2003] , banned all but the lowliest members of Saddam’s Baath Party from holding any government job. CPA Order No.2, released a week later, disbanded the Iraqi army.”…
“If Bremer’s orders didn’t create the insurgency, they certainly inflamed and accelerated its rise.
EDITOR: Consider that at the end of World War II, the first Americans to enter Japan were General Douglas Macarthur with a few aides, all without side arms. He proceeded to work with the Japanese bureaucracy and the Emperor to launch the extraordinarily successful evolution from its bellicose imperial past to a functioning, peaceful democracy.
Meanwhile in Europe, General George Patton made use of the existing Nazi administration to keep the government and economy going until he could weed out those to be prosecuted or dismissed for war crimes.
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“In December, 2003, [Colonel Herbert] McMaster wrote [General John] Abizaid a thirteen- page memo : ‘Military operations alone cannot defeat an insurgency because only economic development and political action can address most sources of disaffection. If military operations are not conducted consistent with political objectives or occur without economic development, they are certain to alienate the population further, reduce the amount of intelligence available to US and Iraqi security forces, and strengthen rather than weaken the enemy.’ ”
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“Now there was a real war going on, yet the senior officers in the Pentagon were shuffling through their routines as if Americans in uniform weren’t fighting and dying anywhere on the planet.”
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“[Vice President Joe] Biden said he understood all that, acknowledged that [Admiral ] Mullen’s case [for a surge] had logic. But, he argued, this course wasn’t politically sustainable; it would require a lot of troops, a lot of money, a lot of time, and the American people wouldn’t put up with it.”
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“[Ambassador] Karl Eikenberry, a retired three-star general …sent a secret cable to secretary of State Hillary Clinton…It was a lengthy critique of [General Stanley] McChrystal’s entire presentation: his assessment of the security situation, his request for more troops, and his call for a shift to a counterinsurgency strategy. Eikenberry stated the reasons for his objections in a simple, shocking sentence: ‘President Karzai,’ he wrote, ‘is not an adequate strategic partner.’ ”
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“[Policy adviser Sarah] Chayes had concluded that the problem with the Afghan government wasn’t that it lacked competence or resources, but rather, that it was corrupt and predatory. Simply training officials wouldn’t improve matters; it might only make them more effective predators.”
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EDITOR: As NewsLanc has stressed since the inception of the Afghan war, it was as though no one ever examined a topographical map. The terrain defies central government control, be it by Afghans or invaders. We needed to get in, kick the butts of al Queda, made ‘nice’ with the local tribal leaders by promising them still more money in the future, and gotten out.
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“Petraeus’s frustrations, in short, stemmed not so much from Karzai as from the nature of Afghanistan itself: its primitive economy (which impeded the rise of an educated, entrepreneurial class); its vast scattered rural population (which a weak central government could rule only through a corrupt patronage network); and its long border with a state who leaders were assisting the insurgency (which limited the success of any fight confined to Afghan territory).
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“Ideally in a war, civilian authorities set the strategic goals, and military commanders devise the plans and tactics to achieve those objectives But the Bush administration had no strategy in Iraq beyond toppling Saddam; and in Afghanistan, it had no strategy beyond toppling the Taliban.”
“Modern-day America does not like messy and slow, especially slow. David Petraeus had written in his PhD dissertation, nearly a quarter century before retiring from the Army, ‘Vietnam was an extremely painful reminder that when it comes to intervention, time and patience are not American virtues in abundant supply.”
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EDITOR: In short, the armed services learned how to combat insurgencies. But they also learned that US role should be limited to training the forces of allies and, at most, inserting a relatively few advisors. (Watch what the US is doing with Syria.)
Iraq and Afghanistan were big and expensive lessons. Had the U. S. Army been capable of learning from its earlier experiences, it would not have required such tragic and expensive wars to change its mind set.
