The Army and Vietnam, part 3

Hmmm….well Krepinevich is a professional anti-insurgency type expert and I’m not, so I suppose we should listen to what he has to say. But if you want my uninformed opinion, I think the key paragraph, and the one where it all goes wrong, is here:

‘After the army has driven off or killed the main guerilla forces, its units must remain in the area while local paramilitary forces are created and the influence of the police force is reestablished. The paramilitary forces should be drawn from among the inhabitants of the area and trained in counterinsurgency operations such as small-unit patrolling, night operations, and the ambush. Resurrection of the local police force is equally important. Properly trained, the police can make an invaluable contribution to the defeat of the insurgents by weeding out the political infrastructure, thus preventing the reemergence of the insurgent movement once the army departs.’

Now. Let’s bend over backwards to be fair and assume it is easy or at least doable to drive out the insurgents. The key problem is this, in a nutshell: to create a non-corrupt, well disciplined ‘indigenous’ police and (then) army.

Now the key to this is not tactics or any specific anti-insurgency model or anything like that. It’s quite simply: money. If you pay the police well they have no incentive to be corrupt (take bribes etc.), and if they have adequate numbers they have little incentive to be brutal. So you don’t just need a well paid police force, you need a well paid, well disciplined police force with plenty of policemen and women.

The problem is: who is to pay for all this? Not the US: they have already indicated their ‘financial patience’ is drying up. But Iraq is bankrupt. So: who pays?

Moreover it’s clear that this police force (and then, on the same model, army) has to be set up immediately, when you have a ‘blank slate’ with which to operate. When things are allowed to drag on a culture of corruption and brutality can (and in Iraq, has) been allowed to develop, in which even the honest cops, to get on, have to ‘turn a blind eye’ to all the bad things they know are going on.

And of course, this new, corrupt, brutal police force acts as a recruiting force for the insurgency, as they are then seen as simply the tool of the occupier: and since they act for the highest bidder, and the occupier will almost always be the highest bidder, this is usually true.

This is only the start of the problems but it is the key one. Counter-insurgency is, above all, costly, and it seems that the coffers of the US in Iraq (and soon, it seems, Afghanstan) are almost empty.

Poland was occupied for what – 6-7 years? They had local polizei forces, local paramilitary forces and all that. And in the end Polish reistance managed to maintain not one but two organized armies there. I guess the Germans didn’t read the book.

Not to be cynical, but I doubt very much that anything the U.S. could have done would have nipped corruption in the bud in Iraq or any other Arab country. It’s deeply engrained in that culture.

Of course, if success in pacifying Iraq was going to require an uncorrupt indigenous paramilitary and police force, that would count as an argument against invading in the first place, but it doesn’t seem to me like a fair criticism of the execution of the occupation.

Interesting series of threads, Ted. Of course, a lot of this is just elaborations on what T.E. Lawrence said in Seven Pillars and, within the U.S. military, what the Army learned fighting the Plains Indians/Filipinos & the Marine Corps learned fighting the Filipinos/Banana Republics (all discreditable actions, more or less, from a state policy standpoint–but at least the USMC learned something from them: Keith Bickel’s Mars Learning: The Marine Corps’ Development of Small Wars Doctrine, 1915-1940 is a fascinating read).

One thing beyond the troop level question that I learned from a retired Special Forces general last spring–and a story I haven’t seen anyone follow up/check–is that during military downsizing of 1990s we gutted our Civil Affairs battalions, including something like 70% of the reserve component. Now if you wanted to go into a major invasion with a severe handicap against making it work, I think that would be a good way to do it.

Alas, a highly un-sexy story for the newspapers.

I have to agree with Ron F. It seems evident to me that we did not replace a dictatorship with a fledgling democracy. We replaced it first with the governance of a floundering old American, Jay Garner (who at least had the sense to know that Americans, completely ignorant of even the most minimal elements of Iraqi culture, couldn’t run the state and advocated immediate elections) and then the governance of the CPA under an American businessman, Paul Bremer, who not only ruled Iraq without any supervision for Iraq’s money (the famous 8 billion or so that is unaccounted for), which is the kind of non-trasparency one associates with dictatorship, but also used the judicial branch as a mere branch of the executive (the shutting down of Sadr’s papers and his arrest warrent, for instance, were – comically — filtered through the court, completely vitiating any chance of the court appearing to be autonomous).

If anything, the CPA was your normal military dictatorship government, not very different from Nasser’s in the aftermath of the officer’s coup in the fifties, except that the financial corruption was completely speeded up, and its beneficiaries existed entirely outside of the country.

The rule of law, without which democracy is a sham, has been violated at the whim of the Americans even after the CPA supposedly ceded its sovereignty. For instance, the CPA laid down rules for the time period within which the constitution was to be created and voted upon. The national assemlby, of course, under American pressure, simply tossed out those rules when they became inconveniant.

And this is only to focus on a small part of Iraq — it is a baghdad-centric account. If one looks at, say, what the British have protected in Basra, it is pretty evident that security concerns — for the British themselves — long ago overthrew even the flimsiest shred of democratic activity. The Sicilian mafia is more democratic than the town council of Basra.

The reduction of democracy to a function of the slogan, vote early and vote often, means the collapse of democracy into mere farce. I would view the models the occupiers planted in Iraq as being anti-democratic in the extreme.

Sorry, a keyboard error.

We wanted to kill off the insurgents and have a democracy restricted to iraqis who didn’t oppose us.

And it had to be done on the cheap. It could be argued that the money siphoned out of iraq by contractors etc was good for the USA — it’s like getting money out of a failing subsidiary before you close it down. Why spend money on something that’s going to fail anyway?

Y81
I think this issue was touched on in the ‘Tokyo nerve gas’ post, but I’m deeply sceptical about explanations that depend (implicitly in this case) on the ‘Arabic national/racial character’ or anything like that. I don’t know where Iraq was in the 70s in terms of the world corruption league, but I know that it’s near the top now. Extreme totalitarian regimes can have many problems but ‘common or garden’ corruption tends not to be one of them. On the contrary: everyone is honest because the penalty for ‘everything’ is death so people are too terrified to break even minor laws.

The fact is that if a police force is badly paid relative to the rest of the population then you have an incentive for corruption in a way you don’t if the police force is highly paid: you just have to assume people acting as rational utility maximisers. You don’t need to invoke the ‘Arabic character’ or anything like that. Bro Bartleby’s point is apposite here. The Abramoff scandal would seem (to an outsider) to indicate that Congressional (at least) American politics is now institutionally corrupt. Is anyone pointing a finger at the ‘white man’s’ or ‘anglo-saxon’ propensity towards corruption?

I could have gone on (and on and on…..) about the problems following from this, but there are obvious problems that ‘The Coalition are heroic liberators’ crowd won’t admit. That doesn’t mean they weren’t/aren’t real. The fact is (and this IS a fact) that if ‘your’ country (whatever that might be) had done nothing to another country, and that other country invaded and occupied your country, you would be resentful, no matter how liberated you might feel (if you deny this, my response is simple: i don’t believe you). Therefore the people who tend to ‘collaborate’ with the invaders will tend to be the sort of people who were described in ye olden days as people of ‘bad character’: i.e. they will be doing it purely for the money. So you have a problem right for the start: your army and police force are not staffed by bright eyed, intelligent, fearless patriots, but instead by people there to make a quick buck. And these people will tend to be more quickly swayed by the option of a large bribe to avoid doing all that paperwork.

And once you have a culture of corruption, it’s hard to get rid of. Who would want to join the Iraqi army or police force now? Everyone knows the culture is one of dissatisfaction, poor training, poor morale, poor pay. So they become pitied, looked down on, and as this happens, they become increasingly likely to lash out. And then they become despised.

And it’s at this point that the insurgents message: ‘they are just stooges for the invaders’ starts to spread, along with increasing insurgent targetting of those collaborating with the Iraqi army/police force. Result: even poorer morale, which means more bribery, corruption etc. etc. etc.

The end result is that every time the Americans try and ‘hand things over’ to the ‘regular’ Iraqi army, that army promptly collapses. And this is not to mention the problem of insurgents masquerading as police/army, insurgent spies, and so forth.

I believe it can’t be said enough that when Bush and Blair state that ‘we will leave when the Iraqi army is ready to take over’ they are effectively saying ‘we will stay forever’ because (without a radical revision of tactics) the Iraqi army will never be ready.

J Thomas: “Lots of jobs, lots of money, why fight?” Even that would have probably failed, because (a) this administration would have increased its skim percentage, keeping everybody in Iraq poor and (b) they could screw up a one-car parade.

“not one but two organized armies there”

Three actually. I’m not sure whether you’re forgetting the far-right or the far-left, but probably the former.

y81, are you talking about Staff or Faculty? :P

Isn’t trying to illuminate the analysis through an American light misleading?

Take a look at Global Guerrillas – the whole blog. At the time of writing, the first story is about “THE GUERRILLA OIL CARTEL” and describes how these people (terrorists – no; crooks, racketeers) control 5 million barrels per day of oil (cf Saudi 2 million barrels per day). What America is going to do about it and the Iraqi war are tangential issues. It isn’t even worth debating whether or not the invasion made the situation worse: it did.

In short, we’re looking at the demise of the nation state. Any analysis that doesn’t take this into account is suspect.

Remember that the Russians did then manage to stamp out all guerilla activity in Poland and the Baltics within four or five years of taking over.

If by ‘Poland’ you mean the part of Poland annexed by Stalin in 1939, then I don’t think that’s true. I don’t have any links at the moment, but it is my impression that organized armed resistance in Western Ukraine and Lithuania was active well into the 1950s and some spontaneous anti-Russian/anti-Soviet terrorist activity pretty much until the end of the USSR.

And if by Poland you mean Poland – well, communist Poland was after all a sovereign state. If I’m not mistaken they even had a multi-party political system there. A client state for sure, but no more so than, say, Japan or South Korea during the same period.

Well, sure, if the goal of counter-insurgency is to control industrial centers and railroads – then it’s not unrealistic, but that’s not what Mr. Krepinevich is writing about. Also, the Warsaw uprising killed 15-20 thousand German soldiers in the course of a couple of months. That’s not peanuts.

Abb1, the genocidal Nazi policies in Poland made the creation of any reliable Polish local forces quite impossible.
Nazi policies in all occupied countries were so destructive and exploitative that compared to them almost any government anywhere looks not too bad.
Even hard-core Fascists like Quisling and Mussert were disappointed and demoralized by the Nazis.
They’re really not a good benchmark to use.

OK, Lurker, fair enough. What about Maquis in Vichy, then? There was functioning French government in Vichy with all kinds of local institutions, police/military/paramilitary and non-trivial local support.

‘US military assessment of readiness is the statistic usually quoted to support your view. An assesment produced by the same set of officers who mismanaged the situation in the first place.’

Er no because in both cases the bias is the same: excessive optimism.

In any case, even if your point was accurate there are even deeper problems, as this article describes:

‘With American help, the Iraqi army is emerging as a lightly armed counterinsurgency force that may control more of the country than the U.S.-led coalition by this spring, U.S. military officials say.

But in coming years the Iraqi army will remain too weak to defend the country and reliant far into the future on America to guarantee Iraq’s sovereignty, experts say….The dilemma for Washington, which wants to hand off its counterinsurgency duties and depart as soon as possible, is that a weak Iraqi army could leave U.S. forces providing security for Iraq for many years…if Iraq is to avoid domination by neighbors – especially Iran – Alani said Baghdad will eventually need a military at least twice as large as planned, armed with weapons that are not in the cards: artillery, attack aircraft and even ballistic missiles.

“Self-defense can’t be done with the forces they’re talking about,” Alani said. “If America wants an independent Iraq that can stand on its own and prevent intervention, there’s no option but to build an offensive capability.”

There are no plans to provide Iraq with artillery or other heavy weapons….’

Moreover: ‘Sectarian divisions continue to be a problem. Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said some security forces were allowed “to act as a virtual extension of Shiite efforts to attack the Sunnis.”

The Kurds’ peshmerga militia remains stronger than Iraq’s national army, Alani said, and most Kurds want to ensure the peshmerga is never disarmed. Shiite parties, too, want to keep militias intact, he said.

“They don’t want to see a strong army because it won’t allow these militia to operate,” Alani said.’

So even if (somehow) the problem of inflitration by the insurgency, corruption, brutality, underfunding, and so forth could be sorted, you have an even more fundamental problem which is that neither Iraq’s neighbours (especially Kuwait) nor significant forces within Iraq (especially the Kurds) actually WANT a well funded, well armed, efficient army on the (well founded) grounds that this might be used against THEM. Moreover, many ‘soldiers’ in the Iraqi army are in fact members of the Kurdish militia with loyalty only to the emerging stage of Kurdistan.

Of course to accept this line of thinking would involve admitting that the Kurds are part of the problem as well as being part of the solution, and so I don’t expect this thoughtcrime to be accepted by the ‘pro-occupation’ crowd anytime soon.

“Extreme totalitarian regimes can have many problems but ‘common or garden’ corruption tends not to be one of them. On the contrary: everyone is honest because the penalty for ‘everything’ is death so people are too terrified to break even minor laws.”

Brendan, that varies a whole lot.

The first thing that helps with corruption is ideology. If a whole lot of people have ideals, they personally won’t do corruption unless they have to for survival. And they’ll despise corrupt guys when they find out about them.

The second thing that helps is feedback. When corrupt guys get turned in and neutralised, everybody who knew they were corrupt sees the system working. But when they get caught and the guy who caught them just wants a piece of the action, then it fails. Everybody who knows about it sees a culture of corruption.

The early soviet union might have been pretty non-corrupt. I dunno. But as it matured and the ideology failed, that definitely broke down. If you and your division chief are both corrupt, he’ll try to protect you. He’ll show you he’s doing as much as he can to protect you hoping that if you do get caught you won’t rat on him, and there’s a reasonable chance you’ll go to your grave with his secrets. Usually no point replacing either of you, the next guys will be just as bad. At least you’re loyal to the next guys up. Every now and then some guys get shot for corruption and it’s generally considered just their bad luck.

To make it work you need at least enough incorruptible people to inspect the others’ work. That’s ideology. They have to believe that the system is worth maintaining, or the inspectors will cheat whenever they can get away with it, just like the regular officials.

“Who will watch the watchers?”

Well, I disagree about the Baltic states – these states had been a part of Russian empire for 200 years, I don’t think 20 years of independence (1918-1939) was enough to inspire many people there to fight and die. Plus the overlord wasn’t, in fact, too ruthless most of the time; these republics had higher standard of living than most of the USSR; they had a degree of autonomy, and their culture wasn’t suppressed much, as far as I know. They were unhappy for sure, but not too unhappy.

As far as Vichy goes, I think you’re right and the point is: if there is a political cause for an insurgency – the insurgency is not going away whether you eliminate their ‘infrastructure’ or not. You have to eliminate the cause or eliminate significant part of the population.

And if the insurgency is just a bunch of bandits not supported by the population, … well, then it’s not really an insurgency, is it?

And if the insurgency is just a bunch of bandits not supported by the population, … well, then it’s not really an insurgency, is it?

That sums up the early response. We officially thought it was only a few thousand “dead-enders” who hadn’t figured out they’d lost yet. Kill enough of them that the rest give up and it’s no problem.

We want to think of ourselves as liberators that almost everybody supports. So if we find out that a significant part of the population opposes us, we then need some reason why so many people would be evil enough to oppose liberation.

First off: to answer Soru’s point:

‘Actual performance of the Iraqi forces seems to have been pretty good the last year. Reported problems tend to be those of excessive zeal (i.e. torture and assassination), not surrender or going over to the other side.’

From 2005:

‘Iraqi army and police units are deserting their posts after the recent escalation in insurgent attacks, according to reports from around the country yesterday.’

However, let’s bend over backwards to be fair and assume (wrongly in my opinion) that this is a dealable with problem.

Next problem: ‘Opinion polls make it appear that shias generally approve of iraqi army recruits. They feel liket he iraqi army is going to do good things. They like the idea of having an iraqi army.’

Well, perhaps. Or is it, perhaps, that they like the idea of a Shia dominated Iraqi army?

‘The Bush administration’s exit strategy for Iraq rests on two pillars: an inclusive, democratic political process that includes all major ethnic groups and a well-trained Iraqi national army. But a week spent eating, sleeping and going on patrol with a crack unit of the Iraqi army – the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division – suggests that the strategy is in serious trouble. Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that’s tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.’

The only question for me is: will historians, looking back, date the beginning of the Iraqi civil war to 2009? Or 2005?

‘Brendan, I have disagreed with you on two points, that iraqi police and military are poorly paid, and that the iraqi public despises them.

While they are very poorly paid by US standards, they are quite well paid by iraqi standards. Opinion polls and anecdotal evidence say they are respected by iraqis, though it of course tends to be kurdish soldiers who get respected by kurds and shia soldiers who get respected by shias.’

Well I’m not really disagreeing with you. I think the solution to the problem is to see that the problems of Iraq has changed. Initially, the Iraqi forces were badly paid, and despised. But as you pointed out (although I think they are still badly paid) unemployment has increased a lot since then, so it’s probably not as bad a job as it once was. In the same way, just because (as the rest of the economy disintegrates) it’s one of the few jobs still around, to join the army or police force is probably a lot less societally unacceptable than it used to be.

So in a sense the Americans have solved that problem. But at what a cost! The way the problem has been ‘solved’ of course is by the creation of a Kurdish militia and a Shia militia, both operating under the rubric of ‘the Iraqi army’: neither having any loyalty to ‘Iraq’, but only to Kurdistan in the one case and…well….Iran probably in the other.

And of course all the problems stated in the first paragraph STILL apply (double) to the Sunni areas.

Incidentally, when I used to write for the unlamented (by everyone except me) ‘no war blog’ i once semi-jokingly remarked that perhaps the Americans would return back to their Sunni-Ba’athist friends. After all, the Ba’athists and the Americans worked well together: the Americans still support Sunni extremists in Saudi Arabia, and Iran is now the new enemy of the minute. It seems I might have been right:

‘Three years after Washington ousted Saddam Hussein from power, some Shi’ite leaders and even U.S. allies say it is switching favor to the ex-leader’s Sunni minority to counter Iran and its nuclear ambitions.

U.S. officials say the efforts to “reach out” to Sunni Arabs are needed to undermine a violent insurgency they are waging and to foster a stable government.

But Shi’ite leaders brought to power by the U.S.-led invasion also see an attempt to clip their wings because of the influence over them of neighboring Shi’ite Iran.’

It’s not completely impossible that when all this nightmare has run its course in (say) 20 years time that the situation will end up much the same as it began, with a neo-Saddam, backed by the US, back in power.

But I still think a catastrophic civil war, which will probably enlarge and engulf the whole region (possibly with the use of nuclear weapons) is still the most likely scenario.

“What’s the third one?”

The right wing NSZ (Nationalist Armed Forces) – it split in ’42 or so with the moderate half joining the “Krajowa” (the other half was pretty much fascist). It had more members than the “Ludowa” though, at least prior to the split.

@Luc (post 38):
“Creating local militias? Intelligence operations by local police? Destroying the political cadre of your opponents? All counterproductive for a stable democratic process.”
I’d say a government (democratic or otherwise) able to mobilize real popular support could definitely do all of this but they’d do it themselves without waiting for a foreign military to tell them to do it.

Lurker, when there’s no government of any sort then that sort of thing would have to arise locally. And then the various local governments might not get along. But when we tried local elections in the first year we were getting islamist local governments (or anyway local governments that expressed a lot of respect for islam, perhaps no more than many american local governments do for christianity, but still…) and Bremer tried to shut those down and replace them with appointed local governors.

We could still get workable local governments with local militias and local police. But at this point the places we’re having trouble, those would be insurgent local governments with insurgent militias and insurgent police. If they were represented in regional and national government they might not fight, but the US government would probably consider it a defeat.