BLOOD YEAR

Correspondence

Paul McGeough

In a news report in the Washington Post this morning, the United States is described as “the greatest nation in the world.” A Post op-ed the other day referred to the US as “the leader of the free world,” and in the election campaign now underway you’ll see the presidential nominees tested on their allegiance to the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

Amid so much self-congratulatory greatness, how to explain Washington’s serial bungling in the Middle East? And in that context, what are we to make of David Kilcullen’s recent contribution to the debate?

As an Australian counterinsurgency expert with years of service in the US military and diplomatic machine, Kilcullen is rightly critical of the American record in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had a front-row seat for that, but now he’s doubling down, urging all-out war against ISIS – and in so doing, he seems to gloss over the usefulness of the elements of counterinsurgency.

Millions of defenceless citizens are caught up in the mess that is Iraq and Syria. Millions more in the region are destabilised as its impact is felt across the region, or they suffer under regimes that are pampered allies of the West, but which are contemptuous of the rights of their people and also increasingly contemptuous of their American friends as they run their regional agendas.

Consider: we are in the fifth year of the Syrian crisis, and only recently have Ankara and Washington been able to agree on a no-fly zone to protect thousands of Syrian refugees huddling on the Syria–Turkey border. And in the New York Times report that broke news of the no-fly zone, we read that a Pentagon program to train and arm rebel fighters in Syria had formally vetted just sixty fighters.

Why so late, so slow, so few? The Middle East is complex, and Syria has to be the most fraught of its serial crises. But Washington and its allies – Australia included – keep going back to the region, assuring us they know how to fix its problems. Remember Tony Abbott’s plan for a unilateral Australian invasion of Iraq – 3500 diggers to see off ISIS? Too often, in failing to understand the region, the nature of its conflicts and the resources needed to achieve the stated objectives, the West reveals itself as the problem, not the solution.

Kilcullen knows his stuff, and he’s entertaining. But Blood Year jars and jolts as he marches on, throwing out Rumsfeldian assurances that this time we know what we’re up against, know what we’re doing.

He sets up a colossal challenge – then argues that it can be done on a dime. This time, he wants just a conventional military response – no open-ended commitment, no counterinsurgency, none of the counterterrorism effort that cost a fortune in Iraq and Afghanistan and that, with all the drama of a slow-motion car crash, revealed the limits of American power.

Kilcullen figures on foreign combat numbers “moderately larger” than the current 4000 or so. But putting a non-specific division- or corps-sized ceiling on his number means that it could rise to 40,000 on his prescription. He argues that airstrikes, now averaging a paltry 10 a day across both Syria and Iraq, need to be amped up. He’s figuring on the scale of Kosovo in 1999 – an average of 250 airstrikes a day over eleven weeks; or the invasion, but not its aftermath, of Afghanistan in 2001 – an initial 5000 troops and about 80 airstrikes a day over ten weeks; or Libya in 2011 – a handful of special operations guys on the ground and 45 airstrikes daily for about seven months.

But in looking at those three interventions, it would be foolhardy to invest all your hopes in a rerun of Kosovo, which ended, militarily, on a relatively tidy note. In both Afghanistan and Libya the aftermath was disastrous – each is still roiled by war and suffering, and Washington rates both as ongoing threats to the national interest. And who can forget the promises that invading Iraq would be “a cakewalk”?

In a war in which more than 200,000 have died in Syria alone, Kilcullen’s deference to the counterinsurgency mantra of protecting the population is seemingly limited to taking greater care with airstrikes. Were Rumsfeld, Cheney or Wolfowitz ever so cavalier?

Kilcullen covers himself with this pitch: “This is a case when the job will become much harder, require much more lethal force and do more harm as time goes on: we have to go hard, now, or we’ll end up having to go in much harder, and potentially on a much larger scale, later – or accept defeat. The risk is not that ISIS will somehow restart its blitzkrieg and conquer Iraq and Syria. Rather, the threat is that of a regional conflagration if there’s no effective international (which, like it or not, means Western-led) response.”

But that’s all it is – a pitch. He makes no allowance for all that could, and does, go wrong after the first shots are fired in war; or for the so-called Pottery Barn principle, cited by Colin Powell when he prophetically warned George W. Bush as he girded his loins to invade Iraq in 2003: “You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You’ll own it all.”

In a nutshell, Kilcullen’s argument is this: like it or not, the West is already engaged in a conventional military struggle with ISIS, and to get to the other side, it needs to go deeper. Oddly, the voice he quotes at greatest length in his essay is George Mason University’s Audrey Kurth Cronin – despite her very different view of the conflict. In the end, he simply disagrees with her, batting back her warnings of the cost of a fully-fledged military campaign, the exhaustion of US resources and the limited chance of success.

In the Middle East, it’s as though a history of foreign intervention is sufficient to justify more intervention, as though somehow it’s okay to use other people’s lives and homelands as laboratories for what might be a smart new Western idea. Merely testing the idea is enough; there is no recognition that by intervening you take on a huge duty of care to the poor buggers whose misfortune it is to live there. Typical of this mindset is former US military and intelligence chief David Petraeus. Co-authoring a “Whither Afghanistan?” piece in the Washington Post in June, he wrote: “All is not lost. Far from it. Kabul is much safer than most cities in war zones.” But that’s a ridiculously low bar when compared to all the lofty reform and development promises – implicit and explicit – made by the West on invading in 2001.

These days, as we read reports of war-weariness driving the US generals to plead for no greater US military involvement in the battle with ISIS, it’s as though Kilcullen is channelling the Bush White House – and it’s scary. In background briefings to reporters, the generals have become leery, because they don’t see a viable outcome. But Kilcullen writes more about what his expansion would not be, than what it would: “I think we should explicitly rule out any occupation and commit only to a moderately larger number of ground troops than at present – but under very different rules of engagement, and with a radically increased weight of air power to back them … Why so hawkish a response? Because this is an escalating threat that’s growing and worsening.” And if “we” don’t, he warns, there is the risk of a regional implosion.

Some years back, while interviewing Kilcullen, I speculated on what level of insurgency violence would make Iraq ungovernable. In response, he assured me that the level of violence was less important than the capacity of a government to deal with it. By that measure Iraq and Syria have had it, and it could be that the near-century-old borders of the Middle East are dissolving before our eyes. And if the Syria and Iraq imagined by British and French diplomats Sykes and Picot are over, their absence could well call into question the viability of Jordan and Lebanon. Based in Beirut, the former British intelligence agent and diplomat Alastair Crooke goes further, depicting ISIS as a “veritable time bomb inserted in the heart of the Middle East,” with all the potential to cause the “implosion of Saudi Arabia as a foundation stone of the modern Middle East.” So the risk of conflagration is real and I’m not sure that it is fully understood or appreciated outside the Middle East. 

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Kilcullen is right on Osama bin Laden’s masterstroke in aggregating what previously were localised grievances and conflicts to create a global jihad against the West, from Somalia to Indonesia to Chechnya. Addressing a military audience in 2003, Kilcullen noted that, “Without the … ability to aggregate dozens of conflicts into a broad movement, the global jihad ceases to exist. It becomes simply a series of disparate local conflicts that are capable of being solved by nation-states … A strategy of Disaggregation would seek to dismantle, or break up, the links that allow the jihad to function as a global entity.”

However, there are three problems here. One, the advent of the internet and social media made aggregation a no-brainer for terrorists. Two, bin Laden was able to offer himself as a saviour to those in crisis around the world precisely because the West did little or nothing to address their grievances. And three, how can those “nation-states” be relied on to do anything if they are failing, broken or rife with corruption?

It might well be that no amount of Western intervention will head off an implosion. But in the meantime, there is a way around the seeming resignation in Washington to a choice between anarchy and autocracy. As the Brookings Institution’s Shadi Hamid argues, “If ISIS and what will surely be a growing list of imitators are to be defeated, then statehood and, more importantly, states that are inclusive and accountable to their people are essential.”

The West is too willing to intervene militarily, and too reluctant to confront autocratic leaders on abuse of the rights of their people. Thus Kilcullen dwells more on support for governments than he does on support for peoples. He acknowledges that on invading Iraq, the West had a “legal and ethical obligation to stabilise the society we’d disrupted.” Yet he concludes that Iraq is again sovereign and independent, and hence “no such obligation exists now.”

Sovereign and independent. Really? Baghdad and Damascus have each lost control of about one-third of their territory, they don’t control their common border and they can neither protect nor provide for their people. Kilcullen then tries to argue that although ISIS-controlled territory overlays both these supposedly sovereign nations, ISIS is itself a state, so it is a legitimate military target for the West. At the same time, Kilcullen rates the Assad regime as “odious,” but implies that its dubious sovereignty should somehow protect it from the same fate as Saddam Hussein’s regime. Like others, he seems bent on keeping both Iraq and Syria as post-Ottoman, Western constructs, crafted for Western, not local, interests.

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In the absence of policies that genuinely serve the interests of the peoples of the region, there is an argument that containment is a better option for handling ISIS. It’s ungainly and uncertain, to be sure, but it does seem to fit somewhere between Kilcullen’s hedged options – at one point he argues that maybe ISIS will mellow, as revolutionary Moscow and Tehran did, and elsewhere that ISIS is irreconcilable and so must be destroyed. Maybe it’s time to test a line thrown out there, back in 1923, by one fabled British diplomat to another – Gertrude Bell to Percy Cox. Bell wrote: “I believe that however much we know about the East, what we never can know is the effect orientals will have on one another if you leave them to themselves.”

Despite efforts to blame Islam for the mayhem in the region, the problem is in the region’s capitals, not in the Koran. More pertinent than “What’s wrong with Islam?” is this question: if the Iraqi tribes were willing to see off al-Qaeda in Iraq, why do they acquiesce in the face of this onslaught by ISIS?

Audrey Cronin, writing in the March–April 2015 issue of Foreign Affairs, argued that the old US counterinsurgency drill, in which Kilcullen had a hand, doesn’t fit today’s conflict, because “the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government has so badly undercut its own political legitimacy that it might be impossible to restore it … [and] Washington … cannot lend legitimacy to a government it no longer controls.” Kilcullen concedes that local Sunnis see any likely alternative as a worse deal than the one they get under ISIS – especially anything led by the United States. But by invoking Kanan Makiya’s Republic of Fear to liken ISIS control to that of Saddam Hussein, Kilcullen misses another point: so many countries in the Middle East are republics of fear, to varying degrees, that fear is a regional norm. Theirs is the stability Hillary Clinton said we had to have in Egypt, as protesters in Cairo chanted “Down, down, Hosni Mubarak” in January 2011; theirs the restoration of democracy for which John Kerry thanks the Egyptian field marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Kilcullen does acknowledge that security aid in the absence of government reform, human rights, rule of law, and economic development will backfire. But in dwelling on broad security issues, he diminishes the latter as essential elements in his equation, especially as the Saudis are becoming more aggressive and the United States and others sell more and more arms into the region, despite a near total refusal by the regimes to commit ground forces to fight ISIS.

Later, Kilcullen explains away the White House resort to drone strikes and unilateral Special Forces raids as “tacit recognition that partnerships with local governments were not succeeding.” At the same time, he argues that it would take years for alternatives like thoroughgoing anti-corruption and political reform programs to make governments capable of dealing with terrorism. But such programs only have a chance of working before the onset of terrorism; once it starts, you’ve got Buckley’s – because the local leaders targeted for Western reform therapy quickly become aware that they are in a position to manipulate their would-be foreign reformers.

Interesting, too, is how Kilcullen casts al-Qaeda in the context of the Arab Spring. As he sees it, the death of Osama bin Laden mired the movement in a protracted leadership struggle. ‘‘AQ was absent … failing [for the moment] to infiltrate the Arab Spring, and the grievances it sought to exploit were being resolved peacefully, which was the last thing it wanted.’’

I beg to differ. Short-lived as it was, and though so few of the grievances it raised were actually resolved, the Arab Spring was proof of how tens of millions of young and frustrated Arabs, over-educated and under-employed, might have responded to a long-term campaign of social, cultural and educational diplomacy coupled with some severe bullying by the West, instead of the West slobbering over their corrupt leaders. As Condoleezza Rice said in Cairo in the northern summer of 2005, clearly on a day when she had not been drinking the exceptionalist Kool-Aid: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in … the Middle East, and we achieved neither.” 

For a secretary of state who got it so right in 2005, she got it absurdly wrong the following year, when she described the Israeli invasion of Lebanon as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” No – that would have been the Arab Spring, when it was the West, potentially far more influential than al-Qaeda is or was, that was missing in action.

Paul McGeough