Costs of war: Conceptual confusion
By Shaun Waterman for ISN
One important reason why the US is finding the going so hard in its war on terror is conceptual confusion. It's hard to have a strategy for victory when the objectives, indeed the whole character of the conflict, are so poorly understood.
An example of that confusion is that the war against terror - as it has actually been fought - is better described, in two of its most important theaters, as a counterinsurgency campaign. The US and its allies are fighting insurgencies in Iraq and in Afghanistan- Pakistan.
This optic is useful because of what it tells us about the role the US and allied militaries ought to play in the conflict. Most strategists agree, and senior US military officials have acknowledged publicly, that it is all but impossible for a foreign military force to defeat an insurgency.
Allied military operations of course have an impact, especially if they are planned through the hearts-and-mind optic of counterinsurgency theory. But the key to long-term success is developing the capacity of domestic forces and assisting them in restoring security - nation-building on the one hand and peacekeeping and stability operations on the other.
In this context, the celebrations about the success of the militia strategy that the US has pursued in Iraq - and that some advocate expanding to Afghanistan - look premature, at best.
Under the strategy, US forces are paying local armed groups to maintain security in Iraq. Nationwide, more than 100,000 fighters, mostly former Sunni insurgents, are organized in these militias, often recruited along tribal lines.
Effectively, they have been paid to change sides, to join the US and its allies in their fight against al-Qaida - although the ground work was done by the group itself, which alienated and eventually went to war with its Sunni partners in the insurgency.
In doing so, they have contributed to the fall-off in violence and helped provide the local intelligence, which has been one of the keys to the success against al-Qaida enjoyed by the surge of US forces.
But in the longer term, on the nation-building and security balance-sheet, it is at best unclear what the effect of the strategy will be.
The key to success or failure in Iraq lies not in any short-term reduction in attacks or even in the destruction of al-Qaida's networks in the country (after all, if the situation, deteriorates again, they can always come back and build new ones), but in the long-term project of building a state that has sufficient legitimacy and enjoys enough of a monopoly on violence that it can maintain security for its citizens, avoid a civil war and lay the groundwork for a possible democratic future.
From this point of view, the militia strategy is a rather large gamble, and whether it will pay off or not crucially depends on the next phase - the integration of the militias into Iraq's regular security forces.
The US has created "in effect, two armies" in Iraq, Dan Curfiss, a professor at the National Defense University's Near East and South Asia Center in Washington, DC, tells ISN Security Watch.
He warns that if the effort to integrate the militias fails, they "could very easily return to a rogue status."
But the Shiite-led Iraqi government is deliberately slow-rolling efforts to absorb the Sunni fighters into the Iraqi military, according to the US commander there, General David Petraeus.
Next month, the US military will hand over to the Iraqis the administration of contracts that it has with groups employing thousands of fighters in the strategically vital Sunni suburbs of Baghdad. The US military maintains an extensive database of information about the fighters, including biometrics like fingerprints; but it is unclear if the Iraqis will get this as part of the hand-over.
How the Shiite-led government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki handles the contracts will be a key indicator of whether the militia strategy gamble will pay off, but the signs are not good.
Maliki "has no interest in integrating these guys - none," says Colin Kahl, of the Center for a New American Security, who was recently briefed by the US military. "He thinks they're thugs; he thinks they're hooligans," he tells ISN Security Watch.
Last month, Iraqi security forces in Diyala province were given orders to arrest or kill some militia leaders, which Kahl says is "evidence that [Maliki is] trying to pick fights with them, hoping that they will start a fight so that he can then turn around and finish them."
The US military plans to try and integrate the militias and end or handover the rest of the contracts by June next year.
Integration needs to go hand-in-hand with new provincial elections - this time around with full participation by Sunni political forces. If either of these efforts fails, or if the tensions between Baghdad and the Kurds escalate into open conflict, pretty much all bets are off in Iraq.
That's the bad news. The good news, if you can call it that, is that the threat such a failure in Iraq would pose to the US homeland is much more diffuse and long-term than the immediate danger posed by the ongoing failure in Afghanistan.
To return to the counterinsurgency optic, the terrorist attacks authorities in the US and its allies most fear - sophisticated, simultaneous mass-casualty attacks against the homeland like 9/11 - are expeditionary campaigns by the insurgency they are fighting in Afghanistan and the Pashtun regions of Pakistan.
Yes there will be "home-grown" terrorists, but they become really dangerous only when trained and directed from the mountain redoubts al-Qaida maintains in its new safe haven. None of the "home-grown" plots uncovered by the FBI posed the remotest real danger to the US homeland: Those who hatched them were wannabes and losers.
Which is why most experts seem to agree that the Afghan-Pakistan border, not Iraq, is the central front of the war on terror: That is where the command and control for those expeditionary attacks is based.
An example of that confusion is that the war against terror - as it has actually been fought - is better described, in two of its most important theaters, as a counterinsurgency campaign. The US and its allies are fighting insurgencies in Iraq and in Afghanistan- Pakistan.
This optic is useful because of what it tells us about the role the US and allied militaries ought to play in the conflict. Most strategists agree, and senior US military officials have acknowledged publicly, that it is all but impossible for a foreign military force to defeat an insurgency.
Allied military operations of course have an impact, especially if they are planned through the hearts-and-mind optic of counterinsurgency theory. But the key to long-term success is developing the capacity of domestic forces and assisting them in restoring security - nation-building on the one hand and peacekeeping and stability operations on the other.
In this context, the celebrations about the success of the militia strategy that the US has pursued in Iraq - and that some advocate expanding to Afghanistan - look premature, at best.
Under the strategy, US forces are paying local armed groups to maintain security in Iraq. Nationwide, more than 100,000 fighters, mostly former Sunni insurgents, are organized in these militias, often recruited along tribal lines.
Effectively, they have been paid to change sides, to join the US and its allies in their fight against al-Qaida - although the ground work was done by the group itself, which alienated and eventually went to war with its Sunni partners in the insurgency.
In doing so, they have contributed to the fall-off in violence and helped provide the local intelligence, which has been one of the keys to the success against al-Qaida enjoyed by the surge of US forces.
But in the longer term, on the nation-building and security balance-sheet, it is at best unclear what the effect of the strategy will be.
The key to success or failure in Iraq lies not in any short-term reduction in attacks or even in the destruction of al-Qaida's networks in the country (after all, if the situation, deteriorates again, they can always come back and build new ones), but in the long-term project of building a state that has sufficient legitimacy and enjoys enough of a monopoly on violence that it can maintain security for its citizens, avoid a civil war and lay the groundwork for a possible democratic future.
From this point of view, the militia strategy is a rather large gamble, and whether it will pay off or not crucially depends on the next phase - the integration of the militias into Iraq's regular security forces.
The US has created "in effect, two armies" in Iraq, Dan Curfiss, a professor at the National Defense University's Near East and South Asia Center in Washington, DC, tells ISN Security Watch.
He warns that if the effort to integrate the militias fails, they "could very easily return to a rogue status."
But the Shiite-led Iraqi government is deliberately slow-rolling efforts to absorb the Sunni fighters into the Iraqi military, according to the US commander there, General David Petraeus.
Next month, the US military will hand over to the Iraqis the administration of contracts that it has with groups employing thousands of fighters in the strategically vital Sunni suburbs of Baghdad. The US military maintains an extensive database of information about the fighters, including biometrics like fingerprints; but it is unclear if the Iraqis will get this as part of the hand-over.
How the Shiite-led government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki handles the contracts will be a key indicator of whether the militia strategy gamble will pay off, but the signs are not good.
Maliki "has no interest in integrating these guys - none," says Colin Kahl, of the Center for a New American Security, who was recently briefed by the US military. "He thinks they're thugs; he thinks they're hooligans," he tells ISN Security Watch.
Last month, Iraqi security forces in Diyala province were given orders to arrest or kill some militia leaders, which Kahl says is "evidence that [Maliki is] trying to pick fights with them, hoping that they will start a fight so that he can then turn around and finish them."
The US military plans to try and integrate the militias and end or handover the rest of the contracts by June next year.
Integration needs to go hand-in-hand with new provincial elections - this time around with full participation by Sunni political forces. If either of these efforts fails, or if the tensions between Baghdad and the Kurds escalate into open conflict, pretty much all bets are off in Iraq.
That's the bad news. The good news, if you can call it that, is that the threat such a failure in Iraq would pose to the US homeland is much more diffuse and long-term than the immediate danger posed by the ongoing failure in Afghanistan.
To return to the counterinsurgency optic, the terrorist attacks authorities in the US and its allies most fear - sophisticated, simultaneous mass-casualty attacks against the homeland like 9/11 - are expeditionary campaigns by the insurgency they are fighting in Afghanistan and the Pashtun regions of Pakistan.
Yes there will be "home-grown" terrorists, but they become really dangerous only when trained and directed from the mountain redoubts al-Qaida maintains in its new safe haven. None of the "home-grown" plots uncovered by the FBI posed the remotest real danger to the US homeland: Those who hatched them were wannabes and losers.
Which is why most experts seem to agree that the Afghan-Pakistan border, not Iraq, is the central front of the war on terror: That is where the command and control for those expeditionary attacks is based.