[Marxism] How to fight (and lose) colonial wars

["Marvin Gandall" <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The model for fighting modern colonial wars in Iraq and elsewhere should be the 
brutal 19th century suppression of America’s indigenous population, writes 
Robert Kaplan in today’s Wall Street Journal. Kaplan’s article is entitled 
Indian Country – “a metaphor”, he admits, “with which a liberal policy 
nomenklatura may be uncomfortable”. 

 

Unlike liberal imperialists, the  Atlantic Monthly columnist and author of 
Warrior Politics and The Coming Anarchy is under no illusions that the US 
Empire is in the business of exporting democracy. Kaplan understands it is held 
together by the  ruthless application of US military force and assistance from 
authoritarian puppet regimes - with democracy to follow later, maybe. 

 

American forces should be no more “constrained” in Iraq than the US Cavalry was 
in crushing resistance by the Apaches and other native peoples, Kaplan says. 
“Then as now, inevitable civilian casualties raised howls of protest among 
humanitarians back East”, and to prevent this, Kaplan proposes independent 
journalists be excluded from witnessing counter-insurgency operations. This 
sounds ominously like anticipation of the pending massacre in  Fallujah. 

 

Kaplan admits the parallel to the Old West is inexact because, unlike then, US 
forces in Iraq are not supported by a “deluge” of  advancing European settlers 
who ultimately overwhelmed the first nations. To compensate, Kaplan says 
American military technique will have to adopt the more nimble tactics of 
guerrilla armies. But this is an old perscription, dating back to Vietnam, and 
overlooks that occupation armies fail not for military reasons, but because 
they lack the political motivation and popular base of resistance movements. 

 

Marv Gandall

-----------------------------------------------  

 

Indian Country

By Robert D. Kaplan 

Wall Street Journal

September 21, 2004

 

An overlooked truth about the war on terrorism, and the war in Iraq in 
particular, is that they both arrived too soon for the American military: 
before it had adequately transformed itself from a dinosauric, Industrial Age 
beast to a light and lethal instrument skilled in guerrilla warfare, attuned to 
the local environment in the way of the 19th-century Apaches. My mention of the 
Apaches is deliberate. For in a world where mass infantry invasions are 
becoming politically and diplomatically prohibitive -- even as dirty little 
struggles proliferate, featuring small clusters of combatants hiding out in 
Third World slums, deserts and jungles -- the American military is back to the 
days of fighting the Indians. 

 

The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be 
uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it 
captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century. But they 
don't mean it as a slight against the Native North Americans. The fact that 
radio call signs so often employ Indian names is an indication of the troops' 
reverence for them. The range of Indian groups, numbering in their hundreds, 
that the U.S. Cavalry and Dragoons had to confront was no less varied than that 
of the warring ethnic and religious militias spread throughout Eurasia, Africa 
and South America in the early 21st century. When the Cavalry invested Indian 
encampments, they periodically encountered warrior braves beside women and 
children, much like Fallujah. Though most Cavalry officers tried to spare the 
lives of noncombatants, inevitable civilian casualties raised howls of protest 
among humanitarians back East, who, because of the dissolution of the conscript 
army at the end of the Civil War, no longer empathized with a volunteer force 
beyond the Mississippi that was drawn from the working classes. 

 

Indian Country has been expanding in recent years because of the security 
vacuum created by the collapse of traditional dictatorships and the emergence 
of new democracies -- whose short-term institutional weaknesses provide whole 
new oxygen systems for terrorists. Iraq is but a microcosm of the earth in this 
regard. To wit, the upsurge of terrorism in the vast archipelago of Indonesia, 
the southern Philippines and parts of Malaysia is a direct result of the 
anarchy unleashed by the passing of military regimes. Likewise, though many do 
not realize it, a more liberalized Middle East will initially see greater 
rather than lesser opportunities for terrorists. As the British diplomatist 
Harold Nicolson understood, public opinion is not necessarily enlightened 
merely because it has been suppressed. 

 

I am not suggesting that we should not work for free societies. I am suggesting 
that our military-security establishment be under no illusions regarding the 
immediate consequences. 

 

In Indian Country, it is not only the outbreak of a full-scale insurgency that 
must be avoided, but the arrival in significant numbers of the global media. It 
would be difficult to fight more cleanly than the Marines did in Fallujah. Yet 
that still wasn't a high enough standard for independent foreign television 
voices such as al-Jazeera, whose very existence owes itself to the creeping 
liberalization in the Arab world for which the U.S. is largely responsible. For 
the more we succeed in democratizing the world, not only the more security 
vacuums that will be created, but the more constrained by newly independent 
local medias our military will be in responding to those vacuums. From a field 
officer's point of view, an age of democracy means an age of restrictive ROEs 
(rules of engagement). 

 

The American military now has the most thankless task of any military in the 
history of warfare: to provide the security armature for an emerging global 
civilization that, the more it matures -- with its own mass media and governing 
structures -- the less credit and sympathy it will grant to the very troops who 
have risked and, indeed, given their lives for it. And as the thunderous roar 
of a global cosmopolitan press corps gets louder -- demanding the application 
of abstract principles of universal justice that, sadly, are often neither 
practical nor necessarily synonymous with American national interest -- the 
smaller and more low-key our deployments will become. In the future, military 
glory will come down to shadowy, page-three skirmishes around the globe, that 
the armed services will quietly celebrate among their own subculture. 

 

The goal will be suppression of terrorist networks through the training of -- 
and combined operations with -- indigenous troops. That is why the Pan-Sahel 
Initiative in Africa, in which Marines and Army Special Forces have been 
training local militaries in Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad, in order to 
counter al-Qaeda infiltration of sub-Saharan Africa, is a surer paradigm for 
the American imperial future than anything occurring in Iraq or Afghanistan. 

 

In months of travels with the American military, I have learned that the 
smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the 
international media, the more effective is the operation. One good 
soldier-diplomat in a place like Mongolia can accomplish miracles. A few 
hundred Green Berets in Colombia and the Philippines can be adequate force 
multipliers. Ten thousand troops, as in Afghanistan, can tread water. And 
130,000, as in Iraq, constitutes a mess that nobody wants to repeat -- 
regardless of one's position on the war. 

 

In Indian Country, the smaller the tactical unit, the more forward deployed it 
is, and the more autonomy it enjoys from the chain of command, the more that 
can be accomplished. It simply isn't enough for units to be out all day in 
Iraqi towns and villages engaged in presence patrols and civil-affairs 
projects: A successful FOB (forward operating base) is a nearly empty one, in 
which most units are living beyond the base perimeters among the indigenous 
population for days or weeks at a time. 

 

Much can be learned from our ongoing Horn of Africa experience. From a base in 
Djibouti, small U.S. military teams have been quietly scouring an anarchic 
region that because of an Islamic setting offers al Qaeda cultural access. "Who 
needs meetings in Washington," one Army major told me. "Guys in the field will 
figure out what to do. I took 10 guys to explore eastern Ethiopia. In every 
town people wanted a bigger American presence. They know we're here, they want 
to see what we can do for them." The new economy-of-force paradigm being 
pioneered in the Horn borrows more from the Lewis and Clark expedition than 
from the major conflicts of the 20th century. 

 

In Indian Country, as one general officer told me, "you want to whack bad guys 
quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian-aid projects." Because of the 
need for simultaneous military, relief and diplomatic operations, our greatest 
enemy is the size, rigidity and artificial boundaries of the Washington 
bureaucracy. Thus, the next administration, be it Republican or Democrat, will 
have to advance the merging of the departments of State and Defense as never 
before; or risk failure. A strong secretary of state who rides roughshod over a 
less dynamic defense secretary -- as a Democratic administration appears to 
promise -- will only compound the problems created by the Bush administration, 
in which the opposite has occurred. The two secretaries must work in unison, 
planting significant numbers of State Department personnel inside the 
military's war fighting commands, and defense personnel inside a modernized 
Agency for International Development. 

 

The Plains Indians were ultimately vanquished not because the U.S. Army adapted 
to the challenge of an unconventional enemy. It never did. In fact, the Army 
never learned the lesson that small units of foot soldiers were more effective 
against the Indians than large mounted regiments burdened by the need to carry 
forage for horses: whose contemporary equivalent are convoys of humvees 
bristling with weaponry that are easily immobilized by an improvised bicycle 
bomb planted by a lone insurgent. Had it not been for a deluge of settlers 
aided by the railroad, security never would have been brought to the Old West. 

 

Now there are no new settlers to help us, nor their equivalent in any form. To 
help secure a more liberal global environment, American ground troops are going 
to have to learn to be more like Apaches. 

 

Mr. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is writing a series of 
books about the U.S. military on the ground, the first of which will be 
published next year.

 

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