Counterinsurgency, Now and Forever

“We weren’t on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.” Daniel Ellsberg, “Hearts and Minds,” 1974.

“I am an American fighting man, and I have no idea what the hell I’m shooting at. Or why.” Christian Bauman, The Ice Beneath You. 2002

“So you have a country that wants us out of there, and we’ve become the enemy. We are the target.” Representative John Murtha, PBS Newshour, November 17, 2005.

“Over there, when we would do a patrol and have a car approach us and we fired warning shots, that’s a thrill, that’s power. Over there, everybody knew we were there. We were the king of the road, and they either respected or hated us for it. And now you’re back here, and you ain’t king of nothing.” Ron Radaker, Alpha Company, 112th Regiment, Pennsylvania National Guard1

The United States has had a long history of fighting small, dirty wars, though most Americans prefer to focus on the good war it fought in the middle of the last century, World War II. The suppression of the insurgency in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century was soon forgotten; pacification and counterinsurgency in the Korean

War, was rarely reported on at the time, and not much discussed by Americans historians thereafter; covert and overt subversion of governments in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa were accomplished largely through the use of local military forces.2

Thus, the ambiguities of the Vietnam War came as a surprise.3 The beginning, however one wishes to date it, was unproblematic for most Americans. Insofar as anyone noticed, the U.S. had come to the aid of an ally struggling against internal communist subversion and external communist aggression. Military advisers were dispatched, counterinsurgent Special Forces units equipped, trained, named and honored in song and 2 film and, for a number of years public anxieties focused on the menace 90 miles offshore.

As Vietnam rose to public consciousness, there was an uneasiness about what exactly the

U.S. was doing there. In a television documentary made a year before combat troops were officially dispatched to Vietnam, reporters worried that “in trying to kill a handful of Viet Cong in a village, why we’ve made at least a hundred recruits by indiscriminate bombing or strafing.”4 The point was made again in March 1965, when a CBS reporter,

Morley Safer, witnessed the torching of the village of Cam Ne. “The day’s operation, burned down 150 houses, wounded three women, killed one baby, wounded one marine and netted [pointing to them] these four prisoners. Four old men who could not answer questions put to them in English. Four old men who had no idea what an I.D. card was.”

Safer assured his audience that the U.S. could win a military victory in Vietnam – in 1965 few doubted, but, he went on, “to a Vietnamese peasant whose home is a – means a lifetime of backbreaking labor – it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.”5

Convincing peasants that the U.S. was on their side was one aspect of counterinsurgency, and counterinsurgency greatly interested President Kennedy and his advisers. Proud of their knowledge of how the enemy operated – not necessarily the

Vietnamese, but any enemy – they quoted Mao: the guerrilla is a fish swimming in the ocean of the people. Dry up the ocean and the problem is solved. No one paused for very long over the metaphor: what, after all, would it mean to dry up the ocean?

Over the course of the long war, there were many approaches to counterinsurgency: the strategic hamlet program (emptying villages into guarded encampments on the British colonial model in Malaya); poisoning the rice crop in areas 3

in which the guerrillas were known to operate so as deny them food and transform

farmers into refugees unable to plant new crops; eliminating, through assassination, the

“infrastructure,” – local village level cadres; saturation bombing and the generation of more refugees; creating small, skilled Special Forces units which could move through the jungle as silent and deadly as the guerrillas themselves; designated free-fire zones in

which anything living was presumed hostile; training village level troops for self-defense;

“clear and hold” or the “oil-spot” strategy – establishing security and legitimacy one

village at a time and slowly expanding the area of control; winning hearts and minds

through country-wide land reform, rural medical clinics, rural education.6

However contradictory, many of these approaches were employed

simultaneously, though the more ambitious country-wide reform programs were only

initiated in the 9th or 10th year of the war. In 1967, counterinsurgency programs were

brought together under one unified command a move strongly urged on the Bush

administration by military and civilian devotees of counterinsurgency. CORDS, Civilian

Operations and Revolutionary development Support, was initially run by Robert

“Blowtorch Bob” Komer, a man who cherished his reputation for volatility. Komer believed wholeheartedly in the importance of combining political and military warfare on the model of successful guerrillas everywhere. In the idiom of the 21st century, the U.S.

had to learn not just to fight asymmetric wars, but to fight them as if it were the weaker party. (This fantasy was played out after the Vietnam War in Rambo and other

Hollywood movies in which the Americans fought as poorly armed guerrillas against

Vietnamese with immense firepower at their command.) 4

Komer’s goal was to contest the NLF for control in every village and hamlet in

South Vietnam through a flexible mix of welfare and security projects under the

supervision of a revolutionary development team that would remain in place for up to six

months. In addition, a vastly expanded number of trained and well-equipped rural paramilitary forces, drawn from the villages themselves, would provide overall security.

Komer also insisted that deep intelligence would be necessary to root out the village level

cadre upon whose efforts the insurgency rested.

Thus, in 1967, the Phoenix (Phung Hoang) program developed out of earlier

counter-terrorist projects run by the CIA. Mixed Vietnamese and American teams were

set a quota of basic level NLF cadre to be “neutralized” each month – and they delivered.

The numbers were impressive: from 1968 to mid-1971, 28,000 VCI (Viet Cong

infrastructure) were captured, 20,000 were killed, and an additional 17,000 defected.

Torture, corruption, extortion marked the program from the outset, and it was never very

clear exactly who was being killed. Nevertheless, Komer was delighted. The figures on

Hamlet Evaluation showed that the number of secure villages had improved markedly. At

a Saigon dinner party, Komer told reporters “he had assured the President that the war

would not be an election issue in 1968.”7 And then came Tet.

Throughout the war, the counterinsurgency experts were convinced that military

security had to be established before any meaningful effort to win the allegiance of the

population could take place. Rooting out the “VCI infrastructure” was a part of that

effort. Obviously, there was a risk that establishing military security might involve

alienating the population whose hearts and minds were waiting to be won; war is a risky business. 5

Later, long after the war was lost, some analysts insisted that had the U.S. fought

a proper counterinsurgency war, rather than the war of attrition General Westmoreland

pursued, it could have won.8 Others argued that it had, in fact, fought such a war and

won – only to be robbed of victory by Congress. As David Elliott explains elsewhere in

this volume, these arguments deal with “the troubling Vietnam experience by historical

revisionism, turning failure into remembered success.” Vietnam is the negative example for almost everything connected to American war-making, and this for pro- and anti-war people alike. On the other hand, many analysts consider counterinsurgency in El

Salvador, the positive example. There, it is said, an insurgency was defeated by a U.S. trained and equipped indigenous force with the help and support of a strictly limited

number of American advisers. In El Salvador, the lessons of counterinsurgency, or what

one of its students and practitioners has called “total war at the grass roots level,” had at

last been mastered. Not firepower but local knowledge and civic action was necessary; a

combination of the political and military any revolutionary movement might envy.9

But the insurgency in El Salvador was not defeated; and the government did not

win. Unlike Iraq, the insurgency in El Salvador was class-based. Unlike Vietnam, where

the Saigon government refused to negotiate with the NLF to the bitter end, when the

Salvadoran government realized it could not crush the insurgency outright, it negotiated

its way out. According to Elisabeth Jean Wood’s analysis of the Salvadoran settlement,

“Once unyielding elites…conceded democracy because popular insurgency, although

containable militarily, could not be ended, and the persisting mobilization eventually

made compromise preferable to continued resistance.” 10 In effect, a legitimate regime

was constructed through negotiations between a coherent insurgency and a reasonably 6

unified elite, negotiations in which the government as well as the insurgents made key

concessions in return for peace. Nothing resembling this process appears likely in Iraq

where the insurgency has no known central leadership and such elite unity as exists as

been steadily eroded by sectarian violence.

At the time of this writing, as the increasing violence of heavily armed police and

militia units approximates open civil war in Iraq, the embrace of El Salvador as a model

has virtually disappeared from the press.11 But in 2005, the El Salvador model was

hailed as the solution to Iraq’s counterinsurgency problems. “The template for Iraq today

is not Vietnam…but El Salvador,” Peter Maass wrote in an essay with the rhetorical title:

“The Salvadorization of Iraq?” None of the people with whom Maass spoke, nor Maass himself, reflected on the differences between El Salvador and Iraq; one, a country under occupation, fighting an insurgency seeking to end that occupation; the other, a government fighting a war against a rural revolution. What mattered instead was the form: how to train and equip an effective indigenous paramilitary force. “The strategic thought that we had,” Douglas Feith explained, “is that we are going to get into very big trouble in Iraq if we are viewed as our enemies would have us viewed. As imperialists, as heavy-handed and stealing their resources.” Iraqis must take on the burden of crushing resistance to the occupation.12

Civilian efforts to train an effective police force failed, though DynCorp, under contract to recruit police trainers, charged the government $50 million each month for its services; in the spring of 2004, the military took over. In the same period, the Iraqi

Minister of the Interior under Ayad Allawi, Falah al-Naqib, in consultation with his senior U.S. adviser, Steve Casteel, organized a Special Police Commando which drew its 7

manpower from Saddam Hussein’s elite forces.13 When the unit was in reasonably good

shape, Steele, a veteran of the U.S. drug wars in Latin America, together with James

Steele, a veteran of the Special Forces in El Salvador, invited the general in charge of

organizing the Iraqi police force, David Petraeus, to visit their headquarters. Petraeus

tested the mettle of several of the commandos by challenging them to a push-up contest.

Presumably satisfied with their prowess, he offered them “whatever arms, ammunition

and supplies they required.”14 The force was largely Sunni, but Peter Maass, after

spending a week with them, believed their “true loyalties…remain unclear.” Steele and

Casteel were indifferent to the fact that the Commando unit was dominated by Sunnis trained, in another life, by Saddam Hussein. What had mattered in El Salvador, what

Steele and Casteel believed would matter in Iraq, was a readiness to inflict maximum violence against the insurgency, anyone who might associated with it, even remotely, and anyone who failed to inform against it.

The Sunni-dominated city of Samarra, Peter Maass reported, was to be the

“proving ground” for the new El Salvador-based strategy. Maass visited the commandos

there in March, 2005. He watched as 100 bound and blindfolded prisoners were slapped

and kicked as they awaited interrogation. The interrogation room itself had a desk “with

bloodstains running down its side.” As the reporter was questioning a young Saudi

prisoner about his treatment by his captors, he could hear the screams of a man being

tortured next door. An American adviser with the commandos commented that he didn’t

think Iraqis “know the value of human life Americans have.” 15

In due course, the Special Police Commandos handed Samarra off to regular Iraqi

police. By the summer of 2005, Major Patrick Walsh told a reporter, the city was once 8 again becoming a “neutral-to-bad-news story.” In August, 2005 the U.S. Army engineers built an earthen barricade over eight feet high and six and a half miles long around the city (Operation Great Wall). Three checkpoints controlled all traffic into and out of town, and the number of insurgent attacks subsided. To persuade Samarra’s population of

200,000 to “cooperate or we’ll clear the city,” Walsh spread the rumor that a major offensive was about to begin. In response, over half the population fled, along with half the police force. There was a marked reduction in insurgent attacks, and in city life. As the U.S. troops withdrew, an American observer thought the remaining Iraqi police force, barricaded in their Green Zone and temporarily reinforced by the return of the Special

Police Commandos, might be able to defend themselves, though over half of them rarely showed up for work.16

The Special Police Commando unit Maass visited was Sunni-led; other militia – the Mahdi army, the Badr Corps -- were affiliated with Shi’a political parties. Naqib resigned as Minister of Defense in April 2005 and his successor, Bayan Jabr, at once moved to recruit a large number of Shi’a police commandos. James Steele, though without regrets for his role in training the first Commando units, worried about the growing sectarian violence: “That is more dangerous in terms of our strategic success than the insurgency,” he told a reporter. “If this thing deteriorates into an all-out civil war our position becomes untenable. Who the hell are you fighting?”17

The problem, according to Col. John Waghelstein, who served two tours in

Vietnam and five in Central America, is that the military persisted in distinguishing between “traditional war” and “those of counterinsurgency (COIN), as if conflicts on the lower end of the spectrum are aberrations” when history “clearly shows that most U.S. 9

wars were at the spectrums’ lower end.”18 A senior Pentagon official told Robert

Kaplan: “After Iraq, we hope not to be invading a big country for a long time, so we’ll be

reduced to low profile raiding, which the military has a very long and venerable tradition

of, from the 19th and early 20th centuries.” Th