Knife Fights Read online

  In this world, one of the critical questions the United States will face is when, whether, and how to intervene in the varieties of insurgencies and rebellions that are likely to be the face of conflict in this century. The complicated answer is “sometimes” with nonlethal assistance and advisers, and “seldom” with U.S. combat forces and then only when vital U.S. national interests are affected. The Afghanistan and Iraq interventions are instructive on this point, but so are the more recent conflicts in Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.

  Afghanistan was, to use Richard Haas’s excellent construction, a war of necessity. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the leaders of Afghanistan refused to hand over the members of Al Qaeda responsible for the costliest foreign attack on U.S. soil, the United States had no choice but to use force to capture or kill the Al Qaeda leadership in simple self-defense. Because the Taliban resisted American efforts to accomplish those tasks, and could not be trusted to prevent Al Qaeda from using its territory to plan and execute future attacks, the Taliban also had to go and be replaced by a government that would pursue policies more supportive of U.S. interests, with the minimum standard being one that would fight rather than support Al Qaeda. This intervention was legal and necessary and remains likely to accomplish its core objective of preventing Afghan territory from again being used to attack the United States or her interests, although the campaign has been longer and harder than anyone would have predicted when it began more than a dozen years ago.

  The two factors that have prolonged the Afghan campaign are instructive as the U.S. contemplates future interventions, hopefully with a “once bitten, twice shy” attitude. They are the presence of sanctuaries in Pakistan and the endemic corruption of the Afghan government that was established in the wake of the Taliban’s initial defeat. These two factors are historically among the most important in predicting the success or failure of a counterinsurgency campaign; both have a strong negative correlation with success, with invulnerable foreign sanctuary that shares a difficult-to-control border the single factor that is most likely to promote the success of an insurgency.

  Still, important as foreign sanctuaries are, there are reasons to believe that the sanctuary Pakistan provides to the Taliban and to Al Qaeda central will not be decisive in determining the final outcome in Afghanistan. Pakistan, which created the mujahedeen who expelled the Soviet Union from Afghanistan with U.S. and Saudi Arabian help (including Osama bin Laden) in the 1980s, is paying a heavy price for allowing the Taliban to use its territory to continue attacks inside Afghanistan; indeed, it has lost more of its own soldiers to the Pakistani Taliban than has the government of Afghanistan. Pakistan has made some efforts to regain control of the Frankenstein’s monster it unleashed, with enthusiastic if not particularly sophisticated counterinsurgency efforts in places like the Swat Valley that have at least complicated the efforts of the Taliban to seize control of the nuclear-armed country.

  The United States and her NATO allies in Afghanistan have not been able to conduct ground operations inside Pakistan but have used airpower in new ways to take on the Pakistani Taliban and, especially, Al Qaeda central. Drone strikes have decimated Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, rendering it essentially irrelevant as a global threat able to plan, prepare, and conduct strikes outside Pakistan’s borders. Drone strikes have not been as effective against the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban but have limited their effectiveness and imposed additional complicating factors on their ability to recruit, train, and conduct operations in both countries. Thus, as important as the Pakistani sanctuary has been for the insurgent groups based there that threaten regional stability, the new technologies being used to identify, locate, track, and disrupt their operations have essentially stalemated the insurgents at the strategic level. The Pakistani-based insurgent groups can continue to operate and cause casualties, but they are unable to mass in attacks of true strategic significance that threaten the government of Afghanistan. As long as the United States provides airpower in support of that government, even after the withdrawal of U.S. ground troops, the Pakistani- based insurgents will be limited to guerrilla attacks that are unlikely to lead to the fall of Kabul. It is worth remembering that Saigon fell in 1975 not to insurgents but to North Vietnamese tanks that would have been easy pickings for American airpower had it still been on station; in the forty years since, the advent of precision weapons empowered by the information revolution has only increased the costs of conventional invasions and attacks for lesser powers.

  The corruption of the Afghan government is another factor that has complicated the counterinsurgency campaign there, but it is also unlikely to be strategically decisive. Corrupt and ineffective host-nation governments are the stock in trade of counterinsurgency campaigns; effective governments regarded as legitimate by their population do not give rise to insurgencies in the first place. And as bad as the Afghan government under President Karzai is by Western standards—often ranking as the worst or next to worst in the world—it is more effective and better regarded by the Afghan population than the despised and repressive Taliban regime that preceded it. Partly because Afghanistan was in such a dire place when the September 11 attacks occurred, life there has improved dramatically for most people despite twelve years of war. A country that had fewer than one thousand telephones in 2001 now has more than ten million, and the population in school has exploded, particularly among girls and young women. The people of Afghanistan do not hate their government, and as long as it remains able to pay its security forces—a question much more for the international community than for the Afghans themselves—the state will hang together. The people do not want to return to the days of the Taliban; bad as the Karzai government is, the Taliban, within the living memory of most Afghans, was far worse.

  The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was a necessary war, and the need for continued counterterrorism operations to be conducted from Afghan territory for the foreseeable future required a counterinsurgency campaign to build and strengthen an Afghan government to a degree sufficient to protect American bases in the country. Operation Desert Storm was also a necessary war, required to prevent Iraq from controlling Kuwaiti oil supplies and to demonstrate that the international community would not tolerate changing borders by the open use of conventional force; if international law is to mean anything, than the occupation of Kuwait could not and did not stand.

  The invasion of Iraq in 2003, on the other hand, was an unnecessary war of choice, fought on intelligence that proved to be false and on logic that was prima facie flawed even if the intelligence had been correct. If Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, the American-led invasion force should have been large enough to secure those weapons sites rather than barely large enough to topple Saddam’s government, much less police the postwar chaos that many, including Conrad Crane, predicted. As a result of inadequate postwar planning and insufficient troop strength, when my battalion arrived in Al Anbar in September 2003, we found acres of weapons depots completely unguarded. The United States was fortunate that all that escaped from the weapons depots—which Saddam had guarded far better than we did in the immediate wake of his fall—were artillery shells to make roadside bombs; if there had been chemical weapons in the storage sites, the invasion of Iraq could have been far more of a disaster than it proved to be.

  Worst of all, because it was a war of choice, the United States had extraordinary freedom of action to choose when, where, with what forces, and how to conduct the invasion, making the failure to plan for the subsequent occupation even more inexcusable. Iraq presented no imminent threat to U.S. or allied interests in March 2003, and I opposed the invasion at the time, as did most serious students of U.S. foreign policy; John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are just two of the political scientists who published articles arguing that the planned invasion was not in the American national interest. They were right, and the costs of the operation to topple Saddam Hussein will constrain American foreign policy and affect intervention decisions for decad
es to come, in the United States and among our allies, as the reluctance to intervene in Syria even by the British has shown.

  Some defenders of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 argue that the invasion and the subsequent creation of an admittedly flawed democracy there contributed to the popular uprisings across the Middle East sometimes collectively referred to as the Arab Spring. This claim is hard to conclusively support or refute; as with the relationship between global warming and individual disasters like Hurricane Sandy, putting more energy into a complex system is likely to have extreme and unpredictable results, but it is hard to draw a direct line to any individual event in a complicated region that the United States struggles to understand.

  However, it is not hard to make a connection between the shattered expectations of quick success in Iraq and subsequent American reluctance to use force to accomplish U.S. national security objectives abroad. The Obama administration’s foreign policy has been marked by reluctance to intervene abroad with ground forces, but even the final days of the George W. Bush administration showed some welcome learning about the uncertain consequences and heavy costs of military intervention, as President Bush refused to support Israeli plans for a strike on Iran.

  Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, was elected to the presidency in no small part because of his predecessor’s poor decisions on Iraq, and because Hillary Clinton, his primary opponent, had voted in favor of the invasion. The extraordinary energy that the Iraq fiasco injected into the American political system was a once-in-a-generation event; America had not been so riven over a foreign policy issue since Vietnam. But even Barack Obama, elected because of his opposition to the invasion, could not afford to overlearn the lesson about the costs of foreign intervention.

  A cat that sits on a hot stove once learns not to sit on any stove, hot or cold. But the United States is too important an actor in the international system, with global interests and global responsibilities, to sit out hard foreign policy choices for the next generation. Indeed, expensive as was the Iraq intervention for his predecessor, President Obama spent much of the first year of his first term focused on two separate decisions to increase troop strength in Afghanistan—unpopular decisions that cost him support from his political base, a fact that contributed to his decision to announce the date of the drawdown of the Afghan surge simultaneously with its commencement. That announcement undercut the effectiveness of the troop surge and betrayed the president’s profound unease with the deployment of military forces to achieve national security objectives abroad in the wake of Iraq—a “half pregnant” attitude that marked many of his subsequent foreign policy decisions as well.

  He would have plenty of decisions to make (or avoid). Population growth and resource scarcity in much of the developing world continued to stir discontent among the populations of poorly governed countries, but the burgeoning information revolution gave new tools to people who in decades past would have suffered in silence and isolation. Thus when Tunisian merchant and frustrated college graduate Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself on December 18, 2010, just over a year after the Afghan surge announcement at West Point, Tunisian revolutionaries were able to seize the moment to protest their inadequate government’s policies. The resulting electronic-enabled protests led not only to the fall of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali barely a month later but, in quick succession over the following year, to changes of government in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. All were driven by popular protests against corrupt and inefficient governments; all posed varying dilemmas to American foreign policy.

  Tunisia had relatively little impact on American policy other than as a tinderbox that sparked the revolutions that shook the foundations of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Egypt was an entirely different issue; it is the largest and most important country in the region and has been a pillar of American policy in the Middle East for decades. Hence the Obama administration initially hesitated when popular rebellion broke out against the administration of President Hosni Mubarak after thirty years of repressive rule that had been one of the driving forces behind the ideology of Al Qaeda—but that also had permitted Mubarak, for all his manifest flaws, to run a foreign policy that was not broadly supported by his population but that was in the interests of the United States and Israel. Mubarak’s fall was a victory for democracy, but democracy in the absence of institutions is merely mob rule—and the mob in Egypt did not support Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel. After initially supporting Mubarak against the popular rebellion, President Obama’s team eventually shifted against him in a move that shocked the other rulers of the Middle East who had longtime alliances with the United States but repressive tendencies toward their own population, chief among them the Al Saud family that governs Saudi Arabia.

  Washington harbored no such concerns about Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, who had committed the fatal error of demobilizing his WMD program in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, believing that his country was next. Having given up the invasion insurance that protected North Korea and that Iran was desperately seeking, Qaddafi was vulnerable to outside pressure when a revolt against his regime garnered international support. A coalition led by Britain and France, but with significant support from the United States, operated under a UN Security Council mandate to support the rebellion with airpower. It proved decisive in a country where the vast majority of the population lives within fifty miles of an international seacoast, and Qaddafi’s regime fled the capital city of Tripoli (but continued fighting) on September 1, 2011. The dictator was himself killed on October 20, but the air campaign was longer and more difficult than Britain or France had expected, and only American logistical support, refueling planes, and ammunition stores allowed it to continue through to completion. Both European powers were chastened by the difficulty of the endeavor, with Britain in particular, decreasing her armed forces for budgetary reasons, demonstrating less inclination to intervene in future military operations abroad.

  If Libya showed the difficulty of small-footprint, no-boots-on-the-ground military interventions in support of insurgents, international unwillingness to intervene in Syria was proof that the lessons had been internalized. Protests against the regime of President Bashar Al Assad began in January 2011, a few weeks before those in Libya, but Syria was a much tougher nut to crack than Libya had been. Assad proved willing to use indiscriminate violence against his own people, including even violating the long-standing international prohibition on the use of chemical weapons, in order to remain in power, while an exhausted international community remained indecisive about whether to intervene in support of the rebels as it had in Libya or even to punish the use of chemical weapons in support of that international norm.

  The Obama administration’s foreign policy team, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and Director of Central Intelligence David Petraeus had recommended a program to arm and train the Syrian rebels in the summer of 2012, but President Obama, facing an election in which his own base was already disenchanted with the surge of American military force into Afghanistan, decided against this limited intervention. The rebels suffered mightily as a result, not just from attacks by the Assad regime but also from internecine warfare within their own ranks. As often happens in these cases, the most violent and best-organized groups scramble to power over the bodies of their rivals, and by the time the question of arming and training the rebels had risen to the top of the American policy agenda again a year later, in the summer of 2013, that window had closed. The rebels were now led by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, many linked with Al Qaeda, and there were no good policy options left for the United States: it didn’t want Assad to remain in power, but it had no guarantee that what replaced him would be better—and the real risk that it might be worse.

  President Obama, who was elected to the presidency in no small part because he had opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, retained an ambivalence toward the use of military power in the service of U.S
. interests throughout his tenure. While willing to use remotely piloted aerial vehicles, or drones, to attack members of Al Qaeda wherever they presented themselves, but particularly in Pakistan and Yemen, and even to authorize the Navy SEAL team mission to kill Osama bin Laden, Obama had internalized lessons about the effectiveness of American power to protect populations and build good governance in countries afflicted by insurgency that were not dissimilar to those learned by T. E. Lawrence a century before, in another war in the Middle East: counterinsurgency operations are messy and slow and extremely expensive.

  And yet insurgency remained a vibrant force in the international system, perhaps the dominant factor in the international relations of the early twenty-first century. The counterexample may appear to be China, the rising power of East Asia, whose ascent carries with it a promise of a return to primacy of the diplomacy empowered by ships and planes that the United States understood so well when it confronted the Soviet Union’s armed forces around the globe. But even China faces significant internal rebellions and the prospect of widespread protests against the legitimacy of its government. The anger and frustration that incited the protests in Tiananmen Square twenty- five years ago have been temporarily diminished by two decades of double-digit economic growth, but when that slows, the barricades will return, made more potent by information-sharing devices that are, ironically, often “Made in China.” It is to protect her own ability to use whatever degree of force is necessary that China so often vetoes interventions in the internal affairs of states like Syria; allowing the Libyan intervention to pass the UN Security Council was a mistake that China will not soon make again.

  The age of counterinsurgency cannot be over as long as insurgencies roil the globe. And so the challenges of insurgency and counterinsurgency will continue. The United States should intervene in them with ground forces as seldom as possible, only when vital national interests are threatened, and only when she can be confident that the peace that will follow the conflict will be an improvement over the prewar situation. Whenever possible, the United States should follow a light-footprint policy, sending advisers and equipment in support of people fighting for freedom rather than putting large numbers of American combat troops on the ground.