The Long War: Dispatch 4 -- On the Terrorists’ Turf

The final panel of the day at the Defense Forum in Washington, DC was entitled, “Fighting on the Terrorists’ Turf: Lessons Learned in Iraq & Afghanistan and the Gap Between Expectations and Realities.” The moderator was Dr. Christopher C. Harmon, who holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at Marine Corps University.

Panel participants were:
Dr. Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies;
Brigadier General John F. Kelly, USMC, the Legislative Assistant to the Commandant of the Marine Corps;
Rear Admiral Michael A. LeFever, US Navy, Former Commander, Expeditionary Strike Group One;
Mr. Michael Scheuer, former Chief of the bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center and author of “Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror.”

At the outset, moderator Harmon wanted to emphasize law enforcement and its support for intelligence as a part of the Global War on Terror. He noted that law enforcement has always been a part of the war, but is now getting new recognition as the importance of local and national police forces in Iraq and Afghanistan unfolds.

Dr. Cordesman began by arguing that it might not be a good idea to describe all the enemies we face as “terrorists.” He suggested that we recognize that the “line between insurgency, terrorism, irregular war, and civil war” is going to be one that is hard to define and may fluctuate from case to case. “Semantics do matter.” Cordesman claimed that when we call something terrorism, it affects our thinking about it, that we are in a way unable to see it for what it is.

“At the beginning of my career,” Cordesman said, “I watched a group of ‘neoliberals’ lose a war. At the end of my career, I’m dealing with a neoconservative group who may be losing a war. You have to approach these issues with realism…” about risks, threats and resources. If you don’t, Cordesman said, “you will commit yourselves to failed states without having prioritized if this is the place to fight and this is the way to fight.”

“I think a lot of you who have served in Iraq would agree that had we gone into Iraq … with a clear plan,” much of what we face today would not have developed. “It doesn’t do any good to defeat terrorists at the tactical level. A failure to go to war without a plan is a failure for which everyone is paying and is a lesson we can never afford to repeat.”

“We must understand just how ideological and religious most of these battles are going to be. Unless you can defeat them ideologically and politically, they are going to come back. They are going to trap you in war of attrition.”

“Our enemies have learned to fight above our level of conventional confidence. We are fighting in an area which is Muslim, which is culturally different, which has different values and expectations, which does not see us as liberators … [to them] we are crusaders, we are occupiers, we are imperialists … above all we are not Muslims.”

One of the greatest problems is our assumption that “Western values are universal and will be welcomed throughout these countries.”

Dr. Cordesman offered no good news about Iraq. “The fact is that things are not getting better. Years after trying to put conventional reconstruction teams into Iraq, we have adequately manned teams in four provinces, two of which are active.”

“We will run out of aid money at some point this year. The supplemental bill just passed will not allow us to sustain our economic programs.” [In Iraq], unemployment ranges from 37% to 60% in some key provinces.”

“We find ourselves equally short of people who will leave the Green Zone as civilians. The effort to organize this in the State Department has very visibly collapsed.”

Cordesman concluded: “The problem is the inability to formulate a clear plan for stability operations, nation-building and the political and economic consequences necessary to the fight. It is the success of the interagency process to support these needs that is necessary if the military effort itself is to have success.”

Rear Admiral Michael A. LeFever took up the discussion next. Admiral LeFever took over the role of the Commander of the Joint Task Force in Pakistan during the US relief effort there. He was told to provide emergency relief and to improve the Pakistani-US relationship. One of his efforts involved building the longest helo air bridge that the world had known.

In that operation, “Success … was measured in the recent polls of the Pak-US relationship that changed from a 23% approval rating to an overwhelming 78%.”

LeFever noted the role of the Navy’s forward-deployed nature was key to the entire endeavor. “Our forward presence enabled us to be there so quickly … I was on the ground within 48 hours of the earthquake making initial assessments.”

He praised the interagency nature of the efforts in Pakistan, and said, “we don’t have to wait for a disaster in order to show the US presence in an interagency role.”

Brigadier General Kelly spoke about his experiences in Iraq, where he has finished two tours. “When we went from conventional operations to Phase IV, we had not done a lot of planning or thinking about it,” he said. The conventional wisdom at the time in the Marine Corps assumed that the Marine forces would leave after taking Baghdad. Kelly said the Iraqis came to quickly see the Americans as what he calls “the man in the moon.” They seemed to be asking, “The war’s over, Saddam’s gone, why can’t you get the electricity working, why can’t you get the water running, and get the trains running on time?”

General Kelly was unimpressed with CPA. “As the CPA grew, money was a problem and direction was nonexistent. We could only push down authority to our battalion commanders and tell them to go forth and do good things.”

He remembered that at some point in the fall of 2003, things took a turn for the worse. “When we went back for OIF2, there were parts of the country in which we could walk without a flack jacket or a helmet and have a cup of coffee with the local sheiks, but two months after that, you could not go into those same places without a rifle company.”

Kelly’s ultimate summary was: “Clearly we lost an opportunity at the end of the Baghdad campaign, and we have suffered from it since.”

Michael Scheuer thought that the term war on terrorism “is a concept that has outlived its usefulness. This war has about as much to do with terrorism as – I don’t know what a good analogy would be.”

Scheuer shaped his remarks around a series of statements about history. His primary view being that the idea of “how history will judge us” seems to be prominent in the news of late.

“History will show that we lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because we didn’t give a damn about history.” Once the Pentagon announced we were in a Long War, he is quite certain that in whatever cave they are hiding in, Zawahiri and Osama “broke Islamic tradition and did a happy dance, while whistling,” because “they can win that war, we can’t win that war.”

“History will show that we are evolving into Israel. We have no public diplomacy to speak of. Our economic power is controlled by the gangsters who control Middle Eastern economies, and the Chinese who control our debt. History will show that Americans have trouble with borders, not only in their own country where they can’t control them, but also…” in countries where they fight insurgencies that are funded from outside existing borders.

“History will show the most religious people on earth in the United States are either intimidated or ignorant about the power of religion around the world. History probably will show that we don’t know how to fight a culture that cannot be deterred [by force].

“History will show that nation-building is a fool’s errand unless you annihilate the enemy and are not trying to build a nation at the same time. We assumed that we could put 800 years of Anglo-American culture on a CDRom and give it to Chalabi and Karzai and tell them, ‘Ok, boys, you’ve got 6 months.’”

At the end of the panel, the head of the US Naval Institute ended the conference by saying that, “Even though some harsh things have been said here today, do not forget at times like these that there have been times like these before,” and to remember what Winston Churchill once said, “America will always do what it needs to do, after it has exhausted every other possibility.”