In the late winter of 2003, as the
United States was dispatching tens of thousands of soldiers to the Middle
East for an invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command
was deployed in sixty-five countries. In Nepal the Special Forces were
training government troops to hunt down the Maoist rebels who were terrorizing
that nation. In the Philippines they were scheduled to increase in number
for the fight against the Abu Sayyaf guerrillas. There was also Colombia—the
third largest recipient of
U.S. foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt,
and the third most populous country in Latin America, after Brazil and
Mexico. Jungly, disease-ridden, and chillingly violent, Colombia is the
possessor of untapped oil reserves and is crucially important to American
interests.
The totalitarian regimes in Iraq and
North Korea, and the gargantuan difficulty of displacing them, may have
been grabbing headlines of late, but the future of military conflict—and
therefore of America's global responsibilities over the coming decades—may
best be gauged in Colombia, where guerrilla groups, both left-wing and
right-wing, have downplayed ideology in favor of decentralized baronies
and franchises built on terrorism, narco-trafficking, kidnapping, counterfeiting,
and the siphoning of oil-pipeline revenues from local governments. FARC
(Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), for example, is Karl Marx
at the top and Adam Smith all the way down the command chain. Guerrilla
warfare is now all about business, and physical cruelty knows no limits.
It extends to torture (fish hooks to tear up the genitals), gang rape,
and the murder of children whose parents do not cooperate with the insurgents.
The Colombian rebels take in hundreds of millions of dollars annually from
cocaine-related profits alone, and have documented links to the Irish Republican
Army and the Basque separatists (who have apparently advised them on kidnapping
and car-bomb tactics). If left unmolested, they will likely establish strategic
links with al Qaeda.
Arauca province, a petroleum-rich area
in northeastern Colombia, near the Venezuelan border, is a pool-table-flat
lesion of broadleaf thickets, scrap-iron settlements, and gravy-brown rivers.
The journey from the airfield to the Colombian army base, where a few dozen
Green Berets and civil-affairs officers and their support staff are bunkered
behind sandbags and concertina wire, is only several hundred yards. Yet
U.S. personnel make the journey in full kit, inside armored cars and Humvees
with mounted MK-19 40mm grenade launchers. As I stepped off the tarmac
in late February, two Colombian soldiers, badly wounded by a car bomb set
off by left-wing narco-terrorists (the bomb had been coated with human
feces in hopes of causing infection), were being carried on stretchers
to the base infirmary, where a Special Forces medic was waiting to treat
them. The day before, the Colombian police had managed to deactivate two
other bombs in Arauca. The day before that there had been an assassination
attempt on a local politician. And the day before that an electricity tower
had been bombed, knocking out power in the region. Previous days had brought
the usual roadside kidnappings, street-corner bicycle bombings, grenade
strikes on police stations, and mortar attacks on Colombian soldiers—using
propane cylinders packed with nails, broken glass, and feces.
As we drove through Arauca's mangy streets
in a Special Forces convoy, every car and bicycle seemed potentially deadly.
Yet the U.S. troops there are defiant, if frustrated. The U.S. government
permits them only to train, rather than fight alongside, their Colombian
counterparts, but they want the rules of engagement loosened. After a truck
unexpectedly pulled out into the street, slowing our convoy and causing
us to scan rooftops and parked vehicles (and causing me to sweat more than
usual in the humid and fetid atmosphere), a Green Beret with experience
on several continents leaned over and said, "If five firemen get killed
fighting a fire, what do you do? Let the building burn? I wish people in
Washington would totally get Vietnam out of their system."
Back at the base, Major Mike Oliver
and Captain Carl Brosky, civil-affairs specialists who between them have
served in the Balkans, Africa, and several Latin American countries, were
spending the day chasing down two containers of equipment for Arauca's
schools and hospital that had been held up in customs at the Venezuelan
border. A week earlier, at Tolomeida, several hundred miles south, I had
watched Sergeant Ivan Castro, a Puerto Rican from Hoboken, New Jersey,
as he patiently taught Colombian soldiers how to sit in a 360-degree "cigar
formation" while on reconnaissance, in order to rest in the field without
being surprised by the enemy. Later he taught them how to peel back in
retreat, without a gap in fire, after making first contact with the enemy.
Castro worked twelve hours in the heat that day, speaking in a steady,
nurturing tone, working with each soldier until the whole unit performed
the drills perfectly.
Even as America's leaders deny that
the United States has true imperial intentions, Colombia—still so remote
from public consciousness—illustrates the imperial reality of America's
global situation. Colombia is only one of the far-flung places in which
we have an active military presence. The historian Erich S. Gruen has observed
that Rome's expansion throughout the Mediterranean littoral may well have
been motivated not by an appetite for conquest per se but because it was
thought necessary for the security of the core homeland. The same is true
for the United States worldwide, in an age of collapsed distances. This
American imperium is without colonies, designed for a jet-and-information
age in which mass movements of people and capital dilute the traditional
meaning of sovereignty. Although we don't establish ourselves permanently
on the ground in many locations, as the British did, reliance on our military
equipment and the training and maintenance that go along with it (for which
the international arms bazaar is no substitute) helps to bind regimes to
us nonetheless. Rather than the mass conscription army that fought World
War II, we now have professional armed forces, which enjoy the soldiering
life for its own sake: a defining attribute of an imperial military, as
the historian Byron Farwell noted in Mr. Kipling's Army (1981).
The Pentagon divides the earth into
five theaters. For example, at the intersection of 5° latitude and
68° longitude, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, CENTCOM (the U.S.
Central Command) gives way to PACOM (the Pacific Command). At the Turkish-Iranian
border it gives way to EUCOM (the European Command). By the 1990s the U.S.
Air Force had a presence of some sort on six of the world's continents.
Long before 9/11 the Special Forces were conducting thousands of operations
a year in a total of nearly 170 countries, with an average of nine "quiet
professionals" (as the Army calls them) on each mission. Since 9/11 the
United States and its personnel have burrowed deep into foreign intelligence
agencies, armies, and police units across the globe.
Precisely because they foment dynamic
change, liberal empires—like those of Venice, Great Britain, and the United
States—create the conditions for their own demise. Thus they must be especially
devious. The very spread of the democracy for which we struggle weakens
our grip on many heretofore docile governments: behold the stubborn refusal
by Turkey and Mexico to go along with U.S. policy on Iraq. Consequently,
if we are to get our way, and at the same time to promote our democratic
principles, we will have to operate nimbly, in the shadows and behind closed
doors, using means far less obvious than the august array of power displayed
in the air and ground war against Iraq. "Don't bluster, don't threaten,
but quietly and severely punish bad behavior," says Eliot Cohen, a military
historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies,
in Washington. "It's the way the Romans acted." Not just the Romans, of
course: "Speak softly and carry a big stick" was Theodore Roosevelt's way
of putting it.
We can take nothing for granted. A hundred
years ago the British Navy looked fairly invincible for all time. A world
managed by the Chinese, by a Franco-German-dominated European Union aligned
with Russia, or by the United Nations (an organization that worships peace
and consensus, and will therefore sacrifice any principle for their sakes)
would be infinitely worse than the world we have now. And so for the time
being the highest morality must be the preservation—and, wherever prudent,
the accretion—of American power.
The purpose of power is not power itself;
it is the fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics
of an orderly world. Those characteristics include basic political stability;
the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived; respect for property; economic
freedom; and representative government, culturally understood. At this
moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that can
serve as an organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of a liberal
civil society. As I will argue below, the United States has acquired this
responsibility at a dangerous and chaotic moment in world history. The
old Cold War system, for half a century the reigning paradigm in international
affairs, is obviously defunct. Enlarging the United Nations Security Council,
as some suggest, would make it even harder for that body to achieve consensus
on anything remotely substantive. Powers that may one day serve as stabilizing
regional influences—India and Russia, China and the European Union—are
themselves still unstable or unformed or unconfident or illiberal.
Hundreds of new and expanding international
institutions are beginning to function effectively worldwide, but they
remain fragile. Two or three decades hence conditions may be propitious
for the emergence of a new international system—one with many influential
actors in a regime of organically evolving interdependence. But until that
time arrives, it is largely the task of the United States to maintain a
modicum of order and stability. We are an ephemeral imperial power, and
if we are smart, we will recognize that basic fact.
The "American Empire" has been discussed
ad nauseam of late, but practical ways of managing it have not. Even so,
the management techniques are emerging. While realists and idealists argue
"nation-building" and other general principles in Washington and New York
seminars, young majors, lieutenant colonels, and other middle-ranking officers
are regularly making decisions in the field about how best to train Colombia's
army, which Afghan tribal chiefs to support, what kind of coast guard and
special forces the Yemeni government requires, how the Mongolians can preserve
their sovereignty against Chinese and Russian infiltration, how to transform
the Romanian military into a smaller service along flexible Western command
lines, and so forth. The fact is that we trust these people on the ground
to be keepers of our values and agents of our imperium, and to act without
specific instructions. A rulebook that does not make sense to them is no
rulebook at all.
The following rules represent a distillation
of my own experience and conversations with diplomats and military officers
I have met in recent travels on four continents, and on military bases
around the United States.
Rule
No. 1
Produce
More Joppolos
When I asked Major Paul S. Warren,
at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the Army's Special Operations Command,
what serves as the model for a civil-affairs officer within the Special
Operations forces, he said, "Read John Hersey's A Bell for Adano—it's
all there." The hero of Hersey's World War II novel is Army Major Victor
Joppolo, an Italian-American civil-affairs officer appointed to govern
the recently liberated Sicilian town of Adano. Joppolo is full of resourcefulness.
He arranges for the U.S. Navy to show local fishermen which parts of the
harbor are free of mines, so that they can use their boats to feed the
town. He finds a bell from an old Navy destroyer to replace the one that
the Fascists took from the local church and melted down for bullets. He
countermands his own general's order outlawing the use of horse-drawn carts,
which the town needs to transport food and water. He goes to the back of
a line to buy bread, to show Adano's citizens that although he is in charge,
he is their servant, not their master. He is the first ruler in the town's
history who doesn't represent a brute force of nature. In Hersey's words,
[Men like Joppolo are] our
future in the world. Neither the eloquence of Churchill nor the humanness
of Roosevelt, no Charter, no four freedoms or fourteen points, no dreamer's
diagram so symmetrical and so faultless on paper, no plan, no hope, no
treaty—none of these things can guarantee anything. Only men can
guarantee, only the behavior of men under pressure, only our Joppolos.
One good man is worth a thousand wonks.
As The Times of India wrote on July 7, 1893, the mind of a sharp
political agent should not be "crowded with fusty learning." Ian Copland,
a historian of the British Raj, wrote that "extroverts and sporting types,
sensitive to the cultural milieu," were always necessary to win the confidence
of local rulers. In Yemen recently I observed a retired Special Forces
officer cementing friendships with local sheikhs and military men by handing
out foot-long bowie knives as gifts. In a world of tribes and thugs manliness
still goes a long way.
The right men or women, no matter how
few, will find the right hinge in a given situation to change history.
The Spartans turned the tide of battle in Sicily by dispatching only a
small mission, headed by Gylippus. His arrival in 414 B.C. kept the Syracusans
from surrendering to the Athenians. It broke the Athenian land blockade
of Syracuse, rallied other Sicilian city-states to the cause, and was crucial
to the defeat of the Athenian fleet the following year. The United States
sent a similarly small mission to El Salvador in the 1980s: never more
than fifty-five Special Forces trainers at one time. But that was enough
to teach the Salvadoran military to confront more effectively the communist
guerrillas while beginning to transform itself from an ill-disciplined
constabulary force into something much closer to a professional army.
"You produce a product and let him loose,"
explains Sidney Shachnow, a retired Army major general. "The Special Forces
that dropped in to help [the Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid] Dostum, the guys
who grew beards, got on horses, and dressed up like Afghans, were not ordered
to do so by Tommy Franks. These were decisions they made in the field."
Shachnow himself is a perfect example
of the kind of man he describes. Hard and chiseled, he calls to mind Ligustinus,
a Roman centurion who spent nearly half his life in the Army—in Spain,
Macedonia, and Greece—and was cited for bravery thirty-four times. Shachnow
is a Holocaust survivor. Born in 1933, in Lithuania, he endured a Nazi
concentration camp as a boy; emigrated to Salem, Massachusetts; joined
the Army as a private out of high school; after reaching the rank of sergeant
first class attended officers' training school; and served two combat tours
in Vietnam, where he was wounded twice. He rose to be a two-star general
and a guiding light of the Special Forces. His success resulted from decisions
made on instinct and impulse, and from an ability to take advantage of
cultural settings in which he did not naturally fit—exactly the ability
that U.S. trainers and commandos in El Salvador, Afghanistan, and so many
other places have had to possess.
"A Special Forces guy," Shachnow told
me, "has to be a lethal killer one moment and a humanitarian the next.
He has to know how to get strangers who speak another language to do things
for him. He has to go from knowing enough Russian to knowing enough Arabic
in a few weeks, depending on the deployment. We need people who are cultural
quick studies." Shachnow was talking about a knack for dealing with people,
almost a form of charisma. The right man will know how to behave in a given
situation—will know how to find things out and act on them.
Rule
No. 2
Stay
on the Move
Xenophon's Greek army cut through the
Persian Empire in 401 B.C., with the troops freely debating each step.
We should be mobile in the same way—get bogged down militarily nowhere,
but make sure we have military access everywhere. Because we have to manage
a world in which—as always—old regimes periodically crumble, disaster lies
in becoming too deeply implanted in more than a handful of countries at
once. Here our provincialism helps. As Hayward S. Florer, a retired Special
Forces colonel, told me, "Even our Special Ops people are insular. Sure,
we like the adventure with other cultures, learning the history and language.
But at heart many of us are farm boys who can't wait to get home. In this
way we're not like the British and French. Our insularity protects us from
becoming colonials."
Colonialism is in part an outgrowth
of cosmopolitanism, the intellectual craving to experience different cultures
and locales; it leads, inexorably, to an intense personal involvement in
their fate. "We want an empire not of colonies or protectorates but of
personal relationships," a Marine lieutenant colonel at Camp Pendleton,
in California, told me. "We back into deployments. There doesn't need to
be a policy directive from the Pentagon—half the time we don't know what
the policy is. We get a message from a Kenyan or Nigerian officer who studied
here that his unit needs training. We try to do it. We help decide, based
on our needs in a region, who we want to help out." The U.S. military is
constantly doing favors for other militaries, favors we call in when we
need to. This is how we sometimes get access to places. The formal base
rights that we have in forty countries may in the future be less significant
than the number of friendships maintained between U.S. officers and their
foreign counterparts. With that in mind, the military needs to establish
a formal data system for tracking such relationships. At present the method
of keeping abreast of these crucial ties is largely anecdotal.
The best tools of access are the so-called
"iron majors," a term that really refers to all mid-level officers, from
noncommissioned master sergeants and chief warrant officers to colonels.
In a sense majors run our military establishment, regardless of who the
Secretary of Defense happens to be. Up through the rank of captain an officer
hasn't closed the door on other career options. But becoming a major means
you've "bought into the corporation," explains Special Forces Major Roger
D. Carstens. "We're the ones who are up at four A.M. answering the general's
e-mails, making sure all the systems are go."
The United States has set up military
missions throughout the formerly communist world, creating situations in
which U.S. majors, lieutenant colonels, and full colonels are often advising
foreign generals and chiefs of staff. Make no mistake: these officers are
policymakers by another name. A Romanian-speaking expert on the Balkans,
Army Lieutenant Colonel Charles van Bebber, has become well known in top
military circles in Bucharest for helping to start the reform process that
led to Romania's integration with NATO. Such small-scale but vital relationships
give America an edge there over its Western European allies. One of the
reasons that countries like Romania and Bulgaria supported the U.S. invasion
of Iraq is that they now see their primary military relationship as being
with America rather than with NATO as such.
In formerly communist Mongolia, U.S.
Army Colonel Tom Wilhelm, a fluent speaker of Russian who studied at Leningrad
State University, is an adviser to the local military. With Wilhelm's help,
Mongolia has reoriented its defense strategy toward international peacekeeping—as
a means of gaining allies in global forums against its rapacious neighbors,
Russia and China. The planned dispatch of a Mongolian contingent to help
patrol postwar Iraq was the result of what one good man—in this case, Wilhelm—was
able to accomplish on the ground. I recently followed him around on an
inspection tour of Mongolia's Gobi Desert border with China. We slept in
local military outposts, rode Bactrian camels, and spent hours in conversation
with mid-level Mongolian officers over meals of horsemeat and camel's milk.
It is through such activities that relationships are built and allies are
gained in an era when anyplace can turn out to be strategic.
Rule
No. 3
Emulate
Second-Century Rome
Provincialism is the aspect of our
national character that will keep the United States from overextending
itself in too many causes. But owing to the wave of immigration from Asia,
the Middle East, and Latin America that began in the 1970s, the United
States is an international society comparable to Rome in the second century
A.D., when the empire reached its territorial zenith under Trajan and,
more important, was granting citizenship to elites in the Balkans, the
Middle East, and North Africa. (Trajan and Hadrian, in fact, were both
from Spain.) Our military, intelligence, and diplomatic communities must
now turn to our Iranian-, Arab-, and other hyphenated Americans—our potential
Joppolos. At a time when we desperately need more language specialists,
it is shameful that we are seeking out so few of the many native speakers
at our disposal. The financial incentives we offer them are simply insufficient,
and the waiting period for security clearance has become farcically long.
This situation has been changing of late for the better: it needs to continue
to do so.
Trained area specialists are likewise
indispensable. In 1976 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger entrusted the
eminent Arabist and diplomat Talcott Seelye, in Lebanon, to carry out two
discreet evacuations of American citizens from that war-torn country with
the help of the Palestine Liberation Organization—which we did not recognize
at the time. Seelye, who was born in Beirut, may not have wholly agreed
with Kissinger's foreign policy—but that didn't matter. He knew how to
get the job done. The fact that Arabists and other area specialists may
be emotionally involved, through marriage or friendship, with host countries—often
causing them to dislike the policies that Washington orders them to execute—can
actually be of benefit, because it gives them credibility with like-minded
locals. In any case, such tensions between policymakers and agents in the
field are typical of imperial systems. We should not be overly concerned
about them.
True, comparison is the beginning of
all serious scholarship, and area experts are ignorant of much outside
their favored patch of ground. Their knowledge of the current reality in
a given country is so prodigious that they often cannot imagine a different
reality. That is why area experts can say what is going on in a place,
but cannot always say what it means. Still, it is impossible to implement
any policy without them, as Kissinger and others learned.
Colonel Robert Warburton, the Anglo-Afghan
who established the Khyber Rifles regiment on the Northwest Frontier of
British India in 1879, was one kind of person needed to manage our interests
in distant corners of the world. Warburton spoke fluent Pashto and Persian,
and was at home among both aristocratic Englishmen and Afridi tribesmen.
The normally cruel and perfidious Afridis held him in such high esteem
that he did not need to go armed among them. Warburton was less a cosmopolitan
than a nuts-and-bolts journeyman, whose linguistic skills came from birth
and circumstance more than from intellectual curiosity. The American equivalents
of Warburton can be found among Arab-Americans posted to Central Command
and Latino-Americans posted to Southern Command—people who fit into places
like Yemen and Colombia, but who want only to return to their suburban
American homes afterward.
Southern Command, in particular, is
full of Spanish-speaking noncommissioned officers: ethnic Mexicans, Dominicans,
Cubans, and Puerto Ricans. The relative shortage of speakers of Arabic
and other languages in the rest of the military indicates that in the Special
Forces, at least, languages may soon have to be recognized as an "occupational
skill"—like weaponry, communications, battlefield medicine, engineering,
and intelligence, one in which every noncommissioned officer must spend
a year specializing. If each Special Forces unit had a couple of officers
who were fluent in several languages spoken in the theater command (Arabic,
Persian, and Turkish in CENTCOM, for example), our ability to project power
would dramatically increase.
The forward basing of area commands
is another strategy that would encourage area expertise and language skills.
In the years to come we should consider moving Central Command headquarters
from Tampa, Florida, to the Middle East, and Southern Command headquarters
from Miami back to Panama, where it was until 1997. There is simply no
substitute for being in the region when it comes to absorbing language
and culture. As a journalist, I have found that in my profession people
on location always have better instincts for the local situation than people
back in the United States, even if they don't always draw the proper conclusions.
Many a mid-level officer has told me that the same holds true in the military.
Rule
No. 4
Use
the Military to Promote Democracy
In an age of expanding democracy, military
and intelligence contacts are more important than ever. Civilian politicians
in weak and fledgling parliamentary systems come and go. But leading military
and security men remain as behind-the-scenes props, sometimes even getting
themselves elected to high office—as has happened in Nigeria, Venezuela,
and Russia. "Whoever the President of Kenya is, the same group of guys
run their special forces and the President's bodyguards," one Army Special
Operations officer told me. "We've trained them. That translates into diplomatic
leverage."
The U.S. military's bilateral relationships
with foreign armies and their officer corps play a substantial role in
safeguarding democratic transitions. Militaries have been the pillars of
so many Third World societies for so long that the advent of elections
can scarcely make them politically irrelevant, especially in Africa and
Latin America. In some places, such as Turkey and Pakistan, the military
and security services have at times actually enjoyed a reputation for greater
liberalism than the civilian authorities. In Colombia in the mid-1990s
the civilian government was tainted by drug money; the military police,
who were seen to be less corrupt, helped to save our bilateral relationship.
U.S. security-assistance programs also
professionalize foreign militaries, thus helping to prevent coups and to
improve the human-rights climate. In the 1980s in El Salvador, Colonel
J. S. Roach, a member of the operational planning team there, observed
that "the Salvadoran military understood they weren't supposed to violate
human rights, but they believed they were driven to extreme measures by
extreme circumstances." One can debate what members of El Salvador's military
"understood," but Roach's team and others pounded home the point that violating
human rights almost never makes sense from a pragmatic perspective, because
it costs the military the civilian support so necessary to rooting out
guerrilla insurgents. "Human rights wasn't a separate one-hour block at
the beginning of the day," Roach said. "You had to find a way to couch
it in the training so that it wasn't just a moralistic approach." Human-rights
abuses didn't come to an end in El Salvador, but observers agree that they
were sharply curbed.
The world is a gritty, messy place,
and there are no perfect solutions. But the fact is that Third World military
men are more likely to listen to American officers who brief them about
human rights as a tool of counterinsurgency than to civilians who talk
about universal principles of justice. At any rate, it isn't only civilians
who talk about universal principles: mid-level officers from around the
world are regularly sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for training in the
history and necessity of protecting human rights. (The protestors who perennially
chain themselves to the gates of Fort Benning, calling its previously named
School of the Americas the "School of Torturers," are implicitly championing
the worst possible strategy if they want Latin armies to take human rights
seriously—a strategy of isolation, which cuts foreign officers off from
American society and values.)
In fact, in places where democracy is
especially weak (Peru and Indonesia are obvious examples), a phone call
from a U.S. general to a local officer will often advance diplomacy (and
also civil society) more effectively than a phone call from the ambassador.
Particularly in previously hostile areas, such as the ex-Soviet Caucasus
and Central Asia, new diplomatic relationships are being eased by the U.S.
military's training of border guards and security services. In other places,
as in Chile a decade ago, the resumption of a bilateral military relationship
with the United States cements a successful democratic transition.
The much larger truth is that the very
distinction between our civilian and military operations overseas is eroding.
In 1994 two Special Forces officers helped the Paraguayan government to
craft new laws just after Paraguay's constitution was adopted. The U.S.
military will increasingly churn out such chameleons: operatives who combine
the traits of soldier, intelligence agent, diplomat, civilian aid worker,
and academic. And at the same time that our uniformed officers are acting
more like diplomats, our diplomats, particularly our ambassadors, are acting
more like generals. It is under the State Department's auspices, not the
Pentagon's, that helicopters are leased to the Colombian army to fight
narco-terrorists and that a campaign is waged to track small planes suspected
of transporting cocaine in the Colombia-Peru-Ecuador region. America's
war against narco-terrorists in Colombia has two overseers: General James
T. Hill, head of Southern Command, and Anne Patterson, the ambassador to
Colombia.
The model for our future diplomats might
be Deane Hinton, who oversaw the counterinsurgency operation as the ambassador
to El Salvador in the early 1980s and then oversaw U.S. efforts to arm
Afghan guerrillas as the ambassador to Pakistan from 1983 to 1987. In both
those cases a military strategy would have been unavailing in the absence
of a successful "interagency" strategy, which backed diplomatic initiatives
and humanitarian aid packages with the power of a cocked gun. The same
will be true in Colombia and in al Qaeda-infested Yemen. At the moment
"interagency" is a dirty word among many in the field, connoting overlapping
bureaucracies with conflicting agendas. But a supple and flexible civilian-military
chain of command is an immensely useful tool.
Of course, in violent and chaotic parts
of the world such as Afghanistan and Yemen, it is only natural that the
soldier will at first be more conspicuous than the Peace Corps worker.
Because parts of Yemen have become too dangerous for American civilians,
the U.S. military is training the Yemeni military to better project power
in the tribal badlands, so that, among other things, our foreign-aid personnel
can return there. In Central and South America the U.S. military regularly
vaccinates farm animals and treats them for diseases, and the villagers
are not less grateful than they would be if the help came from civilians.
The same was true with Mongolians treated by a four-person Air Force dental
mission dispatched recently by Pacific Command to the Mongolian-Chinese
border. The Air Force officers treated eighty-five local inhabitants the
day I was there, and also handed out toys to the children. It is the efficacy
of a humanitarian mission that morally sanctifies it; not whether it is
carried out by civilians or soldiers. And if it serves U.S. interests as
this one did—so much the better.
Rule
No. 5
Be
Light and Lethal
Economy of force—doing the most with
the least—has been an imperative of the U.S. military, diplomatic, and
intelligence communities since the beginning of the Cold War. It will become
even more important as our resources are stretched. Here we can learn a
great deal
From the archives:
"Fourth-generation
Warfare"
(December 2001)
Pentagon mavericks have been trying
for decades to reorient military strategy toward a new kind of threat—the
kind we're suddenly facing in the war on terrorism. Now that we've got
the war they predicted, will we get the reforms they've been pushing for?
By Jason Vest |
|
from the history of U.S. policy in
Latin America over the past several decades: although many journalists
and intellectuals have regarded this policy as something to be ashamed
of, the far more significant, operational truth is that it exemplifies
how we should act worldwide in the foreseeable future.
With Europe the principal Cold War battleground,
and Asia the secondary front because of the threat posed by Communist China
and North Korea, Latin America took a back seat for decades. The U.S. military
had to make do with limited resources while operating in a vast continent.
It succeeded thanks to unconventional warfare, which helped the host governments
do the real work. In practice that meant aggressive intelligence operations
and Special Forces training of local units, combined with domineering diplomacy.
The results were not always pretty and,
frankly, not always moral—consider what occurred in Chile in the aftermath
of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende Gossens. Yet for a relatively
small investment of money and manpower the United States defeated a belligerent
Soviet and Cuban campaign at its back door while paving the way for the
democratic transitions and market liberalizations of the 1980s and 1990s.
Our "quiet professionals" helped to hunt down and kill the hemispheric
agitator Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. Fifty-five Special Forces
trainers in El Salvador accomplished more than did 550,000 soldiers in
Vietnam. A four-member Special Forces "mobile training team" convinced
the Salvadoran police that rather than shooting leftist demonstrators at
rallies, they should provide escape routes for the protesters to run away.
That turned out to be the most effective kind of human-rights policy.
Economy of force in Latin America produced
regimes that in almost every case were better than what the Cubans and
the Russians offered. Even in Chile, despite the iniquities of the dictator
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who took power following Allende's overthrow,
the military regime lowered the infant mortality rate from seventy-nine
to eleven per 1,000 births and reduced the poverty rate from 30 percent
to 11 percent. Privatization gave post-Allende Chile Latin America's only
economy comparable to those of the "Asian tigers." America's no-frills
molding of political reality in the Western Hemisphere did not require
the approval of the UN Security Council, and it did not run the risk of
quagmire. There were usually few Americans on the ground in any one Latin
country.
Economy of force offers a logic appropriate
to an intractable world. Becoming implanted in more than a handful of countries
at once spells disaster. And everyone—humanitarian interventionists included—now
admits that nation-building, whether in Bosnia, Afghanistan, or Colombia,
is fraught with danger, difficulty, and great expense. We shouldn't try
to fix a whole society; rather, we should identify a few key elements in
it, and fix them.
For example: Because a national army
is essentially unreformable without wholesale social and cultural change,
we should work to improve only its elite units, using trainers from the
U.S. military elite. When it comes to military operations, specialized
units should concentrate on the most critical targets; in Colombia, for
instance, these would be the 150 or so hydrochloride laboratories throughout
Colombia that refine cocaine into its final form. And because individual
leaders affect history as much as large social forces do, our efforts should
be invested primarily where current leaders seem particularly talented
and determined. (Alvaro Uribe Vélez, the President of Colombia,
is by all accounts a dynamic workaholic, however embattled, committed both
to protecting human rights and to eliminating rogue forces. Were Andrés
Pastrana, Uribe's less forceful predecessor, still Colombia's leader, it
is doubtful that the United States would be making quite the effort it
is in a place like Arauca.)
The most obvious tool to carry out an
economy-of-force strategy is the Special Forces, which, as Lieutenant Colonel
Kevin A. Christie told me, can perform the military equivalent of "arthroscopic
surgery." Relatively small numbers of Special Forces and Marines can maximize
U.S. influence in a large number of countries without risking what the
Yale historian Paul Kennedy has called imperial "overstretch." Nevertheless,
we shouldn't get carried away. A big increase in the number and use of
Special Forces could make them less special, and therefore less effective.
A less obvious resource is the Coast
Guard, which handles most anti-terrorism and drug-interdiction efforts
at sea. Even in the jet-and-information age 70 percent of intercontinental
cargo travels by ship, making the seas as strategic as ever. The U.S. Coast
Guard, with 38,000 in its active ranks, is the world's seventh largest
navy. In Colombia, which has more miles of navigable river than of passable
roadway, the Coast Guard has been essential in drug-patrol training. In
Yemen, Bob Innes, a retired Coast Guard captain who worked for many years
in Colombia, is building a coast guard to prevent more al Qaeda attacks
on oil tankers. Our strategy in Colombia and Yemen is unspoken but simple:
establish not a totally reformed military but a self-sustaining structure
of a few specialized units. That's the best we will be able to do, and
it will not require a heavy American military presence.
The ultimate in economy of force is
the "one-man mission," in which a single officer is attached to a foreign
army, often at a remote base, to train and advise it. Because there are
usually no other Americans around, the officer cannot escape from the local
environment, even when he is off duty. Thus he rapidly acquires a hands-on
knowledge of the terrain and its inhabitants, making him an intelligence
asset for years to come. The military should consider making more use of
such missions.
Rule
No. 6
Bring
Back the Old Rules
I refer to the pre-Vietnam War rules
by which small groups of quiet professionals would be used to help stabilize
or destabilize a regime, depending on the circumstances and our needs.
Covert means are more discreet and cheaper than declared war and large-scale
mobilization, and in an age when an industrial economy is no longer necessary
for the production of weapons of mass destruction, the American public,
burdened with large government deficits, will demand an extraordinary degree
of protection for as few tax dollars as possible. Impending technologies,
such as bullets that can be directed at specific
From the archives:
"Inside
the Department of Dirty Tricks" (December 2001)
"We're not in the Boy Scouts," Richard
Helms was fond of saying when he ran the Central Intelligence Agency. He
was correct, of course. By Thomas Powers |
|
targets the way larger warheads are
today, and satellites that can track the neurobiological signatures of
individuals, will make assassinations far more feasible, enabling the United
States to kill rulers like Saddam Hussein without having to harm their
subject populations through conventional combat.
As for international law, it has meaning
only when war is a distinct and separate condition from peace. As war grows
more unconventional, more often undeclared, and more asymmetrical, with
the element of surprise becoming the dominant variable, there will be less
and less time for democratic consultation, whether with Congress or with
the UN. Instead civilian-military elites in Washington and elsewhere will
need to make lightning-quick decisions. In such circumstances the sanction
of the so-called international community may gradually lose relevance,
even if everyone soberly declares otherwise.
Bringing back the old rules would help
to circumvent the UN Security Council, which in any case represents an
antiquated power arrangement unreflective of the latest wave of U.S. military
modernization in both tactics and weaponry. In the future we should attempt
to manage most problems long before they get to the Security Council, by
increasingly emphasizing Special Forces and an intelligence service bolstered
by its own military wing—an emphasis we applied successfully in Afghanistan.
Of course, the CIA's military wing will never be large enough to do everything.
Thus the CIA and the Special Forces need to coordinate their efforts more
closely, under "black," or super-clandestine, rules of engagement. Not
only should the CIA be greener (that is, have a larger uniformed
military wing), but the Special Forces should be blacker.
To be sure, such clandestine methods
might not be enough to change a regime like Iraq's. But that kind of regime
is exceedingly rare; the diplomatic farce at the UN a few months back,
with France and Germany working indefatigably to contain the power of a
democratic United States rather than that of a Stalinist, weapons-hungry
Iraq, need not be repeated.
As shocking as some of the above may
sound, much of what I advocate is already taking place. The old rules,
with their accent on discretion, were on the way back even before 9/11.
Witness the increasing use of security-consulting firms and defense contractors
that employ—in places as diverse as South America, the Caucasus, and West
Africa—retired members of the U.S. military to conduct aerial surveillance,
to train local armies, and to help struggling friendly regimes. Consider
Military
Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), of northern Virginia, which during
the mid-1990s restructured and modernized the Croatian military. Shortly
afterward Croatian battlefield success against the Serbs forced Belgrade
to the peace table.
Encouraging an overall moral outcome
to the Yugoslav conflict involved methods that were not always defensible
in narrowly moral terms; the Croats, too, were murderers. And moral ambiguity
is even greater in protracted wars, such as the Cold War and the war on
terrorism, in which deals will always have to be struck with bad people
and bad regimes for the sake of a larger good. The war on terrorism will
not be successful if every aspect of its execution must be disclosed and
justified—in terms of universal principles—to the satisfaction of the world
media and world public opinion. The old rules are good rules because, as
the ancient Chinese philosophers well knew, deception and occasional dirty
work are morally preferable to launching a war.
Rule
No. 7
Remember
the Philippines
The first large-scale encounter between
the U.S. military and a guerrilla insurgency came as the United States
tried to consolidate control over the Philippine archipelago, a former
colony of Spain, after our victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Unfortunately, many of the lessons our military learned from that encounter
were for a long time ignored, because the military's performance in one
dimension was overshadowed by allegations involving another. As Brian McAllister
Linn wrote in his dense and masterly book The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency
in the Philippine War, 1899-1902 (1989), some charges of American brutality
against Filipino civilians were certainly justified, and without question
the brutality drew press attention that colors the episode still. Brutality
is always inexcusable—but in this instance it was hardly the whole story.
Max Boot concludes in The Savage Wars of Peace (2002) that U.S.
actions in the Philippines constitute "one of the most successful counter-insurgencies
waged by a Western army in modern times." Given the challenges ahead, our
experience a century ago in the anarchic Philippines may be more relevant
than our recent experience in Iraq.
Modern communications, which seem to
unify the world to some degree, often foster the illusion that policies
can be one-size-fits-all. Mid-level commanders in the Philippines, however,
lacking helicopters and radios, were forced to become policymakers in their
own patch of jungle. That was a good thing, and it promoted skills that
we need more of: in a rugged topography given over to anarchy—which describes
much of the world today—the political, military, and cultural situation
is going to vary from micro-region to micro-region. The commanders in the
Philippines who were particularly successful emphasized small, mobile units;
developed native intelligence sources; and gained information by interrogating
captured guerrillas. In some parts of the archipelago the United States
was able to exploit ethnic divisions; in other parts it was foolish even
to try. In some parts a purely military strategy was called for; in others
a civil-affairs and humanitarian-aid component was an absolute necessity.
Nevertheless, as Linn observed,
It was only when the Army could
separate the guerrillas from the civilians and prevent the guerrillas from
disrupting civil organization that social reform was possible. Officers
in the Philippines, no matter how benevolent their intentions, realized
that the military objective, the defeat of the guerrillas, was the most
essential of their tasks.
In other words, in areas still not pacified
by our troops, it is perfectly appropriate to see more soldiers than aid
workers. But those soldiers, as William Howard Taft (then the head of the
Philippine Commission) and Brigadier General Frederick Funston both observed,
should be led by field officers of exceptional character, with hands-on
area expertise.
Rule
No. 8
The
Mission Is Everything
No mission should ever be compromised
by diplomatic punctilio. That sounds obvious, and at the same time is often
impossible to implement. But here is what happens when this rule is broken.
In the late 1990s Nigerian soldiers
deputized by the international community were in Sierra Leone, not only
to keep the peace but also, if truth be told, in some cases to steal alluvial
diamonds. Like other African peacekeeping contingents in Sierra Leone,
the Nigerians weren't always paid by their own government, even though
the government was getting money from the international community to provide
peacekeeping. Some of these contingents were openly incompetent; the Zambians,
for instance, were a battalion of mechanics, cooks, and clerks. But the
United Nations said little about any of this; instead it officially accepted
the obvious falsehood that all national armies are roughly equal. Diplomatic
nicety had completely compromised the mission. The result: the peacekeeping
effort nearly collapsed as demoralized and incompetent peacekeepers surrendered
without a fight to murderous teenage paramilitaries, who closed in on the
capital of Freetown. Order was restored only after the British government
dispatched commandos to Sierra Leone. Mounted on rooftops at the airport,
a contingent of those commandos shot and killed any rebel who emerged from
the bush. For the British, only the mission mattered.
When Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons
inspector, demonstrated little enthusiasm for bringing Iraqi scientists
and their families out of Iraq (even though other Iraqi scientists, once
outside their country, had in the past provided valuable intelligence to
the West) he revealed that for the UN, yet again, the mission was not everything.
Unfortunately, for the United States
the mission is not always everything either. It is often hamstrung by diplomacy
and domestic public opinion. The Special Forces are allowed to train and
advise local counterparts, but because of restrictions imposed by the United
States and, often, the host country as well, they typically have to wave
good-bye when local troops take to the field to fight. This can be demoralizing
to our elite units, whose members are not draftees serving out their time
but professional warriors prepared daily to take measured risks—risks that
may seem incredible to timid politicians and other outsiders. And when
host-country soldiers are wounded, we should not be prohibited from helping
them get to our field clinics, as is sometimes the case. Our elite units
should be allowed to provide air cover for local allies, and to help direct
operations on the ground. There are no such limits in Afghanistan; ideally
that would be the case everywhere. Successful imperial militaries have
traditionally fought alongside indigenous troops.
Moreover, arbitrary troop limits set
by Congress, known as "force caps," which have restricted Green Beret trainers
to fifty-five in El Salvador and our troops in Colombia to 400, should
be more flexible. Also, embassy Marines and Army support staff should not
be part of the calculation; force caps should apply only to the advisers
and training teams in the field. Every one of our Green Berets is a force
multiplier, to the extent that an extra ten or twenty of them could make
an exponential difference in the success of a mission. If a cap needs stretching
a bit, the U.S. ambassador and the U.S. military commander in the host
country should be able to stretch it on their own. To think that any of
this would risk another Vietnam is alarmist.
Compromising the mission, moreover,
can mean needlessly compromising our soldiers' safety. Since the destruction
of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and of military apartments at
Khobar Towers, in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, our generals and politicians have
needed a commandment: Thou shalt not be sitting ducks. U.S. troops should
never be concentrated in a place where they cannot aggressively patrol
the surrounding area. Yet that was the situation I observed near the town
of Saravena, in northeastern Colombia: because the rules of engagement
set by our policymakers and the Colombian government did not allow for
aggressive patrolling, a few dozen Green Berets and their support staff
were concentrated there in barracks vulnerable to a possible attack by
cylinder bombs. That may be politically sound, but it is tactically dumb.
And it is morally wrong, because it denies our warriors the means of self-defense.
In Saravena the mission was not everything.
Rule
No. 9
Fight
on Every Front
In their recent article "An
Emerging Synthesis for a New Way of War," published in the Georgetown
Journal of International Affairs, Air Force Colonels James Callard
and Peter Faber describe what they call "combination warfare"—a concept
derived from a 1999 Chinese text by two colonels in the People's Liberation
Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. In the twenty-first century a single
conflict may include not only traditional military activity but also financial
warfare, trade warfare, resource warfare, legal warfare, and so on. The
authors explain that it may eventually involve even ecological warfare
(the manipulation of the heretofore "natural" world, altering the climate).
Because combination warfare draws on all spheres of human activity, it
is the ultimate in total war. It "seeks to overwhelm others by assaulting
them in as many domains ... as possible," Callard and Faber write. "It
creates sustained, and possibly shifting, pressure that is hard to anticipate."
Combination warfare has already begun,
though it has yet to be codified in military doctrine. The most important
front, in a way, may be the media. Like the priests of ancient Egypt, the
rhetoricians of ancient Greece and Rome, and the theologians of medieval
Europe, the media constitute a burgeoning class of bright and ambitious
people whose social and economic stature can have the effect of undermining
political authority. The media increasingly, and dramatically, affect policy
yet bear no responsibility for the outcome.
In terms of U.S. national interests,
media attitudes have gotten both worse and better in recent years. American
leaders deal less and less with strictly American media and more and more
with global ones, as elite U.S. news organs increasingly make use of foreign
nationals and global cosmopolitans with multiple passports. The new, global
media think in terms of abstract universal principles—the traditional weapon
of the weak seeking to restrain the strong—even as the primary responsibility
of our policymakers must be to maintain our strength vis-à-vis China,
Russia, and the rest of the world. On the other hand, it is impossible
to ignore the resurgence of patriotism among American journalists; the
political divide between Europe and the United States in the buildup to
the war in Iraq, and during this war itself, was mirrored by a divide between
the European and the U.S. media. Still, this trend may be ephemeral.
Because the consequences of attack by
weapons of mass destruction are so catastrophic, the United States will
periodically have no choice but to act pre-emptively on limited evidence,
exposing our actions to challenge by journalists, to say nothing of millions
of protesters who are increasingly able to coordinate their demonstrations
worldwide. The enormous anti-war demonstrations on several continents last
February revealed that life inside the post-industrial cocoon of Western
democracy has made people incapable of imagining life inside a totalitarian
system. With affluence often comes not only the loss of imagination but
also the loss of historical memory.
Thus global economic growth in the twenty-first
century can be expected to create mass societies even more deluded than
the ones we have now—the very actions necessary to protect human rights
and democracy will become increasingly hard to explain to those who have
never been deprived of them. The masses "show no concern for the causes
and reasons" behind their own well-being, observed the Spanish philosopher
José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1929),
a book that was equally prescient about the Fascist rallies of the 1930s
and the youth rebellion of the 1960s. Indeed, the peace demonstrators last
February appeared to have no idea whatsoever that their very freedom to
demonstrate had been won by war and conquest in the service of liberty—precisely
what the U.S. and British governments were proposing to do in Iraq. Of
course, the masses are uninterested, as Ortega noted. "Since they do not
see, behind the benefits of civilization, ... they imagine that their role
is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural
rights."
A nation whose businesses can regularly
sell products that people neither want nor need should be able to market
a foreign policy better than it usually does. Just as leading companies
harvest the best former government officials, our government will have
to find the budget and the will to hire away the best communicators for
this marketing effort. We also need diplomats who are fluent in local languages
and dialects and whose sole job is to appear on foreign talk shows (in
the Middle East and elsewhere) and be available to local journalists for
interviews, so as to better represent our point of view. This occurs too
infrequently at the moment. Here, too, we desperately need more area experts;
and we need more hyphenated Americans and language specialists inside government.
Moreover, it is now a strategic imperative that the United States Information
Agency, gutted by the Clinton Administration under pressure from Senator
Jesse Helms, be reinvented.
Some may argue that an effective information
strategy is largely a matter of telling and spinning the truth. But the
truth needs lots of help in societies marked by mass illiteracy, where
rumors and conspiracy theories are the rule rather than the exception.
That is because where few of the men and almost none of the women can read,
news can be communicated only orally; thus it is even more quickly
subject to distortion. In the context of
mass illiteracy, the growing array of CNN-like networks in Arabic and other
languages creates the conditions for a tidal wave of hysteria to be generated
by a single inaccurate news report. Destructive rumors and conspiracy theories
need to be countered quickly.
Indeed, the best information strategy
is to avoid attention-getting confrontations in the first place and to
keep the public's attention as divided as possible. We can dominate the
world only quietly: off camera, so to speak. The moment the public focuses
on a single crisis like the one in Iraq, that crisis is no longer analyzed
on its merits: instead it becomes a rallying point around which lonely
and alienated people in a global mass society can define themselves through
an uplifting group identity, be it European, Muslim, anti-war intellectual,
or whatever.
Nevertheless, although media coverage
of the war in Iraq was unprecedented, many wars will continue to be fought
with few journalists in sight, and consequently with little public awareness.
Look at the Congo, where more than three million people have died in conflict
since the late 1990s without any significant peace protests in the West.
Military conflicts in Colombia, the Philippines, Nepal, and other places
may as well be happening in secret. Our intelligence officers, backed by
commando detachments, should in the future be given as much leeway as they
require to get the job done, so that problems won't fester to the point
where we have to act in front of a battery of television cameras.
Rule
No. 10
Speak
Victorian, Think Pagan
As noted, imperialism in antiquity
was in many respects a strain of isolationism: the demand for absolute
security at home led powers to try to dominate the world around them. That
pagan-Roman model of imperialism contrasts sharply with the altruistic
Victorian one, exemplified by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone in
his comment about protecting "the sanctity of life in the hill villages
of Afghanistan." Americans are truly idealistic by nature, but even if
we weren't, our historical and geographical circumstances would necessitate
that U.S. foreign policy be robed in idealism, so as to garner public support
and ultimately be effective. And yet security concerns necessarily make
our foreign policy more pagan. The idealistic shorthand of "democracy,"
"economic development," and "human rights," by means of which the media
make sense of events in distant parts of the world, conceals many harsh
and complicated ground-level truths. Remember that even Gladstone's vision
was more effectively implemented by the realpolitik of statesmen such as
Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli, and the Marquess of Salisbury, who
kept illiberal empires like Germany and Russia at bay, sometimes through
sheer deviousness, and also arranged for the retaking of Sudan from Islamic
extremists.
By sustaining ourselves first, we will
be able to do the world the most good. Some 200 countries, plus thousands
of nongovernmental organizations, represent a chaos of interests. Without
the organizing force of a great and self-interested liberal power, they
are unable to advance the interests of humanity as a whole.
And there is this coda: Just as, following
the explorations of Portuguese and other mariners, the oceans became a
new arena for great power struggles, so will outer space. We have recognized
this by creating a U.S. Space Command, which is now a part of the U.S.
Strategic Command. The only question now is whether the United States will
invest enough in the military technology required to dominate space. If
a less liberal power such as China does so instead, then American dominance
will be particularly short-lived, no matter how successful the war on terrorism.
No doubt there are some who see an American
empire as the natural order of things for all time. That is not a wise
outlook. The task ahead for the United States has an end point, and in
all probability the end point lies not beyond the conceptual horizon but
in the middle distance—a few decades from now. For a limited period the
United States has the power to write the terms for international society,
in hopes that when the country's imperial hour has passed, new international
institutions and stable regional powers will have begun to flourish, creating
a kind of civil society for the world. The historian E. H. Carr once observed
that "every approach in the past to a world society has been the product
of the ascendancy of a single Power." Such ascendancy allows all manner
of worldwide connections—economic, cultural, institutional—to be made in
a context of order and stability. There will be nothing approaching a true
world government, but we may be able to nurture a loose set of global arrangements
that have arisen organically among responsible and like-minded states.
If this era of reluctant imperium is
to leave a lasting global mark, we must know what we are up to; we must
have a sense that supremacy is bent toward a purpose and is not simply
an end in itself. In many ways the few decades immediately ahead will be
the trickiest ones that our policymakers have ever faced: they are charged
with the job of running an empire that looks forward to its own obsolescence.
Winston Churchill saw in the United
States a worthy successor to the British Empire, one that would carry on
Britain's liberalizing mission. We cannot rest until something emerges
that is just as estimable and concrete as what Churchill saw when he gazed
across the Atlantic. |