Understanding the Long War

by TOM HAYDEN

May 7, 2009

Editor's Note: This is first of a two-part essay.

The concept of the "Long War" is attributed to former
CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid, speaking in 2004.
Leading counterinsurgency theorist John Nagl, an Iraq
combat veteran and now the head of the Center for a New
American Security, writes that "there is a growing
realization that the most likely conflicts of the next
fifty years will be irregular warfare in an 'Arc of
Instability' that encompasses much of the greater
Middle East and parts of Africa and Central and South
Asia." The Pentagon's official Quadrennial Defense
Review (2005) commits the United States to a greater
emphasis on fighting terrorism and insurgencies in this
"arc of instability." The Center for American Progress
repeats the formulation in arguing for a troop
escalation and ten-year commitment in Afghanistan,
saying that the "infrastructure of jihad" must be
destroyed in "the center of an 'arc of instability'
through South and Central Asia and the greater Middle
East."

The implications of this doctrine are staggering. The
very notion of a fifty-year war assumes the consent of
the American people, who have yet to hear of the plan,
for the next six national elections. The weight of a
fifty-year burden will surprise and dismay many in the
antiwar movement. Most Americans living today will die
before the fifty-year war ends, if it does. Youngsters
born and raised today will reach middle age. Unborn
generations will bear the tax burden or fight and die
in this "irregular warfare." There is a chance, of
course, that the Long War can be prevented. It may be
unsustainable, a product of imperial hubris. Public
opinion may tire of the quagmires and costs--but only
if there is a commitment to a fifty-year peace
movement.

In this perspective, Iraq is only an immediate front,
with Afghanistan and Pakistan the expanding fronts, in
a single larger war from the Middle East to South Asia.
Instead of thinking of Iraq like Vietnam, a war that
was definitively ended, it is better to think of Iraq
as a setback, or better a stalemate, on a larger
battlefield where victory or defeat are painfully hard
to define over a timespan of five decades.

I propose to begin by examining the military doctrines
that give rise to notions of the Long War. The peace
movement often adopts the biblical commitment to "study
war no more," but in this case it may prove useful to
become students of military strategies and tactics.
(Those wishing to become students of Long War theory
should consult the bibliography at the end of this
essay.)

1. The New Counterinsurgency Is a Return to the Indian
Wars.

In a September 24, 2007 article in The Nation, "The New
Counterinsurgency," I wrote that the Petraeus plan for
Iraq was as old as our nation's long Indian wars. That
thesis was confirmed in the writings of the
neo-conservative Robert Kaplan, in his September 21,
2004, article in the Wall Street Journal, "Indian
Country."

Kaplan is obsessed with the anarchy loosed on the world
by post-colonial, tribal-based societies, and
emphasizes the need for small wars carried on "off
camera," so to speak. Kaplan approvingly quotes one US
officer as opining that "you want to whack bad guys
quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian aid
projects." The comparison Kaplan makes between today's
Long War and our previous Indian wars is that the
"enemies" were highly decentralized tribal nations who
had to be defeated in one campaign after another. He
realizes that conventional war against the Plains and
western tribes was an unsustainable strategy and that
the native people were overwhelmed by an inexhaustible
supply of white settlers and superior technology like
the railroad. Fighting the new Indian wars today, he
advises, means "the smaller the American footprint and
the less notice it draws from the international media,
the more effective is the operation." In this sense,
Iraq is a strategic setback for Kaplan, "a mess that no
one wants to repeat."

2. Strategic Military Framework: The Fifty-Year Long
War.

Like the Indian wars, winning the Long War will require
taking advantage of the deep divisions that exist in
tribal societies, along lines of religion, ethnicity,
race and geography. The efforts of many Indian leaders
to form effective confederations against US expansion
never succeeded. On the other hand, US army strategies
to pay tribes to deploy "scouts" who would inform on
and fight other tribes were successful. The main
strategy of the Long War is to attract one tribal or
ethnic group to fight their rivals on behalf of the
foreign occupier. Nagl accurately predicted that
"winning the Iraqi people's willingness to turn in
their terrorist neighbors will mark the tipping point
in defeating the insurgency."

Counterinsurgency is portrayed to the public as a more
civilized, even intellectual, form of war directed by
Ivy League professionals, with a proper emphasis on
human rights, political persuasion and protection of
the innocents. Every civilian insulted by a door
knocked down, it is said, is lost to the cause, thus
creating a military motive to be respectful to local
populations. The new Marine-Army counterinsurgency
manual is filled with such suggestions.

But this "hearts and minds" approach downplays what
Vice President Dick Cheney called the use of "the dark
side." Before a local population will turn in its
neighbors, to use Nagl's image, the occupying army must
be seen as defeating those "neighbors," killing and
wounding the alleged insurgents in significant numbers;
weakening or destroying the infrastructure in their
villages, and creating an exodus of refugees (in
Vietnam, this was known as "forced urbanization," a
term of the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington).
In the meantime, the population considered "friendly"
is tightly guarded in what used to be called strategic
hamlets and, in Iraq, became known as "gated
communities": behind concertina wire, blast walls and
watch towers, and with everyone subject to eye
scanners. The lines between enemy, friendly and neutral
in this context are fluid, guaranteeing that many
people will be targeted inaccurately as
"irreconcilable" sympathizers with the insurgents.
Profiling and rounding up people who "look the type"
will lead to detention camps filled individuals lacking
any usable evidence against them. As one Taliban
operative told the New York Times, perhaps
over-confidently:

I know of the Petraeus experiment out there. But we
know our Afghans. They will take the money from
Petraeus, but they will not be on his side. There are
so many people working with the Afghans and the
Americans who are on their payroll, but they inform us,
sell us weapons. (May 5, 2009) The truth is that
conventional warfare by US troops against Muslim
nations is politically impossible, for two reasons that
suggest an inherent weakness. First, the local people
become inflamed against the foreigners, creating better
conditions for the insurgency. Second, the American
people are skeptical of ground wars involving huge
casualties, costs, and possibly the military draft.
Counterinsurgency becomes the fallback military option
of the unwelcome occupier. Counterinsurgency is
low-visibility of necessity, depending on stealth,
psychological and information warfare, both abroad and
at home.

3. What Happened on the Dark Side in Iraq

In Iraq, the dark side first involved the 2003-2004
American-sponsored round-ups and torture, only leaked
to the American public and media by a US guard in Abu
Ghraib. In addition, as many as 50,000 young Iraqis,
mostly Sunnis, have been held in extreme conditions in
detention centers across the country (some of them now
being released under the pact negotiated between
Baghdad and Washington). Then there were the
unreported, top-secret extrajudicial killings described
chillingly in Bob Woodward's The War Within, which were
so effective that they reportedly gave "orgasms" to
Gen. Petraeus's top adviser, Derek Harvey. Woodward
writes that these killings, in which the Pentagon was
the judge, jury and executioner, based heavily on local
informants, were "very possibly the biggest factor in
reducing" Iraq's violence in 2007. It is likely that
death squads were carrying out the revived version of a
"global Phoenix program," as advocated by Gen.
Petraeus's leading counterinsurgency adviser, David
Kilcullen, in the Small Wars Journal (November 30,
2004). Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, confirms that
Phoenix became a model after 9/11, despite the fact
that military historians called it massive,
state-sanctioned murder, and clear evidence that 97
percent of its Vietcong victims were of "negligible
importance."

It is far more widely known that Gen. Petraeus reduced
the Sunni insurgency by hiring some 100,000 Sunnis,
mostly former insurgents, to protect their communities
and battle Al Qaeda in Iraq. This was in accord with
the strategy proposed by another top Petraeus adviser,
Steven Biddle, in 2006:

Use the prospect of a US-trained and US-supported
Shiite-Kurdish force to compel the Sunnis to come to
the negotiating table [and] in order to get the Shiites
and the Kurds to negotiate too, it should threaten to
either withdraw prematurely, a move that would throw
the country into disarray, or to back the Sunnis.
(Foreign Affairs, March-April 2006) Now those so-called
"Sons of Iraq," first known as the "Kit Carson Scouts,"
are increasingly frustrated by the refusal of the
US-supported al-Maliki government to integrate them
into the state structure and pay them living wages. It
is unclear what the future holds for Iraq as US troops
begin to withdraw. Elements of the military, perhaps
including Gen. Raymond Odierno, are known to be unhappy
with the pace of withdrawal, and already are
negotiating with the Iraqi government to delay the
six-month deadline for redeploying American troops to
barracks outside Iraqi cities. It is apparent that
neither conventional warfare (2003-2006) nor
counterinsurgency (2006-2009) have solved the
fundamental problem of pacifying an insurgent
nationalism which was mobilized by the 2003 invasion
itself.

In Iraq, the US strategy was to speed up the Iraqi
clock while slowing down the American one, Petraeus was
fond of saying. That meant accelerating a political
compromise between Shi'a, Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq,
along the lines of the 2007 Baker-Hamilton Report,
while cooling American voter impatience with promises
that peace was just around the corner of the 2008
elections. It was around this time that the Center for
a New American Security was formed among Democratic
national security advocates deeply worried that a voter
mandate could end the war "prematurely."

The key operative in CNAS was Michelle Flournoy, who
went on to vet Pentagon appointments for the Obama
transition team and now serves as an assistant
secretary of defense. Contrary to the views of many in
the antiwar movement and Democratic Party, Petraeus's
2007-08 troop surge was successful in its political
mission of sharply reducing both US and Iraqi
casualties. However, the US military surge included the
massive wave of extrajudicial terror chronicled by
Woodward, as well as paying tens of thousands of Sunni
insurgents not to shoot at American troops. Neither
approach could be counted on to stabilize Iraq for
long.

At the end of 2008, the Bush administration was forced
to accept what the al-Maliki government described as
"the withdrawal pact," according to which the United
States would gradually withdraw all troops by late
2011. Since the US forces have not "won" the war
militarily, there is little evidence that Iraq will
become the stable pro-Western model some seek for their
Long War. Even if another insurgency or civil war is
averted, Iraq will be aligned with Iran's regional
interests for some time to come. President Obama will
be under serious pressure from US military officials in
Iraq and their allies among the neo-conservatives in
Washington, to delay his promised withdrawal or be
accused of "losing" Iraq.

The Iraqi security forces now consist of 600,000
soldiers, including 340,000 members of a largely-Shi'a
force often described as sectarian or dysfunctional. At
present, the US continues to face the dilemma described
by James Fallows in 2005:

The crucial need to improve security and order in Iraq
puts the United States in an impossible position. It
can't honorably leave Iraq--as opposed to simply
evacuating Saigon-style--so long as its military must
provide most of the manpower, weaponry, intelligence
systems and strategies being used against the
insurgency. But it can't sensibly stay when the very
presence of its troops is a worsening irritant to the
Iraqi public and a rallying point for nationalist
opponents--to say nothing of the growing pressure in
the United States for withdrawal." 4. The Long War
Moves from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan

The same counterinsurgency strategies are being
transferred to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with US troop
levels destined to reach 70,000 this year, bringing the
overall Western force level closer and closer to the
declining total in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the expanded
American forces will concentrate on destroying the
poppy fields and villages dominated by the Taliban in
southern Kandahar and Helmund provinces, a
resource-denial strategy from the Indian wars. Many
Americans are expected to be killed or wounded in this
effort to secure and inoculate the rural population
against the Taliban. Many Taliban are likely to be
killed along with along with local civilians, while the
core cadre may retreat to redeploy elsewhere.

The Bagram prison is being massively expanded as a
detention facility where President Obama's Guantanamo
orders do not apply. Bagram now holds an estimated 650
prisoners who, unlike those in Guantanamo, have "almost
no rights," including access to lawyers. "Human rights
campaigners and journalists are strictly forbidden
there," according to a January 28, 2009, report by Der
Spiegel International.

According to a RAND report using World Bank data,
Afghanistan has perhaps the lowest-ranking justice
system in the world. "In comparison to other countries
in the region--such as Iran, Pakistan, Russia,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Ukbekistan--Afghanistan's
justice system was one of the least effective." Bagram
is only one of many detention facilities that will be
filled across the country; the Taliban "liberated" over
1,000 inmates, including 400 of their cadre, from a
Kandahar prison just last year.

Counterinsurgency theory, based on the British
experience in Malaysia, requires a period of ten to
twelve years to impose enough suffering and exhaustion
to force the population into accepting the peace terms
of the dominant power. This is precisely the timetable
laid out by Kilcullen before Sen. John Kerry's Senate
Armed Services Committee on February 5:

[It will take] ten to fifteen years, including at least
two years of significant combat up front.... thirty
thousand extra troops in Afghanistan will cost around 2
billion dollars per month beyond the roughly 20 billion
we already spend; additional governance and development
efforts will cost even more.... [but] If we fail to
stabilize Afghanistan this year, there will be no
future. Kilcullen and others support the current plan
to expand the total Afghanistan security forces from
80,000 to a total of 400,000 overall, costing $20
billion over six to seven years.

In Pakistan, where torture and extrajudicial abuse also
are prevalent, the US spent $12 billion during the past
decade on a [Musharraf] military dictatorship, compared
with one-tenth that amount on development schemes.
These policies only deepened the Muslim nation's
anti-Americanism, alienated the middle-class
opposition, and left the poor in festering poverty. In
addition to these self-imposed problems, the Pentagon
is engaged in a frantic uphill effort to change
Pakistan's strategic military doctrine from preparation
for another conventional (or even nuclear) war against
India to a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban
embedded amid its own domestic population, especially
in the extremely impoverished federally administered
tribal areas that border Afghanistan.

The likelihood of the United States' convincing
Pakistan to view the domestic threat as greater than
that from India is doubtful. Pakistan has fought three
wars with India, and views the US as supporting the
expansion of India's interests in Afghanistan, where
the Pakistan military has supported the Taliban as a
proxy against India. The Northern Alliance forces of
Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks were strongly supported by
India in 2001 against Pakistan's Taliban's allies, and
the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance was a
"catastrophe" for Pakistan, according to Juan Cole.
Since 2001, India has sent hundreds of millons in
assistance to Afghanistan, including funds for Afghan
political candidates in 2004, assistance to sitting
legislators, Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Heart and
Kandahar, and road construction designed, according to
the Indian government, to help their countries' armed
forces "meet their strategic needs."

Polls show that a vast majority of Pakistanis view the
United States and India as far greater threats than the
Taliban, despite the Taliban's unpopularity with much
of Pakistan's public. While it is unlikely that the
Taliban could seize power in Pakistan, it may be
impossible for anyone to militarily prevent Taliban
control of the tribal areas and a growing base among
the Pashtun tribes (28 million in Afghanistan, 12
million in Pakistan).

The remaining options begin to make the United States
look like Gulliver tied down among the Lilliputians.

The US will demand that Pakistan's armed forces fight
the Taliban, which the American military has driven
into Pakistan. Pakistan will demand billions in US aid
without giving guarantees that they will shift their
security deployments in accord with Washington's will.
The US will make clear that it will go to extreme
lengths to prevent a scenario in which Pakistan's
nuclear arsenal falls into the Taliban's hands. No one
on the US side acknowledges that this spiraling
disaster was triggered by US policies over the past
decade.

5. The Quagmire of Crises

To summarize, the "arc of crisis" is turning into a
"quagmire of crises." The current US military strategy
in Pakistan is contradictory mix of an air war by
Predators combined with US special forces trying to
organize a tribal war in search of Al Qaeda. US
policies already have driven Al Qaeda out of
Afghanistan, partly with covert support from Pakistan's
army. As a result, both Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters
have taken up havens in the remote wilderness of
Pakistan's tribal areas. So far the US has budgeted
$450 million for the tribal-based "Frontier Corps" in
the frontier region. This strategy has not only failed
to prevent the Taliban from taking virtual control of
the tribal region, but the effort has killed hundreds
of civilians, provoked deeper public opposition, and
driven the Taliban insurgency further east into
Pakistan.

The US faces a military crisis which Secretary Hillary
Clinton recently called "a mortal threat" to America's
security, the possibility of Taliban or Al Qaeda's
access to Pakistan's nuclear stockpile in the
eventuality that the situation deteriorates further.
This will trigger an intense political campaign to "do
something" about the very threat that US policies have
created.

The US and NATO can barely invade Afghanistan, which
has 32 million people spread over 250,000 square miles,
larger than Iraq. Pakistan, with 172 million people
living over 310, 000 square miles, simply cannot be
invaded. But in a crisis, it is conceivable that
American advisers, even ground troops, might be sent to
occupy the 10,000 square miles on Pakistan's side of
the border. That might result in an anti-American
revolution in the streets across Pakistan.

So what has counterinsurgency achieved thus far? At
most, a stalemate of sorts in Iraq after six years of
combat on top of a brutal decade of sanctions. Nothing
much in Afghanistan, where conventional warfare pushed
Al Qaeda over the border into Pakistan. Nothing much in
Pakistan, where the Pakistan army is resistant to shift
its primary focus away from India.

Kilcullen's war plan for Afghanistan covers ten to
twelve years, starting in 2009. The war on the Pakistan
front is only beginning, meaning that the Obama
administration is managing three wars within the Long
War, not including secret battlegrounds like the
Philippines or what may happen in Iran or
Israel-Palestine, nor the controversial expansion of
NATO to the borders of Russia, Iran, China and other
hotspots along the Arc of Instability. Some in the
intelligence community would even like to expand the
"terrorist" threat to include the immigrant and drug
routes through Central and Latin America as well.

Even if President Obama wishes to carry out a strategic
retreat from "the sorrows of empire," he will be faced
with significant pressure from elements of the
military-industrial complex, and the lack of an
informed public. The path of least resistance, it may
appear to Obama in the short run, is incremental
escalation (sending 20,000 additional Americans) while
stepping up the search for a patchwork diplomatic fix.
But incremental escalation can be like another drink
for an alcoholic, and even that strategy would require
a stepping back from the doctrine of the Long War.
Hawks at the American Enterprise Institute and their
allies like John McCain and Joe Lieberman are pushing
for victory instead of face-saving diplomacy.

The deeper sources of this crisis certainly involve the
American and Western quest for oil, the historic
inequalities between the global North and South, the
West and the Muslim world. But it is important to
emphasis the strategic military dimension, particularly
the guiding strategic vision of a fifty-year war. The
Long War now has a momentum of its own. The impact of
the Long War on other American priorities, like
healthcare and civil liberties, is likely to be
devastating. Since most Americans, especially those
supportive of peace and justice campaigns, are well
aware of domestic issues and general issues of war and
peace, it is important to begin concentrating on the
great deficit in popular understanding, that the Long
War is already here, building from the previous the
cold war dynamic and the Bush era's nomenclature about
the "global war on terrorism."

To be continued... thoughts on The Long Peace Movement.

BIBILIOGRAPHY AND READINGS.

The older classics. For those with serious time, I
would recommend Sun-Tzu and Carl Von Clausewitz for an
introduction to opposing doctrines, still studied
widely.

For the classic Western take on the Arab world, T.E.
Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

The recent classics include Che Guevara and Mao
Tse-Tung. On the Western side, I suggest the writings
of Sir Robert Thompson on Defeating Communist
Insurgency; Frank Kitson, Low Insurgency Operations;
David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare; Robert Taber,
The War of the Flea; and the lengthy but brilliant
study of Algeria by Alistair Horne, A Savage War of
Peace (the cover of Horne's reissued book announces
that it's "on the reading list of President Bush and
the US military," and a blurb by the Washington Post's
Thomas Ricks that it should be read "immediately").

For immediate works of importance: John Nagl, Learning
to Eat Soup with a Knife (the phrase is from Lawrence);
and David Petraeus, Nagl et al., The US Army/Marine
Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (in collaboration
with Harvard's Carr Center). A brilliant counterpoint
to these works is William R. Polk's Violent Politics
(see also his Sorrows of Empire).

Important books on Al Qaeda and Islam include Robert
Dreyfuss's The Devil's Game; Jason Burke's Al Qaeda,
Michael Scheuer's Marching to Hell; Bruce Lawrence,
ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin
Laden; and Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban.

Other critical books include Rashid Khalidi,
Resurrecting Empire and Sowing Crisis; Juan Cole,
Engaging the Muslim World; Ahmed Hashim, Insurgency and
Counterinsurgency in Iraq; Mamood Mamdani, Good Muslim,
Bad Muslim; Tariq Ali, The Duel; and Rashid's Descent
into Chaos.

To follow the counterinsurgency discussions among US
security strategists, go to the smallwarsjournal.com
blog or the Center for American Progress.

About Tom Hayden Tom Hayden is the author of The Other
Side (1966, with Staughton Lynd), The Love of
Possession Is a Disease With Them (1972), Ending the
War in Iraq (2007) and Writings for a Democratic
Society: The Tom Hayden Reader (2008).