Canadian Cincinnatus

The War on Terror: what has worked and what hasn’t 10 years on (Part III)

How could the War on Terror have been fought better? 

For what it’s worth, I think George W Bush’s greatest mistake was that he didn’t strike hard enough, fast enough and go far enough when he could. Obviously this view contradicts the conventional wisdom of Bush’s usual critics. The main piece of evidence for my hypothesis is that the biggest national sponsor of international terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is still standing (though suffering from significant internal dissention).

Machiavelli taught that when you strike, you must strike as hard as possible. Half a heart digs the grave deeper. Conventional military wisdom concurs when it advises field commanders that it is not possible to apply too much force at the crucial point in a battle.

This strategic principle forms the basis for my own ideas on how the War on Terror should have been conducted. I developed my thoughts within the first several months after 9/11 so I can’t be accused of 20/20 hindsight. 

At the time, I envisioned using a much larger force – basically the entire US military – to crush not only Saddam Hussein but to use Iraq as a springboard to take out Iran and Syria, rounding up all terrorists that could be found there, providing as much help as possible to any pro-west elements and then getting out while the getting is good. Prior to coming home, and while there would still be about 10 divisions residing in the Middle East, I would have demanded from all the Middle Eastern regimes that hadn’t been invaded (such as, say, Saudi Arabia) that they turn over all the terrorists who live within their borders or kill them - or you’re next. Such a message, sent out at the very pinnacle of victory would result, I think, in maximum cooperation.

While I would have used much more force than George Bush, I would have counterbalanced this by setting a hard time limit (privately, of course) on the operations: about 2 to 3 years. I would not have engaged in counterinsurgency or nation building (but I would have left a small special forces presence to continue to hunt terrorists). As a result, the shooting war would have been more intense but would have ended much quicker - by the 2004 presidential election, at the latest.

I believe the more intense nature of the fighting would still have resulted in a decisive-battle-style moral victory that the much-longer Iraq insurgency struggle ended up providing. Where I think where my plan is superior is on the domestic front. The weakness of George Bush’s strategy was that, by pulling his punches when he didn’t have to, the hot wars dragged on for far too long. If you look at how America responds to wars - and indeed the history of how democracies in general respond to war - the populace tends to support full-scale wars but not the kind of low intensity conflicts that drag on seemingly forever. The people understand perfectly well the need for an occasional war. What they cannot stomach is perpetual war. This is the reason for the apparent paradox that intense conflicts like World War II enjoy popular support while relatively low intensity affairs like the Boer War, the Philippines’ insurgency and Vietnam become enormously unpopular over time.

P.S. Most of this series has been about Iraq. My take on the Afghan war, and the strategy that should have been employed in that country, has already been explained abundantly and can be found here, here, here and here.

 

The War on Terror: what has worked and what hasn’t 10 years on (part II)

It strikes me that when critics of George W Bush criticize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they do so with a static view of the world. They assume that a world without the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would look exactly like the world today minus those wars. If this were indeed the case then those wars would truly be unnecessary. But such a view is flawed because it doesn’t account for the effect of Al Qaeda’s losses in manpower and logistics, as well as the negative effect those wars have had on their morale. One of the Bush administration’s bragging points is that there has never been a comparable follow-on strike to 9/11. Pathetic attempts, like the crotch bomber, only underscore Al Qaeda’s decline.

The counterargument sometimes given here is that the cost of the War on Terror (the lives of 4,500 US servicemen, the wounding of 5 times that many, not to mention the casualties incurred by wartime allies like Canada) is greater than the cost in blood of  9/11: 3,000 dead. Cold calculation can lead one to the conclusion that the US would be better off with no War on Terror even if it had meant another 9/11-style attack. President Obama has himself has opined that the US is capable of “absorbing another 9/11.”

He is right, but again, the thinking is too static. After 9/11, the Islamic fundamentalist morale was sky high. If the only response to 9/11 were a few cruise missile strikes on aspirin factories and encampments, the jihadists would have concluded – quite reasonably – that they can get away with anything. Volunteers would have been lining up around the block to do another 9/11. As a result, the danger would not have been another 9/11 but a dozen more 9/11’s. And let us not forget the spectre of a nuclear attack. In 1998, Alexander Lebed – Boris Yeltsin’s former defence minister - testified at the US House Armed Services committee that between 100 and 400 backpack nukes were missing. Where are they? I don’t know, but on September 12, 2001 it would have been reasonable to assume that some of them may be terrorist hands.

Why haven’t any been used? Perhaps because the powers that be in terrorist circles (that would be the nation states that sponsor the terror groups) have made sure that the terrorists they sponsor don’t get their hands on them for fear of an overwhelming American nuclear retaliation. Absent an American demonstration of resolve in Iraq and Afghanistan, would they still fear a Made in the USA Armageddon? Perhaps, but perhaps not.

Above all, it must be kept in mind that war is a dynamic venture, with the relative strengths of the opponents are constantly changing, and that one of the prime movers in this regard is the morale of the participants. One indication of the level of morale among Islamic fundamentalists is their presence, or lack thereof, in the recent Arab spring. For the first time in recent memory, demonstrations occurred in the Arab world that were not dominated by calls to return to theocratic barbarism or wild threats hurled at the Great Satan or Israel. While it may be possible that the Islamists will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the chaos that has followed from the popular uprisings (this is unfortunately likely in Egypt), it is also undoubtedly true that they are no longer on the leading edge. On the Arab street, they are not leading public opinion any longer but following it, and that is a huge change.

For that, I believe, we have the George Bush’s War on Terror to thank.

Part III of this essay tomorrow.

 

The War on Terror: what has worked and what hasn’t 10 years on

Carl von Clausewitz, the 19^th century Prussian strategist composed his masterwork, On War, to distil the military wisdom he learned from the Napoleonic Wars, in which he participated. One of his key insights was that the purpose of war is not to occupy ground but to defeat enemy forces. This led him to the concept of a decisive battle. As he saw it, war consists of two armies manoeuvring for advantage and only engaging with the enemy when they think they can beat them. Therefore, in battles that are decisive, the battlefield itself and the land surrounding it is irrelevant, except as to how the lay of the land contributes to defence and movement. The only thing that is important is who wins and who loses – and by how much.

The classic example of a decisive battle is Gettysburg, fought over an insignificant town in Pennsylvania but where the Robert E Lee’s invasion of the north was stopped and the cause of the south doomed because the Confederacy could never make up the losses they suffered on those three days. Another example is Stalingrad. The town itself was an irrelevant place, in the middle of nowhere, of no strategic significance and reduced to rubble while the battle was being fought. It was only significant to the dictators of the opposing sides because the place was named after one of them. But still, the battle fought there was decisive because the loss of the Sixth Army forced the Wehrmaht to be on the defensive from that moment onwards. 

Conventional wisdom says that the doctrine of the decisive battle is irrelevant to counterinsurgency, guerrilla warfare and terror campaigns. In ‘asymmetrical warfare’, the battlefield is the hearts and minds of the local inhabitants. On Sept 12, 2001 I agreed with this view.

But in retrospect, I think it is not true, or rather, it isn’t necessarily true. Looking back at the Iraq campaign, I see that a decisive battle was fought there, one that has proven to be the Gotterdammerung of Al Qaeda. The conventional wisdom about Iraq is that because the nation building and counterinsurgency can never really be concluded decisively, the war will drag on forever unless America unilaterally withdraws, which would be a huge moral defeat. Therefore, Iraq must be a failure. One can counterargue that the success of General Petreaus’ surge bypassed both horns of the dilemma, but I think a more fundamental point can be made: that the war over the Iraq insurgency was a decisive battle, and Al Qaeda lost. 

I think the reason many people don’t see this is because of how we usually interpret the phrase ‘hearts and minds’. We usually think of the hearts and minds of the peasants, among whom terrorists and partisans can find sanctuary and operate. Our counterinsurgency boffins believe they can be won over with non-military efforts such as road building and school construction to demonstrate to them that we are ‘nicer guys’ than the enemy. Sometimes this approach is correct. But there is another sense to the phrase ‘hearts and minds’: it means the morale of the enemy. 

At the end of the day war is a destructive enterprise. You do not win over the enemy by appealing to him. World War II was not won in the public opinion polls of Imperial Japan or the Third Reich. You don’t win the enemy over - you destroy his will to fight. This is what decisive battles do. It can safely be said that on Sept 12, 2001, Islamic terrorists were the very opposite of demoralized. They were exultant, they were triumphalistic, they thought victory was in their grasp and that their enemy was weak and vacillating. They imagined that the only response the US was capable of was a Clintonian cruise missile strike. They thought that they had won a decisive battle.

By taking the battle directly to them in Afghanistan, George W Bush disrupted Al Qaeda’s command and control, crippling their ability to launch a follow-on strike. But I don’t believe that the initial victory really demoralized them. It was too quick and bloodless to do that. What truly demoralized them was the protracted 6 year (2004 to 2009) insurgency they launched in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was overthrown and which they ultimately lost when the Surge succeeded. While the US lost about 3,000 men there, the US military killed hundreds of thousands of insurgents. Unfortunately for the Islamists, the US proved more resilient than they had expected, and the US soldier an order of magnitude better fighter than they are. It is easy to find men willing to die for a winning cause; it is much harder to find somebody to die for a hopeless cause. Even the most committed warrior doesn’t want to die for nothing. After 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s best and brightest are now dead and the ultimate victory of the Caliphate is further than ever.

On September 12, 2001, Al Qaeda was moralized. Today, they are demoralized.

Part II of this essay tomorrow.

Why Korans are burned in Florida

A little remarked upon aspect to the Florida/Afghanistan Koran burning story is Pastor Terry Jones’ motivation in burning the Koran. It is obvious that Terry Jones is a wingnut ignorantly lashing out, but the question remains: why is he lashing out specifically at the Koran and not something else?

My hypothesis is that he is sick and tired of seeing our culture spat upon 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Rarely a day goes by without some high official apologizing for western civilization, giving preferential treatment to the non-western tradition in the case where the two cultures conflict, or simply assuming some grotesque contortion of cravenness demanded by Political Correctness. People can take only so much civilizational disrespect before they lose it. And not everybody who loses it has the eloquence or incisive wit of Mark Steyn.

As an aside, this same dynamic was at play in the last Ontario provincial election when the people of Ontario revolted against Conservative leader John Tory’s faith-based funding initiative. They saw Tory favouring madrassas over secular and Christian schools, and exploded. I don’t think Tory gets it to this day. I think he still believes it was a revolt in favour of Ontario’s public school system. It was not. If Tory had advocated charter schools or a voucher system, the teachers’ union would have gone ballistic (which is why he didn’t do that), but he wouldn’t have faced the broad-based revolt that he did.

Each case shows that people are increasingly tired of being insulted. And this is why I predict that, as long as the leaders of western civilization remain as craven, obsequious and apologetic as Senator Lindsey Graham - who mused aloud about the desirability of limiting free speech, there will be more Pastor Terry Jones’s in our future. 

 

Memo to General Petraeus: If you want to win the ‘hearts and minds’, you need cultural confidence

After the wacky Florida pastor’s Koran burning inspired some excitable locals in Mazar-e-Sharif to murder 7 UN workers, General Petraeus declared the Koran burnings – not the mass murder - “hateful, extremely disrespectful and enormously intolerant”. Earth to the good general, if you want to build a modern nation state out of Afghanistan, you can’t be indulging the country’s most barbaric elements.

I understand what Petraeus is thinking: he believes that insensitivity on our part repels the hearts and minds that our Afghan mission is trying so desperately to woo. While the pastors Koran burnings are not making things easier for him, there is nevertheless a mistake in the good general’s logic: If you want the Afghans on your side, stop sucking up to them. Condemn the murderers; round them up and kill them; and then tell the rest of the Afghans in no uncertain terms that actions committed half-way around the world do not excuse murder and that this kind of behaviour will be put down violently and vigorously in the future. As Osama Bin Laden himself once put it, people gravitate to a strong horse not a weak horse. Craven accommodation is what the weak horse does.

Mark Steyn was quite correct when he opined that the Afghan mission is better off channeling General Charles Napier, who put an end to the custom of suttee in India by declaring: 

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

As a result of Great Britain’s 19^th century cultural confidence, not only is suttee no longer practiced in India, but India is a modern nation with a 60 year parliamentary tradition, British common law and a developing free market economy. In short, today’s India is an integral part of the civilized world. As far as India is concerned, thank God that the old time Brits weren’t as sensitive as General Petraeus.

 

 

Spontaneously Formed Militia Foils Hijacking Attempt…Again

Story here.

As Glenn Reynolds said in his must-read book, An Army of Davids, they’re a pack not a herd. As Mark Steyn remarked, the only things that worked on 9/11 were ordinary citizens taking matters into their own hands, or local authorities. The big-budget, fancy-pants, three-letter-acronym agencies all fell down on the job.

 

Airport Security in North America is completely on the wrong track

After the “don’t touch my junk” controversy, the TSA and its defenders are presenting the issue of nude x-ray scans and enhanced pat-downs as a tradeoff between security and convenience, with the TSA siding with security.

This is a false set of choices, as the example of David Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv demonstrates. Being the principal airport in Israel, Tel Aviv airport is a prime target for Islamic terrorists and yet, it is also one of the safest and most convenient airports to use – with a typical traveler taking only 20 to 30 minutes to go from the highway to the gate. How did Israel achieve this success? They did it by not treating everybody the same. Whereas North American airport security concentrates on things (i.e. shoes, toenail clippers and toothpaste), Israeli security concentrates on people. They do their utmost to identify the 0.01% of the passengers who pose a security risk and focus their attention on them. They are more interested in asking travelers pointed questions - while looking straight into their eyes - than a TSA official, who is more interested in getting the Swedish grandmother to take off her belt. To aid in identifying bad people, Israeli airport security is plugged straight into military intelligence. Our airport security works as if it were stuck on a desert island.

The reason for the disparity in methods is, I believe, political correctness. The problem with the Israeli method is that profiling - ethnic and otherwise – inherently forms a central core technique. To our political correctness nabobs, this is a no-no. They would rather sacrifice safety - as well as the dignity of our citizens - than break this taboo.

Speaking of the dignity of our citizens, I think Mark Steyn is right to point out that assaulting the dignity of our citizenry is not a trivial side issue; it is the central issue. Ordering people around like sheep and subjecting them to indignities is enervating and, in the long term, corrodes the self-reliant virtues required by a free people to remain free. The first instinct of a free man is to deal with his own problems himself. It is not a coincidence that the one bright spot on 9/11 was the “let’s roll” ethos that governed the passengers on United 93. As Steyn pointed out, on the day when all the fancy pants, three-letter acronym, cost-is-no-object federal agencies abjectly failed, it was a spontaneously formed militia on United 93 that helped save part of the day. All our airport screening does is to empower bureaucrats and teach the average person to think that airport security is somebody else’s problem.

The result of this mindset is the ban on all sharp objects from planes because, after all, the 9/11 hijackers used them to take planes over. And yet, once the passengers on United 93 realized that the hijackers were on a suicide mission, they fought back. All we do when we ban sharp objects is prevent people from having the tools they need to fight back and win. If everybody on a plane has a sharp knife and is aware that hijackers might be on a suicide mission, then hijacking that plane becomes impossible. We make every traveler in the world take off their shoes because one guy tried unsuccessfully to blow up a plane with explosives in his shoes. And yet, why did the shoe bomber fail? Because his fellow passengers spontaneously formed a militia and stopped him. Too bad they weren’t allowed to have boxcutters on them; their job would have been easier.

But when you get right down to it, the government doesn’t like people overpowering terrorists. It infringes on their jobs. They don’t like it any more than the Toronto Police liked it when David Chan decided to protect his own property.

When it comes to airport security, freedom isn’t the problem. Political correctness (the doctrine of our elites) and government monopoly on the use of force are the problem. Freedom is the solution.

America Institutes Sharia Law

Still think we will never have Sharia law in North America? Guess again. Sharia law is here already, and we still haven't figured it out.

On September 11 2001, Jihadists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing almost 3000 people. At that time, the western world discovered that we had been at war with Islam for a decade or more, we just didn't realize it. History is repeating itself.

The news of a small time preacher, to a parish of some 40 people in Florida, planned a September 11th demonstration to burn the Koran as a statement that Islam is a religion of the devil. The news spread like wildfire and a small protest in Afghanistan found it's way to the covers of newspapers around the world. The General in charge of Iraq and Afghanistan pleaded for the pastor to cancel the burning. Leaders from every party and every western nation denounced the planned protest, including the President of the United States and unlikely bedfellow, Tea Party darling, Sarah Palin. All demanded that the Koran burning be cancelled. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation, twice (at least) visited the Pastor Jones. An event that would make anybody's guts turn to liquid.

The Pastor has now cancelled the Koran burning. Who wouldn't. It was clear that nobody was going to come to the Pastor's defense.

Legal experts and government officials have repeatedly stated that Pastor Jones was fully within his Constitutional rights to hold such a demonstration. There was no legal way to stop him, yet he has cancelled the demonstration, in full accordance with Sharia Law. There is no need for Islamists to change the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights. They don't care about them anyhow. We have just provided evidence that Islam already has the power to institute Sharia Law upon the western world, and are doing it.  How long will it be before we realize it?

WiseGuy

 

 

Concerning the Ground Zero Mosque and Koran burnings

Is General Patraeus a Coward? 

I can understand politicians and newspapermen expressing their fear of Islamist reprisals for the Koran burning planned for September 11th, but I can't excuse General Patraeus. While there may be room to argue that US soldiers may be put in more danger by such an event, I think it is a stretch at best. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda are already hell bent on killing as many infidels as they can find. It is hard to imagine them getting any more upset. More important is the duty of the US military, which is to protect the Constitution of the United States, which just happens to defend the rights of Pastor Jones, not the unreasonable sensibilities of foreigners. Correct me if I am missing something, but the General appears to me to be demonstrating cowardice, before the enemy. This is a far more damaging event than burning a few Korans.

The fear shown by politicians, the media, and now the military, regarding this non-event, are demonstrating the effectiveness of terrorism. When the Dutch newspaper was attacked for publishing political cartoons depicting Mohammed, the world's news media lay down in fear rather than showing courage by publishing the cartoons en-mass. An opportunity to deliver a victorious blow to the Islamists, was squandered. The lesson for terrorists is that their tactics are working. The west has already surrendered the free press, and shows little sign of trying to win it back. Is the military about to follow suit?

As to the Koran burners, they may be on to something. They just need to adjust their tactics slightly. Perhaps they should insist that the Democrats ban abortion or else they will burn a Koran a day until their demands are met.

WiseGuy

While passengers foil terror attack, arrogant big government sleeps at the wheel

Lets take stock of what worked and what didn’t on the Christmas Day hijacking attempt on Northwest Airlines Flight 253:

What worked: vigilant citizens who spontaneously came together and acted to foil the terrorist. This phenomenon is what blogger Glenn Reynolds calls, the “Army of Davids”  phenomenon. As he says, when responsible citizens band together to fight a threat, they become a pack, not a herd.

What didn’t work: big government airport security measures.

Lessons learned: big government needs even more power to force hard working taxpayers to go through even more demeaning security checks at airports when they want to fly.

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, then lets take a long view of the problem. Lets go back to December 11, 2001 and see what worked and what didn’t then:

What worked: same as above (plus the responders from the lowest level of government, the New York City government led by Rudi Giuliani).

What didn’t work: same as above.

Lessons learned: same as above.

Hmm. I’m beginning to see a pattern. It has been said that the definition of insanity is to expect different results when you keep do the same things over again. However, as economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, often the government only looks like it is irrational. It may in fact be actually behaving quite rationally. It just looks crazy because the government’s stated reasons for doing what it does are not its real reasons. For instance, take airport security. Since every government department’s number one goal is the accumulation of power and money, every solution it will propose must increase its power and its budget.

Second, it has to give the voters the feeling of security, which it does though the increasingly elaborate kabuki theater of airport passenger screening. As the events on Flight 253 illustrate, this feeling of security is only an illusion.

Third, democratic governments must cater to special interest groups in order to win elections. Ethnic lobbies are increasingly powerful and numerous, and it is in the interest of all political parties to cater to them even if it means ignoring real policy proposals that could actually increase security, such as, for instance, profiling airline passengers for Islamic leanings and targeting security measures on them. This illustrates why big solutions often fail. The further away from the problem you get, the more other agenda items get in the way of the solution.

Unfortunately, big journalism, which gets its ideas from big academia, can be usually counted on to support big government measures because big academics and big journalists are really only the courtiers of the governing elite. You can bet that the answer to this problem from the Toronto Star and the CBC is even more airline passenger harassment, never mind that all these policies were already in place prior to Christmas Day, and indeed were in place prior to 9/11. This is, incidentally why big government, big academia and big journalism are usually against self-defense and gun ownership. They empower individuals at the expense of the elites, their clients.

The bottom line for airline travelers: when the s**t hits the fan, you are on your own. If you are lucky, you can count on the goodwill of your neighbour. If you are a natural leader, you can rally those people. But at no point in time should you put your faith in what Mark Steyn called the “fancy-pants federal agencies with the three letter acronyms”. An old friend of mine, who was a 26-year veteran of Metro Toronto Police, described the same phenomenon with different words. He said, “the police are not there to protect you, they are there to catch your murder.”

The bottom line for western civilization: History teaches us that decentralized societies, such as ancient Greek city states, the Roman Republic, Renaissance Italian city states, and Parliamentary England and its colonial offspring are the most dynamic, resilient, adaptable societies, always vastly outproducing sclerotic overcentralized states such as Imperial China, Tsarist Russia, National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union. While there is an advantage to doing certain things centrally in a big way, most situations are best resolved by the people closest to the problem. One only has to look at the Labour Party’s ‘Cool Britannia’, with its big brother cams on every street corner and its zero tolerance approach to self-defense, to see how much some formerly dynamic free societies have degenerated in recent years.