Canadian Cincinnatus

Rand Paul is wrong about ISIS, but so are the people he attacks

Last week, Rand Paul blamed the foreign policy hawks in his own party for the rise of the Middle-East JV team, ISIS. His argument is that if the US had not invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein would still be in charge to make sure that no ISIS-type group emerged. His critics contend that ISIS was formed only after President Obama unilaterally withdrew American forces from Iraq, thus allowing Iraq to drift into chaos. I think both answers are partially true, but, more significantly, partially false.

Let me first saw where I am coming from in all of this. As a Canadian of Eastern European extraction, I thank God that America exists. I think America is the greatest force of good in the world today, and if America weren’t the world’s police force, the world would be immeasurably less free and more chaotic and violent. For this reason, I am not predisposed to isolationists like Paul. Having said that, I also think, because the US is such an overpowering force in the world, there is a tendency to think – especially by Americans but also by everybody else as well – that the US is more influential than it actually is.

Take ISIS. ISIS came together - as an actual army, controlling actual territory - in the Syrian Civil War as one of the groups battling the brutal Syrian dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. In turn, this civil war came into being as part of the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring was inspired by a Tunisian merchant, who lit himself on fire in protest of the heavy-handed Tunisian police. The disturbances in Tunisia quickly spread to Egypt, Syria, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen. One of the places conspicuously absent from the original Arab Spring festivities was Iraq, no doubt because everybody there was exhausted from war. Violence spread only to Iraq after ISIS invaded Iraq from Syria, after metastasizing there in that conflict. Whatever else can be said about the Syrian Civil War, it was not caused by the Iraq War. Syria was at peace right through the Iraq War. The US also had nothing to do with the Arab Spring, being first surprised by it, and then perplexed by what it all meant. In other words, the US did not participate in any of the events that created ISIS. In this sense Rand Paul is completely wrong.

His critics also have a point in that if Obama had left US forces behind, he would have had more leverage with Iraq’s dreadful Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite whose anti-Sunni policies drove Iraqi Sunni’s into ISIS’s arms. The Obama Administration, like the Bush administration before it, constantly hectored al-Maliki about being more welcoming to the Sunnis. Without a military presence in Iraq, Maliki could more easily ignore President Obama than President Bush.

On the other hand, Paul is probably correct to say that if Saddam Hussein had been in charge he would have been in a much better position to crush ISIS. I say probably, because the Assad family had a similar reputation for strong, iron-fisted rule, but look at them now. Assad appears to be on the way out after years of bloody war.

The fact is (one that I never tire in repeating) dictatorships are always weaker than they appear while democracies are always more resilient. Dictatorships are inherently brittle because they lack internal feedback mechanisms like elections, free-markets and a functioning court system. They also systematically hide their dirty laundry. As a result, they appear from without like they are made from granite, at least until the moment they crumble into dust. Look at how fast the Soviet Union fell. For an even better example, look at how quickly Nicolae Ceausescu departed the scene in Romania, after ruling unchallenged for decades. For this reason, the future of dictatorships is hard to predict.

Taking a longer view, what is happening today in the Middle East is that the brittle dictatorships that arose after the French and British colonial masters departed the area are beginning to crumble. In many ways, today’s Middle East struggles are more determined by the borders drawn by the French and the British after World War I than anything the US has done in recently.

Taking an even longer view, what is happening today is that the Middle East is going through a painful transition process from feudalism to the modern world. Much of the rest of the world has gone through a similar process in the past two centuries. First France with Robespierre and Bonaparte, then Russia with the Bolsheviks, and Germany with National Socialism, and Italy with Fascism, and Japan with its militarism, and China with Maoism, many modern nations seems to require a violent transition period when it temporarily adopts some insane, apocalyptic ruling philosophy. Prior to the revolution, it is feudal. After the psychos and tyrants are hanged, it is a modern state. Only the Anglo-Saxon nations seem to be inoculated from this disease.

I think this is what is happening in the Middle East today. The Muslim world is in transition. Until recently, the role of Islam’s military dictatorships has been to retard this process, to hold back the floodgates of modernity. This has created mounting frustration, which is now being expressed in the form of Islamic Millennialism. The Islamic World will join the modern world once this is found wanting and rejected – but not before.

 

P.S. I believe a version of this phenomenon is also what is playing out in Africa today.

 

The strategic lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan

The rise of the isolationist right in the last decade has been motivated by the protracted counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their overwrought reaction – that America must retreat to Fortress America - has got me thinking about the strategic lessons that can be learned from those two military misadventures - the real lessons.

I think the first and most important lesson of those two wars is that advanced militaries do much better in conventional engagements against third-world powers than in counterinsurgency operations. The Saddam Hussein regime and the Taliban were rolled up quickly; this in spite of the fact that conventional war is usually much more intense and bloody than guerilla war. The difference is that the West’s qualitative edge over the third-world means that almost all the bloodshed occurs on the other side, and that the campaigns end quickly and successfully.

As a result, our grand strategy going forward should be to ensure that any conflict between the US and a third-world adversary be conventional rather than unconventional. Guerilla wars should be avoided, and if they can’t be, local proxies should be used as much as possible for the low-tech, in-your-face grunt work that takes decades to show results.

Of course, this lesson does not apply to Russia and China. They have second-rate not fourth-rate armies. As a result, the qualitative edge between us and them is not lop-sided enough to prevent a conventional clash from being bloody and costly on our side as well.

The second lesson is that if our grand strategy fails and we do end up in a guerilla war, we need to account for the nature of the local inhabitants much better. The US’s biggest mistake in Iraq and Afghanistan was to assume that these countries were homogenous nation-states like West Germany and Japan. They are not. The borders of Iraq were decided by French and British diplomats after the First World War, with the result that Iraq is really three nations in one: Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd. Afghanistan is even more chaotic, with Tajik, Uzbek, and Pashtun being the principal tribes, but with many others in the mix. It was created by the British and Russian Empires in the 19^th century as a buffer zone composed of the ungovernable wasteland in between.

The lack of homogeneity in the population is important because an integral part of a western-style civil society is individual rights and equal treatment under the law. Therefore, a country with multiple, antagonistic tribes is likely to fail. For instance, imagine building an ‘Irish Army’ in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s by recruiting in equal measure from local Protestant and Catholic populations. Why would we expect a Protestant Irishman to be loyal to the Catholic standing beside him in the ranks when that man has been his lifelong enemy? The answer is we wouldn’t, but only because Irish culture is more accessible to Western eyes than Iraq or Afghanistan.

Nation-building worked in Germany and Japan because both countries had homogenous populations, each with with strong law-and-order tradition. Civic society was not an alien concept to them. The Germans and Japanese just fit right into the power structure constructed for them by the Americans.

How can one tell beforehand if a country is suitable for post-World War II-style reconstruction? There is an easy answer to this question. Just look at who drew its borders. If a foreign empire or colonial power did it, then the answer is no. If its borders came into being organically, then the answer is a qualified maybe.

So, in spite of this, could the US have nevertheless done better in Iraq and Afghanistan?

I think the nation-building in Iraq would have been more successful if Iraq had been first divided into three smaller countries - Sunni Iraq, Shiite Iraq, and Kurdistan – with separate nation-building programs in each. Of course, the intermingled population along the border regions would have ensured significant messiness, but these troubles would have been smaller and more localized. Evidence supporting the validity of this approach can be found in Kurdistan, which enjoyed regional autonomy and relative tranquility in from 2003 to 2011, while the rest of the country was consumed in flames.

Doubtlessly, I am missing a lot of important details here, but this is why military commanders should be given the flexibility to adapt the overall strategy to the local conditions they confront. Remember, in counterinsurgency, the Little Picture is more important than the Big Picture.

In Afghanistan, the tactics should have been completely different. Being a much more primitive place, nation-building shouldn’t have ever been contemplated at all. As I have argued before, the basic building block in Afghanistan is the tribe. All pacification work should have been conducted on a tribal basis. As I have also said, the key concept for success in Afghanistan is suzerainty. What is a suzerain? A suzerain is a hegemon who controls the foreign policy and the higher-level power structure of a region but leaves the details to the local satraps or rulers.

In fact, this was how the US defeated the Taliban in the first place. The Northern Alliance was never more than a loose coalition of Uzbek and Tajik tribes. The US only lost its way after it abandoned this organic, pre-existing power structure in order to pursue the creation of a western-style state, complete with rule-of-law and equality – concepts completely alien to Afghan tribesmen who had been feuding with each other since time immemorial.

Instead, the US should have installed a loose central government, one that would effectively rule Kabul only, and exercised suzerainty elsewhere. This is how the old King of Afghanistan operated before the Soviets came in. In-country, each tribe should have been dealt with on a case-by-case basis, with friendly tribes given basic military aid and ‘suitcase handshakes’, and unfriendly tribes left to the tender mercies of their traditional enemies, now empowered by American aid. In this way, tribes loyal to us would be incentivized to bring the ‘outside’ tribes into line. A western military presence would likely have been required in larger centres like Kabul and Kandahar, but these would only serve as a kind of super-SWAT team.

What qualifies a tribe as friendly? One, it does not consort with foreign terrorist groups, and two, it allows our special forces free access through their territories in order to confirm this fact. If both conditions are met, they get the guns and the bribes. If not, their neighbours gang up on them. Remember, we don’t really care how they live. Our purpose there is only to deny international terrorists a home base.

Instead, the US pursued a hearts-and-minds strategy. This meant concentrating aid (schools, roads, and hospitals) in troubled areas. This had the effect of showering hostile tribes with gifts while friendly allies were neglected. But the US government didn’t see it that way because they didn’t understand that the basic building block in Afghanistan was the tribe, not the individual or the nation-state.

One last lesson specific to Afghanistan: you can have a War on Terror or you can have a Drug War, but you can’t have both. A friend of mine served in the Helmand River valley, home of Afghanistan’s poppy fields. At first the Americans tried eradicating the crop. When that proved too disruptive (the poppy is Afghanistan’s biggest cash crop), they turned a blind eye to the drug trade. Instead, the US should have used the poppy fields as a thumb-screw on the drug lords: “Shame if something were to happen to that poppy field of yours.” Get the drug lords on your side, and then leave them be. A grand opportunity wasted because too many contradictory goals were pursued concurrently.

I believe these are the real lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, not the Fortress America isolationism currently being peddled by Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. If these methods had been applied to Iraq and Afghanistan right away, a lot of trouble could have been avoided. Better still, Iraq and Afghanistan should have been viewed as a high-intensity, short-term punitive expedition from the start: 2 years max, then out.

 

New civility watch: Jon Stewart’s producer says Oklahoma tornado clearly targets conservatives

Lizz Winstead, the ‘co-creator’ of the Daily Show, that features comedian Jon Stewart, tweeted “This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives.”

She got unlikely support from Glenn Beck who tweeted “How many of us has made a joke we wished we could take back. She has to feel awful.” From the perspective of genuine tolerance, a recurring theme on these pages, Beck is quite right, of course.

However, it must nevertheless be noted that if the roles had been reversed and a conservative had gloated the same way over a natural disaster in a Democrat area, like say Hurricane Sandy, it would have been a career ender.

Incidents like this are useful to file away for the day when leftists lecture conservatives on incivility. At those times, we must throw comments like this back at them to show everybody that their civility talk is just partisan hogwash, and that they are the true political gangsters.

For this reason, I make a practice to note left-wing barbarism in this blog as it occurs.

The phoniness of the pro-Putin charge that the invasion of Georgia was Georgia’s fault.

Yesterday’s post about the Russian-Georgian conflict got me thinking about something that has bugged me for a while: the line circulated in pro-Putin circles, the appeasing western left and even some right-wing bloggers of the isolationist bent, that Georgia attacked Russia!

Anybody with even the tiniest amount of military knowledge recognizes the absurdity of this claim. Even though the invasion was executed incompetently, the military action that transpired require many months of planning and preparation. It is militarily impossible to do something like that on the spur of the moment. In addition, that it started on the opening day of the Beijing Olympics – a huge event guaranteed to use up the media oxygen – raises, or should raise, extreme suspicion.

As usual, my expert on Georgian affairs, Tom M, put it best:

“First off, Russia was never attacked.  But Russian Forces in Georgia were fired upon by Georgian forces.  What amazes me is that anyone could think Russia was attacked, when everything happened well within Georgia... not even a "cross-border" incident.

As far as I know, nobody has articulated things this way... i.e. that Georgian forces never were even close to the Georgia-Russia border... not a single shot was fired into Russian territory.”

He also offered this analogy (that I don’t think is weak): 

“I've been thinking about what kind of analogy to present to Canadian friends about the 2008 Russo-Georgian war...

An obviously weak one would go as follows:

1) Canada and Quebec start hostilities

2) The US grants all in Quebec US citizenship (i.e. issues them US Passports)

3) A skirmish erupts on the Ont-Que border

4) The US then sends massive numbers of troops into Que to protect their newly minted US Citizens from Canada and bombs Ottawa

5) Open war breaks out... Canada loses.”

How to solve the Somali piracy problem – part 2

Now that the hijacking of the American cargo ship and the capture of its captain has been successfully resolved, now is perhaps a good time to revisit an article I wrote on Nov 17, 2008 about the Somali piracy situation. In it, I posited a simple, cost effective solution to this scourge. While my solution is more applicable today than it was back when I originally proposed it, my proscriptions have nevertheless been ignored, no doubt because policymakers have been too squeamish to get their hands dirty implementing the necessary measures. What they don’t realize is that sooner or later, they will have to spill blood but the sooner they do it, the less they will spill. The problem will only escalate until the pirates are finally put in their place.

Meanwhile, over at the Telegraph, noted military historian John Keegan channels the spirit of Stephen Decatur.

Over at the American Spectator site, Jeffrey Lord provides a helpful history of past presidents and how they handled ship hijackings – with widely varying results. (Hint – the ones who were tough on the hijackers were more successful.)

Royal Navy kills pirates off Somali coast

By  all accounts, maritime piracy is a serious and growing phenomenon and failed states such as Somalia are a great place for them. Nobody is going to bring them to justice there. Heck, they are probably treated like local celebrities.

The West’s response has been to patrol the Gulf of Aden with large naval vessels such as the HMS Cumberland. There are two problems with this approach. First, it is expensive. To adequately patrol the entire Somali coast, all the time requires a lot of vessels, and operating them ain’t cheap.

Second, these big ships can be seen a mile away. All the pirates have to do is to sit tight and wait for the ship to sail away before attacking a lone, unescorted freighter. Looking at this from a game theoretic perspective, unless the pirates are as stupid as the ones who chose to operate in the vicinity of the HMS Cumberland, they are in a no-lose situation. When naval ships aren’t around, they do what they want; when they are in view, the pirates take a professional development day; life is good. Which is why the navy can only secure that part of the sea where they are physically present in.

Directly after 9/11, it became fashionable to talk about thinking out-of-the-box. The idea was that without unconventional tactics, you couldn’t hope to defeat an asymmetrical opponent like Osama Bin Laden, who has the luxury to wait for you to drop your guard while you spend billions to secure every single vulnerable point.

I know all this war on terror stuff has gone out of fashion these days, with the election of sunny Obama, but still, I think this is one problem that would benefit from some out-of-the-box strategery.

In this spirit I have a suggestion: why don’t we defeat these pirates the same way Alexander the Great defeated the Scythian raiders north of the Syr Daria River (the Jaxartes) – you bait them. What I have in mind is this. You take a luxury yacht, sail it slowly up and down the Somali coast and wait for the pirates. When they get close and their intentions are obvious, a platoon of commandoes rushes up to the deck and opens fire with everything they got until all the pirates are dead.

Pretty soon the pirates will learn to stay away from luxury yachts. Then you start putting commando teams on small freighters. When the pirates become wary these, you move up to large freighters. It will not take long for incidents of piracy to dry up to a manageable trickle.

I know, I know, the lose-at-any-cost crowd will go nuts. But let them. This plan, while it sounds barbaric when presented in this way, is on much firmer legal ground than it appears. First, the law of the sea gives every ship the right to do whatever it takes to survive on the high seas. And ships are the sovereign territory of the nation under whose flag they fly. Attacking a ship is an act of war. Secondly, who says you aren’t trying to take prisoners? It can be reasonably argued that trying to do so would imperil the safety of your ship so you can’t try very hard.

Of course, this kind of thing is passé these days. And will remain so... until the next big terrorist attack.

The Taliban calls out the Canadians

According to strategypage.com,

“A Taliban spokesman has announced that they are concentrating their attacks on Canadian troops in order to persuade Canadian voters to elect a government willing and eager to get out of Afghanistan. This had long been suspected, as captured Taliban communications had mentioned this tactic before. Al Qaeda had made much of the way the 2004 al Qaeda attack in Spain caused an anti-American government to be elected, and Spanish troops shortly thereafter withdrawn from Iraq.”

We should always remember that just because they are living in a third world hell-hole and hate free society, it doesn’t mean that Islamofascist groups (and the communist movements before them) are naïve about the workings of democracy. They have had plenty of experience playing off different factions of western democracies against each other for their own ends, starting with the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War through Mogadishu on down to today. This is especially true these days when they can count on their diaspora living in western countries for advice.

Of course, if Canadians made a point of standing together in the face of provocation then the Taliban couldn’t succeed. And if they knew that they couldn’t succeed, they wouldn’t try to intimidate us. And if they didn’t try to intimidate us, our casualty rate would be much lower than it currently is.

But try telling this to ‘Taliban’ Jack Layton…