Andrew’s ExSum and why he’s a moral man
This pisses off many partisan people, but I respect Andrew Exum very much.
I’ve certainly feuded with him over the years, especially after he provided what I thought was bad operational and strategic advice to commanders in Afghanistan. But I think he has come eventually to represent the smarter efforts inside the Beltway to link policy to realistic goals in the Middle East and South Asia, a challenge we should wish on no man but a chore he has agreed to attempt.
Yesterday, however, I read his latest essay in IFRI, “Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan: Explaining the Absence of Victory,” and confess I have no idea why he jerks all over the place to avoid saying what he really thinks.
He inexplicably begins a piece about “hearts and minds” without discussing what the phrase means, how it became part of the parlance of colonial counter-revolutionary war in the age of Mao and whether it matters now to the 21st century conflict in Afghanistan.
Eventually he settles on what it’s not – the spending of money merely to bribe or gratify people who normally might shoot at us – before getting to an important point most of our officers today seem to overlook: “HAM” is about control, which is to say using elements of force or suasion to make an offer the people in revolt can’t refuse, a point punctuated by the counter-revolutionary convincing them through a strategic narrative written in blood that he’s going to win and not the guerrillas.
Exum senses that this is complicated by the fact that U.S. COIN doctrine follows an indirect strategy by relying on the host regime to become “legitimate” and — through competence and attractiveness — change the behavior of the “people” in order to out-govern the rebels and provide an acceptable alternative to those supporting or tolerating the enemies of the state.
And, yes, he realizes that the Hamid Karzai government is the unfortunate star on that stage.
Exum at times seems to want to dodge the ways of achieving all this by merely concentrating on what “victory” should look like in Afghanistan – apparently “setting the conditions for a peaceful political process or reconciliation” – or “Iraq 2.0,” if he just had blurted it out.
Only this time ISAF will do that without the help of Jaish al-Mahdi, Badr Brigade, the Peshmerga and actually some pretty competent Iraqi Army battalions that arose from a martial tradition tied to a once functioning state.
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I disagree strongly with Andrew that “victory” in “hearts and minds” campaigns should be that moment peaceful negotiations begin to move toward some political conclusion. In fact, I would suggest that the vast majority of insurgencies haven’t ended like this, most especially when overseen by foreign occupying troops.
But I’ll grant him that this has become the diminished U.S. goal in Kabul and that it will be hard to grasp, even if he should wish to hug it in celebration as tightly as he intellectually grasps his svengali, David Kilcullen, a former Australian officer who now runs a military contracting shop.
It also really didn’t happen in Iraq as he seems to have fancied it, a point that should be considered when Exum credits the operational arts of David Petraeus in 2007 for creating a dip in violence that actually began before he even got to Baghdad and likely had its antecedents in the murky sectarian civil wars that sprang up in the confusion of post-invasion Iraq.
Why he cites the dubious journalism of Linda Robinson’s Tell Me How This Ends and the fairy tale The Gamble by his fellow bearded CNAS cubicle mate Thomas Ricks escapes me, except perhaps as a sign that he’s joking and really wants you to check out Nir Rosen, Gian Gentile, Bing West, Doug Ollivant, Michael Few or pretty much anything written by any Iraqi reporter from 2003 to today.
It also might just be to spite me. I haven’t ruled that out. But I think I know the real reason, and I’ll get to that later. First, let’s discuss what “Hearts and Minds” should really mean to you and how you might reread Andrew’s otherwise fine essay with it in mind.
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The phrase itself has its roots in the words of St Paul and they translate clearly from Greek to English, which is to say they connote the unseen but inner workings of the human mind, both those of reason and emotion.
“Hearts and Minds” entered the lexicon of the counter-revolutionary during a time when African and Asian nations shrugged off colonialism and guerrillas seized upon the advice for staging protracted class warfare envisioned by the successful communist insurgent Mao Zedong.
Mao was interested in mobilizing the masses on an industrial scale, to use those arts of subversion successfully to prod an often reactionary peasant or working caste to psychologically embrace revolution against the state – local or imperial – that oppressed them.
But the psychology of war, even those of irregular guerrillas, presaged Mao. Here, for example, is the British strategic genius of small wars, C.E. Callwell in 1896:
“For it is in the nature of warfare…that the initiative must be maintained, that the regular army must lead while its adversaries follow, and that the enemy must be made to feel a moral inferiority throughout. There must be no doubt as to which side is in the ascendant, no question as to who controls the general course of the war…”
That’s the strategic narrative Exum is getting at, and I believe it ended up in the tactical edition of FM 3–24, an otherwise Maoist cartoon for a field manual that was suffused with “Hearts and Minds” ideology, even if Exum wants you to believe that it wasn’t.
Callwell, we also should acknowledge, advised colonial forces never to exasperate the people too much, as his case study on a colonial expedition in Burma plots perfectly, but to nevertheless seize that which is most important to them, and keep it or barter it for concessions, given time and resources which usually are on the side of the insurgent.
That’s why the counter-revolutionary often must find expedient means of achieving ends, such as punitive expeditions and other forms of war that either send a psychological message to an insurgency or, as with the French razzia, actually destroy the exogenous and endogenous supports to guerrillas, thereby ending the revolt for all practical purposes.
Which is to say, burning crops, dispossessing people of their homes, rustling their cattle and whatever else it takes, with the targets not always the psychology of the people but rather the material supports that give the psychology meaning on the irregular battlefield.
This aspect of counter-revolutionary doctrine gnaws at the corners of the literature published in the 20th and 21st centuries, but it’s always been there. Today’s COIN gurus don’t like to acknowledge it, and when they do they often get it wrong. Kilcullen’s wife, Janine Davidson, couldn’t even spell Callwell’s name right when she worked with her hubby and Exum on “Principles of Modern American Counterinsurgency: Evolution and Debate” at Brookings.
It’s a minor point, some might say, but they seem to get G-A-L-U-L-A right more often than not, eh?
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While Mao was subverting Nationalist China, in the U.S. our Marines were compiling best practices from a series of Banana Wars, a study that would evolve into their Small Wars Manual which was finally released in 1940. In it is an entire section on the psychology of people in revolt:
The motive in small wars is not material destruction. It is usually a project dealing with the social, economic, and political development of the people. It is of primary importance that the fullest benefit be derived from the psychological aspects of the situation. That implies a serious study of the people, their racial, political, religious, and mental development. By analysis and study the reasons for the existing emergency may be deduced; the most practical method of solving the problem is to understand the possible approaches thereto and the repercussion to be expected from any actions which may be contemplated.
Which is to say, the Marines were interested in ferreting out the historical reasons for the rebellion’s causation, either to solve or mitigate them through the tailored use of violence and accommodation. Not imprudently, they found that they could gain the psychology of a people by reading their newspapers from one period to the next. Or, as they would put it:
The outward events of revolutions are always a consequence of changes, often unobserved, which have gone slowly forward in men’s minds. Any profound understanding of a revolution necessitates a knowledge of the mental soil in which the ideas that direct its course have to germinate. Changes in mental attitude are slow and hardly perceptible; often they can be seen only by comparing the character of the people at the beginning and at the end of a given period.
This is the real sap that runs through Exum’s tree of COIN. This is what he’s trying to get to by invoking “hearts and minds.”
The problem for the Marines of yesteryear and our forces today is finding that right balance between force and accommodation. I can assure you that the Marines weren’t nearly as bloodthirsty as some imagine them but that’s largely because they were quite red of tooth and nail in the beginning of many revolutions, which solved many problems before they erupted.
A very tough problem to solve is a long, protracted slog against one or many established guerrilla armies, such as what Exum faces in Afghanistan.
He wants to gussy up his essay to change contemporary perceptions about the meaning of “hearts and minds,” but since Malaya it’s really meant the same thing. In some ways, it’s become as much a euphemism of propaganda as a tool in the kit of the military arts, but that doesn’t change assumptions about its utility.
It was assumed that if Maoist guerrillas would embark on subversion and later battle on an industrial scale, with the masses as their center of gravity, then the colonial or occupying force and its proxy government also would need to contest them for the loyalty of “the people.”
I might at this point suggest that there’s no empirical proof that a western nation has ever successfully fought a counter-revolutionary war using this “hearts and minds” doctrine, but saying that shouldn’t imply that the notion wasn’t without merit when one’s enemies were struggling over the very same psychological terrain.
Take it away, Blowtorch:
“This is a war for the hearts and minds of the farmer in the hamlet. Great things just don’t happen. Dramatic developments do not take place,” said Robert Komer during the Vietnam War.
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My chap Callwell was prescient when he told future counter-revolutionaries why this would be so, but I’ll let another father figure for Exum, the very excellent David Betz of King’s College in London, explain what C.E. was getting at:
(T)he counterinsurgent possesses infinitely more baggage—a fact which was apprehended so clearly and presciently by C.E. Callwell a hundred years ago when he observed that the fundamental asymmetry between insurgency and counterinsurgency lies in the fact that, while tactics favor the regular army, strategy favors the irregular. Insurgency naturally reflects the society from which it emerges; counterinsurgency, by contrast, must consciously laboriously adapt structure, organization, and mindset to the realities of the new environment. If the insurgent is the proverbial ‘fish’ swimming amongst the sea of the people, as Mao put it, the counterinsurgent tends to be the metaphorical fish out of water.
Even when the COIN commander understands the causative forces sparking and shaping the rebellion, shaking and shoving the sharp point of the spear at “the people” often doesn’t do the trick, most especially when he must come to terms with a complex psychology of a varied people.
Or, as battalion commander in Vietnam tersely put it, “Remember, we’re watchdogs you unchain to eat up the burglar. Don’t ask us to be mayors or sociologists worrying about hearts and minds.”
I’ve seen that excellent quote in three places. It appeared in an essay by Thomas G. Paterson; a fascinating 1986 draft of what would become the post-Vietnam COIN doctrine of then-U.S. Maj. David Petraeus; and in the recent dissertation – and later most excellent book – by U.S. Army Col. Gregory A. Daddis, “No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War.”
Callwell and the Marines who waged our Banana Wars would understand easily the institutional sentiment expressed in that quote, and it’s not exactly wrong. But the exasperation of the commander also hints at a professional warrior trying to come to terms with a strategy that won’t work because not only is it very hard for the foreign occupier to seize the “hearts and minds” of an exotic people, but it’s virtually impossible.
In Afghanistan, there are a number of complex reasons for the revolt, just as there are many sorts of “allies” and “enemies” of ours there, some fratricidal. I might suggest that four strategic paradoxes immediately present themselves and Exum never fully tackles them in his essay:
1. The people in revolt dislike foreign occupation, so we “surged” that occupation and extended it into their homelands;
2. The people in revolt dislike the corruption of the Karzai kleptocracy, so we “surged” more of those government agents and their narco-warlord allies into their homelands;
3. The U.S. believes that it must create a legitimate Karzai government, but the means by which we do so actually make the regime more dependent on us for support. That reliance further taints Karzai’s administration as a weak puppet of the west in the eyes of those in revolt; and,
4. The center of gravity might actually be in Pakistan, where the people and government — for many different reasons – continue to provide the vital material support to the guerrilla militias, and none of our efforts in Afghanistan, even if wildly successful, seems likely to change the ideations of the masses or ISI on the other side of the Durand Line.
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I don’t like to play junior psychiatrist, but I’m going to haul out the couch for a moment and offer some thoughts about why I suspect Exum talks around these issues.
Exum has an unusual gift, perhaps the finest trait a counter-revolutionary might possess. He has an amazing ability to empathize with enemies and peoples and institutions. Not sympathize, but empathize – that skill that lets him understand the motives behind someone’s actions.
If you don’t believe me, read his work on the Shiite militias of southern Lebanon.
The problem is that this precious gift rebels against what he is asked to do here. He realizes that it’s highly unlikely that the U.S. might alter the strategic paradoxes I describe above. He also fathoms that the institution of our armed forces, even if it has veered to embrace what I call the “Center of Gratification” theory of COIN, is very good at shooting burglars and very bad at understanding why they became burglars in the first place.
By all accounts, Exum is a decent man. While he quibbles with the Army in which he served, he’s loyal both to it and to the democracy that gives it meaning.
Deep down he understands that if the Army and this nation can’t articulate through highly violent operations — and some accommodation — a strategy that will pacify Afghanistan, then the natural temptation is to invoke mass terror against the population in revolt. He realizes that we could turn to a suite of coercive policies, including indiscriminate torture, that are as noisome as those employed in the Casbah to reach a pause in the fighting or to “crack” the people.
There is historical precedent for this. In World War II, the strategic bombing commands of several nations sought to snap the will of the people through the deliberate use of mass casualty operations against London, Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo among other cities.
After the war, we realized that fire-bombing of whole cities not only didn’t break the psychological will of the people against us, but might have encouraged them to fight on.
That, however, doesn’t matter, because just as COIN advocates rally around the unlikely scholarship of some historians seeking to revise our way to victory in Vietnam, so would many politicians and generals find ways to wage wars across the entire social topography of an enemy people in ways abhorrent to those who are moral.
Exum, you see, understands exactly where “hearts and minds” as a center of gravity ultimately might lead. And he’s too good of a man, an officer and an American to help you get there. Instead, he gives you the least bad options he thinks are ethically available.
Regardless of the war in Afghanistan, he understands that our democracy and our military are much more important than whatever “victory” might be obtained there.
Rather than castigate his essay when you read it, you should applaud him.
I know I did.
NOTE: The exchange between “Looking Glass” and me became quite heated and personal. What it also did was deter others from commenting and obscured Dr Exum’s piece. For that I apologize. I should be above that. I’ve removed the pointless exchange.
Tags: Afghanistan, Andrew Exum, Daddis, hearts and minds, Mao, Petraeus
