Brother, can you paradigm?
I’ve been studying guerrillas and civil wars since 1987, when I got bored with my classes in the Gaeltacht and hitchhiked to Belfast to meet and greet Sinn Fein and the Orange Order militias, chaps who prudently would have nothing to do with me.
I remember ending up in sloggy Sligo, a bit demoralized, chomping curry fries with a woman who thought my kink for civil wars maddening.
That unrequited love for researching communal bloodletting carried through a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps infantry, where I first read Mao and Lawrence and the rest, then as a reporter living with guerrillas while covering an imploding West Africa and Iraq — and later as a very junior soldier in Anbar getting shot at by similar blokes.
Whether as a combatant or a journalist, a murky civil war presents some of the same challenges: How do you know who is winning or losing? How do you chart success or failure? How can you explain to others what’s happening and why? How would someone address or mitigate the causes of the violence and arrive at peace?
Over the past several years, I’ve grown very concerned about the confluence of two increasingly unrestrained forces in American culture – the celebrity journalist and the celebrity general. From the former we’ve gotten a lot of stenography of the latter, and I don’t think either the craft of reporting or the health of our democracy has been well served by their unholy union.
Although he won’t go as far as I will, Douglas Ollivant — the incoming Senior National Security Fellow at the New America Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C. — has some of the same notions.
I really don’t know Doug. We were in graduate school at the same time in Bloomington, I think, but we never met. We’ve communicated by email a few times, and that’s how I learned two years ago that he believed reporters, wonks, politicos and generals were getting the pacification of Iraq during the so-called “Surge” that began in 2007 all wrong.
I agreed with him completely but didn’t say anything about his doubts because it wasn’t my right to do so. Well, now I think that COIN cat’s out of the bag because NAF just published Ollivant’s short but important paper, Countering the New Orthodoxy: Reinterpreting Counterinsurgency in Iraq.
One of the oddities of these population-centric wars amongst the peoples is that so many of the best-selling memoirs, histories and journalism written about them haven’t really taken into account much of what Iraqis or Afghans think or do.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post is a marked exception; and although he comes from a definitely radical point of view, the freelance reporter Nir Rosen probably has spent more time with Iraqis than any other American reporter.
Nir continues to go back, rarely embedding with U.S. troops, speaking Arabic and sussing out meaning from often conflicting stories. I disagree often with some of his interpretations about Iraqi history, but his telling details about daily life in the Middle Eastern republic are usually about right, including their thoughts about America.
But that’s not the way most celebrity journalists have ordered it. And what emerges from this lack of perspective are very military-centric pieces told mostly from the point of view of our highest ranking generals and their political supporters and four-star-struck wonks in the U.S.
In Countering, Ollivant labels this mishmash of memoirs and popular journalism the “new orthodoxy,” which is sort of odd because he concedes there wasn’t an “old orthodoxy” that they supplanted.
He’s nevertheless brave enough to single the voices out, and I don’t disagree with him at all: His pal Linda Robinson, Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward and Kimberly Kagan.
These authors and the military brass inside their tomes have churned out a dominant narrative about the so-called “Surge” in Iraq — and these accounts are almost wholly fiction.
Well, let me modify that slightly. They give far too much credit to Americans for the pacification in Iraq and not nearly enough to those who were doing most of the fighting and dying there, which is to say the Iraqis.
As Ollivant diplomatically puts it, “This is not to say that military action played no role, but rather that it was not central.”
I’ll be more direct: In some, but not all, of their writings about Iraq, Robinson, Ricks, Woodward and Kagan have been journalistic poison.
Stop drinking it.
*****
Ollivant should know what they get wrong. A retired LTC from the U.S. Army, he served on the staff of Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad. A political scientist by dint of his PhD, he recently returned from Afghanistan where he toiled as a private counterinsurgency adviser to our military in the roiling eastern provinces.
In his “New Orthodoxy” counter-narrative, Ollivant is right to play up a series of civil wars that plagued Iraq after the invasion and while Petraeus ruled Baghdad. They included a brutal sectarian war between Arab Shiite and Sunni militias, a war that was fought with the drill bit, the roadside execution, the shallow grave on the edge of neighborhoods and the dispossession of innocent people’s homes and belongings.
The Sunnis lost, and this psychologically dislocating moment – not to mention the quite real dislocation of millions of Sunnis who became refugees in Jordan, Syria and in safer havens within Iraq – played a large, probably dominant, role in suppressing rebellion throughout large swaths of the nation before most of the “Surge” forces even arrived.
This was a far more important event in Iraq than what most reporters and pundits have concentrated on, the anti-occupation militias that pitted themselves against U.S. units.
A second civil war, this one intra-Shiite, was fought in southern Iraq and parts of the capital during the “Surge.” It resulted in the consolidation of power by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Da’wa Party and its coalition of anti-Sadrist Shiite militias, including the Badr Brigade, although the latter never was able to seize on a key goal, the federalization of the oil-rich Shiite south.
Ollivant doesn’t discuss it, but a much quieter ethnic reclamation has been managed in the north by Kurdish people reaffirming their rule over parts of Iraq from which they had been evicted by Saddam Hussein’s Baath government. This shifting balance of power likely hasn’t been concluded like the other civil wars. We should all pray that it is settled peacefully.
Ollivant rightly gives Petraeus and his State Department colleague Ryan Crocker full credit for their unique competence at flexibly providing “political guidance and leadership, one that focuses on accomplishment of strategic aims rather than tactical victories.”
*****
Ollivant discounts the “clear-control-retain” COIN blueprint sold almost as a seamless, scientific military method to the American public during the “Surge” as the primary cause for the dip in violence – a drop, one might add, that began before Petraeus even arrived, marking the undeclared but widely known Shiite victory in the civil war against the Sunnis.
The notion that American COIN operations had “a significant political impact is, to date, empirical unsupported,” according to Ollivant. Moreover, those American operational arts marked “the completion of the change in tactics and strategy, and not its beginning” under others.
The exportable lessons of the “New Orthodoxy” he denigrates as “dubious,” which I think is charitable.
A gaggle of strategists I hang around like to joke that “Everyone is Gian Gentile now.” That’s their way of saying that the military and academia slowly have come to agree with that gadfly’s call to restore the primacy of politics to warmaking and to reject the notion that a suite of tactics cribbed from the years of Maoist revolt can substitute for sound strategy – the ends, ways and means used to achieve realistic, cost-effective foreign policy goals.
Ollivant reaffirms that wisdom and then applies it to Afghanistan. He notes that President Barack Obama’s public statements about the future of Kabul have been miracles of ambiguity, almost certainly because of his need to mesh “the largely incompatible goals of permanently and decisively denying al Qaeda safe havens and Taliban establishment in Afghanistan” while also avoiding an endless occupation and “nation building at astronomical cost.”
The lack of a retributive civil war that settles questions about sectarian or central government power also has affected the outcome in Afghanistan. Ollivant doesn’t tackle the complex social stew of eastern and southern Pakistan, but he notes that those many Taliban and other militias in revolt — and their supporters — don’t believe that they’re losing “to the point that it needs to settle.”
Perhaps of even more importance, the kleptocracy of Hamid Karzai doesn’t hold “the same shared vision of an end state” the U.S. had with Maliki and our other Iraqi partners. This tragic fact suggests that even with a drop in violence the Afghans likely won’t arrive at a “relatively peaceful settlement,” according to Ollivant.
And he’s certain that these strategic paradoxes can’t be overcome by a highly talented commander like Petraeus or dubiously effective counter-insurgency techniques trotted out in Iraq.
Or, as I like to say during awkward moments like this, “Marjah.”
*****
I can overlook the annoying flourishes of NAF’s style for publication – bracketing clichés in quotation marks, an odd use of the noun “counterfactual” – and instead concentrate on what’s very fine about this piece and so should you.
Together, we should forget Ollivant’s use of “wasta,” a tic U.S. military officers seem to have about the Arabic word that makes most Iraqis I know cringe.
I don’t think Ollivant’s writing on the Shiite civil war in the south is particularly strong. He gives too much weight to a Jaish al-Mahdi that largely had disintegrated into smaller gangs because of the very success JAM had destroying Sunni militias. He also doesn’t discuss the salient fact that there are several sorts of “Sadrists,” even different Sadrist political parties, and that loyalty to them often has more of a theological, caste and nationalistic draw than that of partisan politics.
One can’t really understand Moqtada al-Sadr without also coming to terms with the Shiism of his father and uncle.
Perhaps because his essay is so short, Ollivant doesn’t mention all the previous studies that arrived at similar but different enough conclusions. In another forum, however, he acknowledged the scholarship of Jacqueline L. Hazelton, a former reporter who is finishing a draft of what should be a paradigm-cracking study of guerrilla wars in El Salvador, the Philippines, Turkey, Oman and Vietnam.
Andrew Exum and I also are in complete agreement that the ludicrous — and slightly menacing– bio photo Ollivant uses makes him look like a scruffy hobo awakened just outside the Louvre.
All he’s missing is a sign in his mitts, “Will COIN for food.”
But my quibbles are small beer. Ollivant’s latest piece easily overcomes all that with an abiding intellectual honesty that concedes what we don’t know yet about those years in Iraq.
Ollivant refreshingly admits that he doesn’t have all the answers and tasks future historians who shall have greater access to Syrian, Iranian, Iraqi and now classified American documents to arrive at a better understanding of the early 21st century pacification process.
When I finished his paper, I couldn’t help but wonder why Ollivant is stuck at the New America Foundation. Nothing against the think tank, but his highly-refined red teaming skills should be catnip to our military, intelligence and diplomatic bureaucracies.
In other words, someone please hire this man and put him to work telling you why you’re wrong.
I wish journalism had rented his services years ago.
Tags: Afghanistan, crappy hagiographic doofus journalism, Douglas Ollivant, Iraq, New America Foundation, Surge
