Americans are quite naturally focused on what will happen next in Iraq, given the ever-escalating violence in that country and the possibility of a change of course emerging from the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group's recommendations.
But it's also important that both military and civilian policymakers begin thinking seriously about the hard lessons learned during the Iraq fiasco for the future of the fight against jihadist terrorism. As a new Progressive Policy Institute report by foreign policy fellow Kevin Croke explains, the myriad mistakes made by the Bush administration in Iraq point to the renewed relevance of counterinsurgency theory as a guidepost to future counterterrorist efforts.
Many of the administration's most disastrous mistakes in Iraq flowed directly from the belief that the country could be occupied and pacified through the use of conventional military force. And within the U.S. military itself, some experts officers determined to never again fight "another Vietnam" often ignored the strategic insights of counter-insurgency theory, developed specifically to deal with irregular and guerilla warfare.
This latter blind spot is finally being eliminated. The new Army-Marine Corps field manual for counterinsurgency operations, scheduled for release in early December, was heavily influenced by the terrible lessons of Iraq. But it needs to be read by civilian leaders as well.
As Croke notes, the final draft of the field manual is blunt about the limits of military power in dealing with insurgencies, and about the often disastrous consequences of excessive force against insurgents who are tightly integrated with civilian populations.
"The more force used, the less effective it is." It also counsels against giving ammunition to the enemy through things like prisoner abuse, warning: "Lose moral legitimacy, lose the war." And it suggests the United States should pay real attention to the tools of soft power like economic aid, trade preferences, diplomatic leverage, public diplomacy, and the attractive power of American ideals and political institutions.
In this respect, the field manual echoes the very first principle of counter-insurgency theory: You must win hearts and minds. Only when insurgents are separated from their base of popular support can intelligence be gathered, successful operations conducted, and the insurgents defeated. Thus force must be used in careful increments, since overuse of force can drive the wavering population right into the arms of the insurgency.
A second principle of counterinsurgency is that intelligence drives operations. Without it, the counterinsurgent cannot tell friend from foe and cannot target its use of force, and is generally likely to flail around shooting itself in the foot. We must continue to improve our intelligence community's information sharing and human intelligence assets. But we also need much better cooperation with foreign intelligence services, who have the local knowledge and networks of agents that the United States needs. This means that America's collapsing global reputation is a major problem, since countries with anti-American populations will be under growing pressure not to cooperate with us. Finally, the supreme value of intelligence means that the United States must break out of the stale debate between the Bush administration's extreme view that largely disregards civil liberties in counterterrorism operations, and the civil liberties absolutism of some of its critics. Intelligence operations will often take place in the shadowy world of phone intercepts, financial record searches, and passenger manifests, but it need not involve wholesale abandonment of constitutional restraints on state power.
A third principle of counterinsurgency theory is to rigorously support political and economic reforms that undermine insurgencies. In the short term, we should begin a diplomatic campaign aimed at defusing the various Muslim insurgencies that al-Qaeda has successfully co-opted. Working toward political solutions to conflicts in Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, the Caucasus, and the Philippines would help divide the global jihadist movement that Osama bin Laden has unified. Major reforms are also needed to improve the political, social, and economic integration of Europe's Muslims, a small minority of whom have proven dangerously susceptible to jihadist ideology.
Some administration apologists argue that jihadist terrorism's ferocity and nihilism makes it crucially distinct from a traditional insurgency, which typically aims at the overthrow of a particular government. But as Croke points out, "Al Qaeda's main political goal [is] to topple Middle Eastern regimes by attacking their great power patron, the United States." Its transnational nature simple makes it more dangerous and supple. And its focus on slaughtering civilians in order to provoke overreactions and polarize Muslim opinion means that the warnings of counterinsurgency theory about excessive force and the importance of moral legitimacy and "soft power" are even more compelling than in the case of traditional insurgencies.
It may well be too late to apply the lessons of counterinsurgency theory to Iraq, though they remain relevant to the Iraqi end-game. But it's hardly too early to begin learning from the Iraq experience in the continuing fight against jihadist terrorism, which continues on many fronts in many countries.
