[Peace-discuss] Opinion from today's NYT

[David Green]

Among the looters and killers that Carl refers to,
Robert Kaplan is one of the more shameless among the
killers, an acolyte of Henry Kissinger. He is accorded
great respect in mainstream ideological circles.

Send In the State Department 
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
Korat Royal Air Force Base,

Thailand

WHATEVER the future holds for Iraq, within a year or
two there will be far fewer American troops there, and
the debate over whether our military is overstretched
may subside. Yet because of a bloody counterinsurgency
that no one in the military wants to repeat, Iraq has
profoundly affected the Pentagon's deployment
strategies as it shifts toward a greater emphasis on
the Pacific Rim while still facing a profusion of
terrorist-related threats not just in the Middle East
but also in Africa and elsewhere.

"After Iraq," one officer in the Pentagon told me, "we
hope not to be invading a big country for a long time,
so we'll be reduced to low-profile raiding, which the
military has a very long and venerable tradition of,
from the 19th and early 20th centuries." This is one
aspect of what the Pentagon's new Quadrennial Defense
Review means when it speaks of the "long war."

The military wants to increasingly manage the world
through quiet cooperation on one hand, and the use of
host-country proxies on the other. At the forefront of
this strategy is a combination of training missions
with other countries conducted by marines and Army
Special Forces, humanitarian efforts by Army civil
affairs units, and discreet raids on terrorists in
places removed from the headlines. For the military,
this is "soft power," because for the most part the
methods used are indirect. And when they are direct,
few tend to notice, as when our surveillance planes
assist local forces in sub-Saharan Africa in the
hunting and killing of Salafist terrorists.

The long war, if smartly executed, can prevent a big
war. In spending the last few years embedded with
Army, Navy and Marine units, I have learned that the
smaller the American military footprint and the less
notice it draws, the more effective is the operation.
A few hundred Green Berets going after narcoterrorists
or Islamic extremists, as I have seen in Colombia and
the Philippines, can be effective force multipliers.
Ten or twenty thousand troops, as in Afghanistan, can
tread water. And 135,000, as in Iraq, constitute a
mess.

The goal from now on is to get into a place fast,
before a problem begins to fester, when there is
leeway to experiment and thus to make mistakes without
suffering a loss of prestige. The way to avoid
quagmires is to be engaged in more places, not fewer.
Even if Iraq were to dissolve in chaos, this would not
lead to a new era of isolationism, at least as far as
the American military is concerned, 

Take the Horn of Africa, a low-profile theater where
small American military teams comb a large region and
engage in military training and civil affairs projects
with local forces as a way to build relationships in
advance of a major crisis. Never again should we be in
the situation that we were in on the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where there were no
intelligence assets on 9/11 because we had closed all
our networks the decade before, following the Soviet
withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Thus the quadrennial review calls for an increase in
Army Special Forces of at least 15 percent. The
growing emphasis on the Special Operations Command, to
which the Marine Corps will for the first time send a
detachment later this month, is less the brainchild of
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld than a product of
his forceful articulation of a bipartisan ideal,
supported vigorously over the years by Democrats like
former Senator Sam Nunn and John Kerry. There are even
plans to go beyond merely training local forces to
actually embedding small numbers of Special Forces and
Marine advisers with foreign troops on select combat
missions.

While this is all good planning, there is still a
major omission: the civilian — or non-Defense
Department — piece of it is entirely missing. The
longer the war, the less decisive is military
technology and what the Army calls "doctrine." The
struggle against Al Qaeda and its offshoots will go on
for many years after a troop drawdown in Iraq, and in
this worldwide struggle the civilian piece associated
with the State Department will be a vital,
unconventional asset. 

There is precedent here: the British Colonial Office
was, in effect, an interagency office, overseeing not
just the military aspects of empire but also civil
service, education and the like. No matter how
vehemently people deride 19th-century imperialism, the
same people often ask why the Americans can't be as
smart in the field as the British.

To wit: a recent month-long visit to Iraq demonstrated
to me that the progress the American military has made
there in reducing chaos over the past two years is
being jeopardized by the absence of public works
projects of the kind that soak up male youth
unemployment. 

Young Army and Marine officers have become expert at
small-scale projects: setting up neighborhood garbage
collection, fixing generators and the like, but such
efforts make little dent in the long list of needs in
sprawling Iraqi cities. American battalion commanders
hear litanies of complaints about the lack of
electricity and working sewers and often have no
answers except to refer the complainants to the new
Iraqi agencies, which barely function. As I saw one
village elder tell an Army lieutenant colonel in the
Tigris River valley: "All we ask is that you restore
services to the level they were under the previous
regime." 

But the military's humanitarian activities around the
world generally have to do with immediate relief of
natural disasters, and temporary good-will gestures
like holding daylong medical clinics, an unstated aim
of which is to gather intelligence. Repairing the
roads and electrical grid and hospital system of a
large country is simply out of its domain. The
military in Iraq is near the point where it has done
all that it can be expected to do. The years of
financial and organizational neglect at the State
Department and Agency for International Development is
now fundamentally apparent in shot-to-hell cityscapes
like Mosul.

I am not arguing for an emphasis on the State
Department over the Pentagon. I am saying that for a
worldwide fight against terrorism to be effective, the
State Department must become not only as
bureaucratically dynamic as the American military, but
also as fully integrated with it down to the small
unit level. In other words, Agency for International
Development officials must work alongside Green Beret
teams on the humanitarian side of unconventional war.

It is no accident that Special Operations Command gets
its budget not from the Pentagon, but directly from
Congress, and that its bureaucratic flowchart is
numbing in its interagency complexity. It was always
meant to work organically with the State Department as
well as the Pentagon. But this goal has been
insufficiently realized beyond PowerPoint briefings at
its headquarters in Tampa.

The long war envisaged by the Quadrennial Defense
Review is not a sinister vision but a reflection of
reality. Even in the Pacific, where the American
military must be prepared for conflicts in Korea and
Taiwan, the Chinese are more likely to seek dominance
through a growing web of trade and military alliances
with longtime allies like Thailand and the
Philippines, as well as through terrorist splinter
groups in Southeast Asia and its archipelagos,
stretching all the way to Oceania.

The defense review's emphasis on Special Forces is
correct; so is its admission that technology is not
always the answer. As for integrating a newly robust
State Department into this strategy, it is less the
Pentagon's responsibility than that of the White House
and Congress.

Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The
Atlantic Monthly and the author of "Imperial Grunts:
The American Military on the Ground."



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