[Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: Strategies for a global counterinsurgency - Jonathan Morgenstein, Eric Vickland - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Strategies for a global counterinsurgency

By Jonathan Morgenstein and Eric Vickland  |  March 28, 2006  |  The 
Boston Globe

US TROOPS in Iraq face an insurgency similar to those confronted by 
great powers for centuries. Insurgents hide, wait, and strike on their 
own timetables. They wear no uniforms and they utilize tactics of 
deception, ambush, and terror. The insurgents strike weaknesses and 
dictate the terms of the fight.

Iraq is now a microcosm of the global struggle we face -- a 
comprehensive insurgency inadequately described as the global war on 
terrorism. In Iraq and around the world, we will never peacefully 
dissuade those dedicated to violence against us. They must be captured 
or killed. However, the enemy is not just Al Qaeda and other jihadist 
groups that share its messianic vision. It is also organized crime, 
black markets, and sympathetic local populations, all of which sustain 
the insurgency with cash, weapons, and intelligence.

This global insurgency can only be defeated by severing the insurgents' 
connections to populations that sustain them. We must isolate and 
smother an enemy who thrives by delivering empowerment and vengeance to 
populations drowning in poverty, social humiliation, and political 
marginalization. These masses in return sustain the enemy -- passively 
with cover and actively with fighters. We have to convince those who 
passively support the insurgency that we are not their enemy. 
Unfortunately, our current strategy overemphasizing military force 
drives undecided millions into the insurgents' arms. Not only are we 
fighting the war wrong, we are fighting the wrong war.

US forces in Iraq are coming to terms with essential lessons in dealing 
with insurgency: overwhelming firepower is often counterproductive; 
comprehensive reconstruction and information efforts win hearts and 
minds; the best sources of actionable intelligence are local 
populations; and lastly, indigenous law enforcement facilitates smaller 
US footprints, multiplying the effectiveness of all other efforts. These 
same lessons must also guide how we fight our worldwide struggle against 
Islamist extremism.

Counterinsurgency concepts must form the core of our government's 
national security strategy. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches that such 
an approach be based on five equally vital pillars: targeted military 
force, intelligence, law enforcement, information operations, and civil 
affairs.

Taken together, these pillars constitute a global counterinsurgency -- 
an innovative and cohesive paradigm with which to guide America's 
national security policy. As General John Abizaid told Congress last 
September, defeating the insurgency ''requires not only military 
pressure . . . [but] all elements of international and national power." 
Counterinsurgency doctrine tells us that the military is only one of the 
five pillars, and if we are to win, it cannot dominate the other four.

We were compelled and justified in militarily toppling the Taliban. But 
defeating future enemies will more likely demand targeted military force 
such as that being executed against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Africa 
than traditional blunt instruments typical of the Cold War. Those who 
prioritize national missile defense over either special-operations 
capabilities or non-military tools of foreign policy understand neither 
the nature of our greatest threat nor how to defeat it. Our intelligence 
capabilities -- collection and analysis of information -- must be 
expanded and diversified. We must trace technology on weapons of mass 
destruction as well as materials proliferation before they spread. We 
must strengthen social intelligence that will provide essential 
understanding of the demographic and cultural geography within which our 
enemy hides. We must reinvigorate our human intelligence networks so 
that we can penetrate their networks.

Some have downplayed the role of police work in defeating Al Qaeda. As 
9/11 Commission chairman Thomas Kean has observed, this complacency 
perpetuates the disjointed and dysfunctional nature of our law 
enforcement agencies, both within government and vis-a-vis international 
law enforcement bodies. This must change, because effective police 
operations are essential to suffocating the global insurgency.

Our information operations efforts -- instrumental in winning over the 
undecideds among whom the enemy hides and recruits -- is woefully 
inadequate. We must promote America's charity, while exposing the 
enemy's hypocrisy. Civil affairs, ''development" in non-military terms, 
is aggressive economic and political development as well as cultivation 
of civil society institutions and human rights. Only when populations in 
the developing world obtain genuine economic opportunity, social 
dignity, and political empowerment will they no longer incubate the 
global insurgency.

None of these pillars precludes other crucial components of our security 
policy: ending foreign oil dependency, reining in Iranian nuclear 
weapons development, and containing North Korea. Neither do they rule 
out wariness of rival great powers. We must rebuild the alliances that 
we need, yet have rubbed raw in the past six years, and we must close 
off geopolitical fissures that Russia and China will seek to exploit. 
However, the primary threat we face is the global insurgency, and 
defeating it will require a global counterinsurgency as the foundation 
of our national security and foreign policy doctrine.

Jonathan Morgenstein, a principal of the Truman National Security 
Project, is a program officer at the United States Institute of Peace. 
Eric Vickland is a lecturer for the Joint Special Operations University.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/28/strategies_for_a_global_counterinsurgency/
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