COIN: Dr. Kilcullen on SWJ

Posted By Grim

Lt. Col. David Kilcullen has a new piece on operations in Iraq at Small Wars Journal.  As always, you should take time to read his thoughts.

UPDATE:  Kilcullen's description of the cause of the "flip" in Anbar are familiar to readers of MilBlogs.  The causes he describes were predictable in 2004, when I wrote Clausewitz & The Triangle (which, due to apparent problems at the Mudville Gazette, is available currently only as a Wayback cache):

[T]he Sunni Triangle, as mentioned, is largely tribal in culture. People who grew up there are strongly attached to the tribal system, which to them seems as natural and morally right as the sun rising in the east and the moon waxing and waning. The enemy of the tribe is your enemy -- and it is not our side that is wrecking the tribal strength....  It is the guerrillas in Iraq who are undoing the tribal structure, scorning the traditional authority, and bringing chaotic change to the Sunni Triangle.... We overthrew a national government that enjoyed some broad support in the Sunni triangle, but we did not try to overthrow the tribes.

Confer with the actual cause as Kilcullen describes it:

Marrying women to strangers, let alone foreigners, is just not done. AQ, with their hyper-reductionist version of “Islam” stripped of cultural content, discounted the tribes’ view as ignorant, stupid and sinful.

This led to violence, as these things do: AQI killed a sheikh over his refusal to give daughters of his tribe to them in marriage, which created a revenge obligation (tha’r) on his people, who attacked AQI. The terrorists retaliated with immense brutality, killing the children of a prominent sheikh in a particularly gruesome manner, witnesses told us. This was the last straw, they said, and the tribes rose up. Neighboring clans joined the fight, which escalated as AQI (who had generally worn out their welcome through high-handedness) tried to crush the revolt through more atrocities. Soon the uprising took off, spreading along kinship lines through Anbar and into neighboring provinces.

Read the whole thing, and get a sense of what has been, and what is yet possible.  "Of course," he says, "this is motivated primarily by self-interest."

Again, this is utterly standard behavior for tribal leaders pretty much anywhere in the Arab world: you can trust a tribal leader 100% – to follow his tribe’s and his own interests. And that’s OK. Call me cynical, but I tend to trust self-interest, group identity and revenge as reliable motivations – more so than protestations of aspirational democracy, anyway.

Quite right.  That's another thing milbloggers have been saying for a long time -- since 2003, in fact. 

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Some aspects of the war in Iraq are hard to fit into “classical” models of insurgency. One of these is the growing tribal uprising against al Qa’ida, which could transform the war in ways not factored into neat “benchmarks” developed many months ago an... [Read More]

Comments

[liyak]

I see that you are,completely
ignorant of the Koran!Each tribe,is set against,all other,tribes etc.That is the core,of their lives"terror."

[21stCenturyMike]

I really do hate reading papers like this as they always leave me with a desire to learn more or to ask questions. I have always felt that we rushed civilian control in Iraq and we rushed to remove our troops and therefore the command structure off to the side. While I have no issues with either paper, it seems that these same lessons may have been learned at the end of WWII in both Germany and Japan. The big difference would have been the reduced level of government friction in the first few years of the occupation. I still think that Japan would make a better model for this comparison on several levels (tribe like systems, destruction of infrastructure, and maybe religious issues come quickly to mind), but I have not really seen any writing along these lines. I hate to do this to myself, but I am wondering if anyone knows of any research or writing that might help me improve my understanding of the comparisons.

On another tack, do these papers provide a basis for why our political leadership is wrong on the issue of declarations of War? Our Congress has had a real problem in not declaring War due to the transmission of War Powers to the President, but in not actually declaring a War have they made it more difficult for the Military Leadership. By holding back this “Commitment” and not giving the President full War Powers are they adding to the governmental friction? Does this create the issues we are now seeing in Military Leadership (risk aversion, promotions leading to safe desk jobs (not combat roles), high level officers that are better politicians than war fighters, and fear of Congressional oversight)? Why have we, the American people, allowed this to continue and what are our options for fixing the situation?

Last question is how we solve the issue of time. We live in a nano-second world in the US, but human interaction takes time. That is to say that it takes more than a day to establish trust between the tribes (yes, we are the American Tribe), so how to we get that message across to the populace and to politicians who are trying to get or remain elected? I consider this an important part of reducing government friction and am interested in seeing ideas along this line.

Thanks,
mike

[chiropetra]

You're right we forgot the lessons of Japan and Germany when we went into Iraq. Of course it would have helped if we'd had any actual plan for transitioning the country at all.

Time? That's a hard one, although it becomes easier as we get the violence under control. (How long have we been in places like Bosnia?)

Kilcullen has said it takes on the average about a decade to defeat an insurgency. What he didn't say, but what is historically true is that in a successful counterinsurgency, violence follows a power law in that it drops sharply and then gradually declines over the remaining time. (CF Maylaysia)

Will we take the time? If we went strictly by the casualty count, probably. But we won't. The anti-war types are already in full cry to get us out and that is a group which is notoriously resistant to facts. No matter how well things are going they want us gone.

Our waste of the opportunities of the first year, and the lousy strategy of the whole four-year period is likely to bite us, big bad and ugly.

The overriding lesson here is that in the wake of an invasion we have to bring the situation under control very quickly. We don't have time to waste.

[Arch]

Mike:

For an easy reading history of Japan, look for Japan, Past & Present, by Edwin O. Reichauer. It was written in 1953, just after the occupation.

You'll find that Japan is a very strange case. As you know, the mongols tried twice, without success, to invade Japan under Kublai Khan. The last was, I think, in 1281, while Marco Polo was visiting China. As a result, Japanese closed their islands to all foreigners until Commodore Matthew Perry dropped anchor into Tokyo Bay in 1853. The isolation made Japan very unique.
.

[Arch]

I meant the Mongols, under Kublai Khan....

[21stCenturyMike]

Thanks Arch, I will check that source.

and

chiropetra, The military command structure seems to have dropped contingency planning as a requirement, at least in this case. They did not do a good job of planning for a quick end to major hostilities or an occupation as far as I can see, so we need better planning checklists and templates as a minimum (really think we just need fewer people playing CYOA, but that is my opinion). That needs to be fixed, but if we are going to ever have a chance to win future conflicts we need to fix the issue of time (this means that everyone has an understanding that war takes more than a couple of years if you want to win and leave a government in place that respects individual rights; can be done faster if you don't) and the issues of not actually declaring wars.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback,
mike