The 9/11 Wars (47 page)

11
The Turning

FIELD MANUAL 3-24

On the day of the bombing of the al-Askariya shrine in Samarra, an eclectic group of soldiers, experts, intelligence specialists, civilian analysts, human rights campaigners, anthropologists, historians and journalists were sitting around tables and half-empty cups of coffee in a nondescript meeting room in the American army staff college of Leavenworth, Kansas.
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They were a very long way from Iraq, but the conflict was very much present.
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The meeting had been convened by General David Petraeus, the fifty-four-year-old senior officer in charge of the college who after serving in Iraq had seized the opportunity offered by his new tenure to formally reshape the American military’s understanding of how to fight non-conventional operations. The various experts were there to discuss the draft of a new US military field manual on fighting counter-insurgency warfare. Politically adept, ambitious and driven, Petraeus had served as commander of the 101st Airborne Division during and after the 2003 invasion, where he had employed classic counter-insurgency doctrine to achieve a reasonable level of calm and stability in the difficult northern city of Mosul, a Sunni and Ba’athist bastion. A second tour in charge of training Iraqi security forces had been less successful but had nonetheless reinforced the reputation Petraeus had acquired for combining intellectual acumen and curiosity with practical effectiveness. A series of glowing media reports boosted his public profile and sparked some jealousy among the notoriously competitive senior ranks of the US military. Known to have been sceptical of the American involvement in Iraq from the beginning, famously asking ‘how does this end?’ during the invasion, Petraeus represented a maverick minority strand of thinkers that had been largely marginalized within the American armed forces over the four years since 2003.
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Within ten months of the Samarra bombing and the Leavenworth meeting, this minority would be determining US strategy in Iraq.

The writing of the manual, the sessions in Leavenworth, the debate sparked by successive drafts of the manual amounted to a huge and public self-criticism session for the American military. First, the flaws in the strategy and tactics implemented in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003 were unpicked. The failure to secure borders, the raiding from big, heavily defended bases, the isolation from local people, the counterproductive emphasis on force protection, the cultural insensitivity, the chronic inability to understand local dynamics, the lack of sufficient troops to provide the security that could allow stability and economic development, the abuse and violence meted out to detainees were all discussed and analysed. The sessions were, as Petraeus had intended, lively and stimulating. The range of contributors, many from outside the US military, ensured a range of different inputs. One was David Kilcullen, an Australian former army officer with a doctorate in political anthropology, who matched experience from his country’s deployment in East Timor in 1999 with that gained as a US state department consultant in 2006 in Afghanistan. Kilcullen fitted what had been happening in Iraq into a broader theory. When al-Qaeda activists established themselves in a lawless area and successfully provoked an outside intervention by local government forces or international actors, Kilcullen argued, local populations were radicalized and then fought alongside the extremists. These local warriors were not dedicated ideologically committed fighters, he said, but simply ‘accidental guerrillas’. The right tactics and strategy could reverse the process by which they had come to take up arms.
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Other contributors included British officers such as Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who had served in Iraq himself and who, in a widely read article published in the Leavenworth College review, accused the US army of a lack of cultural knowledge and sensitivity that amounted to unwitting ‘institutional racism’.
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Aylwin-Foster also attacked American ‘moral righteousness’, ‘damaging optimism’ and ‘focus on conventional warfare of a particularly swift and violent kind’. His article included statistics revealing that most American operations had been ‘reactive to insurgent activity’, i.e. effectively initiated by the enemy, and ‘only 6 per cent had been aimed at securing a safe environment for the population’. This latter goal was at the heart of many contributors’ thinking.
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Lecturing from the British who, after all, had hardly been hugely successful in Basra, was resented by many American officers, but coming from the only ally who had significant numbers of troops deployed, the criticisms had a certain weight.
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Further input came from cultural anthropologists controversially hired by the Pentagon in a new initiative launched between mid 2005 and mid 2006. The doyenne among them was the flamboyant Montgomery McFate, who drew on close observation on the ground in Iraq – albeit under conditions that could hardly be described as academically ideal – to make a range of observations: that the frequent killings of civilians by US troops at roadblocks were in part due to the gestures indicating ‘stop’ and ‘welcome’ being reversed in American and Iraqi cultures; that coffee shops (forbidden to US troops on force protection grounds) were the natural conduit for information flow in Iraq, not broadcast media as assumed in the West; that confusion over the black flags Shia households traditionally flew from their homes caused needless casualties as Marines conditioned to think a white flag meant surrender assumed a black flag indicated the opposite. McFate did not pull her punches when it came to criticizing her nation’s forces, attacking the ‘ethnocentrism, biased assumptions, and mirror-imaging’ she saw as endemic among American troops. ‘Understanding one’s enemy requires more than a satellite photo of an arms dump,’ she wrote in one military journal. ‘Rather, it requires an understanding of their interests, habits, intentions, beliefs, social organizations and political symbols – in other words, their culture.’
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Eventually Field Manual 3-24, the result of the work at Leavenworth, mentioned ‘culture’ on fifty of its 282 pages.

For a technical military publication, Field Manual 3-24, was a work of extraordinary influence, discussed on television and in newspapers and bought in quantities normally reserved for airport thrillers. Its basic points were simple. Instead of prioritizing the finding and killing of insurgents, troops needed to make protecting local people from the militants the main focus of their efforts. Instead of trying to isolate Americans from local populations to both reduce casualties and to avoid provoking an ‘allergic reaction’ if foreign troops mixed with local people, soldiers needed to eat, sleep and, most importantly, walk among those they were now supposed to protect. The US military’s overwhelming firepower needed to be used judiciously and with consideration of all the possible consequences. Often it was better not to open fire. If a single insurgent was killed and five of his brothers took up arms as a result, that was a net loss not a gain. Humiliating, injuring or killing civilians and damaging their property helped insurgents, whereas ‘using force precisely and discriminately strengthens the rule of law that needs to be established’. The manual also reaffirmed the obligations imposed by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and called abuse of prisoners ‘immoral, illegal, and unprofessional’.
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This latter injunction was not the only element that was politically controversial. A key theme, returned to again and again, was the importance of recognizing and respecting the cultural specificity of a given population. ‘Cultural awareness is a force multiplier,’ Petraeus had said in an article published in January 2006.
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The manual itself went further, arguing that ‘American ideas of what is “normal” or “rational” were not universal’ but instead ‘members of other societies often have different notions of rationality, appropriate behaviour, levels of religious devotion and norms concerning gender. Thus, what may appear abnormal or strange to an external observer may appear as self-evidently normal to a group member.’ For this reason, the manual insisted, it was vitally important ‘to avoid imposing’ American ideas of the normal and the rational on other people. Culture, it said, was ‘arbitrary, meaning that Soldiers and Marines should make no assumptions regarding what a society considers right and wrong, good and bad’.
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This was not what most American conservatives – indeed most Americans – believed. It was certainly far from the thinking of the president, of many of his top officials or of the large number of evangelical Christians within the US armed forces.

Petraeus’ manual was effectively recommending a culturally relativist approach which ran diametrically opposite to the ‘moral clarity’, the belief in American exceptionalism and the confidence in the universal application of American values that had hitherto been such a principal element of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 security strategy.

Equally, the new approach ran counter to another key ideological component of the worldview of the White House. Back in 2002 the Bush administration had pledged ‘to work to bring democracy, development, free markets and free trade to every corner of the world’.
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In this approach, as British academic and Iraq expert Toby Dodge has noted, it was analytic categories derived from, or at the very least shared with, neoliberal economics that were dominant: the individual, the market, democracy and the threat of an overbearing state.
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In Afghanistan and in Iraq, the Bush administration’s emphasis on minimal levels of troops, ‘a light footprint’ and allowing local populations to ‘stand up’ owed as much to this as it did to fears of repeating the Soviets’ mistakes or to General Abizaid’s ‘antibody theory’. But the counter-insurgency theories being elaborated by Petraeus and his team placed the state at the centre of any successful strategy. ‘COIN [counter insurgency operations] … involves the application of national power in the political, military, economic, social, information and infrastructure fields and disciplines,’ the manual stated unequivocally on its second page.
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The new manual drew heavily on the writing of David Galula, a French soldier who had used his experience as an officer in the Algerian war of 1954 to 1962 to write one of the fundamental texts of modern strategic thinking on counter-insurgency. In his work
Counter-insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice
, which was repeatedly referenced in the new manual, Galula stated bluntly that the state, was ‘the machine for the control of the population’ and stressed that only ‘four instruments of control count in a revolutionary war situation: the political structure, the administrative bureaucracy, the police, the armed forces’.
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Again, the manual’s emphasis the centrality of the state was in sharp contrast to cherished principles of the Bush administration and many of those who had voted for them.

Criticism from the right was however muted. On the left, several objections to the new doctrines rapidly surfaced. Some pointed out that this was not the first time armies at a loss to deal with a particular enemy had turned to ‘culture’ in a bid to find new arms or strategies and that doing so was no guarantee of success. There had been similar efforts during (or after) the Indian Mutiny or War of Independence in 1857, in the Pacific Theatre during the Second World War and in Vietnam.
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Many detected the influence of a long tradition of Western ‘Orientalism’ in the text of the manual. Though it avoided some of the more classic prejudices, there was evidence, at least in the discussion of Iraq during the editing of the manual, of a typical European vision of ‘the Arab’, timeless and exotic, inscrutable or wily.
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Some criticized the frequent citing of T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, the British soldier and romantic hero who had written nearly a century ago and whose best-known work,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, was dismissed by some respected scholars as ‘a fine piece of prose but almost worthless for studying the history or society of the Arab world’.
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Others worried that the new doctrines were falsely reassuring, with the ‘new and nicer’ way of fighting they outlined considerably more compatible with the US’s self-image as a source of universal good and universal values than the tactics previously employed and thus a useful way to convince an increasingly disillusioned American public to accept their soldiers continuing to kill large numbers of people in distant countries.
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But the real problem was less academic. When the final draft of the manual was being prepared in June of 2006, there was little indication that anyone was seriously considering the wholesale practical application of what it recommended in Iraq or elsewhere in the near future.

THE SURGE

Nearly 3,000 Iraqis were killed in December 2006, at least two-thirds in sectarian violence.
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Jaffar, the Karada barber, remembered the last days of 2006 as ‘the waiting room of Hell’. ‘Everyday I heard of a relative dying. I never left my home,’ he said.
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