ISIS Threat Is ‘Extremely Worrying’ Says Counter-Insurgency Expert
ISIS Threat Is 'Extremely Worrying' Says Counter-Insurgency Expert – National Public Radio
A decade after the U.S. took control of Fallujah, America is at war again. NPR's Rachel Martin talks with former Lt. Col. John Nagl, whose counter-insurgency manual helped shape U.S. strategy in Iraq…
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. And we begin this morning in Iraq where ISIS militants are on the offensive in Anbar province taking over key cities. The U.S. has kept its distance from the fight in Anbar, instead focusing airstrikes against ISIS militants in the Syrian border town of Kobani. Our next guest says that's a grave mistake.
John Nagl is a retired Army lieutenant colonel. He fought in both Iraq wars and is a co-author of the Army's Counterinsurgency Manual, which helped shape the U.S. strategy in Iraq. Nagl says the U.S. has to put ground troops back into Iraq to fight for Anbar again. He remembers back to the early days of the fighting there in 2003…
I’ll give John Nagl credit, he sticks to his myths about COIN. More concerning to me is his use of irrelevant analogies to justify his arguments. It worries me, because if the audience has no grasp on history they could be suckered by this snake oil. This started with his thesis where he compared the insurgency in Malaya to the hybrid war in Vietnam, and suggested that the British adapted the U.S. failed to. It was hardly that simple, and they were two very different conflicts in so many ways that the comparison was close to irrelevant. Now he arguing that we left troops in Germany and Japan long after the war, so we should have done the same in Iraq as though that is a proper analogy for comparative analysis. In the book “Thinking in Time” its authors encourage the use of historical analogies, but warn against clinging to them if you identify why your current situation is different. If you cling them, you can draw not only incorrect, but dangerously misleading conclusions.
Our COIN strategy did not work, and there is no benefit to clinging to the myth that it did. How do we learn if we cling to our own propaganda as an accurate interpretation of the war? A high level of targeted violence directed at those fighting us worked for a short while. It didn’t solve anything in the longer run, but it did suppress the insurgency long enough to allow the Shia to achieve a stronger grip and provide us an exit. A stronger grip that the Shia lost, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that was in Iraq with open eyes. They are losing that grip even with Iran’s help, which indicates there are powerful players on both sides supporting the fight. It really has little to do with local politics, it is regional politics that extend well beyond the borders of Iraq, so the attempt to win and hearts and minds locally and pretend we were fighting in Malaya was a fool’s errand.
We were being played by all sides, and we playing all sides against each other. Winning an insurgency is not based on doing the same ole dumb crap for another 10 years and hoping it will work if we just keep at it (sort of the same myth that John attacked in his book, but now he is embracing it), it is based on a holistic strategy with “realistic” ends. Furthermore, and most importantly, if the imposed political solution is unsustainable, then there is nothing the military can do to achieve a sustainable victory other than thoroughly crush the resistance. More cow bell doesn’t cut it.
In Iraq, the imposed political system was not sustainable. Unlike WWII, we didn’t have the moral authority to crush the resistance, so that wasn’t an option. We need to honestly reassess the real lessons of the war.Your proposal that we just needed to stay there for another generation is simply not feasible; therefore, it is not a viable approach. We have interests in the world well beyond Iraq. While it certainly benefits our adversaries to see us tied down in a non-winnable war for a couple of decades, it only weakens America. Apparently our COIN strategy ignores the reality that we could stay there another 50 years, and as long as other countries provide external support to the various actors, then the problems will continue. There are many such as examples, once the USSR collapsed, and there was no additional funding for the Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan it fell to the Taliban and the insurgency in El Salvador collapsed. When the U.S. quit supporting Vietnam and Iraqi government they fell. That indicates all politics are not local, and simple strategies based on winning hearts and minds are not sufficient in the real world, only in the world where myth is used as a substitute for the real lessons of history.
It is time to get real, our nation needs honest assessments and strategies that will achieve real ends. We understandably hate to fail, but there are things worse than failure, and that is failure to learn from those failures.
Does anyone know yet, what portion of “ISIS” fighters in Iraq are the Sunnis that the U.S. trained and equipped?