I took notes but many times threw aside my pen in dismay at the level of questions put to the team. General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker and their 'brain trust' of advisors had hammered out a new approach to warfare. The approach integrates economic and political tactics heretofore reserved for the post-conflict phase of war. The approach is so new that nobody -- not the congressionals, not the reporters who later questioned the team at a press conference -- had a lexicon for putting informed questions to the team.
So one had to snatch bits of understanding from examples given by Petraeus or Crocker, and try from these to cobble together a picture of a war like no other. Pundita is also struggling for a lexicon, so I hope the reader will indulge my first attempt to describe what I absorbed from the proceedings.
The core of the new approach is that mechanisms of governance are introduced as a weapon against armed enemies during kinetic (force) operations.
One idea behind the military surge in Iraq was to tamp down the insurgency enough to allow the new government to get on its feet. But Petraeus and Crocker found a circular problem in Iraq:
With no means except warfare to influence the government, insurgents would continue fighting unless the 'Carthage solution' was applied -- a solution that would be morally unacceptable to the Coalition. The only other alternative within classic warfare was a troop size of overwhelming proportions, and to leave the troops permanently occupying the country.
Then, in a manner of speaking the brain trusts sat down and did trigonometry. Would it be possible to counter every angle of armed resistance with creation of a governance mechanism? A mechanism that provided the insurgents with a more efficient approach to getting what they wanted from government?
The answer was clearly, 'Not in all cases.' There are aspects of the insurgency that are actually classic proxy war masquerading as insurgency. But if people in a province had been shooting for years and still not gotten the authority and funds to build, say, a sewer system, it was possible to go back and forth between government and the shooters to work out mechanisms for (a) putting sewer construction into a budget and (b) mechanisms for carrying out a budget administered by the central government.
So when Petraeus and Crocker spoke at the proceedings about building government from the bottom up and linking this with building government from the top down, that's what they meant. Governance procedures are worked out, in ad hoc fashion, based on demands from Iraqis who previously only had the option of violence to demand their share of power and resources. The procedures are folded into tactics for fighting insurgents.
Contrast this with the traditional military approach of overcoming an enemy, then setting a new government in power, and leaving the government to eventually work out procedures for dealing with provinces/tribal regions.
Readers who have leaped ahead might ask whether the new approach has applications for all backward states where outside armed intervention advances or imposes a new government. My answer is my oft-repeated plea to abandon blanket application of any kind of strategy -- whether economic, military, or political.
Clearly there is a lot of back-and-forth allowable in the Crocker-Petraeus approach because the new government is cooperating in some measure with the US. So the team can go to the shooters and ask, 'What are you upset about today?' Then take the answer back to the government and suggest a governance protocol or system that solves the problem that's causing the shooting.
The approach depends on cooperation from the government that might not always be possible in all countries with backward governance procedures. But the basic idea behind the Petraeus-Crocker approach is very powerful in that it frames armed conflict as a problem of efficiency.
If it's going to take half your town killed to protest lack of clean drinking water; if the government has to get many troops killed to tamp down the violence in your town -- both sides can see the value of approaching the conflict as a failure of the efficiency principle.
The efficiency principle goes out the window if the government is rogue; e.g., if it's no more than a gang protecting smuggling routes and contraband trade. But yes, on a carefully chosen individual basis, there are applications for the Crocker-Petraeus trigonometry in other countries with backward governance systems.
But is the approach really working in Iraq? That's what Petraeus and Crocker traveled to Washington to explain: yes, it's working but the ad hoc, case-by-case basis is slow and prone to setbacks. The biggest problem for the US is that Iraqis who have agreed to try the approach are insisting on using the US military as a stand-in for parliamentary representatives.
As Ambassador Crocker explained, Iraq is still a traumatized country. Iraqis don't trust the mechanisms of representative government. They still see government as a phenomenon of rulers rather than systems. They greatly distrust the central government, which oversees a command economy.
Meanwhile, the central government's faith in ethno-sectarian quotas to administer the country has collapsed -- so much so that Maliki visited Sistani earlier this month to discuss abandoning the quotas in favor of a merit-based Cabinet makeup. Sistani's answer was not made public, but Maliki remains convinced by events that only a "technocratic Cabinet" can earn the trust of the provinces.
Will Iran support the creation of a meritocracy in Iraq's central government? Not if they have their way. But Crocker pointed out that because of historical and ethnic reasons Iran is quite limited in their ability to influence politics in Iraq. And Tehran is fast wearing out their welcome among many Iraqi Shiites. That leaves Iran to influence through force of arms, so the struggle for the Coalition is to expose the approach as a very inefficient one for Iraqis.
As the congressional proceedings on Monday and Tuesday emphasized, all this struggle is costing the USA about 9 billion dollars and 60 casualties every month. Will the American people muster the determination to continue supporting a new approach to warfare? The trouble is that for years Americans have shown much patience and determination.
Somewhere I hear laughter. I suppose it's Clausewitz's ghost. But if war is mostly a game of chance, there are steps to improve odds. One step would be for General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker to give up hope that news media and think tanks can explain the Iraq campaign to the American people. The team needs to take into account the newness and complexity of their approach. They should visit Washington at least once every three months and repeat the grueling exercise of personally updating the Congress.
I will close by repeating an observation I made about the first day's proceedings:
[...] Ambassador Ryan Crocker said that Iraqi provincial governments had discovered the Supplemental. The remark would have been funny if not for the shattering implications. We always knew in a vague way that things were really bad under Saddam Hussein's regime. But what was never clear, until Crocker's testimony, is that under Saddam there were no absolutely no political and economic mechanisms for connecting the provinces with the central government in Baghdad -- none. The provincial governments didn't even have a budget.
No comments:
Post a Comment