In the Times Literary Supplement for November 20, 2009, the historian and commentator Christopher Coker reviewed two books — Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officer’s Reading Club, and James Fergusson’s A Million Bullets. In the heat and boredom of Iraq, Hennessey had set up a reading club and tried to do the same thing later while serving in Afghanistan. Fergusson, a freelance journalist, describes a soldier’s life in a war many of the British contingent regard as unwinnable. Coker’s review in the TLS provides a thumbnail interpretation of the Afghanistan war and what he sees as its likely outcome. A shortened version appears below.

The reading club that Hennessey and his friends set up flourished in the same boredom and heat that Winston Churchill once had to endure in Bangalore. (Coker describes how Churchill had embarked on a self-educative reading programme while on military duty in India, starting with Gibbon and Macaulay and going on to Plato, Schopenhauer, and Darwin.) They did not all read books: it was more a discussion club.

Hennessey himself failed to make it past the first hundred pages of Don Quixote, but he read Hunter S. Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear… These days of course most officers are apt to educate themselves about the modern face of war by watching DVDs. At Sandhurst 57 per cent of the course teaching material relies on scenes from war films for the instruction of warriors in the making. Gladiator is a favorite; so is Saving Private Ryan, and about half an hour of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam war classic, Full Metal Jacket.

Yet it is not only the medium of instruction that has changed; so has the language, which is now very removed from the heroic language of books or films. Traditionally soldiers have read books to orientate themselves, either to make sense of their personal experience of war or to have a greater understanding of the larger picture, “what it’s all about”. Churchill tells us he was spurred on to study by catching himself using a good many words, the meaning of which he could not define properly.

But what would he make of war today?

As Matthew Parris pointed out in The Times, the NATO mission in Afghanistan is a semantic nightmare: “agent for change”; “asymmetric means of operation”; “capacity building”; “conditionality demand reduction”; “injectors of risk”; “kinetic situation”; “licit livelihood”; “light footprint”; “partnering and mentoring”; “reconciliation and reintegration”; “rolling out a touchdown approach”; “upskilling”. Today’s soldiers (or “stability enablers” as NATO prefers to call them) are lost in jargon.

No wonder the soldiers are confused. In Afghanistan they find themselves fighting a war which is more intensive in terms of firepower than any they have fought since Korea. It is the British Army’s fourth Afghan war, and in its own way just as frustrating as the others. They are training the Afghans to take over, as they tried to train the Iraqis — “leveraging local capacity”.

Hennessey does not mince his words. They had come “to play with the Afghans and to teach them to use their rifles for the time when the real soldiers had blown up all the Talibaddies and could hand over a peaceful, if not prosperous, province (Helmand) with smiles and handshakes and flag-ceremonies”.

Today’s soldiers, Fergusson points out, are as brave as ever. The first iPod generation of recruits are as reliable as the previous generation — they may make videos and drive by with gangster rap blaring out, but the best of them are still brave… Yet if soldiers are told they are on the “front line” of the War on Terror, they don’t know who they are fighting.

First, they were called Taliban, then the “Anti-Coalition Militia” (or ACM — another acronym), a convenient catch-all for everyone from al-Qaeda, hardliners and foreign jihadists to disgruntled poppy-farmers, co-opted villagers and adventurers looking for a bit of fun. Intelligence Officers later began to speak of “Tier One” and “Tier Two” Taliban in an attempt to distinguish between the committed ideologues who would probably never surrender and the opportunists who might be “folded into” future negotiations. The squaddies’ nickname for their opponents — “flip-flops” — captures a truth that often evades our politicians.

And many of them suspect that the whole operation is likely to end in tears. At one point Fergusson passed the site of one of the great British victories in 1842, just outside Kandahar. In the first two wars, the British won most of the battles, but lost the campaign. They managed to win the third war in 1919 — but to little avail.

Writing in the Toronto Daily Star in October 1922, Ernest Hemingway reminded his readers that the Royal Air Force had largely won the war by bombing Afghan cities behind the lines and destroying the mud forts where the hill-men congregated. But when they came to sign the Treaty, the British gave up every right they had always fought for in Afghanistan: for the first time they allowed it to sign treaties with other countries, including the Soviet Union. The war may have resulted in a British victory, but the peace was an Afghan one. As Hemingway concluded, “the Afghans had always hated England, but now they felt contempt for her.”

The American Surge may well work (brute force usually prevails for a while), but at the end of it they will still confront an enormous political vacuum, an unsustainable government, a jigsaw of tribal rivalries, and the Afghan people themselves. No one is likely to win the present struggle in Afghanistan. A few fortunate warriors like Hennessey may experience a personal victory: for them, triumph enough. As for the Afghans — they are suffering the most, but they also usually have the last word.

[From David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla, Hurst, 2009, 29-32]

Al Qa’ida’s military strategy appears to be aimed at bleeding the United States to exhaustion and bankruptcy, forcing America to withdraw in disarray from the Muslim world so that its local allies collapse, and simultaneously to use the provoking and alienating effects of U.S. intervention as a form of provocation to incite a mass uprising in the Islamic world, or at least to generate and sustain popular support for AQ. In a statement released in late 2004, Usama bin Laden outlined this strategic approach as follows:

All that we have mentioned has made it easy to provoke and bait this [U.S.] Administration, All we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point East to raise a cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals to race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without achieving for it anything of note… so we are continuing this policy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing and nothing is too great for Allah.

In support of this strategy AQ applies four basic tactics that are standard for any insurgent movement, as follows:

Provocation

Insurgents throughout history have committed atrocities, carrying out extremely provocative events to prompt their opponents to react (or overreact) in ways that harm their interests. This may involve provoking government forces into repressive actions that alienate the population or provoking one tribal, religious, ethnic, or community group into attacking another in order to create and exploit instability.

Al Qa’ida or groups allied to it have carried out numerous provocation attacks… The most obvious example of a provocation attack is 9/11 itself, which was designed to provoke a massive U.S. retaliation and prompt a spontaneous uprising of the ummah. While the worldwide uprising failed to occur, subsequent U.S. actions could be seen as playing into the hands of this AQ agenda.

Intimidation

Insurgents seek to prevent local populations from cooperating with governments or coalition forces by publicly killing those who collaborate, intimidating others who might seek to work with the government, and co-opting others. This dynamic was highlighted by the classical insurgency theorist Bernard B. Fall, who served in the French Resistance in World War II. Fall wrote in 1965 that

any sound revolutionary warfare operator (the French underground, the Norwegian underground, or any other anti-Nazi European underground) most of the time used small-war tactics — not to destroy the German army, of which they were thoroughly incapable, but to establish a competitive system of control over the population. Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the occupying forces and attack some of the military targets. But above all they had to kill their own people who collaborated with the enemy.

As Fall notes, insurgents also intimidate government forces (especially police and local government officials) in order to force them into defensive actions that alienate the population or to deter them from taking active measures against the insurgents. Likewise, AQ and its allies have mounted terrorist attacks with the intention of intimidating Western countries and forcing them to cease their support of U.S.-led interventions in Iraq (such as the Madrid bombings of 2004, and the kidnapping of Filipino contractors in the same year, which successfully knocked Spain and the Philippines out of the coalition).

Protraction

Insurgents seek to prolong the conflict in order to exhaust their opponents’ resources, erode the government’s political will, sap public support for the conflict, and avoid losses. Typically, insurgents react to government countermeasures by going quiet (reducing activity and hiding in inaccessible terrain or within sympathetic or intimidated population groups) when pressure becomes too severe. They then emerge later to fight on.

This is one reason why an enemy-centric approach to counterinsurgency is often counterproductive: it tends to alienate and harm the innocent population, who become caught up in the fighting or suffer “collateral” damage, but does little harm to the enemy, who simply melt away when pressure becomes too great.

Exhaustion

Finally, exhaustion is an insurgent tactic that seeks to impose costs on the opponent government, overstress its support system, tire its troops, and waste lives, resources, and political capital, in order to convince the government that continuing the war is not worth the cost… In Iraq, the insurgents ambush and attack convoys and aircraft so that each vehicle has to be retrofitted with expensive protective equipment — armor that alienates our forces from the population — and electronic countermeasures, so that every activity takes much longer and costs much more effort, while carrying greater risk of death or injury.

This imposes what Clausewitz called “friction” on a counterinsurgent force, and ultimately causes the government and the domestic population to cease supporting the war. As noted, an exhaustion strategy of this type is precisely the approach AQ adopted and bin Laden outlined in 2004.

by Warren Kozak

[This first appeared as an Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Dec 22 2009]

Five years ago a particularly gruesome image made its way to our television screens from the war in Iraq. Four U.S. civilian contractors working in Fallujah were ambushed and killed by al Qaeda. Their bodies were burned, then dragged through the streets. Two of the charred bodies were hung from the Euphrates Bridge and left dangling.

This barbaric act left an impression that our military did not forget: In a special operation earlier this year, Navy SEALs captured the mastermind of that attack, Ahmed Hashim Abed. But after he was taken into custody in September, Abed claimed he was punched by his captors. He showed a fat lip to prove it. Three of the SEALS are now awaiting a courts-martial on charges ranging from assault to dereliction of duty and making false statements.

This incident and its twisted irony takes me back to an oddly serene setting many years ago. When I was in college, I joined my parents on a trip to retrace my father’s wartime experience in Europe. We drove from France, through Holland and Belgium and on to Germany—the same route he had taken with the U.S. Army in 1944-45. At a field outside the Belgian town of Malmedy, we got out of our rented car where my father described something I had never heard before.

During the Battle of the Bulge, in the bleak December of 1944, the Germans had quickly overrun the American lines. They took thousands of prisoners as they pushed through in a last chance gamble to turn the war around. One unit, part of the First SS Panzer Division, had captured over a hundred GIs. They were moving fast, and they didn’t care to be burdened by prisoners. So the SS troops put the American soldiers in that field and mowed them down with machine guns.

Around 90 Americans were killed in that barrage. The Germans then walked through the tangle of bodies, shooting those who were still alive in the back of the head. The few that survived were brought to where my father was located in the nearby town of Liege where word of the massacre quickly spread.

My father was never a talker. And in spite of the fact that we were on a trip to look at his past, he didn’t open up much, or couldn’t. When I asked him what the reaction was among the U.S. troops, he answered without emotion: “We didn’t take prisoners for two weeks.” I immediately understood what he meant, and had the sense not to press the issue any further. I just looked out at the field, now green and peaceful on a beautiful summer day, and realized he was looking at the same field and seeing something quite different.

In the weeks following the Malmedy massacre, U.S. troops clearly broke the rules of the Geneva Conventions. Justified or not, they were technically guilty of war crimes.My guess is that the American correspondents imbedded with those troops knew all about this and chose not to report it. So did their officers. They understood the gravity of the war, as well as the absolute importance of its outcome. And they understood that disclosing this information might ultimately help the enemy. In other words, they used common sense. Was the U.S. a lesser country because these GIs weren’t arrested? Was the Constitution jeopardized? Somehow it survived.

You don’t have to dig too deep to understand that war brings out behavior in people that they would never demonstrate in normal life. In Paul Fussell’s moving memoir, “The Boys’ Crusade,” the former infantryman relates a story about the liberation of Dachau. There were about 120 SS guards who had been captured by the Americans. Even though the Germans were being held at gunpoint, they still had the arrogance—or epic stupidity—to continue to heap verbal abuse and threats on the inmates. Their American guards, thoroughly disgusted by what they had already witnessed in the camp, had seen enough and opened fire on the SS. Some of the remaining SS guards were handed over to the inmates who tore them limb from limb. Another war crime? No doubt. Justified? It depends on your point of view. But before you weigh in, realize that you didn’t walk through the camp. You didn’t smell it. You didn’t witness the obscene horror of the Nazis.

Rules of war are important. They are something to strive for as they separate us from our distant ancestors. But when only one side follows these rules, they no longer elevate us. They create a very unlevel field and more than a little frustration. It is equally bizarre for any of us to judge someone’s behavior in war by the rules we follow in our very peaceful universe. We sit in homes that are air-conditioned in the summer and warmed in the winter. We have more than enough food in our bellies and we get enough sleep. The stress in our lives won’t ever match the stress of battle. Can we honestly begin to decide if a soldier acted in compliance with rules that work perfectly well on Main Street but not, say, in Malmedy or Fallujah?

In his book, Mr. Fussell probably sums up the feelings of many soldiers when he quotes a British captain, John Tonkin, who experienced a great deal of the war. “I have always felt,” Capt. Tonkin said, “that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity, because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized. It can’t.”

Warren Kozak is the author of LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (Regnery, 2009)