Detour to Dead end

As I have come across this piece by Edward Luttwak, I thought that a link and some selected snippets from it would prove that I am not the only one out there who knows a bit of history. More importantly, that there are others that learn something from it…

In all cases here he is referring to a draft of a US counterinsurgency manual, FM 3-24 DRAFT. I encourage you to read the whole thing via the link to Harpers provided above.

Much more questionable is the proposition that follows, which is presented as self-evident, that a necessary if not sufficient condition of victory is to provide what the insurgents cannot: basic public services, physical reconstruction, the hope of economic development and social amelioration.

The hidden assumption here is that there is only one kind of politics in this world, a politics in which popular support is important or even decisive, and that such support can be won by providing better government. Yet the extraordinary persistence of dictatorships as diverse in style as the regimes of Cuba, Libya, North Korea, and Syria shows that in fact government needs no popular support as long as it can secure obedience. As for better government, that is certainly wanted in France, Norway, or the United States, but obviously not in Afghanistan or Iraq, where many people prefer indigenous and religious oppression to the freedoms offered by foreign invaders.

If there is a bigger problem with the big picture of the "War on Terror" I can't think of it. There is some reference in Luttwak's essay to the military government the US successfully imposed on Germany and Japan after WW2, but the necessary prerequisite for that was smashing both countries to the ground, firebombing their populations into submission, then completely decapitating their government and replacing it with Allied military governors. Now, I'm not sure even that would work in Iraq and Afghanistan (the Russians tried the first bit with little success), but as in all other fields of human endeavor, half-measures won't get the job done.


All its best methods, all its clever tactics, all the treasure and blood that the United States has been willing to expend, cannot overcome the crippling ambivalence of occupiers who refuse to govern, and their principled and inevitable refusal to out-terrorize the insurgents, the necessary and sufficient condition of a tranquil occupation.

Nothing I haven't said before, but well written, and he uses some excellent historical parallels with the current situations. And I (almost) promise, my next entry will be my digest of the West's situation.