Friday, November 03, 2006
Would more troops on the ground have made a critical difference?
Just after 9/11 when the Administration was thinking big thoughts, I wrote a short paper entitled "A Rescue Mission to Afghanistan" It outlined what we should be doing in Afghanistan after our impending invasion. It was a plea for an intense and lengthy effort comparable to the assistance we offered Europe and Japan after World War II. In other writings at the time, I suggested that we should bring in at least 100,000 troops immediately. Of course, I did not know then that the Iraq invasion was in the offing and would make such a commitment to Afghanistan next to impossible.
However, now that we have the experience of the last few years, I wonder if the problems we set out to solve in Afghanistan and later Iraq were not so intractable that even a massive and much more competent effort would have been unlikely to yield the peace and development that we desired.
The problem is that we are foreigners in strange lands. While for a few people in Afghanistan and Iraq we represent a vision of a better world, for the vast majority we are simply outsiders who will be resented the longer we stay and the more ubiquitous our presence becomes. While on the one hand, more troops will be applauded if they improve security, resentment will also grow faster as the numbers of foreigners increases. There are bound to be people that we mistakenly kill or injure. There are bound to be other public relations nightmares involving locals and the troops; the more troops, the more incidents. There is bound to be corruption, and the more aid we give, the more corruption there will be. The nativists, whether "jihadist" or not, will find it easy to convince the majority that we are in their country for no good, and the more of us there are, and the more money we spend, the more convincing their argument.
The situation would be improved, if we could offer reliable security and development to the populations. We have shown that we can accomplish this for short periods in particular places. But when we move elsewhere, the security situation declines rapidly, particularly for those who have cooperated with Americans or other outsiders, or are seen to be too cooperative. When we leave, the development projects we have undertaken are frequently destroyed; the schools and hospitals are closed.
The only way out of this policy bind would be for the United States and its allies to occupy one or both countries with decisive forces on the order, for example, of 300,000 in Iraq. In this case, we and the Iraqis would have to know that this massive commitment is for the long haul, not just for a year or two. These forces must not pull punches or worry too much about collateral damage. Whether we bring in large police forces, much of the effort must be by our police and those arrested must be tried, sentenced and committed to prison by the occupiers. Half measures will not do. Countries can be successfully invaded and occupied and administered by outsiders. The British certainly showed that (although they had a particularly hard time with this model in Iraq and Afghanistan). But we are not about to do this in countries as large as we are faced with here. We do not have the capabilities any more and we do have a public that would back such an enterprise.
I am not trying to diffuse the responsibility of the Administration or the military for the errors they have made in the planning and execution of our efforts in these countries. But what I am saying is that it may have simply been a mistake to imagine that we could with feasible troop levels do anything like what we accomplished after World War II. We forget that Japan and Germany were much more modernized countries than we are dealing with in the Middle East. Both countries had had considerable experience with the modern institutions that the outsiders tried to impose on them. Their peoples felt that they had been defeated by the Allies. As such, they felt that the Allies had something like a natural right to rule them for a while. For these and other reasons their people were much more open to "reconstruction" in every sense of the word than the Afghanis or Iraqis could be.
I hope we have learned some valuable lessons, that we will be a little less expansive in our plans to unilaterally reconstruct the world in the future.
However, now that we have the experience of the last few years, I wonder if the problems we set out to solve in Afghanistan and later Iraq were not so intractable that even a massive and much more competent effort would have been unlikely to yield the peace and development that we desired.
The problem is that we are foreigners in strange lands. While for a few people in Afghanistan and Iraq we represent a vision of a better world, for the vast majority we are simply outsiders who will be resented the longer we stay and the more ubiquitous our presence becomes. While on the one hand, more troops will be applauded if they improve security, resentment will also grow faster as the numbers of foreigners increases. There are bound to be people that we mistakenly kill or injure. There are bound to be other public relations nightmares involving locals and the troops; the more troops, the more incidents. There is bound to be corruption, and the more aid we give, the more corruption there will be. The nativists, whether "jihadist" or not, will find it easy to convince the majority that we are in their country for no good, and the more of us there are, and the more money we spend, the more convincing their argument.
The situation would be improved, if we could offer reliable security and development to the populations. We have shown that we can accomplish this for short periods in particular places. But when we move elsewhere, the security situation declines rapidly, particularly for those who have cooperated with Americans or other outsiders, or are seen to be too cooperative. When we leave, the development projects we have undertaken are frequently destroyed; the schools and hospitals are closed.
The only way out of this policy bind would be for the United States and its allies to occupy one or both countries with decisive forces on the order, for example, of 300,000 in Iraq. In this case, we and the Iraqis would have to know that this massive commitment is for the long haul, not just for a year or two. These forces must not pull punches or worry too much about collateral damage. Whether we bring in large police forces, much of the effort must be by our police and those arrested must be tried, sentenced and committed to prison by the occupiers. Half measures will not do. Countries can be successfully invaded and occupied and administered by outsiders. The British certainly showed that (although they had a particularly hard time with this model in Iraq and Afghanistan). But we are not about to do this in countries as large as we are faced with here. We do not have the capabilities any more and we do have a public that would back such an enterprise.
I am not trying to diffuse the responsibility of the Administration or the military for the errors they have made in the planning and execution of our efforts in these countries. But what I am saying is that it may have simply been a mistake to imagine that we could with feasible troop levels do anything like what we accomplished after World War II. We forget that Japan and Germany were much more modernized countries than we are dealing with in the Middle East. Both countries had had considerable experience with the modern institutions that the outsiders tried to impose on them. Their peoples felt that they had been defeated by the Allies. As such, they felt that the Allies had something like a natural right to rule them for a while. For these and other reasons their people were much more open to "reconstruction" in every sense of the word than the Afghanis or Iraqis could be.
I hope we have learned some valuable lessons, that we will be a little less expansive in our plans to unilaterally reconstruct the world in the future.
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