Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  The emergence of the Sunni Awakening was not a repudiation but a confirmation of Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine: it showed how improvements in the security situation could snowball by inducing waverers and even enemies to come over to the government’s side once they were convinced that this was the winning side. Yet, no matter how successful the surge was tactically, it could not by itself guarantee long-lasting stability. Successful security operations only create the potential for inclusive and effective governance that addresses minority grievances and binds the country together. That opportunity had been seized in countries such as South Africa in the 1900s, Malaya and the Philippines in the 1950s, El Salvador in the 1980s, Northern Ireland in the 1990s, and Colombia in the 2000s. It was far from clear, however, that Prime Minister Maliki, a militant Shiite leader, would have the perspicacity of a Magsaysay or a Uribe. Indeed his sectarian and divisive agenda, no longer checked by a U.S. military presence after 2011, threatened to undo the gains that American troops and their Iraqi allies had fought so hard to achieve—and to alter the historical assessment of the surge’s ultimate success or failure.88

  THE FACT THAT population-centric counterinsurgency had worked in Iraq, at least temporarily and tactically, was, on one level, not terribly surprising, given its success in other lands and other years. But several aspects of the Iraq experience were unusual. In the first place, few if any countries, with the possible exception of Colombia, had ever recovered after being so close to collapse. In Malaya, Templer had prevailed after early setbacks, but the level of violence there was much lower than in Iraq, and Malaya was a much smaller country. Moreover Templer did not have to worry about much foreign interference, whereas Syria and Iran provided substantial support to the Sunni and Shiite insurgents, respectively. Finally in Malaya, as in most guerrilla conflicts, the insurgents had been isolated in the hinterlands far from the capital, whereas in Iraq the major cities—Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Baqubah, Baghdad—were the battlegrounds. This was a double-edged sword: the sheer number of attacks in Baghdad and other urban areas magnified the crisis but also made it possible to improve the situation quickly by flooding the cities with American troops.

  Equally ambivalent in its impact was the decentralized nature of the Iraqi insurgency: while AQI and the Jaish al Mahdi became the dominant groups among the Sunnis and Shiite, respectively, there were many other “resistance” organizations as well—by one count, fifty-six in all.89 Unlike Communist uprisings, this one had no central insurgent bureaucracy and no widely recognized leader like Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro. The lack of unity made it harder for the insurgents to prevail but also made it harder to stamp them out—“decapitating” strikes, such as the elimination of Zarqawi, could not defeat a diffuse uprising.

  While urban insurgencies have traditionally failed, few insurgencies since the end of World War II had been defeated primarily by a foreign power. In most successful counterinsurgencies of recent decades, an indigenous government received substantial aid from abroad, even those where the bulk of the fighting was done by its own troops. This was not the case in Iraq, where American troops took the lead in 2007 despite the growing public opposition to the war in the United States. They were successful partly because they were not supporting a dictatorial regime, as the Russians had done in Afghanistan, but an elected government that, for all its faults, was broadly representative of the population. Like the British in Malaya, and unlike the French in Algeria and Indochina, the Americans made clear that they were not bent on an indefinite occupation by signing an agreement in 2008 calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2011. It helped also that U.S. troops were seen as neutral arbiters in Iraq’s sectarian landscape. They were trusted by most Iraqis more than their own security forces.

  As a result of his success in Iraq, Petraeus was given the thankless task of undertaking another difficult counterinsurgency effort, this one in Afghanistan—a country that had suffered years of neglect while the Bush administration concentrated America’s resources on Iraq. His task was made all the more difficult by rampant corruption in Afghanistan’s own government, by the presence of Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, and by growing war weariness back home. Petraeus arrived at President Barack Obama’s request in July 2010 and left a year later to become CIA director, having claimed some progress but no dramatic turnaround as in Iraq. The conflict against the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and other insurgents had started before the war in Iraq, and it would last longer. The war in Afghanistan showed that the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, however sound in its distillation of the lessons of history, offered no magic formula for instantly defeating determined guerrillas. Even under the best of circumstances any struggle against an entrenched insurgency would be difficult and protracted. And Afghanistan was hardly the best place to implement the precepts of counterinsurgency, as invaders from Alexander the Great to the British and Russians had previously discovered.

  64.

  DOWN AND OUT?

  The Failures and Successes of

  the Global Islamist Insurgency

  THE EVISCERATION, AT least temporarily, of Al Qaeda in Iraq was only one of many setbacks suffered by the jihadists after 9/11. The most momentous of these was the death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, in a gutsy raid by U.S. Special Operations Forces on his compound in Pakistan that was ordered by President Obama over the objections of some of his advisers. Popular protests and insurrections proved to be far more potent instruments of change than terrorist operations. In 2011 uprisings shook regimes from Libya to Bahrain in ways that Al Qaeda never did. Far from toppling any Muslim governments, the Islamists managed to turn much of the umma against them. The Pew Global Attitudes Project recorded a sharp drop in those expressing “confidence” in Bin Laden between 2003 and 2010—in Pakistan from 46 percent to 18 percent, in Indonesia from 59 percent to 25 percent, in Jordan from 56 percent to 14 percent.90

  Yet even a small minority is enough to sustain a terrorist group, and Al Qaeda had shown an impressive capacity to regenerate itself. Its affiliates continued to operate from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. There was a particularly close connection between Al Qaeda central and its “branded” franchises, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia and Yemen) and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (North Africa). Meanwhile other Islamist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Tehrik-i-Taliban (Pakistani Taliban), the Afghan Taliban, and the Haqqani Network—sympathetic to Al Qaeda but not formally affiliated with it—continued to show considerable strength in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Hamas controlled the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah held sway in Lebanon, and the Shabab bid for power in Somalia. The turmoil that swept the Middle East during the Arab Spring of 2011 offered fresh opportunities for extreme Islamists, including some sympathetic to Al Qaeda, to take power. Based on their record as of 2012, Islamist groups were considerably more successful in seizing power than the anarchists but considerably less successful than the liberal nationalists of the nineteenth century or the communists of the twentieth century.

  The best bet for Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group to have a big impact would be to acquire nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, which Osama bin Laden had said was a “religious duty” for all Muslims.91 Even without such apocalyptic weapons, terrorist groups have the capacity to drag nation-states into fresh wars as Al Qaeda did with the 9/11 attacks, which led to the American invasion of Afghanistan. Hezbollah and the PLO have also caused interstate conflicts by leading Israel to intervene in Lebanon, while Pakistan-based jihadist networks have almost sparked a war between India and Pakistan on several occasions with their attacks on Indian soil. The possibility of terrorists’ setting off a war between nuclear-armed states is not all that far-fetched, considering that a terrorist act was the proximate cause of World War I.

  To defend itself against such calamitous possibilities, America and its allies sought to erect a variety of defenses. Mostly it was a matter of improved security, police work, and intelligence gathering.
The military played an important role, too, though seldom as central as in Iraq and Afghanistan—countries whose previous governments had been toppled by an American invasion. In states with a functioning or semi-functioning government the American role was limited to providing training, weapons, intelligence, and other assistance. Emblematic of this “low footprint” approach was the U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force sent to the Philippines in 2002 to neutralize jihadist groups such as Abu Sayyaf. Comprising fewer than six hundred American personnel, it engaged in no direct combat. Rather it helped train and support the Philippine armed forces while carrying out civil-action projects such as building medical clinics and schools.92

  Barack Obama came to office critical of many aspects of the Bush-era war on terror. However the practices he had most strongly criticized, such as the use of “stress techniques” in interrogations, already had been stopped in Bush’s second term. Other policies, such as holding detainees indefinitely at Guantánamo and trying them via military tribunals, Obama had to accept because of congressional opposition to ending them. In still other areas—such as drone strikes in Pakistan—Obama actually authorized more attacks than his predecessor had done. He also showed more willingness than his predecessor to order potentially risky commando missions such as the one that killed Osama bin Laden. Many liberals were disappointed that Obama had not gone far enough in rolling back Bush policies; many conservatives were equally upset because they thought he had gone too far. But most Americans appeared satisfied with a robust counterterrorism approach that had won bipartisan support in Congress—and kept them safe in the decade after 9/11.

  Yet there was no guarantee that this streak of counterterrorist success would continue. As the “planes operation” showed, defeats in a struggle against an “invisible army” could materialize with shocking suddenness and not just on a distant battlefront but on the home front itself. This was not a threat that Britain, France, Russia, and other Western powers that had battled Islamic insurgents in previous centuries had had to grapple with—Chechens did not attack Moscow in the nineteenth century, any more than Pashtuns attacked London or Moroccans Paris—but it was an inescapable reality of war in the globalized world of the twenty-first century.

  EPILOGUE

  Meeting in Marjah, October 23, 2011

  LIKE DIPLOMATS WITH guns, the marines assembled around their hulking MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) armored vehicles that might have wandered off the set of a Star Wars movie. Their tan boots crunched softly on the dried mud and gravel of their desert base, a modest collection of sand-colored tents covered with camouflage netting and outfitted with hastily assembled plywood furniture, all of it enclosed, almost like a medieval fortress, by rows of dirt-filled Hesco bastions and concrete Jersey barriers designed to stop suicide bombers and enemy rockets. All that was missing was a moat. Conditions were so primitive that there were no Port-a-Potties, much less latrines with running water; the men relieved themselves into plastic “piss tubes” stuck into the dirt. Towering above them were long, thin antennae thrusting upward as if to extend a metal hand through the ether itself to connect this remote outpost with its higher headquarters and with smaller elements in the field. As they listened to a short mission brief, the marines stood next to their armored vehicles in their camouflage fatigues, weighed down with M-4 rifles, spare magazines, body armor, radios, CamelBaks, first-aid kits, and other assorted paraphernalia.

  Suddenly out of a limpid blue sky a strange apparition with giant wings appeared amid a volley of deafening thwacks. Neither airplane nor helicopter but a combination of both, the V-22 Osprey landed at Camp Hanson with its tilt-rotors pointing upward to disgorge a handful of security experts sent from Kabul to assess this Area of Operations. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel A. Schmitt, the wiry and energetic commander of the 3-6 (Third Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment), stepped forward to greet his visitors on this warm fall day, helmet in hand, and to usher them into the MRAPs for the drive ahead—thirty bone-rattling minutes over dirt roads fringed by orchards and farm fields, heading from the northern edge of settlement straight into the population center.

  Sunday, October 23, 2011. The Marjah district of southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.

  Four and a half years after Captain David Brunais had led a squad of soldiers from the Eighty-Second Airborne Division onto the streets of Baghdad, another American officer was departing another American base in another country to engage in another of the time-tested rituals of counterinsurgency. Just as Brunais’s patrol was designed to consolidate the gains his troopers had made through an assault into ungoverned terrain, so too with Schmitt’s “Key Leader Engagement,” the fancy term that the American military conferred on meetings with local notables.

  American marines, the 3-6 among them, had first entered this area, long notorious as a Taliban safe haven and center of the flourishing drug trade, in February 2010. The high hopes of commanders, who had spoken overoptimistically of bringing “government in a box,” were stymied initially by the low quality of Kabul’s representatives and the fighting ability and tenacity of the local insurgents. There was no set-off-the-fireworks victory, no instant turnaround to be had in Marjah, but then there never is when battling an entrenched guerrilla group. Gradually, however, after hard fighting and serious losses on both sides, the marines were able to push the Taliban out of town. Once there had been two marine battalions in Marjah. Now there was only one reinforced battalion, and it was increasingly turning over control of the town itself to the Afghan army and police so that it could pursue the Taliban into the empty desert that lay outside the narrow agricultural belt, literally a “green zone,” that stretched along the Helmand River Valley. Some of the Taliban remained in town, of course, but they found it prudent to hide their weapons, at least for the time being.

  The situation was much safer than it had been back in May 2011 when the 3-6 battalion had arrived for its second deployment to Marjah. Yet Schmitt still took the precaution of having a marine with a hand-held metal detector sweep the path ahead, on the lookout for buried mines, after he and his visitors dismounted from the armored vehicles and were walking to an elder’s gated and heavily guarded house. Capricious and deadly, IEDs had taken a fearsome toll on the marines in Helmand, killing many and leaving many others without arms or legs. Most of these infernal devices were so well concealed that they could be detected only with a metal detector or a set of well-trained eyeballs.

  Once inside, marines and visitors alike engaged in a routine that had become second nature to American troops over the past decade who seemed eager to show by their actions that the age of the “ugly American” was long past. They took off their body armor, leaving it in heaps outside, and walked in to sit down on the floor along the periphery of a spacious salon. Sitting next to them on threadbare carpets were local potentates. At the head of the room, crouched on the floor next to Schmitt, was the owner of the house, Hajji Baz Gul, sporting a traditional flowing white shalwar kameez, a black vest and turban, and a substantial salt-and-pepper beard. (“Hajji” was an honorific denoting one who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca.)

  Meetings with elders like him had been a part of the routine for counterinsurgents since the days of Alexander the Great, and indeed, aside from an expensive watch on his wrist, he did not look as if he would have been out of place in a sit-down with the Macedonian conqueror. Such conversations are designed to exchange information and to reach a modus vivendi between occupiers and occupied. They are not a substitute for the violence and coercion of warfare—killing and jailing insurgents—but they are an essential complement to it. Such diplomatic work took up much of the time of American commanders from the platoon level to the division and beyond, and it distinguishes counterinsurgency from conventional conflict, where the pure kinetic battle is all. Winning a counterinsurgency is a lot more complicated than simply pumping out a lot of lead and involves risks in addition to being shot or blown up—risks such as food poisoning and terminal bore
dom.

  A manservant arrived to distribute with grimy black hands a lunch of rice, cucumbers and tomatoes, and scrawny, incinerated pieces of chicken, all washed down with cold cans of soda. As the assembled company of Americans and Afghans ate with their own hands off plates set on the floor, another elder entered and sat down on the other side of Schmitt from where the first elder had crouched. Hajji Moto Khan was wearing a virtually identical outfit; the only difference was that his beard was perceptibly longer and whiter, which denoted higher standing in this patriarchal community. For the next hour, the Americans and Afghans engaged in a stilted, slow-motion conversation, punctuated by elaborate avowals of affection, through a marine translator. The elders were making a plea for greater infrastructure investment, while Schmitt was making a plea of his own for greater security cooperation.

  Tension simmered not far beneath the surface of this ostensibly friendly interaction. Moto Khan had previously been a local leader of the Taliban. Another elder sitting in the back of the room had lost two sons fighting the marines. These men had no love lost for their camouflaged guests, but as wily survivors they could calculate their own-self interest—and much as their counterparts in Iraq’s Anbar Province had done in 2007, they had decided to throw in their lot with “the strongest tribe,” at least for the time being.

  Thanks to their cooperation, Marjah, once the epicenter of violence in Afghanistan, had turned remarkably peaceful. After leaving the elder’s house, the biggest obstacle that Schmitt encountered was flocks of stubborn sheep blocking the road. No snipers targeted his men, no IEDs went off to blow up his MRAPs. He was even able to lead his visitors on a walk through an open-air market, helmets off to reflect the greater sense of security. Once closed, the market was now bustling, with kids running around, stalls piled high with everything from vegetables to plastic flip-flops, and jingle trucks and motorcycles clogging the main street. Schmitt pointed proudly at this accomplishment, which was more significant in his mind than any number of insurgents caught or killed.