As the sun is setting over the mountains to the west, a small band of Taliban fighters push into a
rugged valley in Afghanistan's Konar province. The terrain is rugged and austere but also eerily
beautiful -- a blend of West Virginia mountains and Arizona desert.
For centuries it has also been a killing ground for armies. The roads are few, narrow and
steep, falling off hundreds of feet to the river below, making every bend in the road a potential
ambush. Large boulders and caves dot the landscape; a passing convoy could be surrounded and
not know till it is too late. Konar province is also near the Pakistan border, allowing smugglers
and insurgents to slip into Afghanistan practically at will. It is, in short, a nearly ideal setting for
launching and sustaining an armed insurgency. The Soviets were bloodied and eventually broken
trying to hunt down the mujahaddeen in places like Konar province. The people of Konar wear
this legacy like a badge of honor.
The Taliban fighters decide to rest at a small village before a rendezvous with other
insurgents. As they sit to drink green chai tea with the village elders, a tradition of hospitality
among Afghanistan's Pashtun people, they are told something surprising: Don't attack the
Americans here. If you make trouble for us, we'll turn you in.
When the United States was poised to insert ground forces into Afghanistan in October
2001, few people thought that such Afghan villages could ever become pro-American. Instead,
experts predicted that America would be humiliated and driven out of Afghanistan, just as the
Soviets were 12 years before.
Why is this small, isolated village defending U.S. soldiers? Unravel that mystery and you
will understand a critical component of how America should wage war in the 21st century.
One reason Americans have been relatively well-received in Afghanistan is that they do
not have a tough act to follow. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, it
indiscriminately annihilated entire villages in pursuit of a handful of mujahaddeen. The rural
population was the chief target of this campaign, in which torture, mass arrests, kidnappings and
indiscriminate bombing campaigns were common. Perhaps a million Afghans were killed in the
decade-long conflict, and millions more fled the country.
The situation in Afghanistan today could not be more different. Despite ferocious media
coverage of occasional abuses, the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan has been a model of restraint.
There are no mass arrests or unexplained civilian disappearances, and American military
operations are scalpel-like in their precision. As a result, public sentiment in most of the country
has not turned against U.S. soldiers.
An important asset
But something even more important is at work in the American war effort. Unlike in
Vietnam, American war planners in Afghanistan have emphasized classic counterinsurgency
tactics, building relationships with local communities to ferret out enemies and making the most
of an important military asset: properly trained U.S. Army Civil Affairs (C.A.) units.
Many of the villagers here in Konar province have been treated at a medical clinic run
with the help of a Civil Affairs unit, and C.A. veterinarians have helped nurse sick animals back
to health. Most of the older villagers are illiterate, but their children attend a school rebuilt with
the assistance of C.A. soldiers using American funds and donated school supplies. For the first
time in years, girls in the village are being taught as well. C.A. soldiers are careful to funnel such
reconstruction projects through the village elders, offering a valuable source of income for its
impoverished but proud residents while cementing trust with local elites.
While combat units are going about their primary job of fighting the enemy, C.A. units
are helping them build relationships with civilian communities, facilitating the collection of
valuable on-the-ground human intelligence, and helping civilians construct the basic elements of
civil infrastructure and civil society. C.A. troops also facilitate interaction between indigenous
civilian and military units in ways that build mutual trust and empathy.
Civil Affairs units are important in America's global war on terrorism because it is in
such weak or failed states as Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq that the war on terrorism will be
fought. The weakness of these states offers terrorist groups a safe harbor in which to recruit
adherents, raise funds and launch operations that increase their international visibility. In such
places the United States faces the daunting challenge of fighting enemies who may lack popular
legitimacy but blend easily into civilian populations. Security forces in these states are often
poorly organized, trained and equipped, and are prone to corruption and mismanagement.
The 17th century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes provides a valuable
insight into the 21st century global war on terror. Hobbes theorized that the state of nature -- a
kind of war of all against all -- would persist until people surrendered their rights to a sovereign
power who would safeguard something even more important than their rights -- their safety.
The sovereign's ability to provide security for his subjects is essential for retaining the consent
of the governed. If the sovereign cannot provide that security, he must cede his legitimacy to
some competitor who can.
Until recently the government of Iraq and its partners have not been able to provide this
security, so Iraqi citizens turned to groups that could. These include such tribal and religious
groups as the Mahdi Militia and Ansar al Sunnah. As America continues its nation-building
expeditions in Afghanistan and Iraq, it would do well to heed Hobbes' warning. Defeating
insurgents on the field of battle is critical -- but no less important is providing security for
ordinary citizens.
By addressing quality-of-life issues and clearing space for civil society to take root,
military forces can help create safe, ordered communities where it is increasingly difficult for
insurgents and terrorists to operate with impunity. The tipping point is when indigenous people
deny aid to insurgents and trust indigenous and U.S. forces to protect them from retribution. This
appears to be the case in Baquba and in Anbar province, where Al Qaeda has been ostracized
and former insurgents now work with the coalition forces to neutralize that terrorist network.
Lessons from Vietnam
Vietnam taught many military strategists that engaging insurgents in direct combat
operations might mean that U.S. forces could win every battle and still lose the war. In South
Vietnam, Vietcong guerillas operated with success wherever they were able to get local villages
to provide them with food, shelter and financial support. They were able do this because the
government of South Vietnam could not provide those villages with security and U.S. forces
were, until late in the conflict, conducting search-and-destroy missions in the highlands that
neglected population security along the inhabited coastline.
Architects of the Iraq war seem to have neglected the lessons of Vietnam and philosopher
Hobbes. Operation Iraqi Freedom, launched in March 2003, showcased the American military's
ability to conduct a complex operation over hundreds of miles of enemy territory and swiftly
defeat an entrenched foe. The U.S. victory was stunning. By May 2003, President George W.
Bush made his now-infamous announcement that major combat operations were over.
The invasion of Iraq, which resulted in a removal of Saddam's regime in a mere 20 days,
was followed by efforts that displayed a fundamental weakness of that machine -- it was a good
tool for destroying an enemy army quickly but not very good for picking up the pieces.
Now, four years later, political support for the U.S. invasion is flagging in the face of a
sustained Iraqi insurgency and bitter sectarian fighting with little sign of an eventual resolution
of hostilities. While the fighting in Iraq -- and Washington -- continues, the real story is not the
origins of the war or its post-invasion missteps, but how American officers on the ground are
finally getting it right.
Led by General David Petraeus, coalition forces have fundamentally changed their
approach to the war. Instead of a strategy in which combat forces focus on hunting the enemy,
Petraeus' strategy focuses on securing the Iraqi people. Significantly, this turnaround was not led
by planning at the Pentagon but has happened piecemeal, led mainly by more junior officers on
the ground. Unfortunately, these tactical successes did not translate into larger victories because,
before Petraeus arrived, there was no comprehensive strategic framework to implement them.
Take Tal Afar, one of the early successes in America's nascent counterinsurgency efforts.
Located close to the Syrian border in northwestern Iraq, Tal Afar was a hotbed of insurgent
activity until the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, led by Colonel H.R. McMaster, arrived in
early 2005. McMaster, who holds a doctorate in history, is an iconoclastic officer who had
written a book critical of the Vietnam War. In it he argued that officers there had not spoken up
early enough in criticizing the Pentagon's heavy-handed search-and-destroy mentality.
McMaster, who arrived in Tal Afar with about a thousand U.S. troops and supporting
Iraqi forces, tried a different approach. Rather than storming the city and forcing his will on it,
McMaster built up a cordon around the city and began negotiating with tribal elders and city
officials about their needs and the future role of American forces in the city.
Once he had reached a working accommodation with the elders, he developed a plan to
root out insurgents from the city and restore security. By developing a relationship with the
people of Tal Afar, McMaster not only reduced the need for force but also minimized U.S. and
civilian casualties. "There are two ways to do counterinsurgency," McMaster's operations
officer told The New Yorker. "You can come in and cordon off a city and level it, à la Fallujah.
Or you can come in, get to know the city, the culture, establish relationships with the people, and
then you can go in and eliminate individuals instead of whole city blocks."
A new approach
McMaster proved himself to be adept as a warrior. He was also a skilled diplomat,
negotiator and city manager. These skills are what our new approach in Iraq under General
Petraeus demands, and such skills will be in high demand in other conflicts of the future. The
conduct of war nearly always involves an element of civil administration in occupied territories,
and this administration can have a marked positive or negative effect on the conduct and
resolution of hostilities in the years and decades ahead.
German forces in the Ukraine during World War II, for instance, liberated a civilian
population that had been brutalized by Stalin's Communist regime. German commanders could
have used Ukrainian resentment to bolster their own war effort. Instead, they inflicted yet more
atrocities on the population, creating bitterly determined guerillas who coordinated with the
counterattacking Soviet forces to ultimately help drive the German army away.
While not immune from harsh excesses, the U.S. military has followed a different path in
its civil operations. Long before the United States was sending infantry battalions to fight
totalitarian regimes in Europe, U.S. troops were involved in the administration of civilian affairs
and civil reconstruction efforts. General Winfield Scott's administration in Tampico, Mexico,
during the 1846-48 Mexican-American War is a clear example. Scott issued General Order 20,
later referred to as "General Scott's martial law order," which was "designed to establish law
and order, while engineering cooperation of the Mexican residents."
As U.S. military students learn in a History of Civil Affairs course:
Scott's troops distributed food to the poor, collected civilian arms, regulated businesses,
restored water supplies, enforced sanitary measures, respected the local religion and hired
local people to perform some of the area damage control functions. Scott also managed to
avoid the abuses and arbitrary rule that could generate an insurgency.
The most successful exercise of Scott's approach prior to the 20th century was in the
Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, when the United States took possession of the
islands in the face of a fierce but not particularly well-organized nationalist resistance. Initially
-- and following a strategy all too familiar to those observing U.S. operations thus far in Iraq --
the U.S. military tried to exercise control over the population by patrolling from heavily fortified
garrisons and appointing locals to politically sensitive posts. With U.S. troops restricted to
garrisons, the Filipino rebels could maneuver and strike at them virtually at will before
disappearing into the surrounding jungle.
U.S. forces were able to gain the upper hand only when they added civil administration
efforts and military control over population centers -- presaging by more than 100 years the
"new" U.S. doctrine of "clear, hold and build" in Iraq. In the Philippines, as Max Boot writes in The Savage Wars of Peace, "soldiers built schools, ran sanitation campaigns, vaccinated people,
collected customs duties, set up courts run by natives, supervised municipal elections, and
generally administered governmental functions efficiently and honestly. . . . Despite the use of
increasingly harsh methods against guerillas and their suspected sympathizers, most U.S.
soldiers remained on good terms with most civilians."
WWII and its lessons
America's 20th-century military watershed, World War II, also demonstrates the
importance of civil military operations to military victory. While this global operation involved
classic large-unit massed battles in the European and Pacific theaters, America's victory in
World War II was sealed by the largest post-conflict reconstruction effort in history. Indeed, this
effort began well before the end of hostilities. Without enormous and sustained military-led
reconstruction efforts in Western Europe and Japan, the United States could easily have lost the
peace. Instead, Japan and West Germany rapidly became key diplomatic allies.
Even Vietnam, which represented a bitter defeat for the U.S. Army, vindicated a similar
approach to war. At first the U.S. military's conventional military solution concentrated on
building the South's capability to resist a large-scale invasion by the North. As a result, the
United States effectively conceded security for the South's population centers to the Vietcong.
Later, as regular Army forces were being drawn down, civil military efforts achieved
some victories in denying the Vietcong access to the South's population, training indigenous
Civilian Irregular Defense Groups to provide security at the village level and helping build local
economic infrastructure. Still later in the war, Combined Action Platoons provided an example
of how small groups of U.S. soldiers could train South Vietnamese militias to protect villages
from Vietcong extortion and control.
Especially after the 1967 Tet Offensive, the United States de-emphasized large-unit
search-and-destroy missions and began its hearts-and-minds campaign, using the same strategy it
had employed 60 years earlier in the Philippines. When the U.S. military secured various
population centers, Vietnamese citizens were better able to resist the anti-government tactics of
the Vietcong.
Similar to the Vietcong, our current enemies from Somalia to Baghdad understand the
futility of confronting U.S. military might directly. Rather, they attack both friendly forces and
civilian populations to create instability and fear in civil society and to undermine U.S. resolve.
As a consequence, ultimate victory in these struggles has as much to do with fostering civil
societies as it does with destroying enemy forces.
Despite its long experience with civil military operations, the U.S. military has
sometimes neglected to build rapport with and secure the civil populace, perhaps assuming that it
is the responsibility of other government agencies. This attitude was deeply ingrained in the
culture of the military as it invaded Iraq. War-fighting prowess was valued to the exclusion of all
other activities.
Why, after years of positive results with civil military operations, should the military ever
be reluctant to engage civil society in a combat theater? One reason is that it is hard to be nice to
people when some of them are trying to kill you. Another is that such approaches to war do not
play to America's undeniable advantages on the modern battlefield: cutting-edge technology and
massed firepower. Also, civil military operations in urban environments are particularly
challenging because of the anonymity and variability of urban terrain -- which can play to the
advantage of groups that are unconcerned with or even seek out mass civilian casualties.
The greatest hurdle to incorporating the civil military mission into the U.S. force
structure from the bottom up is that it requires the human element. There is no technological
substitute for face-to-face relationships. Such connections inevitably expose our troops to
casualties in ways that Tomahawk missiles do not.
Our aversion is partly media driven. Television produces an instinctive recoil at the
plight of casualties, both military and civilian, while glamorizing hi-tech shock-and-awe
campaigns. Yet as the Army's new counterinsurgency manual notes, the more you try to protect
soldiers in fixed fortifications, the less they tend to interact with people and the less safe they
may be.
If we are to fight the global war on terror effectively, America's military must adapt
more flexible approaches and institutionalize the tactics and doctrine of the civil military mission
among all its troop units. Prior to the hard-won lessons in Iraq, most units viewed their missions
as exclusively kinetic ones: find the enemy, fix him in place and annihilate him through massed
firepower. Now those units are beginning to understand the need to transition in short order from
war fighting to problem-solving. For example, during its tour in Iraq, Company B of the 1st
Battalion, 187th Infantry, reportedly spent half of its efforts cultivating local sources of
information, which led them to huge caches of weapons and explosives in Iraq.
Soft skills as priorities
One of the most important lessons from our experience in Iraq is that our military will
not only have to be able to destroy our enemies but will also have to be able to help restore civil
society after a conflict and to strengthen civil societies before conflicts erupt.
Our current enemies and those who would emulate them understand this priority. That is
one reason why they are exerting enormous efforts to attack symbols of societal progress, like
schools and police stations. This past June two Taliban gunmen in Logar province, Afghanistan,
using military weapons, assaulted several little girls leaving their school, wounding six of them
and murdering two of these children, shooting one at point-blank range in the stomach and heart.
The friends and the allies we will need to stand and fight with us against these killers
must be given three things: security, a way of life worth fighting for and a chance to win. Our
armed forces are adept at combat operations and are becoming as versatile at many other "soft"
skills in order to ensure our security now and in the future.
Security and building civil society are mutually reinforcing principles. When people are
safe, they can build their communities. When their needs are addressed, they are more likely to
cooperate with security forces against those who would destroy civil progress. Warfighting and
nation-building are both part of a long military tradition in the United States, and combining the
two will be critical to our future security.
General George C. Marshall, who commanded our military forces in WWII, had it right
when he said: "We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle our flag will
be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of
overwhelming power on the other."
Tim Connors is the director of the Center for Policing Terrorism at the Manhattan Institute and
an officer in the Army Reserve. Paul Howard received his Ph.D. in political philosophy from
Fordham University in 2004. He writes regularly on public policy issues, including security and
health care.
(October 2007)
