The American Way of War

Most Americans don't think of themselves in conjunction with mercenary armies. The idea of a mercenary rubs Americans the wrong way since mercenaries were used by King George III to try to suppress the American Revolution. But... guess what... America no longer has a citizen army. Under Nixon it started the move to a "professional" army and under George Bush this has been beefed up by a large commitment to mercenary armies.

From an article in The Atlantic by William R. Polk, advisor to President John F. Kennedy and professor of history at the University of Chicago. I've bolded key bits:

President Karzai would like to rid Afghanistan of the “private security forces,” whom he accuses of fostering corruption and committing human rights violations. He announced as I began my tale on August 17 that he will abolish these private armies within four months, withdrawing their visas, expelling them and closing down the 50 or more firms that hire them, but he probably cannot. They are “embedded” with our military and with all the diplomatic missions and the Afghan power elite.

Without any sense of irony, diplomats and generals admit that they do so actually to protect their own officials and even their soldiers. Our ambassador, to cite one example, travels with a guard of mercenaries rather than one of Marines who, in my days in government, were charged with guarding the embassies. British Deputy Ambassador Tom Dodd told me, with what I thought was a flash of pride, that the British had a ratio of 1 mercenary for each Englishman whereas the American ratio was 3 to 1. The numbers are so large, I asked him to account for them. “Money,” he replied. “They are cheaper than regular soldiers.”

I find that hard to believe. It must be a toss-up. Each soldier costs us $1 million a year, but foreign (as distinct from Afghan) mercenaries earn $1,000 or more day just in salaries, not counting housing and food, transportation several times a year back and forth to their homes and, perhaps most significant, life insurance.

...

But it isn’t just the rich and powerful whose condottierri lord it over the ordinary Afghans: assorted other gunmen, including unemployed young men and even off-duty policemen, routinely shake down passers-by, shop keepers and even households. Scruffy fellows they may be, but loaded down with Kalashnikov machineguns, grenades and pistols, and cavalier about reading government documents, they pose an implicit threat to almost everyone. The “on-duty” police can do nothing about them because no one can tell who they are or who stands behind them – ministers, heads of government departments, bigger warlords or the Taliban.

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Groups like this are all over the country and in the aggregate the payoff to them is huge. An American Congressional investigation entitled “Warlord, Inc., Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan,” published in June this year, showed that to implement a $2.16 billion transport contract the US military is paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and (indirectly) the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country.” Dexter Filkins of The New York Times (who incidentally won a George Polk Award) put it bluntly, “With U.S. Aid, Warlord Builds an Afghan Empire.” He described “an illiterate former highway patrol commander [who] has grown stronger than the government of Oruzgan Province, not only supplanting its role in providing security but usurping its other functions, his rivals say, like appointing public employees and doling out government largess. His fighters run missions with American Special Forces officers, and when Afghan officials have confronted him he has either rebuffed them or had them removed.” How did he do it? Money. Filkins points out that his company charges $1,200 for each NATO cargo truck to which it gives safe passage and so makes about $2.5 million a month. How does he get away with it? As Filkins wrote, “His militia has been adopted by American Special Forces officers to gather intelligence and fight insurgents.”

So... the war in Afghanistan comes down to using mercenaries who mix well with all the other mercenaries in Afghanistan along with the local ruffians who "lord it over" ordinary Afghanis. I can think of no scenario in which that turns out well for the Americans. All I can see is that Afghanis hatred for Americans and all the various mercenary armies simply grows larger and larger over time.

The "war" in Afghanistan is hopeless. It is presented to Americans as "bringing democracy" to the Afghanis, but the reality is that there is no basis for a civil society and without that you can't have a democracy:

I shamelessly used our wait for the sandwich and coke to pursue our talk in the car about the rule of law. What about property? I asked. “There is no security in property,” he said. “If a person owns, for example, a house, and the local strongman wants it, he just tells the owner to get out. The owner has no choice. If he does not obey, he is apt to be beaten or killed. There is no recourse through government even if the owner has all the proper papers.” But much “private” property, he explained, is not registered. It is either what people took over during the civil wars or is owned by custom, perhaps generation after generation. Under the circumstances of lawlessness, however, the distinction between registered and unregistered property is meaningless since neither can be upheld by any authority.

This is true, he continued, even of government property. If the “intruder” is powerful enough, that is well enough connected to one or other of the inner circle, he can simply take over government lands or buildings. Then even government officials can do nothing to make him vacate. In fact, he may be a minister himself, a member of the “inner circle.” .

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In their meeting with Senator John Kerry, the American press corps bluntly described the regime as Afghanistan’s native mafia.

Here Polk's assessment of the situation in Afghanistan:

Indeed, both he and all the knowledgeable people with whom I have talked believe the situation is far more dire now than last year. It is not just the statistics on casualties and wounded, although they show an accelerating downward trend and the wounded, in particular, are much more numerous than is reported and their wounds are both more grievous and much more expensive to compensate for. (A person with a head injury will cost the Treasury over his lifetime about $5 million in medical bills. Such costs are not figured into the figures given out by the Defense Department on the cost of the war.) But, it is clear that we do not have a coherent or long-term strategy and are trying to make up for that deficiency by throwing money – and people – into the fray more or less without any way of judging whether they help achieve or prevent us from achieving our vague objectives. Meanwhile, the Afghans appear to be sick and tired of Americans.

I got a chuckle at this bit of the article since it reflects that fact that both the American and Afghan societies are beset by nearly insolvable problems caused by ineffective government and the opposed interests of individuals over the collective:

Then our conversation virtually began anew. From warlords and improvement of the security forces, she shifted to what obviously is the bottom line: the issue of corruption. Can the regime survive? Many people here -- but not she, she matter-of- factually said – have dual nationality. They send their children abroad, a son in England, another or a daughter in the US or Canada, etc. – and perhaps their wives as well. They also send along with them or at least to foreign banks as much money as they can. The reason why they do is simple, they have little trust in the existing government and less in the future. Why not? She asked. They have nothing to fall back on. What they are doing is personally prudent even if it is nationally disastrous.

The US has a similar problem. The collective national interest is to spend to juice the economy, but the individual incentives are to save because of uncertainty and at the state level they are forced to cut programs and throw people out of work because of idiotically anti-Keynesian laws that require "balanced budgets". Both societies are wracked by conflicts between individual interests and the collective interest and there is no obvious solution on the horizon because neither society seems to believe in a civil society and an effective government. Both have an ideology of individual "freedom" at the expense of collective security and prosperity.

A chunk of the article is dedicated to drawing similarities to the doomed intervention in Vietnam. I thought this bit was insightful:

“Also bad is the tendency of your contractors to draw on labor from outside the place where a project is undertaken. Of course, contractors draw on the cheapest source of labor. So they might use Tajiks to do a project in a Hazara area, for example. Then the local people have no sense that it is theirs. We see this often. But, if a road, for example, is built in a village by local people, they feel it is somehow theirs and will take care of it. But Americans show no sensitivity to Afghans and their way of living.”

For all the words from Washington about having "learned lessons" and their "deep concern about Afghanis". The reality is that the people sent there and on the ground just go through the motion and do things the way they are used to without any knowledge of the local culture and the side-effects of their actions. Tragic.

Polk explains why the "government in a box" that was supposed to be quickly "rolled out" in Marja didn't work.

Before he arrived, he said, one of the big efforts at doing something was down in the newly conquered province of Marja. The US military had run the Taliban out -- or so they thought -- and General McChrystal was bringing in a “government in a box.” Perhaps the most important piece “in the box” was to be the creation of jobs. So AID set up a program to hire 10,000 workers – virtually all the adults in a local population of about 35,000 people – but only about 1,000 took up the offer. Why? The answer was simple: the local people knew more about guerrilla warfare than the American army did. From years of experience, they knew that the guerrillas had done what guerrillas are supposed to do, fade away when confronted with overwhelming force and come back when the time is right. They are back. And, as other insurgents have done in all the insurgencies I studied in my Violent Politics, they have punished those they regarded as traitors. The 9,000 Afghans who turned down the AID offer were what we would call “street smart.”

When Polk talked to Western reporters living in Afghanistan, he got the same pessimistic assessment that he was getting from the more knowledgeable senior officials:

In summary, I found that they were just as pessimistic as the better informed of my other contacts. The young Chinese-American woman, Bayfang, had worked as a reporter before joining AID to work in Kandahar. So she had experienced both the freedom of the reporters and the “security” of the officials. She remarked on how hard it was to get permission to go out of the guarded compound where, as in Kabul, all the official Americans lived, and then only in body armor and with guards. No wonder, she said, the Americans could not understand the country. They hardly saw it. The reporters, of course, used local transport, mainly taxis, and usually went by themselves to call on Afghans or foreigners in pursuit of their stories. The evening turned into a sort of college bull session. They were all pessimistic. Things are going downhill.

If you want to understand why the US is doomed to lose, as were the Russians, and the British before them, here is a bit that summarizes how "conquerers" inevitably treat the conquered:

Now I have the last and most interesting of all my talks now to relate. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was the Taliban’s head of the central bank, deputy minister of finance, acting minister of defense and ambassador to Pakistan. In short, he was one of the most important men in the Taliban establishment. When Pakistan withdrew its recognition of the Taliban government in 2001, he was abducted and packed off to Bagram prison, to another prison in Kandahar and finally to Guantánamo. Among them, as he recounts in his autobiography, My Life With The Taliban, he was humiliated, repeatedly tortured, almost starved, sat upon, spat upon, cursed, almost always deprived of a chance to pray, had his Qur’an sullied and deprived of sleep for days on end. Finally after four years he released in 2005 without charges and allowed to return to Afghanistan. He now lives, more or less under house arrest, in Kabul.

The article is full of interesting details. If you want to get a better "feel" for Afghanistan and what is really going on there, this article should be on your list of things to read.