http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-betts14aug14,0,6767472.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
How Superpowers Become Impotent
In Lebanon and Iraq, guerrilla tactics turn clean, mean fighting machines
into wimps.
By Richard K. Betts, RICHARD K. BETTS is director of the Saltzman Institute
of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
August 14, 2006
BEING A superpower is handy. No government in the world dares stand up to the
United States on a regular battlefield. Having more than a quarter of the
world's GDP and a half-trillion-dollar defense budget gets us that much and
it's a lot.
Israel is a superpower in its neighborhood too. And yet these two militarily
muscular powers find themselves strategically impotent in the face of age-old
guerrilla tactics married to high-tech capabilities.
The U.S. and Israel are perfectly equipped to knock out Iraqis, the Taliban
or Hezbollah as long as they act like good enemies and come at us in tanks,
planes and ships.
But as anyone watching the news knows, these enemies are not stupid, so they do
not cooperate by fighting in the way we are suited to beat. Instead, in
Afghanistan, the resurgent Taliban pins down NATO forces in hit-and-run
attacks. In Iraq, opponents stymie U.S. control with roadside bombs, sniping
and raids. From Lebanon, Hezbollah fires missiles into Israel's heartland. And
on the Internet, Al Qaeda boasts that it will use radiological weapons.
Along with suicide terrorism and a willingness to incur massive civilian
casualties on their own side, these guerrilla tactics threaten to transform
nationalist insurgents and Islamist terrorists from manageable irritants, who
cause suffering but never severely damage a great power, into formidable
threats to the basic security of the U.S. and its allies
These frightening developments are a wake-up call for U.S. policy. We need to
focus not just on polishing our military strategy but on which fights are
winnable at an acceptable cost. We need to choose our battles more carefully.
The ones we choose should be fought with overwhelming force, as Colin Powell
wisely counseled, but also with overwhelming help to conquered populations who
must be won over if peace is to take hold.
We have no reason to be surprised by our messes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but
our military successes since the 1991 Persian Gulf War made many forget what
previous generations learned painfully about unconventional warfare: Guerrillas
and terrorists plot in secret, rarely wear uniforms and hide among the civilian
population. Despite illusions about precision-guided bombs, regular military
forces cannot rout them without killing lots of the civilians.
To win with our conventional military, we would have to fight like beasts,
slaughtering noncombatants. Americans rightly shrink from this in Iraq, but we
are stuck, with no victory in sight. Israelis, feeling their backs to the wall,
used military power with less restraint in Lebanon, killing hundreds of
civilians to maximize the odds of getting Hezbollah soldiers and supplies. But
this approach is self-defeating, spreading bitterness among victims that
mobilizes more support for Hezbollah.
Short of barbarism, there are only two ways to reduce guerrilla ranks faster
than new recruits refill them. One is to rely on special forces such as Green
Berets, but the few we have are spread thin in hot spots around the world. The
other is to saturate a country with regular troops standing on every street
corner. But our Army is too small to do this in more than one country at a time.
Foreign occupiers face high hurdles in overcoming local nationalist opposition.
The best chance is to try "shock and awe" in occupation as well as in war.
First: a dense presence of occupation forces. This would have meant half a
million U.S. soldiers in Iraq to show the locals from the start that we were
really in charge. We tried to get by with 150,000, which only showed how little
we could control. Second: a quick and massive infusion of economic aid,
construction, medical services and training. If civilians in Afghanistan and
Iraq had jobs, air conditioning, genuine police protection and medical care
soon after the invasion, the insurgencies might not have gained traction.
As it was, the U.S. did these things only in dribs and drabs. We had no serious
plan to co-opt conquered populations. This may sound like bribery, but it is
better than the daily application of firepower to tamp down chaos. Yes, lots of
money was pumped into Iraqi and Afghan reconstruction, but it was a small
proportion of the more than $200 billion spent on the wars so far. Bribery
might not work, but without it, locals have fewer reasons to prefer foreign
occupiers to homegrown resisters.
So both great powers are mired in inconclusive attempts to pacify an exploding
Middle East. With the hopes of peace in tatters, Israelis face narrowing
options. Americans, however, blessed by geography, have more choice. The Bush
line that aggressive action in Iraq was the way to counter terrorism got it
backward; it has embittered more Muslims and energized more terrorists than it
has eliminated. We need to focus on combating Al Qaeda, not multiplying new
enemies. Where we do have to invade as in Afghanistan after Sept. 11 we
should do so with overwhelming force and overwhelming help, to tempt the locals
to buy into our brand of peace so we can leave quickly.
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