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Warren
Marik is a retired CIA officer who is currently in Afghanistan observing the
recent elections. He sent these observations to the list.
The Sepoy Mutiny Syndrome An excellent film from India recently opened in the United StatesMangal Pandeyabout the beginning of the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, when the Army of Bengal revolted against the command and rule of the British East India Company. The East India Company had recruited, trained, and paid native troops of the Army of Bengal to conduct operations against other Indian rulers and states and to maintain order. The revolt of the sepoys resulted in the killing of thousands of British soldiers, civilians, and Indians who remained loyalby the native soldiers upon whom they had depended. The movie is of interest today because of the strong indications that the U.S. military is working under a burden of fear that Iraq and Afghanistan could present the U.S. military with similar mutinies. This fear of betrayal is hindering the U.S. military from accomplishing one of its most important missions: establishing professional military and paramilitary forces that can successfully protect the nascent democracies of these two nations. This fear is, in part, the cause for the lessening confidence that both U.S. taxpayers and Iraqi and Afghan citizens have in the U.S. militarys ability to accomplish its mission. The more disturbing example is the condition of the Iraqi National Army (INA). The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has put the Iraqi military through three iterations during the two and a half years since the U.S. invasion: the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC), the Iraqi National Guard (ING), and now the INA. The short histories of all three have been problematic. The U.S. military and the DOD have been, at best, ambivalent about creating quickly an Iraqi military force that could be considered to be effective against adversaries. Recruiting centers have not been adequately protected, and recruits not thoroughly vetted. Military living conditions have been below minimum standards. Training courses were neither intensive nor extensive. ICDC, ING, andfinallyINA units have always been undergunned. When privately asked recently about artillery for the INA, a senior Iraqi government official replied that the INA has no artillery and the Americans would be unlikely to provide artillery. It is an accepted fact that the former Ayad Allawi government, supposedly under the watch of U.S. advisers, stole millions of dollars and provided the INA with useless military equipment. The recent reappraisal of the effectiveness of Iraqi battalions, after two years of training, is an embarrassment to the United States, not just to the Bush administration. A retired British Army colonel recently said that Iraq is a right rollicking cock-up. In Afghanistan, things are not much better. In spite of the extra year the Bush administration has had to train a professional military in Afghanistan, only one support unit of the Afghan National Army (ANA), a battalion of the 201st Corps in Kabul, is now beginning to receive artillery training. ANA military installations remain vulnerable to suicide attacks. In late September a suicide bomber, a relatively new threat in Afghanistan, was able to penetrate perimeter security of a post very close to Kabul and kill ANA soldiers within own their compound. The Afghan paramilitary has been characterized by observers as more or less a hollow force, and it is estimated that a the paramilitary wont be fully trained or outfitted until 2009, eight years after the invasion. A soldier in the U.S. infantry is generally considered to be ready for combat after 20 weeks of training. The Bush administration has had approximately 180 weeks in Afghanistan and 120 weeks in Iraq to recruit and train professional military and paramilitary forces drawn from populations that have had extensive experience in war. In spite of Baathi incompetence, mostly Shia infantrymen and tankers held their own against (also Shia) Iranian forces that had, at times, a three-to-one advantage. Afghan mujahidin stalemated the Soviet 40th Field Army. Something more is going on here than just the lack of DOD resources and local backwardness. Anyone who has been to Iraq or Afghanistan and who reads the U.S. militarys INA and ANA training newsletters can be forgiven for suspecting that the constant reshuffling, renaming, and renumbering of INA and ANA units and the incessant lauding of operations that result in, for example, the capture of five rocket grenades smacks of a shell game that is the result of something deepercall it the Sepoy Mutiny Syndrome. The syndrome is based on a real threat. The sepoys did, of course, revolt. Also, more than 1,800 years before that mutiny, Arminiustrained by the Romansled a German revolt that destroyed three Roman legions. During World War II, less than a century after the Sepoy Mutiny, Subhas Chandra Bose led Indian Army prisoners of warcaptured by the Japanese and reengineered as the Indian National Armyagainst British India. There are risks to recruiting, training, and organizing nationals other than ones own into a professional fighting force while occupying their country. The Sepoy Mutiny Syndrome is easy to catch. Get over it. The Bush administration committed the U.S. military to these two large and complicated interventions. There have been no publicized U.S. government resignations in response. The U.S. military as a whole is notoriously uncomfortable working with foreign militaries other than on the defense attaché cocktail circuit. One part of the military, however, is relatively comfortable dealing with foreign forces. Part of the mission of the Special Operations Forces (SOF) is to work with foreign military groups. Some support exists for combining the SOF with the CIAs paramilitary wing (which is probably more comfortable dealing with foreigners than with Americans) for the training missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. taxpayers might well come out winners with that combination. The regular Army, also, is not without its historical successes. The KATUSA (Korean Augmentees to the U.S. Army) program was initially criticized during the Korean War but is now generally believed to be a wellspring of the modern, efficient Republic of Korea Army (ROKA). Many Americans who had contact with ROKA troops in Vietnam certainly would not have considered them to be slow on the uptake, a term used to characterize Iraqi and Afghan trainees in the recent months. The U.S. military seems to be improving, with embedded advisers and other aggressive hands-on training methods. Great! Just as the courageous resistance by the passengers of UA93 on September 11, 2001, put to rest the chimera of the Stockholm Syndrome, the U.S. military must put to rest the Sepoy Mutiny Syndrome. |
