I am not confident – which is to say I think it is entirely impossible – that the US has the necessary eyes and ears for a successful counterinsurgency. A successful counterinsurgency needs good intel to seperate and penetrate, as well as a stable core native government base. There is none in Iraq.
The US position looks very much like that of the French, ex the settlers, in Algeria, except even the French had a good solid core set of local collaborators. Don’t forget that. The harkis did not suffer for nothing.
Collounsbury
mark:
January 13th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
Hi Col-
ok, Somalia was a sloppy analogy on my part, more used as a short-hand for a failed state. By Sierra Leone I was alluding to the tendency for anarchic 4GW forces to spill-over in to neighboring states as they did in West Africa where the ECOMOG peacekeepers ended up drawing the rebel forces back to their home countries, destabilizing an arc of nations.
Lebanon was probably a step-up if I recall properly, they at least had a nominal legitimate government presiding over the warring militias – Iraq does not have even that yet.
Counterinsurgency teams should be relatively small with fluent ( social context too, not just linguistics)translators in each team. MI suport for Counterintelligence teams would require, rough guess, minimum 50 additional good fluent analysts for sifting intel. I could be underestimating though. Can we scrape such a group together from CENTCOM,State,IC and PMC without impairing other critical priorities ? I don’t know. Damn sad if we can’t manage that kind of task force at this stage.
Re: Algeria – I understand your point to a limited extent because the Foreign Legion paras had a far freer hand and more local experience in this kind of work and the French still lost ( or probably would have if DeGaulle had not cut his losses and pulled the plug)Very brutal group.
Anonymous:
January 13th, 2005 at 9:12 pm
Right, sorry about sniping in re the examples.
I am afraid that I think that, no, the US can not scrape the necessary together.
Worse, the real countintel should be supported by a solid core native group. That clearly is not avail in Iraq…. at the moment.
In re Algeria: I am also refering to the Algerians who fought, out of choice, for the French. The French had good native penetration, still lost since their did not have a good core of a counterweight to the ideological side of the insurgency.
That is our problem.
mark:
January 14th, 2005 at 3:39 am
I have occasional email contact with a friend of a friend in Iraq doing real counterintel work with Iraqis. He sounded terribly burnt out and annoyed in his last contact at the Army non -spec op types who would not move on his intel in a timely fashion unless things were 100% certain, which by that time leads are often getting stale.
On the other hand, he’s there voluntarily at a very high rate of pay, second time out so he knew what he was buying.
a from l:
January 14th, 2005 at 10:27 am
An alternative would be to find, negotiate with and sponsor a Ba’athist candidate that would work with the West, and put them into power. If all they are interested in is power, status and an opportunity to pillage the national treasury then, in the grand scheme of things, that should not interfere with the West’s strategic interests in the region. A certain amount of window-dressing may be necessary, but it could be done (remember the Ribbontrop-Molotov agreement). It would be a betrayal of the ordinary people of Iraq, but possibly they may have to be betrayed anyway.
Anonymous:
January 14th, 2005 at 2:53 pm
I would argue that everyone was betrayed by the criminally incompetent, mind bogglingly incompetent”post war” efforts, and even more so by the blindingly stupid insistence (enabled by far too many dogmatic Right Bolsheviks) that everything was/is going fine.
What infuriates me is there are still pollyanish idiots trying to claim Iraq is going better than it looks. It bloody well isn’t and only by understanding that and getting serious (rather than blaming some idiotic Left for one’s problems) is it going to get fixed…. well it’s probably too late, but…
Anonymous:
January 13th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
Not Somalia or Sierra Leone, Lebanon, late stage.
I am not confident – which is to say I think it is entirely impossible – that the US has the necessary eyes and ears for a successful counterinsurgency. A successful counterinsurgency needs good intel to seperate and penetrate, as well as a stable core native government base. There is none in Iraq.
The US position looks very much like that of the French, ex the settlers, in Algeria, except even the French had a good solid core set of local collaborators. Don’t forget that. The harkis did not suffer for nothing.
Collounsbury
mark:
January 13th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
Hi Col-
ok, Somalia was a sloppy analogy on my part, more used as a short-hand for a failed state. By Sierra Leone I was alluding to the tendency for anarchic 4GW forces to spill-over in to neighboring states as they did in West Africa where the ECOMOG peacekeepers ended up drawing the rebel forces back to their home countries, destabilizing an arc of nations.
Lebanon was probably a step-up if I recall properly, they at least had a nominal legitimate government presiding over the warring militias – Iraq does not have even that yet.
Counterinsurgency teams should be relatively small with fluent ( social context too, not just linguistics)translators in each team. MI suport for Counterintelligence teams would require, rough guess, minimum 50 additional good fluent analysts for sifting intel. I could be underestimating though. Can we scrape such a group together from CENTCOM,State,IC and PMC without impairing other critical priorities ? I don’t know. Damn sad if we can’t manage that kind of task force at this stage.
Re: Algeria – I understand your point to a limited extent because the Foreign Legion paras had a far freer hand and more local experience in this kind of work and the French still lost ( or probably would have if DeGaulle had not cut his losses and pulled the plug)Very brutal group.
Anonymous:
January 13th, 2005 at 9:12 pm
Right, sorry about sniping in re the examples.
I am afraid that I think that, no, the US can not scrape the necessary together.
Worse, the real countintel should be supported by a solid core native group. That clearly is not avail in Iraq…. at the moment.
In re Algeria: I am also refering to the Algerians who fought, out of choice, for the French. The French had good native penetration, still lost since their did not have a good core of a counterweight to the ideological side of the insurgency.
That is our problem.
mark:
January 14th, 2005 at 3:39 am
I have occasional email contact with a friend of a friend in Iraq doing real counterintel work with Iraqis. He sounded terribly burnt out and annoyed in his last contact at the Army non -spec op types who would not move on his intel in a timely fashion unless things were 100% certain, which by that time leads are often getting stale.
On the other hand, he’s there voluntarily at a very high rate of pay, second time out so he knew what he was buying.
a from l:
January 14th, 2005 at 10:27 am
An alternative would be to find, negotiate with and sponsor a Ba’athist candidate that would work with the West, and put them into power. If all they are interested in is power, status and an opportunity to pillage the national treasury then, in the grand scheme of things, that should not interfere with the West’s strategic interests in the region. A certain amount of window-dressing may be necessary, but it could be done (remember the Ribbontrop-Molotov agreement). It would be a betrayal of the ordinary people of Iraq, but possibly they may have to be betrayed anyway.
Anonymous:
January 14th, 2005 at 2:53 pm
I would argue that everyone was betrayed by the criminally incompetent, mind bogglingly incompetent”post war” efforts, and even more so by the blindingly stupid insistence (enabled by far too many dogmatic Right Bolsheviks) that everything was/is going fine.
What infuriates me is there are still pollyanish idiots trying to claim Iraq is going better than it looks. It bloody well isn’t and only by understanding that and getting serious (rather than blaming some idiotic Left for one’s problems) is it going to get fixed…. well it’s probably too late, but…
Collounsbury
Anonymous:
January 14th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
***Cough***
-praktike
mark:
January 14th, 2005 at 8:14 pm
LOL ! Ok, ok. I’ll set it up.
Ah, liberals…helping their fellows to enlightenment ;o)