As the insurgency continued, Robinson revised his view, warning that the greatest obstacle to success in the Philippines was misguided American interference: “We assert a glorious American liberty and insist that all shall live by American standards.”15 Trouble arose, in Robinson’s mind, from American inflexibility that “makes no allowance for people whom it does not know and for conditions it does not understand.”16
In contrast to Americans in the Philippines and Vietnam, the French képis bleus of the Special Administrative Section (SAS) possessed considerable knowledge of North African culture. By war’s end, SAS officers as well as many in the regular army had come to realize that knowledge about an Algerian village’s history and how that history had formed village attitudes was not a matter of mere academic interest. Rather it was a necessary prerequisite for an effective pacification program. It is noteworthy that the capture of Saddam Hussein resulted from painstaking social analysis of tribal connections performed by an American special intelligence group.
However, it is discouraging to observe that only in late 2007, six years into the Afghan war, did the U.S. military come to the conclusion that its troops did not sufficiently understand how to battle the Taliban insurgency. The U.S. Army captain charged with creating a new “Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy” told his American students that the important battles are 80 percent political and 20 percent military. To engage in the political contest, the students had to learn about local culture and history in order to think like the Taliban.17 If the United States is to engage effectively in the “Long War,” it should not take six years to arrive at the starting point.
Language
Back in 1940 the Marine Corps’ Small Wars Manual had emphasized the importance of cultural knowledge and most especially language skills, noting that “political methods and motives which govern the actions of foreign people and their political parties . . . are practically beyond the understanding of persons who do not speak their language.”18 Sadly, this key insight has had little influence on policy.
In the 1950s, when American advisers began training the South Vietnamese army, fewer than a dozen men in the Military Assistance Advisory Group spoke Vietnamese. The U.S. Army did not have a Vietnamese-language school. Little had changed by 1965 when the marines landed. Even those serving in Combined Action Platoons seldom acquired anything beyond a few words picked up while working in the villages. More than forty years later the challenge of overcoming a lack of language skills and ignorance of a foreign culture returned to hamper a new generation of counterinsurgency warriors. A March 2007 article in the Marine Corps Gazette paraphrased comments from the codirector of the navy’s Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare: “The general lack of cultural preparation for the Iraq campaign, including an insufficient number of people with language skills to understand even the basic information, is one of the causes of failure to effectively combat this insurgency.”19
Given the circumstances preceding the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq—the United States had fought this same foe in 1990 and been on armed watch against Saddam Hussein ever since; the 2000 U.S. Census reported almost 1.2 million citizens of Arab descent—this negligence is astonishing.
Reform and the political Arena
The realization that victory over an insurgency must begin by providing people with physical security has gained wide acceptance. As with every other aspect of counterinsurgency, the “security first and foremost” imperative is not as simple as it seems. Perceptions of security differ. Year after year around 42,000 Americans die in vehicle accidents. The country’s nearly 200 million drivers shrug off the fact that for almost all of them it is by far the most dangerous activity they routinely perform. In contrast, serial sniper attacks that killed ten people over a three-week period in October 2002 in the Washington, D.C., area so terrorized the region’s inhabitants that hundreds of thousands made substantial alterations in their life routines. Iraqis experienced a drumbeat of terror orders of magnitude worse. They proved sensitive to and appreciative of improvements in security. But they expect and will undoubtedly demand more. Weeks after a battle with insurgents had destroyed a market in Baghdad’s Sadr City, an Iraqi merchant returned to deliver a truckload of potatoes. Free-flowing raw sewage ran through the market. Clouds of flies swarmed around heaps of uncollected garbage. At home, frequent electricity outages left him sweltering in 110-degree heat. While acknowledging the improvements in security, he observed, “This is no way to live.”20
The comments of French and British counterinsurgency specialists affirm the idea that there must be progress along multiple paths that go beyond the mere provision of security. General Jacques Allard summarized lessons learned from the counterinsurgency in Algeria: “Destruction will achieve nothing if we don’t go beyond it. If the population were left to itself, the rebel organization would soon emerge again. After having destroyed, we must construct.”21
Robert Thompson observed, “Security by itself is not enough to make the peasant willing to choose to support the government.”22 Successful pacification may begin with security but thereafter the government must deliver services to the people in order to prove itself worthy. The twin challenges of security and reform are the major challenges a counterinsurgency power confronts. No matter how skillfully or massively applied, military might alone will not solve a conflict’s underlying political causes.
Yet these are the easier tasks compared to tackling the root causes of the insurgency. That effort requires redistributing political and economic power. Fundamental, endemic problems exist that will require much time to fix and there is no certainty that the imposed solutions will either work while the counterinsurgency power is present or endure after it leaves. These facts should give pause to political and military leaders who advocate intervening to thwart an insurgency.
Commitment
Like some contemporary American planners in Iraq, the Philippine Commission under William Howard Taft believed that the institution of good government would win the support of most Filipinos. Taft understood it would take time—he guessed fifty or a hundred years—for the Filipinos to develop Anglo-Saxon political principles. The process had to start by educating the children. In the meantime, since the United States could rely only on a very small nucleus of educated Filipinos, the Americans needed to supervise closely all levels of government. He observed that, “lacking the American initiative, lacking the American knowledge of how to carry on a government, any government there must be a complete failure.”23
The postwar Senate inquiry into the conduct of the Philippine War also considered prospects for the future. Many senators were bothered by an apparent open-ended commitment of American soldiers and gold to the Philippines. During his testimony, General MacArthur addressed this concern. He said that although the Filipinos had made great strides, they still held “rudimentary republican ideas and aspirations.” With American tutelage they could continue on the path to progress. He then warned, “American withdrawal from the islands, therefore, would, in my opinion, result in permanent failure of republicanism in the East, and the devastation of the archipelago by internecine and fratricidal war, which would continue indefinitely until suppressed by some external force.”24
Whether in 1898 or 2009 Americans are not a patient people when it comes to foreign entanglements. After helping guide the United States to victory in World War II, George C. Marshall made reference to the protracted struggle that pitted Britain and its American colonists against the French and observed that the American public would not tolerate another Seven Years’ War. Westmoreland’s chief intelligence officer in Vietnam agreed. He believed that foremost among America’s weaknesses in waging war in Vietnam was a weakness inherent to democracies: the “incapacity to sustain a long, unfocused, inconclusive, and bloody war far from home, for unidentified or ill-defined national objectives.”25
In conventional war there are many obvious metrics to measure progress, such as enemy territory captured
or enemy soldiers killed. Not so in a counterinsurgency, and this particularly wears on patience. Even professional military men often completely fail to perceive actual trends. American generals in the Philippines twice claimed the war all but over only to have a fresh outbreak of violence rock the public’s confidence. After a 1960 inspection tour in Algeria, a French general warned, “I want to caution generals and commanders of sectors against exaggerated optimism, which leads them to pretend that pacification has been achieved.” Claims that “peace has returned” were invariably only “superficially true.”26
The general pointed to continued enemy activity in an area where two very capable officers had skillfully conducted two operational approaches that were polar opposites. The tough Indochina veteran Colonel Marcel Bigeard had “pacified” his zone by emphasizing unfettered military and police action. In contrast, in a nearby zone another colonel had relied upon political and psychological methods that emphasized building friendly relations with the local people and increasing the authority of native leaders. Both approaches significantly tamped down violence. Both allowed the claim that pacification was achieved. Yet both seemed to run up against a ceiling beyond which they could not ascend. Hidden somewhere beyond reach was an insurgent hard core capable of acts of terror in order to deny, if not reverse, apparent progress.
At the end of the day, military counterinsurgency is a holding operation, designed not to gain a specific, war-winning objective (since by definition there is no such objective) but rather to gain time to institute the reforms necessary to undermine the insurgents. Algerian-born correspondent Michael Clark had considerable firsthand experience witnessing the French struggle in Algeria. Clark cogently observed, “It has been said that even if the F.L.N. suffers grievous reverses, terrorist agitation can never be stamped out. I do not agree. In any conflict of this sort, uncertainty as to the final outcome gives the terrorist the margin of complicity he needs for protection. But if it becomes manifest that defeat, not victory, awaits the masters whom the terrorists serves, that protective margin will vanish; the terrorist, isolated, can then be destroyed.”27
A MODERN ANALYST, Colonel John Nagl, describes victory in this manner: “The way you win a counterinsurgency campaign is that you don’t—you help the host nation defeat the insurgency.”28 If that is so, then American leaders have to assess accurately the host nation’s capacities before intervening.
This was not done in Vietnam. Instead of asking if anything could be done, American political leaders made the fundamental mistake of asking what should be done. In the future the decision to offer assistance against an insurgency should follow a careful examination of whether the United States has the leverage to move the host nation in the direction the United States thinks it should move. It may well be that America’s nominal ally, the host nation that actually has to win the fight, finds necessary reforms unacceptable because its leaders know they will lose power if they accept reform.
Opposition to foreigners is a powerful recruiting tool for almost all insurgencies. This fact must also be addressed by today’s strategists who argue that victory in the “Long War” currently requires or will require the presence of American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, through the arc of instability, and even in Central and South America. The ability of Americans to defeat an insurgency and the costs associated with this effort have to be weighed against the fact that the American presence provides some of the fuel that feeds the insurgency.
The lessons of history and the case studies in this book do not necessarily refute the belief that an insurgency cannot be defeated by an outside, foreign force. A strategic doctrine can be built that provides a path to victory. Some, perhaps much, of what is propounded in the U.S. military’s current counterinsurgency doctrine presents useful signposts for that path.
What is absolutely certain is that any victory achieved by American warriors and their allies will require a long-term commitment of blood and treasure. Given this fact, certain conclusions follow. An American president in his role as commander in chief must decide if an insurgency truly poses a mortal threat to the nation. This should be the litmus test for American involvement against foreign insurgencies. Then the commander in chief has to convince the American people that his assessment is correct. Having done this, he—and almost certainly his successors—must continue over the ensuing painful years to make the case why the war is necessary. Otherwise public support for keeping American troops in harm’s way will dissolve. Otherwise a president is trifling with the blood of America’s warriors as well as the lives of foreign civilians who inevitably will become part of the collateral damage of war.
On this subject the historical record is perfectly clear: a successful counterinsurgency requires a long-term commitment. How long is unknowable. It is the dreaded open-ended commitment that politicians fear to make, but it is the only way.
Words written in the year 44 B.C. by the great Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero provide an enduring guide for the way forward: “An army abroad is of little use unless there is wise counsel at home.”29
Acknowledgments
Jungle of Snakes emerged from a protracted series of discussions among myself, Peter Ginna of Bloomsbury Press, and my agent, Jeff Gerecke. Peter wanted to know about relevant military history that would inform a reader about America’s ongoing counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. My research produced a very broad list of possible topics. Then Jeff acted as invaluable referee, employing his keen knowledge of history to help weigh and assess. The three-person process of refining and distillation yielded this book. My first set of thanks goes out to Peter and Jeff for their efforts and ultimate confidence.
After a book’s concept is defined, the writer embarks on a period of research; this is always a mixture of thrilling discovery and face-reddening frustration. In spite of technological advances that allow access to information in ways that seemed unimaginable just two or three books ago, at the end of the day any author’s research still depends upon the contributions of dedicated librarians and archivists. I am profoundly appreciative of the help received at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia; and at the Virginia Military Institute, Washington and Lee University, and Rockbridge Regional Library, all in my hometown of Lexington, Virginia.
The U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, now located in a fine new building, remains a fabulous resource. Their collection of letters and diaries provided insight into the minds of a generation of American warriors who confronted challenges more than 100 years ago that would be utterly familiar to today’s soldiers and marines.
I had the privilege to discover the exceedingly helpful resources provided by the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. The marine archivists and historians, particularly Danny Crawford and Fred Allison, could not have been more helpful as they shared their printed and oral history files. The marine library provided open-handed access to many arcane tomes devoted to counterinsurgency. It was particularly poignant that while I was at Quantico, young marines just back from Iraq were also present. Heading home to the mountains that evening, I drove through the Chancellorsville and Wilderness battlefields and experienced another somber reminder of the consequences of committing the nation’s military to war.
After research coalesces into some semblance of a coherent manuscript, editors sharpen their pens and set to work. I was fortunate to benefit from outstanding editors. As she has done for more than thirty years, my soul mate and wife, Roberta, again provided professional editing. Her encouragement, combined with a sometimes stern reminder, “Try using English, please,” will probably be remembered to my grave. The book also benefitted enormously from Peter Ginna’s insightful editorial critiques. Mike O’Connor and Sue Warga skillfully oversaw the always difficult task of copyediting. Meanwhile, from production headquarters, Pete Beatty cheerfully kept the project moving ahead.
Again, thank you all.
James
R. Arnold
Lexington, Virginia, 2009
Notes
Introduction
1. “Testimony of R. James Woolsey, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on National Security, February 12, 1998,” Strategic Intelligence Homepage, http://www.loyola.edu/dept/politics/intel/19980212woolsey.html (May 2008).
2. Editorial on the Philippine Insurrection, New York Times, January 2, 1901.
3. “Guardians at the Gate,” Time, January 7, 1966, 10, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,834900-10,00.html (May 2008).
4. George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy: Can Social Scientists Redefine the ‘War on Terror’?” New Yorker, December 18, 2006, 61.
Chapter 1: An American Victory Yields a Guerilla War
1. McKinley to Otis, December 21, 1898, in U.S. Army Adjutant-General’s Office, Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1993), 2:859.
2. John R. M. Taylor, The Philippine Insurrection Against the United States (Pasay City, Philippines: Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 1971–73), 2:277.
3. Emilio Aguinaldo, “Proclamation to the Philippine People,” February 5, 1899, in Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neoco lonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 20–21.
4. Albert G. Robinson, The Philippines: The War and the People; A Record of Personal Observations and Experiences (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1901), 354.
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