Services are a key

Mao Tse-Tung once wrote that guerrillas - or “insurgents” as they are called nowadays - are like fish in a lake. To an observer all fish look alike as they swim in the water. For guerrillas, the lake is the people among whom the guerrillas live and strike. Ideally, the people support the guerrillas with manpower, resources and shelter. Less ideally, they simply do not oppose the guerrillas. And if the people oppose the guerrillas, then the guerrillas must strike fear into the people to gain at least minimal material support. Fear is inflicted by assassinations, bombings and other terrorist acts. The guerrillas must protect their identities above all, amplifying the people’s fear because no one knows who is a terrorist and who is not.

Mao said defeating guerrillas is done by drying up the lake. If the counter-insurgency forces can make the people decide to overcome their fear and ally with the government, then the insurgents’ freedom to act and operate is steadily reduced as more and more people act on their allegiance.

Over the decades, counter-insurgency experts have learned that defeating insurgencies requires fine calibrations of applying penalties to the people for supporting guerrillas or staying neutral, and rewarding them for allying with the government. American forces in Iraq were maybe a little slow to identify just what incentives the Iraqi people needed to guide them into drying up the terrorists’ lake, but now things seem to be proceeding well. The LA Times ran a piece by Max Boot on how US Army officers shed their orientation towards major armor engagements and focused on winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people as a key means of defeating the insurgency.

Last week at Ft. Hood in Texas, on a tour of military bases organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, I heard a colonel in the 1st Cavalry Division explain one training approach. The 1st Cavalry, which garrisoned Baghdad from March 2004 to March 2005, is an armored force designed to fight other tank armies. In order to figure out how to run a modern metropolis, officers spent time with Austin city officials before they deployed. They also rode along with electrical, water, sewage and garbage workers. Applying what they learned, the 1st Cavalry troops discovered that the more they improved municipal service in Baghdad, the less likely residents were to cooperate with insurgents. Thanks to their efforts, the Iraqi capital is significantly more peaceful today than it was a year ago.

It’s striking that one of the complaints Osama bin Laden made against the non-Islamist governments of Arab countries was that they fail to provide such services to the people. In 1996, for example, bin Laden said,

“The ordinary man knows that [Saudi Arabia] is the largest oil producer in the world, yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services.”

This observation sheds light on OBL’s strategic incompetence. He has always considered the Arab ummah, or Muslims masses, as his natural ally. He has said over periods of years that his main tactic in Saudi Arabia (his principal strategic target) was to bring forth conditions that would cause either of two things. First, the ruling Saudi royals to convert in both word and deed to bin Laden’s form of Islamism and institute strict sharia law throughout the land, or second for the people to arise in righteous, religious indignation and overthrow the corrupt Saudi regime.

But OBL never demonstrated to the Saudis or anyone else how they would actually be better of under Islamism than they are now. In fact, he proved quite the opposite: in the several years he and the Islamist Taliban ruled Afghanistan, the Afghan people sufered from bad services and a personally corrupt regime (not to mention a murderous regime, of course).

If OBL and co. had really been interested in winning the hearts and minds of the ummah,
they would have used Afghanistan as a proof-of-concept base to garner admiration from the ummah. But they didn’t even try.

Instead, OBL and the Taliban revealed the true face of Islamism - government of the many by the few, for the benefit of the few. Far from improving the quality of lives for the Afghan men and women, they coupled ordinary governmental ineptitude with fascisti regulation and enforcement of the minutiae of daily living. Islamism proved to be no shining light on a hill, beckoning the ummah to shake off their temporal masters. There was only a downside for the people to change regimes in Saudi Arabia.

Iraq under Saddam was literally a secular version of Islamist fanaticism. Replace Afghanistan’s cult of Quran with a cult of Saddam and that was Iraq. Perhaps it was even worse, since Saddam’s security apparatus was even more comprehensive and ruthless than the Taliban’s. Civil services under Saddam were not much better than they are now and in fact services in many parts of Iraq now are enormously better than they ever were under Saddam. That’s drying up the lake in which the Iraqi insurgencies swim - and note the plural, “insurgencies.” There’s more than one, and that’s the topic of an upcoming post.

UD: I’ve added this post to James Joyner’s Friday linkfest.