The National Interest

Amidst all the talk of troop numbers, drawdowns and militia crackdowns, TNI makes sense of the Iraq situation: Stephen Biddle, Andrew Michta and Steven Metz weigh in.

Patient Stabilized?
Stephen Biddle

IRAQ’S PROGNOSIS is better today than it has been for a long time. An end to major violence, and with it a major reduction in the risk of a wider war and the human cost of further bloodshed, is now a real possibility. But to realize this potential won’t be cheap or easy. And it won’t produce Eden on the Euphrates. A stable Iraq would probably look more like Bosnia or Kosovo than Japan or Germany.

This is because the likeliest route to stability in Iraq is not by winning hearts and minds or reaching a grand political bargain in Baghdad. It is by building on a rapidly expanding system of “bottom up” local cease-fires, in which individual combatant factions who retain their arms nevertheless agree to stop using them and stand down. Of course, fighters who voluntarily stop shooting can voluntarily start again; such deals are not inherently stable or self-policing. But neither are these merely accidents or brief tactical breathing spells. Cease-fires in Iraq have spread so rapidly because they reflect an underlying, systematic shift in the war’s strategic calculus since early 2006 that has now made peace look better than war for the major combatants. This same strategic reality gives most of the remaining holdouts a similar incentive to stand down, which could bring an uneasy stability to Iraq.

If so, the challenge for the United States would not end. The mission would shift from war fighting to peacekeeping, and U.S. casualties would fall accordingly. But a continued presence by a substantial outside force would be essential for many years to keep a patchwork quilt of wary former enemies from turning on one another.

This was not what the administration had in mind when it designed the surge or invaded Iraq. And it will not produce a strong, internally unified, Jeffersonian democracy that spreads liberty through the Middle East while standing in alliance with America against extremist and hegemonic threats in the region. But it can stop the fighting, save the lives of untold thousands of innocent Iraqis who would otherwise die brutal, violent deaths, and secure America’s remaining vital strategic interest in this conflict: that it not spread to engulf the entire Middle East in a regionwide war. Eden this is not. Reasonable people could judge it too costly or too risky. But there is now a greater chance of stability in exchange for this cost and risk than there has been since this war’s early months—and given the stakes, the case for staying and doing what is needed is stronger now than it has been for years.

THE ORIGINAL idea behind the surge was to reduce the violence in Baghdad, enabling the Iraqis to negotiate the kind of national power-sharing deal we thought would be necessary to stabilize the country. The violence came down, but the compromise did not follow. Instead, a completely different possibility arose—a “bottom up” approach beginning with a group of Sunni tribal sheikhs in Anbar Province.

In a span of just a few months, this “bottom-up” approach has yielded more than one hundred local cease-fires across much of western and central Iraq. The participants agree not to fight U.S. or Iraqi government forces, to turn their arms instead on common enemies, to wear distinguishing uniforms, to patrol their home districts, to limit their activities to those home districts and to provide coalition forces with biometric data (e.g., fingerprints and retinal scans) for all members. In exchange they receive recognition as legitimate security providers in their districts, a pledge that they will not be fired upon by U.S. or Iraqi government forces as long as they observe their end of the agreement and a U.S.-provided salary of $300 per member per month. More than eighty thousand Iraqis have now joined the “Awakening Councils” or “Concerned Local Citizen” (CLC) groups that implement these deals.

This was very bad news for al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The CLC members had once been their allies, providing the safe houses, financial support, intelligence and concealment that had been essential to AQI. Without this, al-Qaeda was left exposed to U.S. firepower in ways it had never been before. Their ensuing heavy losses in Anbar and Baghdad drove AQI’s remnants into the limited areas of Diyala, Salah ad Din and Ninawa Provinces where CLC deals had not yet been reached.

The CLCs are mostly Sunni. But many of the principal Shia combatants are now observing their own cease-fires. In particular, in August 2007 Moktada al-Sadr, the principal Shia militia warlord in central Iraq, directed his Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) or “Mahdi Army” militia to stand down, too.

Holdouts remain, especially in the northern provinces between Baghdad and Kurdistan. But by January 2008, most of the major combatants on both the Sunni and Shia sides were all observing voluntary cease-fires. This produced a dramatic reduction in opposition, a dramatic reduction in the number of enemy-initiated attacks, and a corresponding reduction in U.S. casualties, Iraqi civilian deaths and Iraqi government military losses. There are no guarantees, but it is now increasingly plausible that enough of today’s holdouts can be brought around to bring something resembling a nationwide cease-fire to Iraq.

IF THIS happens, will the cease-fires hold? After all, voluntary decisions to stop fighting can be reversed. CLC members and JAM militiamen retain their weapons. Many are essentially the same units, under the same leaders, that fought coalition forces until agreeing to stop in 2007. Many retain fond hopes to realize their former ambitions and seize control of the country eventually. Many observers have thus argued that these cease-fire deals could easily collapse. And indeed they could.

But this is not unusual for cease-fires meant to end communal civil wars such as Iraq’s. These typically involve very distrustful parties; they often begin with former combatants agreeing to cease-fires but retaining their arms; and they are always at risk of renewed violence. Many fail under these pressures. But some succeed: in Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, for example, cease-fires of this kind have held.

Translating fragile deals into persistent stability requires at least two key conditions: peace has to be in the perceived strategic self-interest of both parties, and outside peacekeepers have to be present to keep it that way.

UNTIL RECENTLY, Iraq failed to meet the first condition. But two major errors by AQI changed the strategic landscape dramatically by mid-2007.

Their first big mistake was to bomb the Shia Askariya Mosque in Samarra in February 2006. Before this, Sunnis believed they were the militarily stronger side; if only they could drive the United States out, they thought they could defeat a weak Shia regime and rule Iraq again. The Shia had largely allowed the U.S. and Iraqi governments to wage war against the Sunnis for them; Shia militias had fought mostly defensively and often stood on the sidelines in Sunni-U.S. combat. But when AQI destroyed the shrine, the Shia militias entered the war in force and on the offensive. The result was the Battle of Baghdad: a yearlong wave of sectarian violence in the capital pitting Sunni insurgent factions and their AQI allies against, especially, the Jaish al-Mahdi. At the time, Americans saw this wave of bloodshed as a disaster—and in humanitarian terms it was. But in retrospect, it may prove to have been the critical enabler of a later wave of cease-fires by changing fundamentally the Sunni strategic calculus in Iraq.

The Battle of Baghdad gave the Sunnis a Technicolor view of what an all-out war would really mean, and they did not like what they saw. With the Americans playing no decisive role, the JAM overwhelmed Sunni combatants in neighborhood after neighborhood, turning what had been a mixed-sect city into a predominantly Shia one. Districts that had been Sunni homeland for generations were now off-limits, populated with and defended by their rivals. By goading the JAM into open battle, AQI had triggered a head-to-head fight in which Sunnis were clearly and decisively beaten by Shia they had assumed they could dominate.

AQI’s second mistake was a systematic alienation of its Sunni allies. Fellow Sunnis whom AQI’s leadership judged insufficiently devout or committed were treated with extraordinary brutality—including delivery of children’s severed heads to the doorsteps of wayward sheikhs. The smuggling networks that Sunnis in Anbar Province relied upon to fund tribal patronage networks were appropriated by AQI for its own use, leaving sheikhs impoverished and disempowered. Before the Battle of Baghdad, most Sunnis tolerated these costs on the assumption that AQI’s combat value against Shia and Americans outweighed their disadvantages. Defeat in Baghdad, however, showed that AQI could not deliver real protection, making AQI all cost and no benefit for its coreligionists.

By late 2006, Sunnis who once thought they were on the road to victory thus realized they faced defeat unless they found new allies. This forced them to abandon AQI and turn to the United States while they still could. After initial wariness, U.S. forces took the plunge and aligned with the tribes against AQI. With American firepower connected to Sunni tribal knowledge of whom and where to strike, the ensuing campaign decimated AQI and led to their virtual eviction from Anbar Province. U.S. protection in turn enabled the tribes to survive the inevitable, brutal AQI counterattacks. The result was a provincewide cease-fire under the auspices of the Anbar Awakening Council and the U.S. military.

News of the Anbar model spread rapidly among disaffected Sunnis elsewhere. And as word spread, U.S. surge brigades began arriving. The combination of Sunni realignment, increased U.S. troop strength and a new U.S. mission of direct population security created a powerful synergy. The prospect of U.S. security emboldened Sunnis outside Anbar to realign with the United States; Sunni realignment enhanced U.S. lethality against AQI; U.S. defeat of local AQI cells protected realigned Sunnis; local cease-fires with the Sunnis reduced U.S. casualties and freed U.S. forces to venture outward from Baghdad into the surrounding areas to keep AQI off balance and on the run.

Cease-fires with Sunnis in turn facilitated cease-fires with key Shia militias. For Moktada al-Sadr, leader of the JAM, the Sunni stand-down and the U.S. surge transformed the strategic landscape. The JAM arose to defend Shia civilians from Sunni violence. But that violence was now on the wane as Sunnis brokered cease-fires. In the interim, JAM thugs had increasingly exploited the population’s dependency on the militia to extort personal profit through gangland control of key commodities such as cooking oil and gasoline, inspiring growing resentment among Shia civilians. This was tolerated when the JAM was all that stood between Shia and mass murder by Sunnis. But as the Sunni threat receded, the continuing exploitation turned the JAM into a parasite rather than a protector, and its Shia public support waned.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military buildup in Baghdad posed an increasing threat to JAM control over its base. The Americans offered Shia security without gangsterism, and the Sunni cease-fires meant not just diminished public tolerance for the gangsters, but greater U.S. freedom to swing troops into a battle with the JAM for control over Shia population centers. Al-Sadr could have fought this, staking his reputation and his militia on a gamble that he could defeat the Americans. But al-Sadr had tried this twice before and been decimated by U.S. firepower each time. In the past, he had nevertheless emerged from these defeats stronger than ever, as his popularity among Shia brought fresh recruits in droves to replace his losses. Now, by contrast, his popularity was declining. And his control over his own militia was splintering as rogue lieutenants with their own income took an increasingly independent path. With a weaker army and a declining ability to replace its losses, al-Sadr thus had no assurance that he could survive another hammering from the U.S. Army. He chose instead to stand down.

YET, THE local reductions in violence have not produced national reconciliation among Iraq’s elected representatives in the capital. Why not?

In time they may. For now, though, the Shia-dominated al-Maliki government’s incentives differ from those of its coreligionist Moktada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr needs peace to avoid further deterioration in his internal position and to avert casualties he cannot replace in a costly battle with the Americans. Al-Maliki, by contrast, is not fighting the Americans—the surge is no threat to him. On the contrary, U.S. reinforcements and weaker Sunni opposition reduce the cost of continued warfare for the al-Maliki government’s army. For al-Maliki, moreover, peace is politically and militarily riskier than war. Reconciliation along American lines requires dangerous and politically painful compromises with rival Sunnis: oil-revenue sharing with Sunni provinces, hiring of former Baathists, Anbari political empowerment and other initiatives that al-Maliki’s Shia allies dislike, and which al-Maliki fears will merely strengthen his sectarian enemies militarily. A predominantly Sunni CLC movement adds to these fears. Al-Sadr needs peace because war now risks his political status; al-Maliki, conversely, runs greater risks by compromising for peace than by standing fast and allowing the war to continue. Thus, the Shia-dominated government makes little progress toward peace even as Shia militias stand down in cease-fires.

This is not to deny any progress by the government. It has been distributing revenue to Sunni provinces even without a hydrocarbon law to require this. It recently passed a new de-Baathification law making it easier to hire Sunnis into some government jobs and had been doing such hiring even without a legal mandate. To date this has resembled a form of toe dipping: the al-Maliki government has been willing to experiment tentatively with compromise as long as it retained the ability to back off again later if the results were unfavorable. These moves could lay the basis for eventual compromise. But for the near- to mid-term future we are likelier to see a weak and sclerotic central government unable to do more than distribute oil revenue, while the real dynamic of Iraqi security devolves to localities.

THUS, FOR now, local cease-fires look more likely to end the fighting than national grand bargains. But for these cease-fires to hold, an outside party will be needed to serve as a peacekeeper.

This is because such deals are neither self-enforcing nor inherently stable. Even where peace is in the mutual self-interest of the majority on both sides, there will still be spoilers who seek to overturn the cease-fire and renew the war. Rogue elements of Shia militias profit from the fighting and will seek to restore the instability within which they flourish. And AQI has no interest whatsoever in stability. Though on the ropes, even small numbers of committed AQI terrorists can bomb selected marketplaces and public gatherings. In an environment of wary, tentative, edgy peace between well-armed and distrustful former combatants, even a few such attacks can lead to an escalatory spiral that quickly returns the country to mass violence.

In another bad-case-but-likely scenario, the central parties to the cease-fire may try to expand their area of control at the expense of neighboring CLCs or militia districts. Ambitious Sunnis with dreams of Baathist restoration may use the lull to build strength, probe their rivals for weaknesses, then launch a new offensive if they discover a vulnerability. Shia militia leaders unsatisfied with a limited role in a weak government could push the limits of their accepted status at the expense of Sunnis or rival Shia warlords. The military balance limits what Sunnis, especially, can actually accomplish via renewed violence, but some will surely test the waters anyway or simply miscalculate; either way, it is easy to imagine the cease-fire parties cheating on the terms.

Outside peacekeepers play a crucial role in damping such escalatory spirals and enforcing cease-fire terms. As long as the underlying strategic calculus favors peace, then an outside military presence allows victims of spoiler attacks to wait rather than retaliate—they can afford to delay and see whether the Americans will avenge them. Similarly, if CLC leaders and militia commanders know that a U.S. combat brigade is going to enter their district and arrest any leader whose followers violate the terms of the agreed cease-fire—and if the provision of biometric data and locating information for all CLC members means that the Americans know who the violators are and where to find them—then the underlying mutual interest in cease-fire is less likely to be tested.

This is not war fighting. But it does require troops who can fight if they have to. And some fighting would be needed, especially early on, to punish spoilers and cease-fire violators, thereby discouraging further violence. Peacekeepers must thus be combat capable, but peacekeeping should not require the casualty toll of sustained warfare.

Peacekeeping of this kind is labor intensive, long term and would almost certainly have to be a U.S. undertaking, especially in the early years. We are the only plausible candidate for this role for now—no one else is lining up to don a blue helmet in Iraq. We are not widely loved by Iraqis; among the few things all Iraqi subcommunities now share is a dislike for the American occupation. Yet we are the only party to today’s conflict that no other party sees as a threat of genocide. We may not be loved, but we are tolerated. And Iraqi attitudes toward Americans are not fixed: Sunni views of the U.S. role, for example, have changed dramatically in less than a year. Marine patrols in Falluja that would have been ambushed are now met with kids mugging for photos from marines carrying lollipops along with their rifles.

This mission will be long—perhaps twenty years long—until a new generation, which has not been scarred by the experience of sectarian bloodletting, rises to leadership age in Iraq. A U.S. role will clearly be important for at least part of this time, but it may not be necessary for the United States to do this alone the entire time. If two to three years of apparent stability make it clear that the Iraq mission really has become peacekeeping rather than war fighting, then it is entirely plausible that others might be willing to step in and lighten the American load, especially if they can do so under a UN banner rather than a bilateral agreement with the United States or the government of Iraq. So we need not assume a twenty-year U.S. responsibility alone. But a long-term presence by outsiders will be needed. And it would be imprudent to assume that we can turn this over to others immediately.

The number of troops required could also be large. The social science of peacekeeping-troop requirements is underdeveloped, but the rule of thumb for troop adequacy in this role is similar to that used for counterinsurgency: around one capable combatant per fifty civilians. For a country the size of Iraq, that would mean an ideal force of around five hundred thousand peacekeepers—which is obviously impossible. But some such missions have been accomplished with much smaller forces. In Liberia, for example, fifteen thousand UN troops stabilized a cease-fire in a country of four million; in Sierra Leone, twenty thousand UN troops sufficed in a country of six million. It would be a mistake to assume that such small forces can always succeed in a potentially very demanding mission—but it would be just as bad to assume that because the United States cannot meet the rule-of-thumb troop count, the mission is hopeless. The best assumption is that more is better when it comes to peacekeeping: the larger the force, the better the odds, hence the right troop count is the largest one we can sustain for a potentially extended stay.

Some now hope that lesser measures will suffice to stabilize Iraq’s cease-fires. The U.S. leadership in Baghdad, for example, hopes that it can create a financial incentive for CLCs to behave by making them Iraqi government employees. But the al-Maliki regime is resisting this, and it is far from clear that Sunni CLC leaders would trust al-Maliki to pay them if the United States withdrew most of its troops. Nor would government paychecks for CLCs do much for the JAM, which is an equally grave threat to stability.

Financial incentives alone won’t prevent spoiling, but they would help. They are just another useful tool for effective peacekeeping. The chance of maintaining a stable Iraq is highest with the largest number of peacekeepers we can sustain; other measures help, but they are not substitutes.

IRAQ IS thus not hopeless—there is a real chance for stability. But this is no time for a victory parade. Stability’s requirements are hard, and its payoff is likely to be imperfect.

Nor is it guaranteed. Peacekeeping sometimes succeeds, but peacekeepers can also wear out their welcome. If the U.S. presence is not replaced in time by tolerable alternatives, nationalist resistance could beget a new insurgency and a war of a different kind. If spoiler violence or probes for weakness are not met forcefully enough, then challenges could overwhelm the peacekeepers and Iraq could collapse into renewed warfare. If ongoing operations do not spread today’s cease-fires through the rest of Iraq, then the U.S. mission could remain that of war fighting without any peace to keep.

Given these costs and risks, a case can still be made for cutting our losses now and withdrawing all U.S. forces as soon as logistically practical. But withdrawal has costs and dangers of its own: U.S. departure from an unstable Iraq risks regional intervention and a much wider war engulfing the heart of the Middle East’s oil production, plus the human consequences of spiraling sectarian bloodshed if the war escalates in our wake, even without foreign intervention.

Any policy for Iraq is thus a gamble. Stability cannot be guaranteed by staying; disaster cannot be excluded if we leave; exact odds cannot be known for either in advance. The scale of cost and uncertainty here makes all options for Iraq unattractive and risky.

But we have to choose one. And the strategic landscape of 2008 shifts the odds and the risks in ways that make the case for staying less unattractive than it has been for a long time.

Stephen Biddle is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Double or Nothing
Andrew A. Michta

THE UNITED States cannot afford to maintain its current strategy, planning for both traditional war and the entire spectrum of stability operations, without making it a top priority to double the current size of its armed forces. Since such an expansion of our military is unlikely, the incoming administration and Congress must seek to reduce the scope of our global commitments, redefine the War on Terror, and give the country a strategy that it can pay for and that its armed forces can implement at sustainable force levels.

Until the creeping democracy agenda of the Clinton years and the outright universalism of the neoconservative program, generations of American leaders implicitly recognized that the key to national security is regional stability, and that it rests not so much on shared democratic values but on legitimate regimes, regardless of whether they are based on democratic franchise, historical accident or simply sufficient strength to impose order.

The crucial step on the road to redefining the core requirements for the U.S. military must be rethinking the assumptions that have informed U.S. post–Cold War strategy under both Democratic and Republican administrations. We should not view American values as the immediate driver of policy. The promotion of democratic universalism in the past two decades—especially the upsurge in the regime-change strategy of the “neoconservative moment”—has put an unsustainable strain on the U.S. military.

Now, somewhere between this democratic idealism and our strained military capabilities lies a realist alternative to almost two decades of strategic meandering. This requires that we rethink the scope of our existing security commitments so that current military resources are credibly matched to strategy. Prioritizing regime legitimacy instead of democratic universalism would allow the United States to ease the burden on its military by encouraging enduring regional stability. A security policy focused on regime legitimacy would return the military back to its traditional deterrent and defensive roles, and allow it to train for a clearly defined mission.

A Mismatched Strategy

THE UNITED States is now confronted by a rise in asymmetric threats. Needing to provide post-conflict security and reconstruction, the military finds itself in urban environments where its technological advantage is quickly forfeited. Operations often require saturating the area with the maximum number of “boots on the ground.” The argument that the highly trained and superbly equipped modern Western professional warrior will compensate for the paucity of numbers is being challenged daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. The lessons of Operation Enduring Freedom and the 2003 Iraq campaign have confirmed that the U.S. military has the ability to quickly destroy any conventional military force in its path. The problem is that in full-spectrum stability operations, traditional combat is but the initial phase in a process that goes all the way from warfighting to peacekeeping to community policing.

For the initial critical security phase of stability operations, there is simply no substitute for an infantry soldier with a rifle on patrol coming into contact with the local population. An army that has been trained and equipped for traditional combat will continue to struggle in this new urban war, fought among populations that look for security and order while demanding respect for their customs and social relationships. The new battlefield environment in which the U.S. military finds itself combines many tasks: combat against insurgents, support for civilian populations, police functions, restoration and maintenance of damaged infrastructure, cooperation with private companies and NGOs, support of nascent political institutions, and—as U.S. government officials like to put it—“winning the hearts and minds” of the population. Very few American soldiers today, except perhaps for seasoned members of the special forces, have the skill set to perform the range of duties required. It may be tempting for a country with an unmatched military to regard the armed forces as the principal tool of policy, but no amount of resources is going to transform even the best-trained soldier into a modern-day Prometheus, capable of destroying and building at the same time, killing and capturing the insurgents while building schools and waterworks, organizing elections and restoring power grids. The U.S. armed forces are simply being asked to fulfill missions that are beyond the capabilities of any modern professional military force, especially given the insufficient numbers of our deployable infantry.

Most urban-stability and counterinsurgency operations, in addition to being wars of attrition, are essentially “wars of protracted presence” aimed at securing and winning over local populations. These missions require large numbers of troops, constant presence on the street to build a sense of security among the population and the ability to fight in a complex environment; a mistake by a single soldier can change the attitudes of the population in an instant. Here, the United States and its NATO allies have the wrong troops for the task—forces too small and trained for a very different job.

The Military We Have…

OUR NATION is at war against global terrorist networks and if, as the Bush Administration has maintained, our military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of that struggle, then why have our armed forces not grown and adapted in response to the needs of this new type of warfare? As in past conflicts, both in Iraq and Afghanistan the military tool should be sufficient in size to match the task. In World War I, the United States raised and trained an expeditionary force able to fight alongside the French and the British on the western front. In World War II, the nation went from a very low level of peacetime readiness to a military that dwarfed its adversaries. During that war, mobilized national resources more than matched the task at hand. In the Cold War, U.S. forces deployed in Europe and Asia, buttressed by NATO and our security agreements with Japan and South Korea, were sufficient in size and had their tasks clearly defined. In the 1990 Gulf War, the United States led a coalition that included over 500,000 U.S. troops—a force more than adequate for routing Saddam Hussein’s army. When the Powell Doctrine called for “overwhelming force” to defeat any potential adversary, the numbers were there to support the strategy. In all these cases, the strategy and the force structure were congruent, yielding successful outcomes.

In contrast, the shortage of troops has been palpable since the beginning of the 2003 Iraq War. The result has been a high operations tempo of repeated rotations and an ensuing strain on soldiers and their families. The overstretch of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan is a structural problem that goes much deeper than past and current policy misjudgments and changing battlefield conditions. The personnel shortage, especially in the infantry ranks, has been the main reason why the surge in Iraq has had to rely on increased unit rotations. The price has been prohibitive. There is neither enough time for soldiers to retrain, refit and get the family time so critical to our volunteer force environment, nor to get new personnel trained and integrated. Worse still, another regional war caused by an escalation in the Middle East or an implosion in Pakistan would put into question the military’s ability to respond. The best that senior military leadership can do is hope that such scenarios will not come to pass. But as the saying goes: Hope is a poor substitute for planning.

Present estimates of U.S. military personnel shortfalls vary depending on the circumstances, but all scenarios must deal with the shortage of troops available for additional short-notice deployments. The personnel crunch is, in part, a post–Cold War legacy. Between 1989 and 1996 the army shed over a quarter-million active-duty personnel, ending up with fewer than 500,000 troops. The urgency of the current troop deficit has been recognized by Congress. Senators Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Jack Reed (D-RI) and Ken Salazar (D-CO) recently called for increasing the size of the army by 100,000. In spring 2007, President Bush also proposed an expansion of permanent active army end strength. Based on the so-called Gates Plan there would be a growth in troop size to 547,000 for the army and 202,000 for the Marine Corps, respectively, by 2012. This would amount to a total increase of 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines.¹ Although the planned increase will relieve some of the immediate pressure on the military, it is simply not enough, especially considering the scope of our current missions and potential contingencies.

Where to go from here?

ONE OPTION is to augment our professional military with a form of conscription targeted specifically at stability operations, similar to what the French are considering for their own professional army—an admittedly controversial idea. With the current level of U.S. defense spending fast approaching $2 billion per day, doubling the armed forces would mean both increases in taxes and reductions in spending.

On the other hand, the reintroduction of national military service would require a sense of urgency among the public—the very opposite of the attitudes fostered by this administration as part of the War on Terror. After all, it is counterintuitive to ask young American men and women to accept the draft if they have been told for several years that the correct response to terrorism is to continue focusing on travel, shopping and living their lives as if little has changed. Since the government asked little of the nation beyond the inconvenience of added airport security measures in 2001, it is unlikely that, short of another national trauma, it will reverse course in 2008.

Either of these solutions is political poison, as the president would have to muster sufficient support on Capitol Hill to roll back decades of established thinking about how much we spend on defense and the acceptability of a draft for an unpopular war.

If a dramatic increase in the size of the U.S. military to match the current expansive strategy is not in the cards, an alternative is to reduce the scope of the country’s global security commitments and to jettison post–Cold War assumptions about the imperative of accelerated democratic transitions in critical regions of the world. Instead, American resources should be refocused on a lower-cost, pragmatic security strategy based on supporting regime legitimacy as the path to regional stability.

The United States needs a strategy that is sustainable long-term. This requires that we rethink the scope of our existing security commitments, so that current military resources are credibly matched to strategy. This approach would allow the United States to fund the core high-tech “hedge programs” against the rapidly shifting power balance in Asia, while maintaining an option to intervene in crisis areas. It would require that we rapidly disengage from Iraq, reduce and redefine our stake in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and return to offshore balancing in the Middle East. It would also require that we plan for an Afghanistan without NATO troops, with an eye toward stability rather than democracy-building, and that we return NATO to its role as the premier defensive alliance. In that way, NATO would regain the credibility of its commitments by limiting itself to a strictly defined area, rather than the current amorphous à la carte expeditionary coalition it has become. This four-pronged redefinition would offer the United States a realist strategy that could be managed by the military at only slightly increased force levels.

With respect to the War on Terror, we should re-evaluate the post-9/11 paradigm and reduce the rhetorical excesses of the Bush Administration, which has framed the terrorist challenge as an existential global struggle. This is not about warfighting in the traditional sense—military pitted against military. Successful counter-terrorism efforts that disrupt and suppress terrorist networks rely more on effective intelligence and police measures than on conventional forces. Subverting substate actors requires a great deal of cooperation on the international and domestic levels. Such multilateral cooperative approaches to dealing with international terrorism should be our first priority, with the military reserved for those cases where force is clearly and unequivocally warranted.

Since the 1990s, the United States has committed itself to an expansive national security strategy that has relied evermore heavily on the military instrument, while at the same time contracting the size of the armed forces called upon to implement it. Like in the 2004 election, today the executive and Congress continue to argue over tactics in Iraq, while the overall reassessment of U.S. global strategy is being deferred yet again to the next presidency.

The limits imposed by the current structuring of the U.S. armed forces, rather than ideological debates in Washington, may finally force a redefinition of the U.S. security strategy for the coming decade. Absent an exponential increase in defense spending or a return to the draft, the next president will have to reassess the scope of our current deployments with the goal of eliminating those in which the structure of the U.S. military and the nature of the conflict constitute a fundamental mismatch.

Andrew A. Michta is a professor of National Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.

¹The projected 2012 troop numbers are based in part on those given by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates while speaking at a joint press conference with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and General Peter Pace at the White House Conference Center Briefing Room on January 11, 2007.

Three Years and You’re Out
Steven Metz

AS THE insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan fester and grow, we need to face facts. Americans are only prepared to support major counterinsurgency operations for about three years. Yet, when the United States enters a war, it doesn’t base its strategy on this inevitability. Instead, we tell ourselves that we’re in for as long as it takes. That may be morally satisfying, but it’s politically unrealistic. With this certain wane in public and congressional backing, we need to choose our confrontations wisely and rethink our tactics.

Multinational peacekeeping missions dominated at the close of the Cold War, and counterinsurgency began to look like a strategic relic. Yet after September 11, strategists correctly assumed that “irregular warfare” would be America’s most pressing challenge in the coming years. But as the security community pulled the old playbook off the shelf, it turned out that much of what we thought we knew about insurgency was wrong, or at least desperately in need of revision. So there was a scramble to develop the first new counterinsurgency doctrine since the 1980s.

A flurry of conferences, seminars, symposia, war games, articles and studies ensued. Even though discussions included soft-power wielders like the State Department, the Agency for International Development and the intelligence community, the greatest effort—as in the past—came from the military. So, the current face of American strategy is General David Petraeus rather than Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Though the security establishment has dusted off and updated some old concepts, it hasn’t gone far enough. By assuming that contemporary insurgencies are much like past ones, we underestimate the effort that successful campaigns require and overestimate the cost of simply leaving others to fight these battles. Counterinsurgency is still viewed as a variant of war. The objective is still the decisive defeat of the enemy. The risk is still that insurgents will seize control of the state.

As we begin to get involved, we should realize that, unlike decision-making processes in conventional war—where the president and his top advisors assess expected strategic costs, risks and benefits, and then decide whether war is the best option—in counterinsurgency there is seldom such a discrete decision point. Instead, the United States inches in, providing a bit of support to a regime, then a bit more, until it finds itself so deeply involved that the political and strategic costs of disengagement are seemingly overwhelming. Counterinsurgency support is simply an immense task.

The Nature of the Beast

CONTEMPORARY INSURGENCIES are just one dimension of deep, complex conflicts caused by flawed or ineffective political, security, social and cultural systems. Insurgency is intertwined with a range of other destabilizing phenomena: extensive organized and street crime; gang violence; economic, public health and ecological problems; social, ethnic or sectarian strife; rampant corruption; ineffective governance; and, in the broadest sense, a crisis of legitimacy.

The cast of characters has also expanded. Modern insurgencies don’t simply involve the insurgents, the government and external state sponsors. Unaffiliated militias, organized criminal gangs and private military corporations all affect the outcome too. And it doesn’t end there. Diaspora communities, the media, transnational corporations and non-governmental organizations also play a major role in the evolution of the conflict.

And now insurgents must generate their own funds. The Soviet Union, Cuba and China no longer serve as sponsors. This means that insurgencies shift from “grievance” to “greed” as they evolve. While they initially form in response to real or perceived political threats, over time they become more focused on generating resources.

Because big states are no longer underwriting the costs of battle, insurgent victory is unlikely, but it does mean battles can go on for a very long time. Modern insurgencies tend toward a stalemate in which the insurgents have vested personal interests in sustaining the conflict: They become political enterprises rather than political movements. And the longer a complex conflict persists, the greater the damage to regional and global security. Today, the dangers insurgency produces—terrorism, expanded organized crime, refugee flows, humanitarian disasters, ecological damage, the profusion of arms and so forth—come not from the unlikely possibility of radical insurgents seizing state power, but rather from the continuation of the conflict itself.

Though few insurgencies have ever ended with an outright, decisive and final win, today this is even less likely. So long as a handful of militants can raise money, gain access to the Internet and the transnational media, and undertake regular acts of terrorism, they can sustain an insurgency. It is impossible to kill them all as long as whatever motivates them inspires new recruits and the United States is unwilling or unable to occupy a foreign country for an extended period.

Furthering this intractability, as an insurgency matures, personal motives—especially the desire for revenge—become more important. Placating someone’s anger at a real or perceived personal wrong can be more difficult than meeting their political demands. Participation in armed rebellion is empowering; it provides fulfillment, excitement and identity, particularly for young males who had few of these things during peacetime. As insurgents, they are respected and feared. But when the insurgency ends, most return to marginalization, becoming simply one more uneducated denizen of society’s bottom tier. Thus, it is less political objectives driving insurgents than deep psychological needs.

Flawed assumptions about the regimes we support also stifle progress. Our strategies are based on a commitment to a state; our objective is to sustain the regime and improve its legitimacy and capacity for self-defense. And as we partner up with fledgling governments, we take for granted that those in Baghdad or Kabul share our objectives—defeating insurgents. We also often foolishly presume our partner government is both willing and able to undertake major political and economic reforms. And that strengthening our partner is the best avenue to stability and security.

Reality is different. The elites we support often develop a vested interest in sustaining an insurgency, at least so long as the rebels cannot win. Having a comfortable, controlled insurgency lowers pressure on the regime for reform, allows it greater latitude in controlling its opponents, and often provides a stream of foreign assistance that can be skimmed or used for patronage. And while we ask our partner regime to improve its security forces, these may be more of a threat than the insurgents themselves. After all, many more governments have been overthrown by military coups than insurgencies. We critique corruption and nepotism even though these are the lifeblood of patronage-based systems. Ultimately, American counterinsurgency strategy and doctrine assume that our partner elites will commit de facto political and economic suicide, reforming away the system that made them powerful and rich. Yet we are bewildered when this does not happen.

Rather than solely working through regimes and seeking decisive “victory” over insurgents, we should strive toward reconciliation, attempting to dampen, contain and resolve complex conflicts as rapidly as possible. And we must be prepared to return when a dampened conflict reemerges. The U.S. role might be that of mediator, peacekeeper or even supporter of non-insurgent militias rather than simply the backer of the regime. This may mean accepting the insurgents as legitimate representatives of at least some segment of a nation’s people and buying them off, whether economically or politically. This is a bitter pill to swallow for a nation that deifies “victory” and demonizes insurgents like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda—one does not share power with or meet the demands of the devil. But these polarized views are impediments to conflict resolution.

Effective state-building requires strong, insightful and reflective national leaders who understand what makes their nations susceptible to conflict and are willing and able to address it. Simply strengthening a regime and hoping that it eventually exercises full control over all of its territory is unrealistic in most parts of the world today, particularly those prone to insurgency. “Ungoverned spaces” and ineffective governments are the norm. Visionaries are rare, and the United States cannot manufacture them or assure that they hold power. We should thus pick our fights more carefully, not simply based on the ideology of the insurgents, but on the nature of the regime and the nature of the system. Some regimes, even ones fighting horrible enemies, may not be redeemable. The cost of fixing deeply flawed systems may be greater than the benefits.

New Thinking

THESE ISSUES suggest three broad strategic approaches. All should be pursued multilaterally whenever possible, but we have to understand what we’re getting into.

When there is a flawed but functioning state with reasonably good leadership willing to undertake serious political, economic, security and cultural reform, our existing methods of regime support make sense. In this construct, the U.S. military’s primary function is what doctrine calls “foreign internal defense”—supporting the efforts of a partner state to augment its capabilities, effectiveness and legitimacy.

When there is no functioning state with a relatively strong leadership, and the economic, social, political, security and cultural systems are dysfunctional, our approach should be nuanced. When there is UN and multinational support for re-engineering such a state—for establishing what would be, in effect, a neo-trusteeship—the United States should participate. In cases where there are particularly strong ties to American national interests, we might even play a major role. Again, though, the United States must be aware of the narrow window of opportunity before public and congressional support begins to erode, particularly if there are American casualties. We should count on major support for three years, with a significant diminution thereafter.

Finally, if there is no multinational support for the creation of a neo-trusteeship, the United States should eschew counterinsurgency, opting instead for humanitarian relief (perhaps with the creation of refugee sanctuaries) and containment (largely by bolstering neighboring states). We must know when to walk away.

We must remain aware at the start that a flawed or failed system needs extensive re-engineering, not simply an aid package and a pat on the back. We should thus think in terms of system re-engineering with an emphasis on psychological and cultural shifts, rather than just political reform. Counterinsurgency is always about more than political grievances. Its causes—and solutions—lie deep within a failing culture.

Currently, the United States lacks the expertise to do this even when our partner is receptive. We have an adequate number of military trainers and advisors but are short in many vital non-military fields including law enforcement, judicial systems, civil-society building, and intelligence advice and training. We are unable to re-engineer the psychological structure of failed systems by providing alternative means of empowerment for the disillusioned and methods for constraining the risk-taking behavior of young males (such as women’s empowerment). We cannot do this in our own inner cities much less in a foreign culture. And we must be honest with ourselves: Often it is the very culture of a state that makes it uncompetitive and breeds instability. Modest political reforms and an infusion of security assistance will not fix this.

In all likelihood, we are facing a tumultuous security environment over the next few decades. This means there will be many insurgencies where a solution is bereft of multinational support or neo-trusteeships. This leaves the United States best served by offering up humanitarian relief and containment, not guns and soldiers. Few insurgencies, if any, will seize control of the state. We should not let the prevalence or the ideology of insurgents draw us into involvement when the chances of success are low. We must remember the Cold War assumption that without American action, insurgents would take over states, become Soviet satellites and shift the global balance of power did not hold. Insurgent victories in Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe did not save the Soviet Union or do serious damage to the United States. This remains true today. The chances of an insurgency affiliated with Al-Qaeda seizing and holding control of a state are limited. And, if one does, the chances that it will make a major difference in the global security environment are almost nil. It is, then, the protraction of insurgencies that threatens American interests. And the strategic costs of avoiding involvement in counterinsurgency are less than those of involvement in a drawn-out and potentially failed counterinsurgency campaign. The sooner the revision of U.S. strategy for counterinsurgency begins, the better.

Steven Metz is the chairman of the Regional Strategy and Planning Department and a research professor at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute. The ideas in this paper are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the official positions of the U.S. Army or Department of Defense.