Wretchard provides some interesting commentary on Robert Kaplan’s Atlantic Monthly piece, “The Coming Normalcy”. Writes Wretchard:
One of Kaplan’s recurring assertions in The Coming Normalcy is that the American shortcomings for dealing with situations like Iraq—which he views as prototypical of an anarchic Third World society—go far beyond any defects in planning for the invasion of Iraq peculiar to the Bush administration. In Kaplan’s view the long-established bureaucratic instruments are simply structured wrongly: they are too monolithic and uncoordinated to effectively transform any typical anarchy into democratic order. He thinks the armed forces, whose lives are at stake, have adapted most by pushing responsibility downward to the brigade rather than the divisional level. “Flattening” the decision-making and intelligence cycle process has helped the Army and Marines get on top of the military aspects of the insurgency, but it hasn’t helped reconstruction much. Everywhere he went, soldiers and Marines asked, ‘where is USAID, where is the State Department?’ And the answer unfortunately, was that neither USAID nor the State Department had the money or the bureaucratic configuration to fight a joint battle with the military against the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq.
[…]
Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states. Occasionally some force of exceptional virulence would escape or be set loose to ravage the outside world: destroy a temple in India, athletes in Munich or a subway in Paris. Through the 80s and 90s the rest of the world toted up its losses at each outbreak, mended its fences and hoped it would never happen again. But after September 11 the problem grew too big to ignore, yet the question of how to destroy anarchy, already by definition in a shambles, remained.
Anarchy is self-defending, as the failed United Nations relief mission to Somalia in 1990 discovered to its cost. It will appropriate relief supplies, money and aid workers themselves as gang property, the economic basis of its system. Anarchy absorbs violence just as it absorbs relief and even gains strength from it when weapons, designed to disrupt ordered societies, are unleashed on it. Countries like Pakistan, Syria, Iraq and Iran are defended less by frontier fortifications than by the sheer toxicity of their societies. Not for nothing did Saddam release tens of thousands of hardened criminals from jail immediately before the invasion of Iraq. They were his wolves upon the frozen steppes.
It would be a serious mistake to think that the problem of confronting national security threats within the context of anarchy is limited to Iraq. Iraq is simply where the West must come to grips with The Coming Anarchy because it cannot step around it. And it is not the only place. An earlier post noted how the eviction of the Taliban from Afghanistan has simply shifted the fighting to Pakistan, the country in which the Taliban was first born. The real metric in any war against rogue “states” will not be the reduction of strongpoints, like Tora-bora given such prominence by the media, but the reduction of anarchy which constitutes their energy core.
Kaplan correctly understands that no campaign against Iran, Syria or any similar state can be expected to succeed until the lessons of OIF are successfully internalized. And the key he hints, is learning how to use force to allow indigenous order to emerge. If Napoleon wrought the army-killer in the 18th century as the answer to his strategic dilemmas, America must invent a anarchy-killer in the 21st; or a globalized world in which boundaries are ever more tenuous will be permanently at risk.
One way to combat the anarchy (or, you prefer, the power vaccuum) that is the result of the overthrow of such totalitarian states, it seems to me, is to have in place an international reconstruction force that can immediately negotiate conditions for providing aid to the various sects who find themselves suddenly vying for power, and to launch a propaganda campaign that promotes, forcefully, the idea of sectarian compromise as the quickest way to infrastructure rebuilding and political stability. This diplomatic and financial assault on an anarchic system—mulilateral, and joined to the efforts of the military (at the brigade level) to work intimately with the “leaders” that emerge from the power vaccuum, could provide the conditions for a successful negotiation of the rebuilding of a civil society out of the ashes out failed totalitarianism.
Of course, I’m just spitballing here. I welcome your ideas and comments—as well as your recommendations on how to make such a joint strategy possible is so poisoned a political climate. It is likely that many of the European countries will only be willing to join such an effort out of national interest. But as Spain showed after the Madrid bombings and subsequent elections, the flip side of this “motivating” factor is to turn toward appeasement and isolationism.
My position has been that the philosophical precepts that have softened and sapped the will of western countries (there is an inherent, relativistic anarchy to progressivism’s near totalitarian insistence on the unmooring of universal truths) need to be confronted on their own terms: that is, the incoherence of the prevailing social (including media) structure that has promoted dangerous anti-liberal ideals need to be rebuked—forcefully—and, ultimately, relegated to the ash heep of history. For this to occur, however, will require cultural civil wars within western states as the precursor to a willingness to act in concert against the coming anarchies in a way that is both effective and ideologically self-assured. That is, we must agree on the nature of the enemy, and on what it is about our western liberalism that is worth fighting for.
Sadly, such an effort will require either a clarifying event of tragic proportions, or else a kind of philosophical deprogramming that, ironically, is anathema to western political systems—whose politicians are often more concerned with the pragmatism of gaining power by appealing to voting blocs than they are with resisting that impulse as a way to re-establish a firm westernized sovereignty that has cohered enough around classically liberal ideas in order to truly join as allies on the same page ideologically.
(h/t Terry Hastings)
This concept isn’t too far off of the work being done as a follow-on to DoD reform (the Goldwater-Nichols Act) undertaken during the ‘80s. Once the DoD started focusing on jointness, the question that naturally comes to the fore in recent years is integrating the entire national security apparatus.
Hence, the Beyond Goldwater-Nichols project.
Additionally, as a brief tie-in to earlier discussions, this is why the concepts of modifying the three phase model of warfare by splitting the last phase into two parts, and the possible addition of a phase 0 start to become significant. It brings the broader picture of security to a close, and then has a logical framework for relatively painless integration of non-DoD assets into broader questions of things like reconstruction.
dovetails into a lot of what Thomas Barnett talks about in his books The Pentagon’s New Map and Blueprint for Action.
The “civilized world” (which he looks at mostly in terms of economic connectivity, and as such included rising economic powers such as India, China, and even Brazil) shares too many seams with the world of anarchy (or as he calls it, “the world of Hobbes”). Civilized connectivity overlaps with the security gaps in the world of anarchy, and we end up with the terrorist threat we have today.
His solution also focuses heavily on the idea that simply hunting down the bad actors in the anarchy states will be an endless futile effort. Rather, we have to simultaniously hunt down these bad actors and produce a force that can secure and reconnect fail states to the rest of the world. Among other concepts, Barnett focuses on the idea of a “system admin” force that can move into a state after national military forces are neutralized. While it may sound like a “pussy Military”, the design focuses on moving overwhelming security into an area along with integrated technical and community relations project managers.
My appologies if this appears twice – I hit “submit” and it vanished…
I think the best example of flattening I saw was the CERP (Commander’s Emergency Response Program). I administered a million dollars for my commander in the 110 square km area (300,000 people) around our base. I, a simple Major serving as the Brigade S-5 could get schools built, wells dug, etc., while the poor USAID rep in our area had to break herself in half to get something approved, funded and underway – fighting paperwork, inertia and the like.
If there was a legit need, and my commander agreed, I could get a school built in 3 months, a well dug and operational in a week, etc.
I am not sure I like the Armed Forces being the primary vehicle of reconstruction [despite the fact that we seem to be pretty good at tailoring reconstruction to security]- I am hopeful that Secretary Rice can get more DoS people out into the field and working. If we (the military) can integrate them into the effort, that should answer nicely.
As for other nations – Japan quietly has done some big things, and I noticed the Koreans pitching in a respectable amount too. Countries like those, and the US could be the core group – adding others to particular situations as they see fit/can do so.
Just a thought or two on my part.
Hopefully the poeple that believe in, and are competent at, nation building will win.
Hmmmm.
Thank you for your vote of support for the Republican Party.
Hopefully? And if not, what then? Do we just look the other way and leave the brown people to kill each other? Do you remember what happened in Southeast Asia when the left persuaded the US to abandon them? Millions died.
The consequences of a loss will be paid in people’s lives. That’s why, as Jeff says, we need to confront the anarchism at home.
Hmmm.
Wal-Mart.
Lots and lots of Wal-Marts.
Nothing to take the mind off implanting IEDs like a wife nagging to go to Wal-Mart to get a new patio set before her parents arrive.
All kidding aside I wouldn’t be surprised if handing some of this stuff off to Wal-Mart wouldn’t be a good idea anyways. After all the first store, that I know of, to re-open after Katrina in most places was Wal-Mart. They certainly do have the organizational and logistical abilities to do the job.
Jeff—In light of the lessons of the tsunami relief, why do you say the reconstruction force should be “international”? Was that just a reflex from hearing too much tranny BS, or is there some special reason why that would actually work in such cases?
TW: “remember”!
This is precisely why they should have held elections in May 2003 instead of January 2005.
I hope my enthusiasm has been noted.
I’m speaking as an individual. There’s only so much that I can do to make sure that competent nation builders are in charge. After that its hope.
Ed, you are right – the two outfits I saw in N.O. right away (besides we National Guardsmen)were the Salvation Army and Wal-Mart.
Cripes, give me a big enough CERP budget, a couple of battalions of good troops, the late Sam Walton’s economic powerhouse and I could move the world.
Michael Yon offers Kaplan’s entire article for free as a pdf file:
http://michaelyon-online.com/media/pdf/ComingNormalcy.pdf
Enjoy!
I am a big Robert Kaplan fan, but I limit my blogging to transatlantic affairs, especially German-American Relations. I write with two other German Fulbright Alunni for the Atlantic Review http:atlanticreview.org and organize the quartely carnivals of German American Relations http://america-germany.atlanticreview.org/
Perhaps you are interested in participating. That would be great.
Oops, that is http://atlanticreview.org