Bill Roggio has the latest on the coalition initiatives in Iraq, and according to Michael Yon, who emailed Reynolds, things are going very well. But what I’d like to consider is the economics of the situation.
As we know, part of bin-Laden’s plot was to cause the collapse of the US economy. It is true that the war has been costly, but fortunately this has been largely offset by economic expansion spurred by the Bush administration’s tax policies and general promotion of “ownership,” i.e. capitalism. Al-Qaeda’s objective has been to fight what has been termed an asymmetrical war, wherein the policies, materiel and attitudes of the coalition towards loss of life could be utilized against it. It has largely been a guerilla war by proxy from the Islamist side: al-Qaeda, Iran and realigned Ba’athists. Now, however, they have committed so many men and so much materiel to the battlefield that they are in a position of vulnerability themselves, having committed to invest as much as they can into the production of atrocities in theater while the Western media are allied with their interests.
What they are presently losing in Iraq cannot be easily made up, and the days when they were able to ensure the financial welfare of the families of their martyrs are done, and this, along with the numbers that they are losing, will hurt recruitment. They have also made themselves so obnoxious generally to the citizenry that once in part supported them, that they have begun to lose the propaganda battle within Iraq.
In short, the tables are turned, in my view. I wonder whether any of our military readers would care to comment, critique, or flesh out my interpretation.
Al-Qaida is definitely feeling the hurt, but I would not call them paupers just yet. Remember that they have a big piece of the opium trade in Afghanistan.
Whether that will make up for the loss of human capital is another question.
What this means is that when you wake up in the morning, those goalposts aren’t gonna be where you remember.
Dan,
I think that this is one of your more concise & precision directed writings in a while. Great job.
Thanks, PMain. But ever notice how they don’t get any comments? ;-P
This post here isn’t as cogent as yours but it’s definitely worth a link. This comment jumps out… some guy named
drunyan… he is worthy of an attempt at the block-quotey thing I think…
I have commented and posted on Iranian overreach before – and what you describe is similar. I saw the same thing happen to the HIG and Talib in Afghanistan – when I got there, they could still send 150 man groups over the border from Pakistan (sure, we blew them up with A-10s, B-2s and AC-130s, but they at least formed up and moved) – now they strap bombs on 6 year olds and hide amongst women and children.
What you describe is us attriting the enemy, but you’d never hear about it if it were not for Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, CENTCOM’s PAO, etc. You ain’t ever gonna hear it on the CBS Evening News or coming out of Chris Matthews or the like.
If an enemy gets killed, and nobody reports it, was there ever a victory?
Thanks, Major John. Give me some links and I’ll hook up to your stuff.
Cross posted from Bloody Scott, where there is a fetching picture of a compleat David.
In military, or at least asymmetrical war terms, you make an excellent point.Several things happen as an insurgency develops-The insurgency is forced by attrition to move away from its initial cell structure, which is almost immune from penetration, and to recruit from a wider and less committed base, which is less secure.As you have noted, no insurgency is self-sufficient in arms and munitions, so trails develop, both financial and physical, which are vulnerable to interdiction and trackback.If the insurgency is totally reliant on terror, it swiftly alienates its ‘host community".At the same time, the conventional forces, not being as stupid as Greenwald(s) and others would wish, diversify into highly unconventional sub-units, which whilst largely divorced from the conventional order of battle, do have first call on its resources, whether in the form of weapons, communications equipment or specific to task personnel.We are moving into this phase.The outlook for the Caliphate is poor.
As furriskey notes, there are many successes by "unconventional sub-units", which by their nature don’t advertise. They are doing an amazing job, which will give future military historians much to reflect upon.
However, in the current push, as has been the case consistently in Iraq, the difficulty of the "Catch and Release" system continues to be a plague. When "suspected insurgents" are captured/apprehended, there is a high probability that they will be released with little or no incarceration time and soon be back in the fight. Until the Iraqi justice system can be made functional, the MNF, and the Iraqis, will be operating at an extreme handicap regarding serious attrition of the enemy.
[…] while back, I considered the economics of al-Qaeda’s troubles with The Surge in a hypothetical manner, and now the blogosphere is awakening to the possibility […]