From Mark Moyar

I started writing A Question of Command in the middle of 2007, near the nadir of the Iraq war, in large part because I was distraught at the daily slaughter in Iraqi cities. Having recently completed a book on the first half of the Vietnam War, I had started on the sequel but decided to put it on hold in order to write something of more immediate value to the Americans serving abroad. The United States, I was convinced, was not providing its military officers with the proper instruction before sending them into battle in Iraq and Afghanistan. I believed, in addition, that America’s strategic and policy decisions had suffered badly from a lack of understanding of counterinsurgency that stemmed, in considerable measure, from the scarcity of good books on the subject.

For the preceding three years, I had been teaching mid-career officers at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia. During that period, a new colonel took charge of the college and re-oriented the curriculum towards counterinsurgency, as a result of his experiences commanding a Marine regiment in Fallujah. I had responsibility for identifying new instructional material for one of the core courses taken by all of the students, so I rapidly gained familiarity with historical and theoretical works on counterinsurgency that lay outside my lane of the Vietnam War.

As I waded into new sources, I reached the same conclusion I had reached in the course of writing two books on Vietnam—that most of the scholarship did not delve adequately into the actual business of how to defeat insurgents. Too much of it focused on high-level strategy and policy and on theoretical questions. There were only a few noteworthy exceptions, and they were historical works rather than theoretical treatises, like Brian Linn’s The Philippine War and Andrew Birtle’s U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine. Teaching experienced military officers, many of whom had already served in Iraq or Afghanistan, allowed me to see better the lack of practical usefulness of so much counterinsurgency research.

My broadening awareness of the counterinsurgency literature also revealed that Vietnam specialists were not the only people who accepted too readily the “hearts and minds” theory of counterinsurgency, which claims that counterinsurgencies should be defeated primarily with social, economic, and political reforms, not with military force. Through many years of research on Vietnam, I had concluded that the hearts and mind theory did not work in the case of the Vietnam War, and I came to the same conclusion for many other counterinsurgencies. In A Question of Command, I argue that security and good governance, rather than sweeping reforms, are the key activities in counterinsurgency, and that success in those two activities is principally a function of leadership. Rather than focusing on finding the right methods, as the “hearts-and-minds” school recommends, counterinsurgents should concentrate on finding the right leaders.

With the publication of A Question of Command, I hope to influence three specific audiences, in addition to the general public. The first is the U.S. military’s officer corps. Through its historical analysis and theoretical analysis, the book illustrates the leadership attributes and methods that have produced success in the past and are likely to do so in the future. It explains how to develop leaders, put them in the right positions, delegate authority efficiently, co-opt new groups of leaders, and influence an ally’s leadership. These subjects have been ignored almost entirely by previous scholars, in favor of topics of considerably less value to practitioners.

The second audience is policymakers, who are apt to make bad decisions in counterinsurgency situations if they do not understand the dynamics of counterinsurgency leadership. For example, American policymakers would not have barred Iraq’s traditional ruling class from the new Iraqi security forces had it known that building security force programs on a crash basis without experienced officers is a recipe for disaster.

The third audience is the scholarly community, particularly in the areas of history and political science. I am hoping to convince them that they have given insufficient attention to the role of leadership in counterinsurgency, and will therefore redirect attention in such a way as to promote greater learning in this area.

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From Peter J. Munson

While deployed to Afghanistan in 2004, I applied and was accepted to the Marine Corps’ foreign area officer program, specializing in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2005, I began studying in Monterey, Califonia, first at the Naval Postgraduate School, then Defense Language Institute. As Iraq was the most immediately important place to the military at the time, I set about trying to learn as much as I could about the country and its history.

I quickly found that the available material was inadequate for my purposes. While numerous studies and histories had been published on Iraq pre-2003, and several high profile books detailing the military and policy aspects of events in 2003 and after were beginning to show up, none explicitly linked Iraq’s history and legacies to what was going on in the country post-invasion. What is more, the quickly growing literature on post-invasion Iraq focused on either policy and strategy critique or individual observations of soldiers or journalists. There was a significant gap for someone trying to learn about Iraqi society, culture, and politics in the new era.

Using democratic transition literature as my guide, I wrote several papers and a thesis on aspects of the Sunni insurgency. The transition literature pointed out key phenomena that had presented problems for previous transitions and helped me to put the Iraqi case in perspective. When I got some very positive feedback on my initial work, I decided to push ahead and attempt to expand my work into a book, incorporating the other groups in Iraq and paying close attention to the political process.

My intent was to produce a book that, instead of focusing on U.S. military actions or the popular policy debate, would explain the Iraqi side of the attempt at transition. I set out to review Iraq’s recent history and the effects of that history on culture, society, and politics, and to demonstrate how those legacies were affecting events in post-Saddam Iraq. The goal was to produce a work that would be of interest to general readers, but would be documented and researched sufficiently to be of special use to service members, officials, and academics considering the problems in Iraq.

Over the next year and a half, I worked on the book while studying Arabic at Defense Language Institute. By the end of my studies there, I was able to read Arabic and incorporate a good number of Arabic sources into my research. In summer of 2007, I moved to Muscat, Oman, working at the U.S. Embassy there and traveling extensively in the Middle East. I was able to incorporate some insights gained from working with militaries in the region and from talking to a wide variety of Arabs, including some Iraqi expatriates, to hone some of my conclusions in the book. By this point, however, interest in Iraq was waning and I was unable to find a publisher until spring 2008, when two houses finally offered to give the book a chance and Potomac Books vowed to put the book out for a general audience.

The publishing timeline allowed me to incorporate a number of important updates, including the results of the provincial elections in 2009. The most important phase of Iraqi transition is yet to come, however, with American influence waning and national elections forthcoming. The manner in which the government ultimately deals with issues such as Kirkuk, reconciliation, and constitutional amendments will also be telling. Hopefully, if interest in Iraq in Transition is strong, I will be able to incorporate these important events in a second edition.

I think it is incredibly important for Americans, and especially the professionals involved in the formulation, execution, and analysis of policy, to understand the complexities and challenges that confront political reform and democratization. At first glance, democracy promotion seems intuitive and “right,” yet the reality of its implementation in other societies is not so simple. I hope that this book adds to the body of literature on democratic transition, which shows that foreign policy cannot be based on rosy assumptions and glib hopes of miraculous transformations. At the same time, just because Iraq was such a mess does not mean we should not attempt to draw insight from it. Many lessons can be learned from Iraq and used to help other states facing more gradual transformation away from authoritarian rule toward some sort of socially acceptable hybrid, if not outright democracy.

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From Ami Pedahzur

One of the first steps taken by President Barack Obama after his inauguration was to start the process of shutting down the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. Supporters of the step praised the president for adhering to moral principles and international law while skeptics have argued that this would undermine the effectiveness of the war on terror. Only time will tell whether this step was successful or not, but in the meantime it should turn our attention to the reasons for creating this detention camp in the first place.

The detention center at Guantánamo Bay has raised questions of why leaders tend to choose offensive measures to combat terrorism and why these measures aren’t more successful. In my book, I address this question through the analysis of the Israeli counterterrorism endeavor over the last sixty years—an endeavor dominated by what I call the “war model.” Since the raids on Palestinian population centers in the early 1950s by the Unit 101—Israel’s first commando unit—this model had yielded very limited results. Emotion, pressures from the security establishment and domestic political considerations have shaped Israeli counterterrorism policy more than any overarching strategy to cope with the threat of terrorism.

My conclusions have implications for policymaking beyond the Israeli case. Most policymakers might be surprised to learn that the demise of terrorist groups and the end of terrorist campaigns in the past have had little to do with offensive counterterrorist measures applied against them. The only approach that has dramatically reduced the number of terrorist attacks and their lethality is the “defensive” one. Sending military forces after the terrorists is much less effective than enhancing security in public areas and relying on domestic intelligence organizations and police forces. And most democracies, despite their declared policies, end up negotiating with terrorists on a frequent basis and cut deals with them.

Terrorism is one tactic which sub-state actors of various types apply for attaining their goals. This tactic is mostly chosen in asymmetrical conflicts, when such groups suffer from inherent military inferiority. Terrorism is employed as a symbolic act of violence aimed at non-combatants with the intent of creating an atmosphere of fear and anger amongst the citizens of the target state. Media coverage of these events only enhances this sense of fear and panic.

However, it is not only civilians who are subjected to the fear inflicted by terrorism. Policymakers suffer from the same effect. A terrorist attack, especially on a large scale or of a highly symbolic magnitude, is likely to frustrate, upset, and lead to emotional turmoil. Thus, leaders are influenced by their own emotions well before they reach a decision-making point. In most cases, elected policymakers in democracies are eager to prove to their terrorized constituents that they are strong, and would like nothing more than to boost public morale as well as their own approval ratings. Consequently, and without knowing it, they limit their cognitive scope of possible decisions to a small number of offensive responses. Unfortunately, this is exactly the outcome that terrorists are interested in.

This process is reinforced by the fact that the angry leaders naturally seek the advice of the security establishment. Most military and intelligence officers are trained to see any challenge from a narrow offensive perspective, and do not have a full grasp of the political and social causes and implications of terrorism and counterterrorism. Thus, they are likely to provide policymakers with a relatively limited set of aggressive options for response.

In past wars, the enemy was identifiable, the rules of engagement were clear, and victory was easy to measure. The struggle against terrorism presents intelligence and military officers with unprecedented challenges. The heads of the security establishment are first faced with the challenge of identifying an elusive enemy. In many cases, the same sub-state actors that perpetrate terrorism, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the IRA, and ETA, are also involved in local politics and even social activities. They rarely wear uniforms and they operate from civilian population centers. Thus, the reliance on signal and visual intelligence, which is highly effective in the struggle against ordered armies, becomes secondary to human intelligence. In other words, technology is at best only a supplement in solving the intelligence puzzle.

After identifying the terrorists, comes the challenge of understanding their motivations and goals. What state actors, especially in the West, perceive as rational does not necessarily reflect the preferences of sub-state actors in other cultures. Therefore, it is very hard to make assumptions regarding the true motivations of the terrorists, identify their vulnerabilities and predict their future steps. This requires intelligence analysts who speak the relevant languages, have a deep understanding of other cultures and are capable of transforming their knowledge into policy alternatives.

But even a clear intelligence picture and a good policy are not enough. Modern militaries are not structured or trained to respond to 21st-century terrorism. They are trained to fight wars with other armies. Even elite counterterrorism units and SWAT teams are more suitable for coping with past scenarios such as hostage-taking crises than with suicide bombers. Thus, the expectations that the armed forces can carry out successful counterterrorism operations are not entirely realistic.

The reliance on the armed forces also takes a high toll in other national security areas. The resources which are needed for countering terrorism are diverted from other military units and projects, which often are more vital from strategic and national security points of view.

In the Israeli case, the best example is the misuse of Sayeret Matkal, a highly trained intelligence recon unit, the main goal of which is to supply detailed intelligence for operations like the one against the Syrian nuclear facility in 2007. This unit also has been deployed for rescue, kidnapping and assassination missions since the late 1960s. After a series of failures, especially in rescue missions, Israel formed an elite police counterterrorism unit (Yamam), with the sole purpose of carrying out counterterrorism related operations. Yet, Sayeret Matkal’s commanders know that successful counterterrorism operations, unlike clandestine recon operations, are much more visible and likely to sustain the unit’s reputation and flow of resources. So they use their political ties in policymaking circles to keep on being assigned such operations. This leaves the Yamam counterterrorism experts, who have far less political clout, frustrated and marginalized.

As I indicated earlier, terrorism is merely one tactic that is employed by groups which simultaneously use other strategies, most commonly guerrilla warfare. The LTTE (”Tamil Tigers”) in Sri Lanka, the PLO in the 1970s and Hezbollah today are the best examples of highly versatile groups in terms of strategies, tactics and weapons. It is very hard to declare a war on a tactic, and thus the majority of wars against terrorism turn quickly into extended counterinsurgency operations.

While the state enjoys superiority in technology and firepower, the insurgents usually fight within a well-known territory and easily assimilate among non-combatants. This leads the states to use air strikes and artillery attacks and thus to cause collateral damage amongst civilians. This vicious cycle eventually enhances popular support for the insurgents, as was reflected in Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon and 2009 war in Gaza. In most cases, after a long war of attrition, the state, which launched the attack and refused to negotiate with the terrorists, will cut a deal with them either through direct or indirect negotiations. In terms of winning or losing, such a scenario actually strengthens those who initiated the campaign of terror in the first place.

Clearly, these failures raise the question of whether the resources now being spent on counterterrorism operations shouldn’t be allocated to other national security needs, while thinking “outside the box” on creative ways to cope with terrorism.

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There is one central lesson that cultural anthropology has to offer. It is the lesson of Franz Boas, who founded American anthropology, of his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and of their intellectual descendants, such as Clifford Geertz, arguably the most influential American cultural anthropologist of the second half of the 20th century.

That lesson is “culture matters.” If we want to understand people, to grasp what people are doing and why they do it, we have to examine their own perspective. As Geertz said, we have to see things “from the natives’ point of view,” whether the natives are from Brooklyn or Calgary, Palermo or Bucharest, Baghdad or Quetta.

The reason that we must understand things “from the natives’ point of view” is that people act according to how they perceive the world; according to what they value, what they disdain; and according to what they hope for, and what they fear. If we want to understand how people will act, we must understand the world from their perspective.

If we want to engage with people, to influence their actions and to win them over, to bring them into a counter-insurgency effort, to engage in economic exchange, to encourage development, to block their initiatives, or to fight them, we must understand why and how they act as they do. And thus we must know how they see the world.

When I say that we must grasp the natives’ point of view, I am not saying that people are the prisoners of the norms and rules of their society, hemmed in by the “cake of custom.” Cultural anthropology has moved beyond such an overly normative view of mankind. Rather, following the lead of Max Weber, and latterly, Fredrik Barth, we understand that people are goal-oriented, making decisions, choosing one alternative over another in order to advance their own goals. In other words, everyone, everywhere, acts strategically, at least in part. An anthropological approach to “strategic studies” is to study the strategies of people and peoples in the world as they pursue their goals. We had better know the strategies of other folks before we formulate our own.

Of course, culture, ways of understanding and evaluating the world, or, once again, as Geertz says, culture as “models of” the world, and “models for” action in the world, is not the only thing in the world. People may not just pursue their own visions, but must cope with the constraints of institutional limitations. British social anthropologists have stressed the ways in which societal institutions—such as chief, markets, descent groups, exogamous marriage patterns, ancestor worship, etc.—are constrained by their interconnection with each other. One consequence of which is that some institutions or patterns of action are incompatible. For example, sharing and mutual welfare in a large kin group, on the one hand, and capital accumulation, on the other hand, tend to be in conflict.

As well, people everywhere must cope with other populations and cultures, and their goals and strategies. Peoples and cultures often intrude upon one another, interfere with one another, and consequently every group must have a “foreign policy.” Everyone is constrained one way or another by other peoples and other cultures.

And, of course, people, whatever their culture, must cope with the challenges and constraints of their physical and biological environments. Culture, to some degree, incorporates strategies for dealing with the environment, to adapting to the environment while pursuing their other goals.

Once we have some idea of others’ cultures and the bases of their strategies, we are in a strong position to consider our own. Recently I received an inquiry from an Army major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Currently he is a graduate student at the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School , and was assigned my book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, for review. In that book, I stress the tribal foundation of Arab culture, and discuss its implications for state formation.

One question that this major raised was what I thought, in the light of my analysis, of the U.S. Army’s counter-insurgency manual’s position that counter-insurgency should always be directed toward supporting the legitimate government.

In the light of my analysis—that there were no legitimate governments in the Middle East, and that in many regions, including urban areas, only tribal or sect-based organization was regarded as legitimate by the local population—I replied that the counter-insurgency handbook’s position that counter-insurgency should always be directed toward supporting the legitimate government was a rationalization meant to justify our intervention in our own eyes according to our own values.

The emphasis on a legitimate government might not be a rational response to our practical interests in a particular region. For example, if we want to counter an insurgency, we might need to collaborate with non-governmental, even anti-governmental organizations, such as tribes. This is what happened in al-Anbar province of Iraq, where the U.S. Army gave support to the Sunni tribes when they rebelled against the impositions of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and in turn the Sunni tribes gave the Americans support as the Americans pursued Al Qaeda. If our interests and ambitions are to block an anti-American or anti-Western initiative, we might be wise to be satisfied with that result, once achieved, and allow local folks to carry on according their vision, rather than try to impose ours.

Another way to put this is that our culture matters in how we see the world. In trying to act upon the world, we must consider whether and to what extent our interests and desires coincide, or whether our interests are more limited than our desires. This question underlies some of the disagreements between foreign policy “idealists” and “realists.”

The al-Anbar case is an interesting one for the general argument I am presenting here. No one needed a good cultural anthropologist more than Al Qaeda in Iraq. Mostly non-Iraqis, the Al Qaeda fighters and functionaries pushed around local Iraqis, not realizing or appreciating that they were members of tribes, or the significance of that fact. They did not consider how the local Iraqis would receive their impositions, or understand that the Iraqi tribesmen had the capability to mobilize militarily in support of their own autonomy and self-determination. As a result, local Iraqi tribesmen rebelled against Al Qaeda, fought them, and turned for the first time to ally with the Americans. If Al Qaeda had had a good cultural analysis of al-Anbar, they might have acted with more restraint and respect, and might have advanced their cause rather than being crushed, as they have been.

In sum, one contribution of cultural anthropology to strategic studies is to urge pre-strategic studies of peoples’ presuppositions, values, goals, and strategies—those of other peoples and those of our own—before moving to formulating strategies to act on the world. For to act effectively in the world requires that we know our own biases and that we know other people’s trajectories.

Philip Carl Salzman made these remarks to a working session on strategic studies and the disciplines, convened by MESH at Harvard University on September 23.

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point just released a study on the foreign fighters streaming into Iraq. The new study, Bombers, Bank Accounts, and Bleedout: al-Qa’ida’s Road in and Out of Iraq, edited by my colleague Brian Fishman, expands on an analysis of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s personnel records conducted by the CTC in December 2007. Chapters are written by Brian Fishman and Joseph Felter, Peter Bergen, Jacob Shapiro, and Vahid Brown.

Bombers, Bank Accounts, and Bleedout not only expands on the analysis of the Sinjar Records conducted in the first report but also introduces a host of new data. It contains statistics on the exact number and nationality of foreign fighters held by the United States at Camp Bucca in Iraq; contracts signed by AQI’s foreign suicide bombers; contracts signed by AQI fighters entering and leaving Iraq; accounting sheets signed by various fighters that indicate funding sources and expenditures; several narratives describing AQI’s network in Syria, personnel problems, and ties to Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon; weapons reports, and other documents. These documents can be downloaded from the CTC’s website.

Some of the report’s major findings are that foreign fighters were an important source of funds for Al Qaeda in Iraq, and that Saudi fighters contributed far more money than any other nationality. The report concludes that “bleedout” of fighters from Iraq is occurring, but in relatively small numbers. Nonetheless, these individual fighters will likely be well-trained and very dangerous. The primary threat from these fighters is to Arab states, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and possibly Somalia. A chapter devoted to smuggling finds that smuggling of all kinds takes place across the Syrian-Iraqi border, and is linked to rampant corruption in both countries.

Fighting between government forces and Shiite rebels in the mountainous governate of Sa’ada in the far north of Yemen has displaced approximately 130,000 people since 2004. The Washington Post ran an article a month ago, explaing the context of the fighting. This new situation map, prepared by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and accurate as of July 3, 2008, shows the affected districts, the concentrations of displaced persons, and the sites of fighting and blocked roads. Click on the thumbnail to view the map (pdf).

From Priya Satia

There was something fittingly fateful about how I came to write Spies in Arabia. Exactly a year before the 9/11 attacks, when the war in Iraq was but a twinkle in George W.’s eye, I stumbled into the Mesopotamian quagmire from the east. While exploring British Indian efforts to “develop” that region during World War One, I came across frequent complaints by local British officials about their difficulty gathering information in the country.

I assumed their problems arose partly out of a cultural mindset that had long seen the Middle East, and the “Orient” more generally, as essentially unknowable, mysterious, inscrutable. Here, I thought, was a question worth pursuing further: How did long-circulating cultural representations about the Middle East influence the practical unfolding of empire on the ground? How did they shape military and intelligence operations? The question promised to inject new life into the somewhat tired subject of European perceptions of the Orient. And so, I embarked for the UK to research the history of British intelligence-gathering in the Middle East, without an inkling that the topic was about to seize center stage in American political debate.

My clever academic question soon acquired a more sinister and politically urgent aspect when the records of the Air Ministry revealed the true significance of the subject of British surveillance in the Middle East: After World War One, Iraq became the first colony policed from the air, bombardment forming a routine part of administration. The Royal Air Force’s obsessive emphasis on “ubiquity” of surveillance seemed in some way to be connected to those earlier complaints of blindness, a hypothesis I set about proving by tracing the culture of intelligence-gathering in the region before, during, and after the war. As I read official records alongside agents’ personal papers, contemporary fiction, scholarly journals, and the press, the extent to which secret histories—the history of espionage—can produce immense effects in politics and culture became increasingly and eerily apparent.

Then came September 11, 2001, and the book that I had launched for its apparent intellectual merits inexorably acquired a new purpose and an increasingly polemical subtext. The more I thought and wrote, the more I grew convinced that the contemporary echo of my historical topic was neither a coincidence, nor evidence of my political prescience, nor even the tragically farcical repetition of history; it was in fact the unfolding of a new chapter in that unfinished history. What came to be known as the “group think” of our intelligence community was, I found, partly a legacy of the British intelligence establishment’s earlier incursion in the region, as was the mentality guiding American counterinsurgency.

Intelligence, it turns out, is not simply the matter of collecting objectively true, but hidden facts. It depends on prior epistemological choices, as we are now painfully aware—and those are liable to be shaped by cultural understandings. If a certain Edwardian-era hankering after romance and fascination with Bedouin inspired the eccentric community of British Arabist agents (T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, St. John Philby, and John Glubb being among the most well-known) to volunteer to spy in the Middle East, that very “genius”—and their claim to such a genius—ensured that all that the British state did in the region was similarly inventive—and often with horrific consequences, as in the case of the aerial surveillance regime. The book’s purpose is partly to make sense of how those who claimed the greatest empathy with Arabs—those most committed to “Arab freedom”—became the most enthusiastic supporters of a regime they knew to be unprecedentedly lethal and highly error-prone: How it came to be, in George Orwell’s words, that “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: [and] this is called pacification.”

Conversely, today’s events helped me understand the historical significance of the new imperial style ushered in with air control, what I call “covert empire.” At the very moment that Britain’s democracy became truly inclusive after the war, and began, somewhat self-consciously, to assert its right to check the power of the British state, particularly the extravagant expenditure and brutality in Iraq, those activities became increasingly hidden from public view; administrative and military power fell into the hands of unaccountable intelligence bodies. There was a lesson in here for us—about the perils of democracy, its fostering of a paranoid official secrecy simply by virtue of its insistent demand for openness. Somewhat counter-intuitively, when a democracy attempts imperial occupation, there is a lot of lying and a lot of unrecorded death. Indeed, today’s conversation about official secrecy about violence and corruption in Iraq seems almost to parody the parliamentary debates of 1920s Britain. Then, too, “spin,” euphemism, and spurious declarations of success accompanied the creation of an ethnically-ordered, militaristic, and corruptly developmentalist security state in Iraq.

The secrecy of British intervention was not lost on Iraqis. They too grew suspicious, indeed paranoid, about the extent of their independence once it was nominally granted in 1932, and even after the RAF finally departed in 1958—with good reason, since a mere two years later, the CIA made its first attempt to assassinate the Iraqi head of state. My hope is that Spies in Arabia will not only help us think about the follies of Britain’s imperial past (and dispel the myth of Britain’s success in Iraq) but will also remind us of the all-too-recent historical memory shaping reception to Western occupation in formerly colonized countries, however benevolent its stated objective; people simply can no longer swallow that much unfairness—or that much paternalism (except perhaps under UN auspices).

At a practical level, the lesson from the past is that the local spawn of covert empire is inevitably doomed: today’s blinkered conversation about why the Iraqi government is failing to step up so that we can stand down is founded on the fallacy that an only nominally independent government can ever have any legitimacy. Collaborationist regimes are, by their very nature, prone to paralysis and/or oppression. And making the U.S. presence more discreet—for instance, by replacing troops with airpower, as has been suggested—will only further compromise local authority. Iraq needs to belong fully and without reservation to the Iraqis; my own hunch is that if we depart, we will be pleasantly surprised by their possession of the heroic yet ordinary human capacity to avert the chaos that we claim to fear—and that we have in any case delivered to them.

Spies in Arabia has morphed into a rather different book from what I had foreseen. As much as it attempts to explain the past, it provides an unwitting but insistent comment on our present discontents. Flying in the face of our usual assumptions about the relatively benign and retiring nature of the inter-war British empire, it tacitly questions any modern government’s presumption of the oxymoronic role of peaceful empire.

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Be sure to read the speech given on Monday by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the Association of American Universities in Washington.

Since 9/11, the U.S. and its allies have been involved in two prolonged counter-insurgency campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars are low-tech conflicts in which anthropological skills and language training are often more important than high-tech weapons systems.

But as David Ucko pointed out in the most recent Orbis, a quick study of defense spending priorities reveals that large, expensive weapons systems better suited for a future conventional war with China continue to soak up more funds than training and equipment tailored for the counter-insurgency fights in Iraq and Afghanistan. Department of Defense anthropologist Montgomery McFate is fond of pointing out that the amount of money spent by the Pentagon on social science research annually is equal to just two and a half F-22 fighter-interceptors—a weapons system Gates complains has yet to fly a single mission in Iraq or Afghanistan, while soldiers on the ground remain in dire need of better language skills and cultural training to help navigate the population-centric battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gates also understands the Department of Defense needs the help of America’s academy to develop these language skills, regional expertise, and cultural knowledge. As such, he went before the Association of American Universities on Monday prepared to be humble, self-depreciating, and charming in his effort to woo an academic community whose members often have an uneasy relationship with the uniformed military services.

Inevitably, the speech turned to the Human Terrain Teams in use in Iraq and Afghanistan which have provoked a furious reaction from an anthropological community still scarred by Project Camelot and other Cold War misadventures. McFate herself has been relentlessly targeted by the self-appointed mandarins of the anthropological community who have threatened to blacklist any anthropologist who dares work for the Pentagon. Gates addressed the subject with typical good humor:

At times, the lexicon we come up with for new programs appears almost designed to induce maximum paranoia. In that vein, “Human Terrain Teams” follows in the proud tradition of initiatives like:
• The Office of Special Plans;
• TALON Reporting System; and
• Total Information Awareness.
In reality, there is a long history of cooperation—as well as controversy—between the U.S. government and anthropology. Understanding the traditions, motivations, and languages of other parts of the world has not always been a strong suit of the United States. It was a problem during the Cold War, and remains a problem.

It is hard to imagine Donald Rumsfeld giving such a speech, but perhaps that is unfair. Gates, as the former president of Texas A&M University, is uniquely prepared to address the grievances and grudges of academia while at the same time making it clear that America needs the help of its regional studies experts and language scholars to help it carry out operations abroad in a way that best protects the lives and welfare of the innocents. He was right to extend an “olive branch” (as one headline put it) to academia. It remains to be seen whether or not he and the nation’s uniformed services gain a reciprocal response.

While it is far too early to say that the United States and its allies have permanently “crippled” Al Qaeda in Iraq (as claimed by some U.S. officials), clearly the terrorist organization has suffered grievous blows in the last year. Indeed, U.S. officials are so pleased they hope to use the “Anbar model” in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as elsewhere in Iraq. Beyond its benefits for Iraqi stability, what does this success mean?

For many years, politicians and pundits (including me) have devoted painful attention to the ramifications of failure in Iraq for the future of Al Qaeda and the broader salafi-jihadist movement. The prognostications have ranged from pessimistic to calamitous, with predictions that Iraq will be “the new Afghanistan” commonplace. Attention has not yet focused, however, on how the decline of Al Qaeda in Iraq could affect the future of the salafi-jihadist movement in the greater Middle East and throughout the world. To be clear, any judgment is speculative at this point: Al Qaeda in Iraq is not dead, and the situation in Iraq is in such flux that today’s certainties could seem laughable tomorrow.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the U.S. decision to invade and occupy Iraq was a lifeline for Al Qaeda, which had been battered since losing its haven in Afghanistan and suffering from a global manhunt after the 9/11 attacks. The popularity of the Iraq resistance led Al Qaeda’s popularity to soar among young angry Muslims around the world. Al Qaeda is now back in Afghanistan and is stronger than ever in Pakistan.

Yet today Al Qaeda in Iraq—though not the Al Qaeda core—is on the run. Sunni tribes and “concerned local citizens” groups are killing or arresting many of its cadre and transforming parts of Iraq from sanctuaries to hunting grounds. In addition to improving the chances for a semi-stable Iraq, these blows have tremendous implications for the future of the organization outside Iraq. At the very least, Iraq will be a less useful base for salafi-jihadists to plot attacks in neighboring countries such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which they have done for several years now. Iraq will also be less of a draw and training ground for young radicals from the Middle East and Europe, who have flocked to Iraq since the 2003 invasion to fight the United States. Would-be fighters may come to see Iraq as a place where local Sunnis will pursue them mercilessly rather than as the center of the anti-U.S. struggle.

Less tangible but perhaps most important, Iraq might come to symbolize the organization’s lack of appeal and gross mistakes rather than triumph against the “crusaders.” The salafi-jihadists’ credibility has suffered. Since 2003, Al Qaeda has made Iraq the center of its propaganda, and for years has encouraged its supporters and taunted America with each report of a U.S. setback. Recent statements from Zawahiri and bin Laden suggest the leaders recognize the missteps Al Qaeda in Iraq has made and how much this has cost the organization. This will have long-term consequences for recruitment and the movement’s constant competition with rivals within the radical Islamist community. Indeed, the debate about “who lost Iraq” could eventually be harsher in salafi-jihadist circles than in the United States. In addition, the Iraq struggle was moving the organization’s fighters more and more against the Shi’a, but Al Qaeda in Iraq’s defeat came at the hands of Sunnis, suggesting that the “enemy within” may again consume the movement.

Yet the genie cannot go completely back into the bottle, for the Iraq struggle has fundamentally changed the salafi-jihadist movement. Fighters who went to Iraq learned a new set of capabilities that are now dispersed to the far corners of the earth. Techniques like checkpoint evasion, urban warfare, and particularly the use of sophisticated IEDs and suicide bombing all are now part of the arsenal of salafi-jihadists elsewhere. Salafi-jihadists are now exceptionally skilled info-warriors, able to create and disseminate sophisticated propaganda in the blink of an eye. Salafi-jihadist military successes also shattered the sense of U.S. invulnerability created after Washington quickly ousted the Taliban. Recent U.S. gains offset this slightly, but we will never be ten feet tall in salafi-jihadist eyes. Finally, the sectarian conflict in Iraq has energized many salafi-jihadists against the Shi’a, a focus that may diminish but will not go away.

Success also has its dark side. Although Bush administration officials were widely criticized for claiming “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here,” clearly Iraq did divert many radicals who would seek to fight elsewhere. (The fallacy of the administration’s argument was not diversion per se but rather ignoring that outrage over the invasion inspired many young Muslims to take up arms, thus increasing the overall pool.) Some of these individuals may stay home and foment trouble, raising the risk of greater regional instability. Such unrest is particularly likely in Saudi Arabia, for which the Iraq conflict was a safety valve where many angry salafi-jihadists went to shoot Americans instead of staying home and plotting against the Al Saud.

More important, many of the foreign fighters in Iraq will go home, and even small numbers of fighters may radicalize and change the orientation of existing local groups, as happened with Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon. Finally, Al Qaeda in Iraq could again revive: U.S. and Iraqi successes against it are real, but the organization is tenacious and U.S. successes are fragile.

On Thursday evening, Turkish forces entered northern Iraq to do battle with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari has called the move “a limited military incursion into a remote, isolated and uninhabited region.” According to various sources, there have been clashes in the Qandil mountains along the Iraqi-Iranian border and in the Zap region. Turkish aircraft reportedly also bombed targets around Al-Amadiyah, an Iraqi Kurdish mountain town about 10 kilometers south of the Turkish border.

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has made available three maps showing the location of PKK enclaves in northern Iraq. (Click on each thumbnail to see the full map.)

The first one has been prepared by Abdulkadir Onay, a lieutenant colonel in the Turkish Army and a visiting military fellow at The Washington Institute. It divides the PKK presence in northern Iraq into eight regions, delineates them, and numbers the camps and “the approximate number of terrorists” in each region. It also shows which parts of northern Iraq are accessible only with PKK authorization

The other two maps, from last year, show the same area in a satellite view that gives a sense of the topography, and marks PKK bases. One map shows the western sector, the other shows the eastern sector.

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