By PHK
George Packer’s “Knowing the Enemy,” published in the December 18 New Yorker is one of the most thought provoking articles on the nature of the militant Islamic threat behind W’s so-called “global war on terror” that I have read in months, if not years. This article is well worth taking the 20 or so minutes to read – go back, read and reread it again. Then forward it to your Congressional representatives, presidential hopefuls and their staffs.
Much of “Knowing the Enemy” is just plain common sense – but it is a common sense that this country has lost under the inept leadership of the current occupant of the White House, his flailing over-militarized,* unilateralist approach to US foreign policy, and far too much MSM complicity in accepting and propagating the neoconservative-generated grossly simplified, wrongheaded view of a single Islamic global anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-western insurgency that demands a military “solution” and that has provided the mantra for W’s administration since 9/11.
Insurgency runs in families
“Knowing the Enemy” is revolutionary, refreshing and pragmatic. Its focus is on people, their relationships and interactions. Packer asks and answers the questions why and how disaffected young Muslim men become violent Islamic jihadists. The basic reason, he and his well informed sources argue is that they “get pulled in by their social networks” – family, friends, associates. Militant Islamic ideas play, in essence, a secondary role.
In a sense, this observation about human nature is as old as the hills. Not only was it highlighted by French scholar Olivier Roy in Globalized Islam an excellent book which Packer references briefly, but the importance of social networks in perpetuating insurgencies was also substantiated by eminent American social scientists as well as through the anthropological field research of two of Packer’s chief sources – Australian David Kilcullen, now an advisor on counterterrorism at the State Department on loan from the Australian military, on Indonesia and Montgomery McFate, an American Pentagon consultant, on Northern Ireland.
For whatever reason, however, this simple concept about human interaction has been ignored by a “Rumsfeld Pentagon” refusing to cut expensive weapons systems to permit, as Packer argues, the creation of “new combat units” and free “other resources necessary for a proper counterinsurgency strategy.”
"Disaggregating insurgencies"
Packer also tells us that there is no single Islamic jihadist insurgency as both W and Osama bin Laden would like us to believe – but more likely 60 or so local insurgencies in various corners of the Muslim world – with different goals, needs and approaches. Each needs to be dealt with individually as Kilcullen explains “finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad.”
Just as a single Communist monolith did not, in reality, exist during the Cold War despite what the Kremlin leadership wanted us to believe, an integrated militant Islamic movement is far more a figment of today’s imagination tied together by clever propagandists through expanded global information networks.
Information: the new element of power
What I find as intriguing about “Knowing the Enemy,” however, is Packer’s identification of the spread of information locally and globally as a crucial element in the success or failure of countering today’s insurgencies – whether or not Islamic. It is here that the US government – both its military and civilian bureaucracies – makes one of its largest and perhaps, if retired Colonel Steve Fondacaro has it right, gravest errors. This answer Kilcullen tells us lies in understanding, engaging and influencing foreigners “in their villages and slums” not in the formal Councils of State. This is, in my view, primarily a civilian activity and not one that any uniformed military can achieve on its own.
In fact, this is precisely what the US stopped doing after the end of the Cold War. Bush administration rhetoric to the contrary, this administration has done nothing to change the equation – Karen Hughes and Condi Rice – despite their vocal protestations to the contrary - included.
Will a new Congress be willing – or able – to override the entrenched policies and people of this administration’s final two years? I – like Packer and others he quotes - doubt it. They’re right: this would mean not only a “profound shift in mindset and attitude” on the part of the current administration but also a “drastic change in budgetary and bureaucratic priorities.” Such a tectonic shift will require an entirely new, different and hopefully far more intelligent White House. But will this happen and will January 2009 come too late?
*Civilian agencies have only received 1.4 percent of the total money in Iraq and Afghanistan according to James Kunder, a former marine and acting deputy of the U.S. Agency for International Development whereas classic “counterinsurgency doctrine argues that eighty percent of the effort should be nonmilitary.”