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Aussie Unconventional War Whizkid

Explains all to the PBS crowd. Former Petraeus advisor LTC Kilcullen on Charlie Rose: 

” … we need to remain agile and remember that the society that we are dealing with in Iraq was fundamentally corroded and damaged by 35 years of tyranny. And so, there’s a certain psychological or cultural effect that that has on people. And you can’t expect a society to sort of drop that and become a sort of Jeffersonian democracy within a reasonably short period of time, particularly when there’s an enemy out there.

And I think this is one of the things, you know, that we need to remember, that this is a two-way street. There is an enemy. This stuff that is happening in Iraq didn’t happen just because (Bush admin) made mistakes. You know, we don’t want to be narcissistic about this. This isn’t, you know, all our fault. There’s two sides here. The enemy deliberately provoked this.”

…

Conventional warfare is binary. Right? It has two sides. And its enemy- centric. What you’re trying to do is figure out what the enemy is trying to do and defeat the enemy by, you know, outmaneuvering them or removing their war-making power, basically.

Counterinsurgency is not like that. It’s not enemy-centric. It’s actually population-centric. And I think we have found over the last three or four years of evolution of the conflict in Iraq that the more we focus on the population and protecting them, the easier it is to deal with the enemy. The more we focus on the enemy, the harder it is to actually get anything done with the population …  That’s fundamentally what the surge is about.

…

 Let me talk time. There has never been a successful counterinsurgency that took less than 10 years.

CHARLIE ROSE: Less than 10 years?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Successful.

CHARLIE ROSE: Name the most successful ones.

DAVID KILCULLEN: The one that people quote fundamentally is usually the Malayan insurgency.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

DAVID KILCULLEN: That’s a slightly atypical example, though, for a variety of reasons.

Northern Ireland took 30 years.

CHARLIE ROSE: And in the end, it was a political settlement.

DAVID KILCULLEN: All counterinsurgency solutions are political.

CHARLIE ROSE: OK.

DAVID KILCULLEN: The role of the military in counterinsurgency is to hold the ring and create space that allows the political process to take place. Again, people talk about that with regard to the surge.

Politics is alchemy. It’s not an engineering project. You can’t build it step by step, through benchmarks to a solution. It takes people to feel comfortable and be able to work together and to build confidence. And we all know this from domestic politics.

And so what the military tries to do is to create, if you like, enough calmness and enough population security to allow political leadership to go forward, and that takes a long time.

CHARLIE ROSE: OK. So should then the goal of the United States to be — its leadership is to say to its public, which is financing and giving its sons and daughters to this effort, should it be to say, this is going to take 10 years? There’s never been a counterinsurgency that has worked in less than 10 years. And so, we believe these stakes demand that of us. And therefore, you need to understand what the goal is, how long it’s going to take, what the sacrifice is, and why the results are so important.

DAVID KILCULLEN: That is a factor. I think it’s worth pointing out that just because it’s going to take 10 years doesn’t mean we’re going to be there for 10 years …

CHARLIE ROSE: So in other words, as they stand up, we stand down? Is that the idea?

…

DAVID KILCULLEN: … The rate at which you build local capacity drives your exit strategy. OK? The faster you can stand up effective forces and effective governance structures, particularly, then the faster you can exit from the campaign.

…

CHARLIE ROSE: … Should we have known all this when we went in there, and should we have been able to implement strategies that take all that into consideration when we went in there? And if we didn’t, why?

DAVID KILCULLEN: We did know all this back then … I’ll tell you what I think, watching it from my position and what I went through, through the Afghanistan and Iraq period. I think that we — there was certainly a feeling after the Afghan war that we had changed the nature of conflict in some way, because of the rapid success against the Taliban.

 …

CHARLIE ROSE: Are these insurgents pretty smart?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Very much so.

CHARLIE ROSE: Very much so. How come they got so smart?

DAVID KILCULLEN: It’s evolution. You know, we kill the stupid ones.

If you think about what has happened to the average Iraqi insurgent group since 2003, some of them had a personnel turnover in excess of 1,500 percent, right?

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.

DAVID KILCULLEN: So we’ve — we’ve killed the stupid ones by now. And those that weren’t killed have learned. And I think adaptation is perhaps one of their most salient characteristics.

…

DAVID KILCULLEN: It’s like — you know, you are climbing a mountain. And you’re having difficulty getting up the mountain. So you say the mountain is not climbable. The mountain is climbable. Maybe you can’t climb it, but it’s climbable. Counterinsurgency is winnable. About 80 percent of counterinsurgency campaigns have been won. It’s a bit of a myth to think that we can’t win against insurgents. Insurgents usually lose. But the difference between a successful and a failed counterinsurgency often resides in the political activity.

…

CHARLIE ROSE: People have come and sat exactly where you are. Smart people.

DAVID KILCULLEN: Many people much smarter than me.

(CROSSTALK)

CHARLIE ROSE: I’m not making that point. But I’m saying smart people come here.

DAVID KILCULLEN: Absolutely.

CHARLIE ROSE: And they’ve characterized this as the worst foreign policy decision in American history. And if not the worst, at least the top three or four. What do you think history is going to say about this?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Well, I would say that, again, that’s a fascinating historical debate. I don’t want to sound glib, but I have other problems to deal with right now, which is to play the hand we’ve been dealt in the best possible fashion. And you can argue the rights and wrongs of decisions made in 2002 for a long time. The only practical value of that for a guy like me is to think about some of the mistakes we made in 2002 and 2003 and try to avoid them coming out.

Anyway, go read the whole thing. h/t reader Steve.

Topics: Iraq

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:00 am on Wednesday, October 10, 2007

3 Responses to “Aussie Unconventional War Whizkid”

1. sarah rolph Says:
   October 10th, 2007 at 11:06 am

   This is great, thanks for the pointer, Jules. And Steve.

2. The Dread Pundit Bluto Says:
   October 10th, 2007 at 12:00 pm

   It’s striking how Rose constantly struggles to steer the interview toward immediate, short term partisan concerns, while Kilcullen has a pragmatic, historical view of events.

   How many Americans are still capable of looking past the current election cycle?

3. melody Says:
   October 20th, 2007 at 11:26 pm

   I have a much better understanding 0f the reason of the surge, and
   the idea behind what they are doing in Iraq and I want to thank
   you, James and Mr. Kilkallen
   .
   I knew it would take at least 10 years if not more when the war
   started, the President stood there and told us that many times,
   but the libs were so intent on getting rid of him and his war, they
   really made it difficult for any real truth to be out here.

   It is changing, a great deal, the conservatives are fighting back and
   the liberals are sinking like a stone. Except for her majesty.

   Poor Charlie, he believed the lib lies and propaganda for so long
   he was in a small state of shock from the truth being out there!

   I am confident both countries will, in time, be as democratic as they
   will be able to handle, it will be very difficult to learn something some
   Americans do not understand! We are not looking for perfection,
   what country has that?

   Bless you, Jack, please tell us more when you can, your honesty is so
   needed and when you speak, easier to understand, the truth
   can only help.

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