Noah Shachtman of Wired‘s Danger Room interviews his friend and colleague, David Axe, about his war reporting:
Danger Room: Okay. Of all the f—ed-up places you’ve been, what’s the most f—ed-up of all? Why?
David Axe: Chad, by far. Even in Somalia, I felt like there was a fairly clear division between “danger” and “safety.” When I was with my fixers, I felt safe. In Chad, I never felt safe. In that country, violence visited me everywhere: in the capital, when corrupt cops hijacked my car; in a Catholic mission in Sudanese border country, when heavily-armed child soldiers hopped the fence and tried to break into my photographer’s and my rooms as a gunfight erupted all around us.
Now, as it turns out, my sense of safety in Somalia was an illusion. Just a few months after I left Mogadishu, the guards my then-girlfriend Daria and I had worked with — and had felt safe with — sold a couple of Western freelance reporters into the captivity of an Islamic group. The reporters — Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan — were held for months, tortured, abused. My fixer in Mogadishu narrowly escaped coming to a bad end in that episode. Realizing he could no longer trust the guards and others around him, he went into hiding.
DR: Dude, you dragged your girlfriend to Somalia?
DA: Hey, it was her idea! She insisted, and, as I had predicted, it meant the end of our relationship. But it was worth it, I guess. Based in part on her freelance work in Somalia, she got a job with the Wall Street Journal and is now doing quite well for herself. Me? I suffered something of a breakdown and had to move back in with my parents for several months just to get back to normal. Embarrassing, I know.
Axe saw the Dutch counterinsurgency go catastrophically wrong:
It’s unfair to compare the Dutch and American militaries. The Dutch army’s “soft-power” approach was, in fact, hard power wearing a clever disguise. Let me explain.
The Dutch military had always claimed that their strategy was to rely on reconstruction and development, rather than combat, to secure Uruzgan province, near Helmand. Of course, that strategy hinged on the Taliban essentially cooperating with NATO activities. They didn’t. In the summer of 2007, the Taliban targeted with a car bomb a Dutch convoy at a girl’s school in the province’s capital then massed hundreds of fighters for an infantry assault on Afghan police positions in a key town. The Dutch had no choice but to fight. Problem is, they were not prepared to risk the lives of their infantrymen in close combat. Rather than close with the Taliban and root them out of the town, as I believe the Americans would have done, the Dutch chose to bombard the town with Apache helicopters, F-16s and 155-millimeter artillery. A post-battle NATO report found that as many as 90 civilians died in the bombardment. Ironically, the Dutch army’s reluctance to shift to a focused, “hard” approach — dismounted infantry — resulted in a huge loss of life and credibility.
The Americans, by contrast, tend to hold back on the heavy artillery in favor of infantry maneuver — at least these days, they do. When the Taliban attacked an American patrol in Logar province in 2009, I watched as a squad bailed from a damaged vehicle and assaulted the enemy position. One of the soldiers told me later that the safest tactic in such a situation is to close with the enemy, because it ends the fight quickly and precisely. That’s preferable to a drawn-out fight in which one side refuses to accept the short-term risk resulting from a decisive maneuver. Had the Americans been there in Uruzgan in 2007, I believe they would have handled the fight differently, and civilians’ lives would have been saved — though potentially at the cost of a few American lives. Soft power should not mean a reluctance to risk soldiers’ lives during the occasional firefight, if that means saving the people you’re trying to influence. A truly effective soft-power approach should be built on the stick backbone of courage and military prowess.
Now, I’m not accusing the average Dutch trooper of being a coward. Far from it. But I am accusing Dutch commanders and political leaders of advancing a failed strategy.