Isegoria

Matthew Teague of the Men’s Journal describes David Kilcullen’s ascent to the role of architect of modern warfare:

For a whole generation of Americans, the very word counterinsurgency had the tang of vulgarity, when it was spoken at all. Our last attempt at it, in Vietnam, left a lingering bad taste. And if traditionalists had their way, counterinsurgency would have died a flaming death in Saigon.

So the latest thinking on counterinsurgency took root in foreign soil, far from the Pentagon. In 1993, Kilcullen, then a young captain and anthropologist in the Australian Army, moved to a West Java city to study the Indonesian language. One day he noticed a military museum there, and inside he found a display about a decades-old war between the Indonesian government and a Muslim insurgency called Darul Islam. Somehow Kilcullen — a student of military history — had never heard of it, and he wondered why. His generation knew counterinsurgency only as an utterly failed idea. But here, under glass, he had found evidence that it could succeed on a large scale: The Indonesian government had handily defeated the rebel movement. He threw himself into researching the conflict and eventually focused his doctoral thesis on counterinsurgency as applied against Darul Islam.

He made this discovery at a time when almost no one else knew, or cared, about counterinsurgency. So by day Kilcullen served as an Australian officer in Indonesia, and in the evenings he visited the nation’s aging rebel leaders who’d been put down by the government. They resisted at first, but over time, and over tea, he pressed them for details on tactics, strategies, motivations, weaknesses.

A few years later, Kilcullen led a company of peacekeepers protecting East Timor residents from retaliatory violence as they made a break for independence. To casual observers this Christian-separatist insurgency bore little resemblance to the Darul Islam rebellion 50 years earlier. But Kilcullen realized the two movements, religion aside, shared critical tactics and motives. And if a counterinsurgent force could isolate those elements, it could break a rebellion.

He finished his dissertation in 2001, just as the world started to care — deeply — about counterinsurgency.

Over the next few years, Kilcullen watched the world’s finest armies spin in the sands of Afghanistan and Iraq. One night in 2006, he sat down with a pen, a notebook, and a bottle of Laphroaig scotch. Toward the end of World War I, one of Kilcullen’s heroes, T.E. Lawrence, had written Twenty-seven Articles, a note to other British officers about how to lead an insurgency. So that night Kilcullen answered with Twenty-eight Articles, about how to end one.

Insurgency and counterinsurgency pivot on the same point. Lawrence included it in Article 15: “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.”

Kilcullen wrote in his Article 13, “Conduct village and neighborhood surveys to identify needs in the community — then follow through to meet them, build common interests and mobilize popular support. This is your true main effort: Everything else is secondary.”

The message is plain, in both cases: Don’t die on someone else’s soil if you can help it. Win over the locals and train them to wage their own war. If winning them over requires digging wells in the meantime, so be it. Lightbulb wiring at the local mosque? Fine. Baby formula for the orphanage? Sure.

There weren’t many new ideas in Kilcullen’s Articles. Other thinkers had made similar points before. A half century ago, for instance, in the midst of widespread French failure in the Algerian War, French officer David Galula used COIN tactics to smash the insurgent forces in his area. At about the same time, British envoy Sir Robert Thompson used similar means to put down a rebellion in colonial Malaya.

Those men were brilliant field commanders. But Kilcullen’s gift is fermenting the ideas of past intellectuals and distilling them to their most potent, palatable essences. He thinks in terms of shapes — circles, arrows, pillars, and arches — that lend themselves to diagrams. I once saw him, over lunch, sketch the entire Afghan conflict on a scrap of paper and then solve it with one tiny arrow. “That’s where we’re working to break the cycle,” he said. Such simplicity can be intoxicating.

Kilcullen sent out his Twenty-eight Articles by email to a few colleagues and tacticians scattered around the world, who then passed it along to their superiors and subordinates, who forwarded it further, until the Australian’s note became a sort of idealogical pinup girl, stuffed in rucksacks, tacked to corkboards, scrutinized for every blemish and beauty mark. Lawrence’s original Articles showed up in 1917 in a publication called the Arab Bulletin and took generations to seep into popular thinking about war. But Kilcullen’s email, within months, landed on the desks of some important military thinkers.

One of them was David Petraeus, who at the time was plotting a coup of his own within the U.S. military. After years of watching America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq slowly slide toward failure, a group of young strategists — military, civilian operators, diplomats — felt their superiors were dangerously out of touch. The old guard had grown up waging a supersize, purely theoretical Cold War. They didn’t know how to stop an insurgency. So that’s exactly what the younger subordinates staged: an insurgency.

“It was a bottom-up rebellion, by junior officers with combat time in the field,” Kilcullen says. “That’s why I had to write Twenty-eight Articles over a whiskey in the middle of the night — it was an underground document. Petraeus was our leader and top cover.”

At the time, the Army kept Petraeus relatively marginalized, along with his ideas about counterinsurgency. He was in charge of Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where he oversaw several schools and training programs. But he also — critically — oversaw the assembly of a new handbook for how America wages war. The field manual is much more than a guide or collection of lessons learned; it is the rudder that steers the ship. It is doctrine. Petraeus assembled a cohort of COIN students to write it, including Kilcullen. The Australian’s seemingly breezy, simple approach appealed to Petraeus; it brought order to the furball of ethical, political, and tactical questions Americans faced in Afghanistan. “As an insurgency ends,” Kilcullen wrote, “a defection is better than a surrender, a surrender better than a capture, and a capture better than a kill.” And just like that, with the publication in late 2006 of FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, the COIN advocates overthrew the traditional U.S. military. Soon Petraeus took charge of the war in Iraq and brought Kilcullen on as a top adviser. That’s how, less than a year after sending his middle-of-the-night email, Kilcullen helped shape and direct the Iraq troop surge of 2007.

CIA operator Raymond Davis found himself at the center of an international incident when two young Pakistani men on a motorcycle started following his car:

Davis didn’t have time to ponder their motives. The intersection of Jail and Ferozepur roads was packed with cars, bicycles, rickshaws, and pedestrians; the motorcycle pulled around his car and stopped just ahead of it. Shamshad, on the back of the bike, turned. He raised his pistol. He cocked it.

There is a switch inside the minds of men who work as Special Forces soldiers. It toggles between the perception of another person as “friend” or “enemy.” In one setting, it inspires a fierce and even noble protectiveness. But the moment the switch is flipped to “enemy,” vision narrows and everything but the target fades away.

Shamshad’s gun cocked, and Davis’s switch flipped.

In an instant he raised his own pistol, a semiautomatic Glock, and fired a series of five rounds straight through his windshield. The bullets punched neat holes through it, leaving only a sprinkling of green glass cubes and trapezoids on Davis’s dashboard.

He shot Shamshad in the stomach, behind his right ear, in the back, in the left arm, and in the left thigh. Shamshad fell onto the motorcycle and dropped his weapon. Haider ran toward the intersection and made it about 50 feet to a brick-and-grass island in the road. Davis opened his door, stepped from his car, and shot him five times, including twice in the back, as Haider ran. It was an unbelievable feat of marksmanship.

Anwar Khan, the manager of a restaurant on the intersection, was washing his hands in the men’s room when he heard the first shots. They sounded strange. Muffled. “I thought it was a customer firing,” he says. He ran into the restaurant as more shots barked from the street. These sounded sharper. Khan watched, amazed, as Davis walked back to his car, retrieved a camera, and then walked to each of the bodies. He photographed them with the calm of a scholar documenting some historical artifact. No hurry. No tremor.

“He was so confident,” Khan says, shaking his head.

As a crowd formed, Davis radioed his team for backup. He waited for them in his car, but the crowd became a mob and smashed out his rear window, raining glass onto the backseat. Davis couldn’t wait any longer. He dropped the car into gear, cranked the steering wheel, and somehow maneuvered away from the crowd and the intersection.

Khan, the restaurateur, stood astonished as the white Honda revved, leaping and gunning its way through dense traffic. “It did not feel real,” he says. “It was like an American movie.”

He was still standing at his restaurant’s window a few minutes later when he heard the approach of a second hard-revving vehicle. A Land Cruiser charged into view, just a few feet in front of the restaurant, which meant it was on the wrong side of the road. And behind it came a wave of people on foot, running and shouting. Only later would he find out why.

A few minutes earlier and about a quarter mile down Jail Road, Zahid Chaudhry, a car salesman, had stepped outside his small dealership and noticed the Land Cruiser. Traffic was backed up, heading toward the big intersection to his right. The Land Cruiser, stuck in the unmoving mass, lurched sideways and climbed over the foot-tall cement traffic divider. The driver — a foreigner, he could see — then turned upstream against oncoming traffic, swerving and surging toward the intersection.

“Look at him!” Chaudhry told a colleague. “He must have killed someone.”

Then, as though to prove him right, the Land Cruiser smashed head-on into a motorcycle. In a sliver of a moment, its rider, a young man named Ibad-ur Rehman, hit head-first into the hood of the Land Cruiser, buckling it.

The Land Cruiser stopped, as everyone on the street watched. Its driver backed up but couldn’t dislodge the bike or its rider. They were both stuck to the grill. So, facing a sickening dilemma, the driver decided to continue forward, racing once more toward the intersection. After a hundred yards or so, Rehman and his motorcycle came loose, and when bystanders ran to his side, they found him dead. They turned — a hundred or more people now — and ran after the Land Cruiser, calling for police and memorizing its license plate number, which turned out to be counterfeit.

When the vehicle arrived at the intersection where Davis had fled minutes earlier, it stopped a moment as the driver and a passenger scanned the scene for Davis. A man approached the Land Cruiser and pulled open the driver’s door. The driver, according to people who witnessed it, swung up a weapon — some said a compact assault rifle of some sort, others said a large pistol — and pressed its muzzle to the man’s head. The man backed away, and the Land Cruiser tore ahead, swinging right at the intersection and toward the American consulate.

Along the way, police said, the vehicle’s occupants jettisoned a bizarre sort of litter: bullets, batteries, a pair of gloves, a baton, and a scrap of cloth bearing an American flag.

The Land Cruiser disappeared behind the walls of the consulate, and the two men inside were spirited back to the U.S. before Pakistani authorities could get their hands on them.

By the way, if you intend on shooting someone, might I suggest cocking the gun before you approach them?

Ron DiFrancesco was the last person to make it out of the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Not everyone trying to escape with him made it:

He stopped at a landing in the middle of the impact zone, on the 79th or 80th floor. Overwhelmed by the smoke, he joined others, about a dozen total, some stretched out facedown on the concrete floor, others crouched in the corners, all gasping for air.

A collapsed wall blocked further descent. DiFrancesco could see panic in people’s eyes. Some were crying. Several began to slip into unconsciousness. Then, something remarkable happened: “Someone told me to get up.” Someone, he says, “called me.” The voice, which was male but did not belong to anyone in the stairwell, was insistent: “Get up!” It addressed DiFrancesco by his first name and gave him encouragement: “It was, ‘Hey! You can do this.’ ” But it was more than a voice — DiFrancesco had a vivid sense of a physical presence nearby.

DiFrancesco experienced the Third Man Factor at work:

Ron DiFrancesco’s encounter may sound like a curiosity, an unusual delusion of an overstressed mind or a testament to his faith. But over the years, the experience he described has occurred again and again, not only to 9/11 survivors, but also to mountaineers, divers, polar explorers, prisoners of war, solo sailors, shipwreck survivors, aviators, and astronauts. All have escaped traumatic events only to tell strikingly similar stories of having felt the close presence of a companion and helper — one that offered a sense of protection, relief, guidance, and hope, and left the person convinced that there was some other being at his or her side, when by any normal calculation there was none.

There is, it seems, a common experience that happens to people who confront life at its extremes, and strange as it may sound, given the cruel hardship they suffer to reach that place, it is something wonderful. This radical notion is based on the extraordinary testimony of scores of people who have emerged alive when they ought to have died. To a person, they report that at a critical point they were joined by an additional, unexplained friend who lent them the power to overcome the direst of circumstances. There is a name for the phenomenon: It’s called the Third Man factor.

The most famous of these encounters comes from Sir Ernest Shackleton, who in his narrative South gave the strange report of an unseen presence that accompanied him on his escape from Antarctica after the expedition’s ship, Endurance, had been crushed by ice. It was Shackleton’s experience that inspired the term “Third Man factor” (although for his group it was actually a “fourth man” — T.S. Eliot misremembered the number when he wrote his poem The Waste Land, which popularized the idea). The brilliant and fearless climber Wilfrid Noyce considered the Third Man a “second self.” Some say he’s a hallucination. Some say he’s real.

When I first began searching for answers, it amazed me that these stories had never been collected in a single place, so I began to assemble them. For five years I contacted survivors, read through old handwritten journals, and combed through published exploration narratives and survival stories. Sometimes all the conditions seemed right for such an experience, but there would be no mention of it in any published account. Then, when I would approach a survivor — such as the British climber Tony Streather, who narrowly escaped death on Haramosh in the Karakoram — I would discover that an unseen being had intervened to help him, too. It was only years after his ordeal that Streather, who was giving a lecture on teamwork and survival to a class at the British military academy at Sandhurst, told his students of the presence that sometimes seemed to actively help pull him up an avalanche field. As Streather later elaborated, “there was some being which helped me survive.”

The New York Times headline really should read We hate Blackwater and its founder, Eric Prince:

The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.

Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.
[...]
In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.

The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.
[...]
For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

To help fulfill his ambitions, Mr. Prince’s new company, Reflex Responses, obtained another multimillion-dollar contract to protect a string of planned nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity. He hopes to earn billions more, the former employees said, by assembling additional battalions of Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments.

Knowing that his ventures are magnets for controversy, Mr. Prince has masked his involvement with the mercenary battalion. His name is not included on contracts and most other corporate documents, and company insiders have at times tried to hide his identity by referring to him by the code name “Kingfish.” But three former employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements, and two people involved in security contracting described Mr. Prince’s central role.

The former employees said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from halfway around the world, Mr. Prince’s subordinates were following his strict rule: hire no Muslims.

Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims.

A few years ago, Kevin McMurray of Men’s Journal interviewed Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorist Center, about the hunt for Bin Laden after 9/11:

But didn’t you tell your lead operative in Afghanistan to bring you the head of Osama Bin Laden boxed in ice so you could show it to President Bush?

Let me characterize it in a different way. This is not about some kind of grisly decapitation exercise. What it is about is on a Third World battlefield, in the fog of war, being able to prove your actions. With rounds whizzing by your head, are you going to take the time to get out a fingerprint kit, maybe draw some blood for a DNA match, perhaps take a dental impression? If it were me, I’d want something fast.

Will we ever catch Bin Laden?

There is a profound desire by all senior government leaders to catch this guy. It’s a high priority. So yeah, he will be caught. Will his capture have a detrimental effect on Al Qaeda? Yes. Will it be a catastrophic effect? No. Someone will rise to take his place, and we will have to deal with it.

I guess he didn’t plan on SEAL Team Six bringing along their CSI-style biometric equipment.

Anyway, I enjoyed this bit about Russia’s reaction to our decision to enter Afghanistan:

When you briefed the Russians on our plans to attack Afghanistan they reportedly said, “You’re really going to get the hell kicked out of you,” and you replied, “We’re going to kill them — we’re going to put their heads on sticks.” True?

True, and you know what, the Russians loved it! After the meeting was over, two senior Russian officials, whom I will not name, said to me, “Mr. Black, finally America is acting like a superpower!” They’d been to the rodeo and they lost. They had a hell of a fight in Afghanistan. It was a great expression of solidarity in our moment of need. We needed their support and their cooperation, and we got it. They too were the enemies of Al Qaeda and the Taliban; they just had to be assured that we had no ulterior motivations.