Counter-Insurgency Deceptions in Iraq and Afghanistan

By ANTHONY DiMAGGIO

Despite a 2008 U.S.-Iraqi agreement requiring a total withdrawal from Iraq by the end of 2011, U.S. Admiral and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen is now “warning” Iraqi leaders that they only have a few weeks to decide if they want troops to remain in the country past the formal withdrawal date.  In recent weeks, Democrats and Republicans have also recently taken up “debate” over Obama’s alleged plan for “withdrawal” from Afghanistan.  U.S. military planners love to frame their violent occupations as necessary “humanitarian” interventions, aimed at “saving” the poor and downtrodden of the third world.  These claims have always been disingenuous, and the gravity of recent evidence suggests that efforts to entertain the humanitarian myth amount to little more than propaganda.   >>
Take for example, Iraq and Afghanistan.  Both occupations were vehemently defended by liberal and conservative political officials, as well as their counterparts in the mass media under the guise of pure intentions and selfless sacrifice.  Both occupations are opposed by the majority of Americans, Afghans and Iraqis on the grounds that the destruction they’ve caused leave countries worse off than if the U.S. had simply not intervened in the first place.

In the case of Afghanistan, the Obama administration announced that the beginning of a phased withdrawal could begin as early as July of 2011, and continue through 2014.  The 2011 withdrawal date was promised as far back as late 2009, at the same time that Obama announced his “surge” of an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.  Obama’s ‘09 withdrawal announcement, made simultaneously alongside his announcement of the escalation of war, was unprecedented in U.S. history.  Rarely do aggressors provide an “exit strategy” at the onset of their onslaughts.  This novel development, however, reflected not so much the “democratic” responsiveness of the Obama administration to the public (considering that most Americans opposed the war at the time, and continue to do so today), but rather a begrudging concession on the part of the Democrats that they can no longer pursue (a la Bush) bloody wars without a (at least vague) promised end in sight.  Still the unprecedented escalation-de-escalation strategy should hardly be viewed as a “revolutionary” development in U.S. foreign policy.  After all, under Obama the Afghan war is set to endure for a grueling 13 years at minimum, considering the initial escalation of the conflict began immediately following the September 11th attacks.  Furthermore, through the first four years of his presidency, Obama will have spent more on the military than even George W. Bush did by the end of his first term.  If anything, Obama has demonstrated that imperialist policies and military escalation can be even more effectively pursued under Democratic regimes, with “anti-war” figures like Obama farcically celebrated as a proponent of “de-escalation” and “peace.”

Predictably, the even more hopelessly war-addicted Republicans have attacked Obama’s “withdrawal” timetable as dangerous, irresponsible, and naïvely “anti-war.”  John McCain announced shortly following the ’09 Afghanistan escalation that any inclusion of a withdrawal date was “dispiriting,” and would guarantee that Afghans would be less likely to “risk their lives to take our side in this fight.”  The withdrawal date, McCain argued, is one that “enemies can exploit to weaken and intimidate our friends.”  In March of this year, Republican Congressman Mike Coffman similarly announced that he was skeptical of a possible withdrawal, considering the “security interests in Afghanistan that we must accept…we need to make sure that the Taliban don’t take over the country.”  Coffman’s comments came at a time when a non-binding House resolution calling for a full, accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan (by year’s end) was defeated by a vote of 93-321, with only eight Republicans voting in support.

Efforts to establish a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq were similarly lambasted at every turn by liberals and conservatives during the early years of that war, and later by conservative hawks once mainstream liberals decided the war was no longer “worth it” in terms of financial cost and American lives.  U.S. officials repeatedly warn (no matter the conflict) that a withdrawal will inevitably result in increased instability, chaos, and bloodbath.  In 2008, for example, the neoconservative editors of the Washington Post were still chastising President Obama for his “unrealistic” withdrawal plan (7/8/2008).  The editors celebrated the U.S. for its supposedly successful “counterinsurgency strategy” which “helped bring about a dramatic drop in violence.”  They warned that “it would be folly to begin a forced march out of the country without regard to the risks of renewed sectarian warfare and escalating intervention in the country by Iran and other of Iraq’s neighbors.”

The occupation of Iraq never really ended, although one wouldn’t know this due to the meager-to-non-existent coverage of the conflict in the mass media.  The Associated Press reported in March of this year that, “Eight years later [after the U.S. invasion], thousands of U.S. troops remain in Iraq — and their mission may not be accomplished until far into the future.  Despite a security agreement requiring a full U.S. military withdrawal by the year’s end, hundreds if not thousands of American soldiers [47,000 more accurately] will continue to be in Iraq beyond 2011.”  It is true, as USA Today reported last year, that as of September 2010 the mandate for U.S. troops under the newly declared “Operation New Dawn” is to “focus on training Iraqis to handle their own security and have U.S. combat authority curtailed.”  This point, however, is extremely important because it establishes a marker date, which helps in comparing violence in Iraq prior to and following the end of major combat operations (excluding special ops campaigns, which have continued following August 2010).

How has Iraq fared after the end of major U.S. combat operations?  As the New York Times reported in December of 2010 (four months after the U.S. “withdrawal”), violence in Iraq was at its lowest levels since the start of the occupation in 2003.  Total recorded civilian casualties for 2010, as reported by the Iraq Body Count project, stood at 3,976, down from 4,680 in 2009, and from the high of 2,327 a month in 2006 at the height of Iraq’s civil war.  Monthly deaths in the last four months of 2010 (after the U.S. “withdrawal”) stood at 270 a month, amounting to a 27 percent reduction from the 370 a month average for the first eight months of 2010.  Casualties in early 2011 have remained at generally lower levels, as the country averaged 314 deaths a month – a 15 percent reduction from the first eight months of 2010 (before the end of major U.S. combat operations).

The implications of these figures were ignored in typical Orwellian fashion by the editors of the Washington Post, who celebrated “a good year in Iraq” in 2010, in which “violence, has dwindled to the lowest level Iraq probably has known in decades” (12/22/2010).  Presumably, the paper expected Americans to forget it had incompetently predicted that the exact opposite would happen if Obama was allowed to follow through with his tepid July 2008 call for a “phased redeployment of combat troops” that would culminate in a removal of “combat brigades” by July of 2010.

Anyone who critically followed the war in Iraq was aware of the poverty of warnings that withdrawal would lead to national collapse and civil war.  Quite the opposite, violence steadily escalated under the U.S. occupation and transformed into full-blown civil war throughout the first five years of U.S. combat operations in Iraq.

At every step of the war, the U.S. was responsible for escalating the conflict and violence – as consistently recognized by the majority of Iraqis themselves in surveys done over the years.  Bush’s staggering incompetence in dissolving Iraq’s military, government, and security forces led directly to the country’s deterioration into civil war, as Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish sectarian militias and “insurgents” stepped in to compete for control and in order to fill the power vacuum.  The U.S. washed its hands of responsibility for the destruction, as it announced its abandonment of reconstruction funding in January of 2006 – thereby ensuring that there would be no progress in improving Iraq’s infrastructure, devastated by decades of (U.S.-sponsored) war and sanctions.

The United States could hardly be divorced from Iraq’s destabilization in light of its own bombings and counter-insurgency operations, which were estimated to have led to more than half of the total 655,000 deaths in Iraq by 2006 (at the height of the country’s civil war).  Total deaths under the occupation were calculated to reach as high as 1.2 million by 2007, following the onset of Bush’s allegedly humanitarian “surge.”  Such destruction does not even take into account the humiliating torture suffered by countless Iraqis (a la Abu Ghraib) who were often collectively detained and terrorized during counter-insurgency operations, typically based on flimsy to non-existent evidence.

The Bush administration’s own support for the “Salvador Option,” in which the U.S. employed and trained death squads to help in “counter-insurgency” efforts was an ominous example of the United States’ total contempt for stability and human rights in Iraq.  Such efforts directly contributed to the deterioration of security throughout the country, encouraging the growth in violence between Kurdish, Shia and Sunni populations, and inciting the indiscriminate targeting of Iraqi civilians across ethnic-sectarian lines.

The presence of more than 150,000 American troops served as a lightning rod for attracting Islamist suicide bombers and other terrorists who played a key role in the emerging civil war.  The occupation and the Bush administration’s opposition to democratic elections (later begrudgingly reversed by the administration after mass national protests) also provided much encouragement for Iraqi nationals (who made up the vast majority of the “insurgency”), who wished to take up arms against an unresponsive, repressive foreign power.  Such animosity toward the U.S. was hardly surprising in light of Bush’s “pacification” campaign, which collectively punished entire towns and cities by cutting off their food and water, or by destroying them altogether (as in the cases of Fallujah and Ramadi).  The “logic” behind such attacks was that these cities were the sites of strong insurgent activity; in essence, collectively terrorizing the civilians in these areas was seen as a legitimate tool for coercing the Iraqi people into turning against the “insurgency.”

The last defense of the occupation typically starts by citing the 2007 “surge” of another 20,000 troops into Iraq as succeeding in reducing sectarian violence and ending the Iraqi civil war.  Careful analysis of the events surrounding the surge, however, suggests that this escalation succeeded in disarming Sunni communities in Baghdad, thereby enabling a massive ethnic cleansing (undertaken by Shia militias working under the cover of the Baghdad security forces) that eventually culminated with a decline in violence (only after large areas of the city were effectively cleared out of their Sunni inhabitants).  Even the National Intelligence Agency challenged the “surge worked” narrative, admitting in its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that “population displacement [a la U.S.-enabled ethnic cleansing] has resulted from sectarian violence…the polarization of communities is most evident in Baghdad…where population displacements have led to significant sectarian separation, conflict levels have diminished because warring communities find it more difficult to penetrate communal enclaves.”

Enter the war in Afghanistan.  Long promoted by Bush and Obama as necessary in fighting terror and promoting regional stability and democracy, the war has done anything but accomplish these goals.  Reconstruction was always a joke, as numerous critics have documented the overwhelming lack of funding allocated for rebuilding this war torn country.  Additionally, violence in Afghanistan remains at high levels today, as symbolized in a recent April attack in Kabul in which the New York Times reported that “an insurgent wearing an Afghan Army uniform and a vest laced with explosives opened fire inside the heavily fortified Ministry of Defense headquarters, killing at least two soldiers.”  The attack was intended to strike at France’s Minister of Defense, Gérard Longuet, who was supposed to be visiting the compound.

The targeting of NATO and U.S. forces has grown in light of Obama’s ‘09 escalation, as Taliban forces seek to expel the United States and its allies from the country.  Since the U.S. escalated its campaign two years ago, violence has increased significantly.  Afghan civilian casualties increased by 15 percent from 2009 to 2010, as the total number of recorded dead totaled 5,189 for both years (total deaths from 2007 to 2010 have reached nearly 10,000).

It is true that more than two-thirds of those killed in 2010 were the result of Taliban attacks (compared to sixteen percent that can be traced back to NATO and Afghan government forces).  Any attempt to exonerate the U.S. in light of the above statistics, however, is highly dubious.  As the Guardian reports, a now-declassified U.S. State Department cable (released via Wikileaks) one year before Obama’s ’09 escalation indicated that the U.S. had hoped for “a rising tide of chaos and violence, caused by increased NATO operations.”  As the cable explained, U.S. intelligence expressed support for putting increased pressure on the Taliban “in order to bring out their more violent and radical tendencies…this will alienate the population and give us an opportunity to separate the Taliban from the population.”  In other words, an active part of the U.S. plan was the encouragement of violence against civilians, in the hopes that the terror brought by the U.S. “surge” would end in the Afghan people turning against the Taliban.  It is within this context of U.S.-terror escalation that one should evaluate the steady growth in attacks (and the ensuing destabilization) that have taken place since Obama began his surge.

An honest evaluation of U.S. counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan clearly demonstrates that the U.S. is responsible for escalating, rather than reducing violence and destabilization.  This inconvenient truth is predictably ignored by media pundits and political officials who retain a vested political interest in perpetuating the myth that “humanitarian catastrophe” will ensue if the U.S. withdraws.  Critics of these wars know the opposite is true.  The sooner the U.S. fully withdraws from Afghanistan, the greater the chances that mass violence and social deterioration will subside.

Anthony DiMaggio is the co-author (with Paul Street) of the forthcoming “Crashing the Tea Party” (Paradigm Publishers) due out in May 2011.  He is also the author of When Media Goes to War (2010) and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008).   He has taught U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University, and can be reached at: adimag2@uic.edu_________________________________________
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The Return of Domestic CounterInsurgency?

By BRENDAN McQUADE

David Petraeus’ appointment as CIA director speaks to the increasing dominance in counterinsurgency in policy and raises a series of troubling questions about general militarization of American society. Petraeus is the man who literally rewrote the book on counterinsurgency and is set to lead the most powerful covert agency in human history. His appointment means that the CIA is going to be even more involved in the shadowy, protracted, ambiguous conflicts that involve building up governments and social movements that support US policy and destroying those that do not.

What is Counterinsurgency?

In the terms of Petraeus’ celebrated manual, counterinsurgency is the “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.” Petraeus describes “insurgency” as “an organized protracted politico-military struggle to weaken the control of and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power or other political authority while increasing insurgent control.”

More critically and historically, counterinsurgency involves a powerful state intervening into a militarily weak (and formerly colonized) society. In contrast to the traditional military war aim, defeating the rival army, counterinsurgency has political goals: building a regime supportive to that more powerful state’s political project and, usually, destroying the revolutionary movement that challenges it. On lower level, counterinsurgency begins with an intelligence effort, gathering information on the politics and culture of the society begin targeted. The goal is to penetrate into the intimate corners of a society—to get agents inside civil society organizations, families, and social networks—and figure out who is “the wrong side.”

With this intelligence on hand, the task becomes neutralizing political rivals by turning, capturing, or killing them. In an 2003 article, Seymour Hersh quoted an American in Baghdad who explained it as: “We’re going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We’ve got to scare the[m]…into submission.” Despite the official denials, then, the infamous kill teams of Afghanistan are not bad apples but the logical and necessary outcome of this kind of warfare.

A more humanitarian, “civic action,” mission co-exists alongside this more coercive intelligence mission. A functioning government cannot be built with violence alone. Services need to be provided: schools, hospitals, roads, and all the rest of modern infrastructure. The new counterinsurgents, of which Petraeus is the most visible, are acutely aware of this need. Lauded by the press as “scholar-warriors,” counterinsurgents argue for a necessity of unity between civil-military roles, cultural sensitivity and a restrained use of force. Despite all these complexities, it’s still warfare: “Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man’s warfare; it’s the graduate level of war.”
The Ever-Expanding War on Terror

Today the War on Terror involves American military forces and intelligence operatives in at least 75 countries, not just Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan but the Philippines, Colombia, Yemen, Somalia and “elsewhere in Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.” The CIA is now on the ground in Libya and questions about the twenty years General Khalifa Hifter spent in suburban Virginia and a possible CIA ties are rising. Leon Panetta, the CIA director Petraeus is set to succeed, just held five days of secret talks in Turkey regarding the rebellion in Syria. As the United States continues to involve itself in conflicts like these, counterinsurgency becomes increasingly important. In places like Pakistan, Libya and Syria, where an overt military presence is political difficult, the CIA leads. Under Petraeus’ command, we can expect the CIA to become even more active in this regard.

As Philip Giraldi, a retired CIA counterterrorism expert, told me when I interviewed him in the summer of 2009: “The military’s got a huge tail whenever it goes it has an enormous footprint. The CIA operates in smaller units. They’re civilians. They can blend in. They can have predator [drone] bases in places that politically sensitive like inside Pakistan. For example, the other predators are operating out of Africa. They operate in Djibouti. There’s a French military base where the CIA people are stationed. The French would not let an American military presence but they would accept an intelligence group under civilian auspices.”

Political circumstances have not always favored counterinsurgency. In the Vietnam years, the CIA was the leading proponent of counterinsurgency and the military was quite resistant. It needed the backing of President Johnson to force its agenda on a recalcitrant generation of traditional military officers. After the Tet Offensive, the military embraced counterinsurgency but only for a time. After Vietnam, everyone—including the CIA—distanced themselves from counterinsurgency.

When I asked Giraldi who was the leading counterinsurgent today in the CIA, he told me: “Nobody comes to mind. When I was teaching at the CIA school back in the early eighties, the counterinsurgency people—the Special Operations Group is what it was called at the time—was down to about forty guys and, you know, no leaders, no renowned figures. It wasn’t that kind of thing. It was an adjunct of the Special Activities Division, which I was in, and was sent in do training in various places in Asia and Africa.”

When counterinsurgency returned as dominant policy during the War on Terror, the military was its most visible advocate. Today after the seeming success of the Iraq troop surge, the counterinsurgents are dominant in the military. Andrew Bacevich, perhaps the most prominent critic of counterinsurgency today, went so far as to argue that we are witnessing the emergence of the “Petraeus doctrine,” where “armed conflict will be protracted, ambiguous, and continuous… War [now] implies not only coercion but also social engineering.” The Petraeus doctrine displaces the more cautious Powell Doctrine “with its emphasis on overwhelming force, assumed that future American wars would be brief, decisive, and infrequent.”

In 2009, Giraldi told me that the CIA’s Special Operations Group was again growing: “Now they are much bigger they have a lot of contractors. They have a lot of ex-Special Forces people working for them but they are still kind of an adjunct. I’d be hard pressed to come up with a senior officer in SOG.” With David Petraeus, the man who made counterinsurgency dominant in the US military, at the helm of the CIA, we can expect SOG to continue to grow and become more central.

“How many more Vietnams can the American Republic Sustain?”

Petraeus’ command of the CIA and the increasing importance of counterinsurgency also raise troubling questions for US politics more broadly. Here, the best analysis of “counterinsurgency” comes from Eqbal Ahmad. He saw counterinsurgency from a wildly different perspective than committed counterinsurgents like Petraeus.

Ahmad was born in 1933 or 1934 in the village of Irki in Binhar, India. During the partition of the British Raj into the modern-nation states of India and Pakistan in 1947, Ahmad and his older brothers migrated to Pakistan. In the chaos, Ahmad lost his brothers and traveled north to Lahore alone. As a young man, he went on to fight against the French in the Algerian Revolution and get a PhD from Princeton. Ahmad understood the dilemmas of colonized. He knew what it was like to simultaneously resent, envy and admire his colonial conquer. He saw “counterinsurgency” from the other end of the counterinsurgent’s gun barrel.

In addition understanding what counterinsurgency meant for the targeted, Ahmad also saw its effects on the imperial power. Counterinsurgency threatens democratic politics at home because it necessarily entails a politicization of the military and the blurring of civilian and military roles:

“Training and participation in counterinsurgency necessarily involves emphasis on the unity and interrelatedness of civilian and military talks and authority. It is not realistic to expect military men who are trained to be ‘soldiers-political workers’ to remain apolitical at home…The determination to equip the natives with the ‘will to fight’ transfers eventually to the metropolitan country when the ‘will’ of the people ‘at home’ appears to be sagging. The crusade abroad may find expressions at home when the society is viewed as needing moral or political regeneration.”

Petraeus is already implicated in the treasonous game of undermining the democratic politics in the name of inflating the “will to fight.” In early February 2009, Gareth Porter, wrote two stories alleging that “A network of senior military officers is…reported to be preparing to support Petraeus and [the top-commander in Iraq, Gen.] Ray Odierno by mobilising public opinion against Obama’s decision,” to keep to his campaign promises on Iraq withdrawal. According to Porter, Petraeus’ leak reportedly attempted to force Obama’s hand, leaking information that implies “that Obama had requested the three plans,” on Iraq withdrawal. Prophetically, Porter concluded “The Petraeus leak also serves to promote the idea that Obama is moving away from his campaign pledge on a 16-month combat troop withdrawal.”

What will Petraeus’ tenure as CIA director mean for future political developments in the United States? “Counterrevolutionary chickens,” Ahmad presciently noted in 1971, also “have a tendency to come home to roast. Whether the ‘homecoming’ is complete or partial depends on the strains and stresses of involvements abroad a government’s ability to extricate itself from the war in good time. The [French] Fourth Republic survived the first Indochinese war but collapsed during the Algerian. It is impossible to tell how many more Vietnams the American republic can sustain. There is, however, considerable evidence that forces of law and order, including the army and several local police departments are applying the theories of pacification and counterguerilla warfare to problems at home.”

As Ahmad was writing, the FBI’s COunterINTELligence PROgrams, COINTELPRO, domestic programs that used methods similar to counterinsurgency, targeted the Communist Party USA, Socialist Workers Party, the Black Power Movements, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, and the American Indian Movement for “neutralization.” While “domestic counterinsurgency” has not yet returned to that scale, the militarization of US society has continued in the last forty years: surveillance and data-mining (NSA, DHS and private); the emerging nationwide intelligence network (DHS “Fusion Centers”); the increasing “paramilitarization” of police (intelligence-led policing); and the creation of the first domestic combatant command, US Northern Command or US NORTHCOM.

With all these measures put in place, domestic counterinsurgency along the lines of COINTELPRO could easily be resumed at a level hitherto unimaginable within the United States. While much would have to change politically for this to become possible, the appointment of Petraeus to head the CIA and the wider rise of the new counterinsurgents is not an encouraging development.

Brendan McQuade is currently working on a PhD in sociology department at Binghamton University (SUNY)

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“Glibness, Superficial Charm, Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth, Deceitful, Cunning, Manipulative, Lacks Remorse, Callous, Lacks Empathy, Does Not Accept Responsibility for Own Actions, and Impulsiveness … “

By G. I. WILSON, USMC Ret.

This essay attempts to make it easier for you to identify the quality and character of military officers and civilian bureaucrats, to increase your awareness and recognition of careerism and its consequences. As Americans, we all must exercise more care and caution in our appraisal of our senior military officers and the Washington “suits” that exert dominating influence on the cost of defense and the conduct of American national security policy.

The Department of Defense (DOD) that I have observed all too closely for over three decades is an overgrown bureaucracy committed to standing still for, if not actively promoting, poorly conceived policy agendas and hardware programs funded and supported by Congress. Coupled to that is the task of attracting the blind loyalty of senior military and civilian actors on the Washington, D.C. stage. For the careerists in America’s national security apparatus, it is all about awarding contracts and personal advancement, not winning wars.

Careerists serve for all the wrong reasons. They weaken national defense, rob the military of its warrior ethos and drive away the very highly principled mavericks that we need to reverse the decay. This can only be remedied by rekindling the time honored principles of military service (i.e. duty, honor, country) among both officers and civilians.

What Is Careerism?

In the DOD today, standard bureaucratic behavior is focused on conniving with politically focused congressional advocates and their counterparts in industry and think tanks to advance selected hardware and policy agendas. Once the careerist generals, admirals, colonels and captains exit active military service, they perpetuate their inside baseball by re-materializing as government appointees, political candidates, DOD contractor shills, so-called Pentagon “mentors,” and network talking heads. All are raking in money, peddling influence, exerting pressure for vested interests, all the while collecting retired pay, healthcare, commissary privileges and more at taxpayer expense.

For example, Gen. Jim Jones, U.S. Marine Corps, ret., occupied a big chair in the White House as the president’s national security advisor. Adm. Joe Sestak, U.S. Navy, ret., went to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives seeking promotion to the U.S. Senate. Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, U.S. Army, ret., is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Many others dot the boards of the big defense contractors. As author Bob Woodward points out in The War Within, many of the uniform-to-suits careerists made themselves cozy with political circles in Washington, D.C. in ways and to a degree that did not exist before 2001. As for the senior careerists in the ranks of the civilian bureaucracy, there is a similar variation of take-this-job-and-flip-it among public, academic and private sector positions. While it’s distasteful observing this in civilian quarters, it is the “self-fixation” of our top military leadership that this author finds most disturbing.

What is wrong with retired officers populating civilian government offices, industry and politics?

Author Edward N. Luttwak explains that it means a lifelong path of political correctness, playing it safe, making only decisions that create no waves, or – better yet – waves that promote the selected agenda. Worst of all, careerists leverage the bureaucracies in DOD and Congress to dilute any personal accountability and responsibility – the very essence of careerism. Luttwak warns “If careerism becomes the general attitude, the very basis of leadership is destroyed.” That era of pseudo-leadership is upon us.

Careerism is also artfully described by Robert Coram and Col. John Boyd of the U.S. Air Force. The careerist’s singular aspiration is “the desire to be, rather than the desire to do. It is the desire to have rank, rather than use it; the pursuit of promotion without a clear sense of what to do with a higher rank once one has attained it.”

The etiology of careerism stems from a shift in the basic values within the officer corps as described by Samuel P. Huntington in his classic work The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Huntington contends the most important feature that distinguishes military personnel from all others is the view that the military is truly a “higher calling” in the service of one’s country.

Today, this is no longer the case. Morris Janowitz observed in The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait:

“Those who see the military profession as a calling or a unique profession are outnumbered by a greater concentration of individuals for whom the military is just another job . . . . For a sizable majority – about 20 percent, or about one out of every five – no motive [for joining the military] could be discerned, except that the military was a job.”

Maj. Michael L. Mosier posits in “Getting a Grip on Careerism” in Airpower Journal how military sociologists theorize that the idea of a higher calling has diminished as institutional values deteriorate. While institutional values deteriorate, careerists exhibit traits of psychopathy replacing the higher calling with ambitions of personal gain and unaccountability.

Babiak and Hare’s Snakes in Suits, a book about psychopaths in the workplace, may seem foreign when juxtaposed with national security, but is instructive in the recognition of character traits the careerists exhibit and the wreckage they leave behind. (The writer is not suggesting that all careerists are psychopaths; however, the behavior of both has much in common.)

Consider the behavior of psychopaths described by Babiak and Hare: Glibness, superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, deceitful, cunning, manipulative, lacks remorse, callous, lacks empathy, does not accept responsibility for own actions, and impulsiveness. Look for these behavioral markers in careerists and what psychologists call the “paradox of power.”

Jonah Lehrer writes about the “paradox of power” in The Wall Street Journal, contending that the very traits that help leaders accumulate power and influence in the first place (being polite, honest, outgoing) all but disappear once power and authority are achieved. Positive leadership traits are replaced with impulsiveness, recklessness and rudeness. Lehrer further notes that authority coupled with the power paradox leads to flawed cognitive processes that in turn “distort the ability to evaluate information and make complex decisions.”

As one who has worked in and around the Pentagon bureaucracy for a few decades, other characteristics come to mind. In addition to placing one’s self in a position of accelerating personal gain, careerists also collect accoutrements of rank and position, perks and lists of biographical achievements, defined as positions, ranks and titles held. It is not about what they achieved but rather the positions and titles they held.

It is appalling that so many senior officers think that the military is all about getting promoted and accumulating as many signs of rank and status as possible, completed with a host of perks. What is lost on careerists is that they are getting the opportunity to actually do things that most people only dream of, or get to see just in the movies.

They are so prevalent because bureaucracies are in effect designed by and for careerists propagated by reams of regulations and layers of superfluous commands. Bureaucracies give careerists a place “to be somebody” rather than an opportunity to do something. They are promoted because of a zero defect record of playing it safe, making no controversial decisions and requiring others to do the same.

Recognizing Careerists

Careerists in both uniforms and suits thrive on hardware programs. It is not a matter of whether a weapon system works but whether it survives. One might point to the failed programs like the A-12 bomber or the Sgt. York “DIVAD” gun which saw billions wasted before they were cancelled. But look more skeptically at the programs that survive, even prosper, that are irrelevant to the wars we fight, double in cost (or more), are delivered years late and break promise after promise for performance.

Even for the so-called successful programs, the improved performance is never commensurate with the increase in cost. What manager among the orchards of low hanging fruit of Pentagon procurement fiascos has been held accountable? What senior DOD acquisition “Czar” has not found himself a huge pay raise from industry upon retirement? Congress and DOD often reward poor program performance and cost escalation. In 2010, Defense Secretary Gates replaced the general in charge of the Joint Strike Fighter program, but the action was a remarkable exception, and nothing fundamental to the program’s problems was changed.

The careerists are not interested in fostering people and ideas or developing good personnel and education programs. The rewards are in hardware issues, not people issues – except that one human factor does predominate: self.

The Washington Post wrote a review of Gen. Wesley Clark, U.S. Army, who was relieved of command in Europe in 2000 shortly after the ineffectual military campaign he commanded against Serbia in 1999. (Not long thereafter he immersed himself in presidential campaign politics.) The article revealed much about the man’s careerism and its characteristics. The reporter for The Washington Post explains with details the animus against Clark: His leadership was  “undercut by his relentless need to be front and center, to always make it all about him winning — rather than the mission.”

Clark’s deep infatuation with the word “I,” which runs through the veins of all careerists, was evident in his own explanation to the reporter:

“How do you think I could have succeeded in the military if everybody didn’t like me? It’s impossible,” he said. “Do you realize I was the first person promoted to full colonel in my entire year group of 2,000 officers? I was the only one selected. Do you realize that? . . . Do you realize I was the only one of my West Point class picked to command a brigade when I was picked? . . . I was the first person picked for brigadier general. You have to balance this out. . . . A lot of people love me.”

If Clark blames himself at all for the abrupt ending of his career after 34 years in the Army, he has never let on. More than one friend has quoted him, when trying to comprehend his forced retirement, as saying plaintively, “But we won the war…”

Without question Clark, like most careerists, has little love for subordinates, peers and others whom he sees as impediments to his career. The Post reported “In an institution filled with ambitious men, some viewed Clark as over the top, someone who would do or say anything to get ahead — and get his way.”

Placing self above the interests of one’s military service, DOD, and even national security is de rigueur. The Taipei Times of Sept. 9, 2010, wrote of retired U.S. Navy Adm. William Owens the following:

“Retired US Admiral William Owens — the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wants to end arms sales to Taiwan — is now aiding an effort by China’s Huawei Technologies to supply equipment to Sprint Nextel and operate in the US.

“A team of eight US senators has written to the administration of US President Barack Obama warning that the move by Huawei could ‘undermine US national security.’

“A national carrier in the US servicing 41.8 million customers at the end of the second quarter, Sprint Nextel is also a supplier to the Pentagon and US law enforcement agencies.”

And later,

“‘If our electronics are compromised, we are cooked,’ [China expert Arthur] Waldron said in his e-mail sent to a wide circle of China watchers.

‘Who is to say that subsystems bought from China will not have back doors and hidden links to their suppliers? We would be mad to think otherwise. The Chinese are not stupid,’ he wrote.”

Recognizing the Silence of Careerism

The same careerist system rewards those who ignore hardware but promote, or fail to stand up against, gigantic policy mistakes. Ambassador Paul Bremmer, who was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom, insisted on the disbanding of the Iraqi army in May 2003. This put an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 Iraqi soldiers out of work, and available to help foment the violence that followed.

Many serving officers and retirees are not forgetting that when senior commanding generals of America’s expeditionary ground forces assembled in Baghdad in May 2003 to hear Ambassador Bremer announce the decision to dismantle the Iraqi state, army and police and occupy much of Arab Iraq with U.S. and British forces, not a single general officer raised any objection.

It is impossible to know whether the refusal of general officers commanding American forces in the field to implement such a misguided and disastrous policy would have allowed American forces to avoid the expensive occupation of Iraq. Speaking out or retiring immediately certainly would have given officials in the government an opportunity to consider places a thousand times more important than Diyala or al-Anbar, starting with the United States itself.”

The apologists for this behavior deceptively ascribed their ruthless climb of the Pentagon ladder as an artifact of doing the right thing. But it is actually a lack of professionalism and an abandonment of the principles of military service. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan provide the most painful recent examples. They have severely tested and frequently compromised the U.S. officer corps’ traditional values of duty, honor and country. This is obvious in the selective careerist- and agenda-ridden assertions to portray a false picture of events to the American public about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Recent examples from every level of command are:

• Americans were told Iraq was invaded to locate and destroy weapons of mass destruction. It was a lie.
• Americans were told former National Football League star Army Ranger Sgt. Pat Tillman died fighting the enemy. It was a lie.
• Americans were told Army Spc. Jessica Lynch fired her M16 rifle until she ran out of bullets and was captured. It was a lie.
• Americans were told repeatedly the rebellion against our military presence in Iraq was defeated and “security was improving.” It was protracted lying punctuated by a daily diet of exploding bombs and mutilated bodies until massive cash payments to the Sunni Arab opponents bought cooperation.
• Despite numerous classified and unclassified accounts of brutality meted out to prisoners of war and the civilian population by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan – reports that describe the chain of command as aware of the abuses but routinely ignoring or covering them up – not a single general officer was called to account.
• In 2010, Americans are told Iraq is a “democracy,” when in reality, Iraq is mired in corruption and violence,  its oil is in Chinese hands, and Iran, not the United States influences Iraq’s political destiny.

One can go on, especially now about Afghanistan, but surely the point is made: as the American people are told the conjured tales of the policy advocates, the senior military command stays silent; in fact, some assist, even fabricate, deceptive rationalization further underwriting deafening silence.

Effects

President Eisenhower’s worst nightmare described in his January 1961 farewell address has become fulfilled. Today’s consolidated defense industries have become inseparable from the government and hold political careers in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives at risk if sufficient tax dollars are not committed to the industries’ expensive defense products. That the politicians succumb, holding their political well-being above the merits of any weapons debate, is the very definition of careerism. Unless and until the politicians realize their political fate hinges on a broader perspective, their votes on defense issues will be driven by their narrowly perceived short-term interest, mostly “pork” and campaign contributions.

The “revolving door” enriches civilian executives in the defense industry, and its supporting consulting businesses, for periodic service in the Department of Defense, and it rewards retired generals and admirals for their access to the men and women they left behind in the Pentagon and not coincidentally promoted to flag rank. Rewards are particularly plentiful for the three- and four-star officers who supported and defended expensive defense programs even when the usefulness of the programs was doubted inside their own service bureaucracies, among other places.

Consequently, it’s no surprise that federal auditors, poring over the Defense Department’s conflicting financial statements, missing data and accounting discrepancies, are unable to provide an accurate accounting of the Defense Department’s books.  According to a July 8, 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office, the generals in U.S. Central Command and Washington, D.C. lost $1.2 billion worth of war materiel shipped to Iraq for the campaign to remove Saddam Hussein from power. More recently, a congressional staff report found aid to Afghanistan ending up in the hands of the Taliban. This sort of thing would almost be funny, in an insane sort of way, if poor senior leadership did not result in the loss of American life in uniform, undermine American strategic interests abroad, drain the United States Treasury of its tax dollars, and erode the economic well-being of the American people the nation’s flag officers are sworn to defend.

Perhaps, the lack of accountability explains why supposedly objective, retired military officers retained as analysts by national television networks have little incentive to jeopardize their lucrative contracts with the political and industrial elites by telling the American people the hard facts about events in Iraq or Afghanistan? Nurturing the Pentagon money flow and the domestic political environment that supports it while influencing their chosen successors—often their former aides—to keep the money spigots open profoundly changes the message the retired generals and colonels send to the listening audience.

These behaviors help reinforce the myth that only generals and admirals can or should formulate the fundamental principles governing the application of American military power, or even military doctrine. Today, this myth has transformed the president, as well as members of the House and the Senate, into doormats for the four-stars. Secretary of Defense Gates and the Army and Marine Corps four-stars in U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) currently wield more influence over U.S. defense and foreign policy than any senator or congressman, and almost no one in the mainstream media is willing to challenge anything they say or do.

Renewed enthusiasm in the four-star ranks for pursuit of the presidency is surely also related to these trends. It’s no secret that a four-star general who transforms himself into a political figure while still in uniform with the aid of political allies in the press and Congress can be so powerful the president may be reluctant to publicly oppose him. After all, members of Congress are always willing to cultivate outspoken four-star generals for narrow partisan advantage. Gen. David Petraeus, the current CENTCOM commander, [and nominated last week by President Obama to be the next director of the CIA]  is the latest in the succession of Army four-stars (including former NATO Commanders Alexander Haig and Wesley Clark) who clearly harbors, despite denials, aspirations to be president.

It is against this backdrop of tumultuous change in civil-military relations since Eisenhower left office that officers coming to Washington, D.C. for the first time – in many instances from arduous duty as company, battalion or brigade commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan – must be viewed. These are the officers that members of Congress and their staffs are likely to meet, and it is from their ranks that will spring the next generation of flag officers. Understanding what makes these officers tick is the real challenge.

Understanding Military Officers

It’s impossible to talk about officers in the armed forces without some mention of demographics. As in the past, the overwhelming majority of officers (roughly 75 per cent) are of European ancestry. However, regardless of their ethnic origin, American officers are more likely to be from high-income families and they are on average better educated than most American citizens. This demographic profile is consistent with historic data in all, but one way. Today’s officers are more religious than their predecessors were 20 or 30 years ago, and they’ve grown up inside a military bureaucracy that differs in important ways from the Reagan-era armed forces.

There are other factors as well. Today, the new paradigm of warfare (counterinsurgency) creates bureaucratic power bases and careerists that derive their relevance from the currently accepted view of war. Few, if any, military officers rose to prominence in the aftermath of the Vietnam War by arguing for an institutional doctrine that addressed the complexities of limited wars. Today, just about no one will rise through the ranks by raising issues about the U.S. armed forces’ ironically new exclusive strategic focus on counterinsurgency. The overemphasis on counterinsurgency must be countered by candid debate and coming to grips with fourth generation warfare – the legacy of failed states and hybrid threats.

The tendency inside the peacetime military to advance officers who tell the boss what he wants to hear is well known; being candid is not career enhancing. This chronic lack of professional candor is now a pervasive facet of political correctness and careerism that supports a new doctrinal orthodoxy inside DOD. That new orthodoxy is a doctrine based in part on a popular journalistic narrative that is deeply flawed but coincides with the careerist modus operandi of going along to get along. In practice, the advocates of this doctrinal orthodoxy are not telling U.S. ground forces to adapt to future strategic conditions and global hybrid threats. They are instead telling American forces to train and equip almost exclusively for future unwanted occupations inside the Islamic world.

Unfortunately, the officers advocating doctrinal orthodoxy and persistent warfare inside the Islamic world are as career-minded and oppressive as those who maintained the fiction that Operation Desert Storm validated warmed over “Blitzkrieg theory” in the form of air-land battle doctrine in 1991. The use of the term “counterinsurgency” to describe conflicts inside the Muslim world creates the illusion the United States has “discovered” a military solution to societal misery. This assertion is untrue, and officers who’ve served for years in places where no sane American would voluntarily spend two minutes will make these points in private if asked.

Many officers today think America’s national security demands armed forces organized around the capability to fight enemies with the capability to fight back – enemies that look like our own conventional forces and are not optimized for counterinsurgency, or even split down the middle that try to do both. A major with two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan summed up the problem that weighs heavily on the minds of many officers in the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines:

“If we were to fight against someone who was capable and at least marginally equipped, we could, for the first time since the Korean War or World War II, find ourselves fighting on someone else’s time schedule and initiative. No one in the force today knows what it is to fight on someone else’s clock. If we were hit and hit hard during a build-up, if we faced a capable anti-air threat that knocked a few aircraft, manned or unmanned, out of the sky, against a naval threat that could actually threaten our surface combatants in coastal waters, or that had a ground force that could give battle and launch surprise attacks of their own, our collective psyche’s would be shocked, and our forces paralyzed.”

In sum, our armed forces today are tasked to fight occupational wars they cannot win and they are unprepared for the enemies we claim to be best suited for. That the voices you can faintly hear expressing concern about this (and the assertion that it is not a hardware acquisition question – i.e. a money-making issue) come from the middle of and beneath the officer corps shows how vacant the careerist minds at the top have become. 

The Officer Corps in the Balance

In years past, it was easy to identify officers who spent their time checking with superiors or peers concerning whether or not to act. These types seldom pursued what was right. They were simply “staying in their lane,” as the saying goes. Officers with the moral courage to take a stand on the grounds that it was in the interest of the American people, even when it might contradict the service’s bureaucratic guidelines, were not easy to find, but not uncommon. Today, officers with these attributes still exist, but they are very hard to find. Officers who do so now must be extremely clever, as well as extraordinarily courageous. The erosion that caused this change is an important change that outsiders, including journalists and Hill staffers, must grasp and appreciate.

Officers’ disenchantment with the nation’s focus on hostile occupations and armed nation-building is matched by a growing lack of confidence in, and recognition of careerism among, the field-grade officers, i.e., colonels and generals, but also those senior enlisted who have opted for careerism – aping their officers.

My personal experience and recent surveys indicate that junior officers in the U.S. Army (and Marine Corps) feel a lot of dissatisfaction with the quality of senior leadership. This “disconnect” between junior officers, and their commanders, has been around for more than a decade. It’s gotten worse with a war on, because, unlike past wars, there has not been widespread removal of battalion and brigade commanders who did not perform well. In World War II and Korea, it was common for commanders who did not deliver, to be replaced. With a war going on now and junior officers facing life and death situations because their commanders were not being aggressive or innovative enough, many have been leaving the service.

Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, U.S. Army, returned in 2009 from two months in Iraq where he interviewed young Army officers for a research project. His observation reinforces the comments above: “There is enormous pride among young officers in their units and in each other, but I see strong evidence that they are rapidly losing faith in the Army and the country’s political leadership.” Careerism and political correctness in all the services may be taking a much greater toll (although a somewhat different one) on our personnel than the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Concluding Thoughts

The U.S. military is not led by a Centurion or Spartan class of hardened professionals. Perhaps it should be. The leadership of the armed forces looks bleak, save for a very few. The outliers among senior officers are those who are willing to take unpopular positions for the troops’ or nation’s benefit (not for their own benefit and career enhancement) on politically charged issues. For example, Generals Conway and Amos articulate opposition inside the Marine Corps to the repeal of the “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” policy regarding gay and lesbian service members (DADT), reflecting a sentiment in the Corps’ ranks. Whether or not one agrees or disagrees with DADT, is not the issue. The point is Generals Conway and Amos have the moral courage to state their position as unpopular as it may be in some politically correct circles. This writer submits too many, unlike these generals, would rather go along to get along.

For the moment, U.S. military culture and the essence of conducting warfare within clearly defined Constitutional and sensible strategic parameters are insidiously perverted by domestic political interests, political correctness and political constituencies inside the senior ranks of America’s military establishment fused to the generals’ and admirals’ unabashed careerism.

The questions members of Congress and journalists should ask are the questions on the minds of many officers in the armed forces regarding these issues: Are the four-star generals and admirals merely military “caretakers” for the assigned mission without taking moral or professional responsibility for the assignment to which American military power is committed? Are conflicts with Islamic groups that have no armies, no air defenses and no air forces yet another avenue for generals, admirals and colonels to pursue selfish ends?

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling writes about the failure to resist utterly stupid and self-defeating policies conceived in Washington, D.C. Yingling contends that this failure is not the result of “individual failures, but rather a crisis of an entire institution.”  America’s generals and admirals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war, yet they advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy.

Meanwhile America’s generals, colonels, admirals and captains blinded by the illusion of bureaucratic power, mimic the behaviors of the politicians, managers and policy advocates. Individuals preoccupied with their own internal goals are blind to what is happening around them: “Being in a position of power makes people feel they can do no wrong.” As a result of this intoxication with power, careerists unwittingly (and wittingly) underwrite a defense-industrial-congressional complex where the primary purpose is awarding contracts and shoveling power, perks and money in disparate forms, rather than winning wars.

How do we fix this? Part of the answer is military reform ushered in by drastic budget cuts to hardware programs Col. Michael Wyly, U.S. Marine Corps, ret., who is held in high respect, seeks a culture where a warrior class of “mavericks” is accepted and those who place themselves above the time-honored principles of military service (duty, honor, country) find themselves on the outside looking in. Wyly observes of the consummate Pentagon maverick, Col. John Boyd :

“Yet it is unfortunate that we have to think of him as a maverick. He should have been the norm: an independent thinker who did his own research on a daily basis and espoused his views regardless of convention because he had the courage to do so. Courage is a virtue. In the military profession, courage tops the list of virtues required and demanded. My experiences in combat demonstrated that you can’t have the physical kind of courage without the moral kind. Officers with Boyd’s degree of moral courage need to be the norm, not the mavericks. Another way of putting it is that we all need to have the courage to be mavericks when institutional thought stagnates. But we have a responsibility not to let it stagnate.”

G.I. Wilson (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.) has deployed on multiple combat tours with the Marines; he holds a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York – Albany and a master’s degree from Webster University. He teaches criminal justice at the college level and is a graduate student in forensic psychology currently doing an internship with University of California, San Diego’s Department of Psychiatry. This essay is one of the contributions to The Pentagon Labyrinth: Ten Short Essays to Help You Through It, edited by Winslow T. Wheeler and published bythe Center for Defense Information / World Security Institute and accessible, with footnotes, at http://dnipogo.org/labyrinth/

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Morlock and Friends

By JEFF SPARROW

In 2010, Jeremy Morlock and Andrew Holmes, two US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, set out to kill a civilian, for no other reason than that they could.The latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine documents the activities of Morlock and Holmes and the so-called ‘Kill Team’ they led, activities that culminated in the murder of a young farmer named Gul Mudin.

The story is shocking. But, depressingly, much of it is also very familiar. Consider, for instance, a brief video taken by the soldiers, documenting an airstrike on two suspected insurgents. Like Wikileaks’ ‘Collateral Murder’ video, the soundtrack records the unabashed pleasure the men take in watching the Afghanis die.

The soldiers subsequently edited the clip for distribution, sexing up the footage with a rock soundtrack and a title card reading ‘Death Zone’. Throughout the internet, there’s a flourishing genre of such home-made combat films. As far back as 2005, the Pentagon denounced the proliferation of clips in which real deaths had been overdubbed with heavy metal or hip hop, on the basis that, as the New York Sun rather diplomatically put it, ‘they could be regarded as anti-Arab’.

Another clip from the Rolling Stone story shows soldiers gunning down two armed Afghan men riding a motorbike. After the shooting, the men gather round the corpses. ‘I want to look at my kill,’ says one, and all the soldiers pull out cameras and begin snapping. That photographic enthusiasm produced a cache that Rolling Stone’s Mark Boal describes: a grotesque image gallery of severed heads, mutilated torsos and other body parts, sometimes adorned with props.

Again, we’ve seen this before.

In late 2005, an adult site called nowthatsfuckedup.com began offering serving US soldiers access to sexual material in exchange for photos proving they were in combat zones. The proprietors expected photos of locales. Instead, they received so many images of body parts and corpses that, before being shut down, they established a special gallery to display this war porn alongside their more traditional brand of smut.

Boal argues that the photos from the Kill Team’s Third Platoon exemplified a culture of hostility toward, and contempt for, the people of Afghanistan. ‘Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people, whether it was the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army or locals,’ one soldier explained to investigators. ‘Everyone would say they’re savages.’

That was the context in which Morlock and Holmes embarked on their thrill-killings. And that was the also context in which no-one tried to stop them. The military trains soldiers to kill; killing entails dehumanization. But in wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s very easy for that dehumanization to take on an explicitly racial dynamic.

A few years ago, I interviewed Camilo Mejía, a US Iraq veteran active in the anti-war movement. ‘The moment we got [to Iraq],’ he told me, ‘we realised that they were calling [Iraqis] “hajis”.’ [T]hey used it to dehumanize everything. Haji applied to everything, not just the people. It was haji food,haji women, haji kids, haji music – everything was haji, worthless.’

I remembered Mejía last week, in the context of a scandal about Australian troops in Afghanistan, who had been using FaceBook to describe Afghans as ‘sand coons’, ‘dune coons’, ‘niggers’, and ‘smelly locals’. Now, it’s a long way from insults to murder, and there’s no suggestion that those soldiers backing up their racism with illegitimate violence.Nonetheless, there’s all kinds of historical evidence to suggest that, in wars in which the enemy is understood as racially inferior, the kind of sociopathy documented by Rolling Stonebecomes far more prevalent.

For instance, before the advent of portable cameras, battlefield souveniring often involved the collection not of images of bodies but the body parts themselves. Yet that practice was considerably less common in, say, the Western Front of the First World War, where the combatants were culturally familiar with each other, than on the Pacific Front during the Second World War, where both sides saw the other as entirely subhuman. Such was the quantity of body parts taken that US soldiers returning from combat in the Pacific were routinely asked whether they were carrying bones; in 1984, a team repatriating wartime Japanese corpses from the Mariana Islandsestimated that an astonishing 60 per cent lacked skulls, presumably because they’d been souvenired.

Authorities might talk about the need to win ‘hearts and minds’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. But in the context of an occupation there’s a countervailing pressure to discourage soldiers from empathizing with the locals they police.

Mejía put it like this. ‘They don’t prepare you for a different culture, and they don’t want you to understand it, because understanding Iraqi culture means you humanize Iraqis. […] It’s not in their interests that you have those conversations; it’s not in their interests that you view the people as people.’

Ronn Cantu, another Iraq veteran turned peacenik, described the same phenomenon. ‘[T]here’s a perception that they’re less than human, more like animals. […] When people don’t speak your language, you feel that they’re incapable of communication, just because you don’t understand them. In Iraq, that’s a multiplied a thousandfold – and then you’re given a rifle and told that whatever you do, you won’t get into any trouble.’

As it happens, the soldiers from the Third Platoon ‘Kill Team’ are, in fact, in trouble, with five soldiers charged with murder. Yet Rolling Stone describes an army desperately scrambling to portray those involved as ‘bad apples’ even though murders of civilians were allegedly ‘common knowledge’ among the unit. No officers have been charged — indeed, some have been promoted — despite allegations they knew about the killings from the beginning.

Conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan require very young men to police a population that’s largely hostile to their presence. The dynamic between occupiers and occupied facilitates a racial antipathy, such that some of those young men will inevitably do terrible things.

Yes, individual perpetrators must be held accountable for their crimes. But should we not also be asking questions about the character of wars that foster such a tremendous hatred toward the civilian population in whose name we are supposedly fighting?

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland magazine and the author of Killing:Misadventures in Violence.

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Kosovo’s Dirty Secrets

By JEAN-ARNAULT DÉRENS

On October 27, 1999 Budimir Baljosevic, a teacher aged 50, and four friends tried to escape from the ghetto to which the Serbs of the Kosovan town of Orahovac/Rahovec had been confined. Kosovo had been placed under interim United Nations administration in June that year, and a Nato-led peacekeeping force, KFOR, had moved in.

A Roma resident of the town, Agron N, had offered to guide them to Rozaje in Montenegro, for a fee of $840 each. His credentials justified the high price: he worked with the TMK (Kosovo Protection Corps), an organization supervised by Nato; its mission was the social reintegration of former guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA); he had already completed four successful “exfiltrations” of Serbs from Orahovac; a bricklayer by trade, he was involved in the construction of a new TMK base in the neighbouring town of Djakovica/Gjakove – where the five Serbs were last seen.

Agron N explained: “I stopped to look for my brother-in-law, who was supposed to come with us, driving in convoy. I left the Serbs in the car. When I came out of my brother-in-law’s house, someone shouted to me to hide and strangers took the Serbs. No one’s heard from them since.” He decided it was better for his own safety to spend a few months in Novi Pazar, in Serbia. Baljosevic’s brother tried many times to get news of the five Serbs, without success: “Some Italian soldiers from KFOR came to see me, and the UN police, too, but I never heard anything.”

Their fate is commonplace. Negovan Mavric keeps a small café at Velika Hoca, a Serb enclave a few kilometers from Orahovac/Rahovec, and runs the local branch of the Association of Families of Kidnapped and Missing Persons in Kosovo and Metohija. He showed me a list of the village’s dead and missing: the remains of 19 Serbs kidnapped in 1998 and 1999 have been found, but 55 Serbs and nine Roma are still missing. The first murder of a Serb civilian was recorded on May 12, 1998, when the Serbian police and the KLA began to fight for control of the district, where many Serbs then lived. The last kidnapping was on July 28, 2000, more than a year after the UN protectorate was established.

The hills around Velika Hoca are covered with vineyards; the mountains high above them mark the border between Kosovo and Albania. In the past, Albanians and Serbs coexisted peacefully in the Orahovac/Rahovec district. Since June 1999 the Serb population has fallen from nearly 10,000 to 700 in Velika Hoca, and 300 in the upper part of the town of Orahovac. The Serbs have been driven out of mixed villages such as Zociste, Opterusa and Retimlije.

The majority of the missing Serbs were kidnapped as early as July 1998, when the KLA briefly besieged Orahovac. Then a large number of Serb civilians from Retimlije were taken to a KLA base in the nearby village of Semetiste. The women were freed four days later, after the Red Cross intervened; none of the men (one just 16 years old) were seen alive again. In April 2005 some were identified among the remains of 21 people buried in a mass grave some distance away, in the village of Volujak/Valljake, near Klina.

Held on suspicion

Olgica Bozanic, a Serb from Orahovac who has taken refuge in Belgrade, is a member of the Association of Families of Kidnapped and Missing Persons. She may have lost as many as 10 relatives, including her two brothers, uncles and cousins. She heard news of one from Albanian former neighbors, who were held for several months by the guerrillas on suspicion of collaboration with the Serbian regime. They said that some Serbs from the Orahovac area were initially held near the main KLA base in the area, in the village of Drenovac/Drenovce. After the fighting stopped, they were transferred to Deva, a village in the Has mountains, near the Albanian border. It seems the KLA had occupied a base abandoned by the Yugoslav army when it withdrew in June 1999, and converted it into a detention centre. The Orahovac Serbs were then taken to Kukes, in Albania, and later to Durres, on the Albanian coast, where Bozanic’s former neighbours claimed to have seen them alive, in a KLA prison, in 2001.

Most Serbs kidnapped before the end of the war were probably killed inside Kosovo. The idea that those kidnapped after KFOR drove in were taken to Albania was put forward some time ago, but there has been no trace of them. In autumn 1999 Sefko Alomerovic, president of the district of Novi Pazar’s Helsinki Committee (a local organization, independent of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia), conducted a long inquiry, but the report has been lost and Alomerovic died in 2003. In interviews in 2000, he claimed to have visited five detention centers in Kosovo. These were small facilities – often converted garages or industrial buildings on the outskirts of towns – housing 10-50 detainees. The centers were under the authority of a Commandant “Mala” (real name Alush Agushi), a close associate of Ramush Haradinaj. Some families had tried to ransom detainees, but although large sums of money had been paid to intermediaries, none had ever been freed.

Some Serbs had been kept with a view to exchanging them for Albanian prisoners in Serbia, whose numbers were estimated at around 800 in 2000. There is no evidence that any exchanges ever took place. Some sources claim that many Serb detainees were executed in 2001, when Serbia passed an amnesty law and freed Albanians suspected of having belonged to the KLA. Some detention centers in Kosovo were used as staging camps for both Serb and Albanian prisoners awaiting transfer to Albania. Alomerovic was the first to mention human organ trafficking, suspecting that international criminal networks were buying organs supplied by members of the KLA.

Wall of silence

His revelations were not followed up and were in fact rejected by international organizations in Kosovo, including the UN interim administration mission, then led by Bernard Kouchner. Alomerovic, well known as a human rights militant and a long-term opponent of the Milosevic regime, talked of a “wall of silence”; KFOR denied the existence of any detention centers in Kosovo, in spite of evidence. Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, has also described this wall of silence, which she encountered when attempting to investigate the disappearance of Serb civilians and rumours of human organ trafficking.

As Dick Marty has emphasised in many interviews since the publication of his  report to the Council of Europe “everybody in Kosovo” knew of the disappearance of Serb civilians, and of the detention during the war of many Albanians suspected of collaborating with the Serbian regime. Since 1999 the Pristina daily Bota Sot has never stopped denouncing the elimination of sympathizers of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK, founded by the late Ibrahim Rugova), during and since the war. The paper’s editor Bajrush Morina summed it up: “Three thousand people have been murdered in Kosovo since 1999, and only 600 of those murders have been solved. There’s been a lot of talk of revenge killings by families, but most are political murders.” Two of the paper’s reporters have been killed and Morina had to hire private bodyguards for a time. Yet the stories Bota Sot publishes have always been regarded with suspicion, given its relationship with the LDK.

Bota Sot has regularly reported the existence of detention centers in Kosovo and Albania, where Albanians accused of collaboration were held. In February this year the trial of former KLA commanders Sabit Geci and Riza Alijaj began in Mitrovica. They are accused of committing serious crimes against detainees in a camp at Cahan, in the mountains of northern As from the Kosovo border.
During the war, the secluded village of Cahan was used by the KLA as a logistics centre and a rear base for volunteers going to fight in Kosovo. Local strongman Bedri Cahani admitted that the inhabitants of Cahan smuggled cigarettes into Kosovo and that he was recruited by the KLA in autumn 1997, mainly to smuggle fighters over the mountains at night. The KLA was using an Albanian army barracks, abandoned in 1992, which still stands at the entrance to the village: this also housed a detention centre, mentioned by Marty. Cahan is a secluded spot, nearly 10km by rough mountain tracks from the town of Kruma.

ZZ spent two and a half months in “hell” at Cahan, and will be a key protected witness at the trial of Geci and Alijaj. He remembers systematic abuse and serious torture. Some detainees were forced to have sexual relations with each other; others were subjected to simulated executions. But, he told me, “I was probably the longest-serving prisoner at Cahan, and I only saw Albanians.” He had also seen some of the KLA’s most important commanders in Cahan, especially Hashim Thaci, Kosovo’s current prime minister.

All the detainees there in 1999 were, like ZZ, senior figures in the LDK. Most were arrested in the towns of Kukes and Kruma, which were full of refugees driven out of Kosovo by the Serbian forces. Some were members of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo (Fark), a guerrilla movement rival to the KLA, started, without much success on the ground, by supporters of Ibrahim Rugova.

The Drenica Group

Marty’s report singles out as responsible an internal faction of the KLA, which it refers to as the “Drenica Group”, listing as members Hashim Thaci, Azem Syla, Xhavit Haliti, Kadri Veseli, Fatmir Limaj, Sabit Geci and Riza Alijaj. These former guerrilla commanders are all from the Drenica area; they were also members of the Popular Movement of Kosovo (LPK), a secret Marxist-Leninist organization favorable to the Albanian Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha. The movement emerged among the Albanian diaspora in Switzerland, and had an extensive network of clandestine militants in Kosovo. It was the LPK that created the KLA in 1996, bringing together a number of groups of independent militants already operating in Kosovo, mainly in the Drenica area. The best known, Adem Jashari, a great hero who is virtually worshipped in Kosovo, was killed by the Serbian police on March 6, 1998. His cousin, Gani Geci, survived and narrowly escaped an attempt on his life in 2001. Geci has never joined the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), the direct successor to the LPK. He is from the family of the bajraktar(hereditary village chieftain) of the village of Llausha, in the Drenica area. He remained a member of the LDK and later of a small splinter group, whom he represented during the last Kosovo parliament.
Geci told me: “We were faithful to Ibrahim Rugova, and we had never heard of the LPK, nor of Fark: as far as we were concerned, the KLA badge united all the fighters. When the LPK people arrived from Switzerland, we made them welcome. They had money and promised us weapons, but we quickly realized they were only interested in power. In any case, they never fought the Serbs. They relied on Nato to do that. They only fought other Albanians, to gain absolute power, and, since the end of the war they have systematically bled Kosovo dry.”

His claims are largely confirmed by a recently declassified Nato report from 2003, which identifies Haliti as the “godfather” of Kosovo, controlling most illegal activities, including smuggling, drug trafficking and prostitution. As well as being a senior figure in the LPK, Haliti was notorious as an agent of the Sigurimi, the secret service of Stalinist Albania. He is a top leader of the Drenica Group, which is synonymous with the leadership of the LPK and today’s PDK.

The PDK had a powerful tool in the Sherbimi Informativ i Kosoves (Shik), an intelligence service headed by Veseli and Syla. In 2009 Kosovo was shaken by the revelations of a former Shik agent, Nazim Bllaca, who admitted having murdered an Albanian who had collaborated with the Serbian police. Under house arrest while awaiting trial, Bllaca is once more free to speak to the press. In an interview in Koha Ditore this January, he claimed that Shik had killed “600 people in the first few months after the establishment of the UN protectorate and 1,000 over 12 months”.

People are beginning to talk in Kosovo about the violence by the KLA against Albanians accused of collaboration, or those whose political persuasion differed from the guerrillas. However, nobody yet wants to talk about the fate of the missing Serbs. ZZ explained that, at the end of the war, he was transferred from the camp at Cahan to the town of Prizren, in Kosovo: “For several days, they kept me in the cellar of a house, with seven elderly Serbs and one Roma. There were two of us Albanian prisoners from the camp at Cahan, and our gaolers forced us to hit the old Serbs. In the end, some German soldiers from KFOR freed me, but the Serbs had already been taken away, I don’t know where.”

I was unable to find any evidence that, after the war was over, the camp at Cahan had also housed Serbs intended to supply the trade in human organs. However, when Cahan housed a torture centre for “dissident” members of the KLA, in spring 1999, it was visited regularly by members of US special forces.

Translated by Charles Goulden

Jean-Arnault Dérens is editor of Le Courrier des Balkan(balkans.courriers.info); his latest book, co-authored with Laurent Geslin, isVoyage au pays des Gorani: Balkans, début du XXIe siècle (Journey to the Land of the Gorani: the Balkans at the Start of the 21st Century), Cartouche, Paris, 2010. This article appears in the April edition of the excellent monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found atmondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

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