Over the years I have watched in general amazement as our Special Operations Forces have travelled around the world an whacked every two bit wannabe terrorist in the world. The good news is that we are very, very good at this sort of thing. The problem?
ww.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-anwar-al-awlaki.html?_r=0
It is not making one lick of difference. In fact, in places like Yemen where Answr al-Awlaki and his Al Qaeda cohorts were targeted the result was not a safer Yemen ... it was the collapse of Yemen into something chaotic. The same can be seen happening in Iraq/Syria where our efforts against ISIS have had almost no effect and a retiring Chief of Staff of the Army acknowledges that we may have to consider partition of Iraq. Afghanistan isn't doing much better despite over a decade of taking out low and high level Taliban, with the Taliban recently seizing terrain in Southern Afghanistan.
So what is the problem? Why isn't all this effort is eliminating bad guys producing the results that it SHOULD produce? The answer? We are not dealing with ALL the bad guys.
Let me share with you LTG Ali-Gadan, the Iraqi Ground Forces Commander. A man that controlled all Iraqi ground forces outside of Baghdad when I first met him in 2008. To call the man corrupt would be a statement of fact, but would hardly begin to encapsulate the sheer magnitude of what this man stole. In one case, meeting a new tribal chief (himself something of a mafia figure), we walked into his house and LTG Gadan decided he liked the man's chandelier - and promptly had his henchmen jump up on a table and remove it (right in front of his American Advisors).
The upshot is that we spent billions building a credible Iraqi force that collapsed in 2014 when a couple of hundred ISIS fighters appeared. Why? Because for the previous six years, a collection of corrupt men like LTG Gadan were soaking their own forces. Medical supplies? Too easy to push into the black market and the officers get their appropriate cut, Soldiers go without. Gas is too easy to dilute or simply not deliver, and Soldiers go without. Food budgets are way too easy to skim, and Soldiers are left to either starve are tap into their own paychecks (which are often skimmed as well). Buildings can be skimped on, leaving the Soldiers in shoddy conditions. The corruption was all present and invasive. The Soldiers knew it.
So when they were attacked? They knew their corrupt officers (Not all mind you, but a good chunk) were the first to flee, and so they did too - leaving ISIS with billions of dollars of military equipment. (Sounds like Basra eight years earlier, guess who the IGFC CDR was?) It's not like we didn't know that massive corruption was a problem, but can we acknowledge what a massive strategic failure it is to create a military force whose sole purpose seems to be to allow corrupt men to hollow it our for their own profit?
Afghanistan is no better. In Southern Afghanistan there is a man name Bachachan (Sp?). This is a man famous not just for corruption, but for the gang rape of 'arrested criminals' and 'Taliban'. He and his henchmen would drag young men off the street and then rape them until they coughed up information. Our American pride was sated by extracting a promise that this behavior would ONLY be used with the Taliban. Bachachan has been promoted through the ranks in the Afghan Police forces, and, with the withdrawal of US forces, his district has been sorely pressed by the Taliban (with plenty of local support). Again, its not like we were unaware of this guy's behavior.
Now stop for a second and imagine how an American community would react to having a police force that was dragging young men off the street and gang raping them into confessions and sometimes murdering them? Ferguson, MO would be a picnic. Yet was asked people in Afghanistan to accept this as BETTER than the Taliban?
In fact, time and time again, we ask local populations to reject our enemies. Yet the alternative we offer them is a bunch of corrupt goons whose sole purpose is to extract wealth from the local populace. We, with all our violent capabilities, do nothing about this. Not a thing. We often, in defiance of our own values, use of force to prop these guys up, breeding even more resentment.
To be fair, there are incredibly capable people in thee countries. I, for example, got to work with LTG Hussein Al-Awadi. His resurrection of the National Police is proof positive of what happens when honorable men lead local forces. To our credit, we supported LTG Hussein, but I am still trying to figure out why we spent so much effort on LTG Ali-Gadan?
The question is what to do about all of this? I will submit that we are very, very good at removing bad guys. I will submit that 'bad guys' include those would nominally sign up for our side, but do so only to extract wealth from us and their own people. We have the ability to make these guys go away. We have the ability to do it with plausible deniability (locals must be pissed about his corruption, eh?)
Why aren't we?
Why are we instead fostering regimes ripe with corruption? Regimes that steal our efforts our from under us, even as our enemies cannot defeat us on the battlefield? Why do we ask local people to choose between brutal regimes and corrupt and brutal regimes?
If the US is serious about tackling issues in the ME and Afghanistan, then it needs to focus less on kinetics and more about rooting out the fifth column of corrupt 'leaders' sitting right next to us and undermining everything we are doing. Simply put, why we let Ali-Gadan extract wealth from the force WE created for almost a decade, leaving a hollow shell behind, is incomprehensible. It took the fall of Mosul and the complete collapse of the Iraqi ground forces to 'see' the damage he did. Yet no where is this being talked about, even as we 'retrain' and 'rebuild' the Iraqi forces to take on ISIS.
Maybe we should deal with the larger problem of corruption first?
ww.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-anwar-al-awlaki.html?_r=0
It is not making one lick of difference. In fact, in places like Yemen where Answr al-Awlaki and his Al Qaeda cohorts were targeted the result was not a safer Yemen ... it was the collapse of Yemen into something chaotic. The same can be seen happening in Iraq/Syria where our efforts against ISIS have had almost no effect and a retiring Chief of Staff of the Army acknowledges that we may have to consider partition of Iraq. Afghanistan isn't doing much better despite over a decade of taking out low and high level Taliban, with the Taliban recently seizing terrain in Southern Afghanistan.
So what is the problem? Why isn't all this effort is eliminating bad guys producing the results that it SHOULD produce? The answer? We are not dealing with ALL the bad guys.
Let me share with you LTG Ali-Gadan, the Iraqi Ground Forces Commander. A man that controlled all Iraqi ground forces outside of Baghdad when I first met him in 2008. To call the man corrupt would be a statement of fact, but would hardly begin to encapsulate the sheer magnitude of what this man stole. In one case, meeting a new tribal chief (himself something of a mafia figure), we walked into his house and LTG Gadan decided he liked the man's chandelier - and promptly had his henchmen jump up on a table and remove it (right in front of his American Advisors).
The upshot is that we spent billions building a credible Iraqi force that collapsed in 2014 when a couple of hundred ISIS fighters appeared. Why? Because for the previous six years, a collection of corrupt men like LTG Gadan were soaking their own forces. Medical supplies? Too easy to push into the black market and the officers get their appropriate cut, Soldiers go without. Gas is too easy to dilute or simply not deliver, and Soldiers go without. Food budgets are way too easy to skim, and Soldiers are left to either starve are tap into their own paychecks (which are often skimmed as well). Buildings can be skimped on, leaving the Soldiers in shoddy conditions. The corruption was all present and invasive. The Soldiers knew it.
So when they were attacked? They knew their corrupt officers (Not all mind you, but a good chunk) were the first to flee, and so they did too - leaving ISIS with billions of dollars of military equipment. (Sounds like Basra eight years earlier, guess who the IGFC CDR was?) It's not like we didn't know that massive corruption was a problem, but can we acknowledge what a massive strategic failure it is to create a military force whose sole purpose seems to be to allow corrupt men to hollow it our for their own profit?
Afghanistan is no better. In Southern Afghanistan there is a man name Bachachan (Sp?). This is a man famous not just for corruption, but for the gang rape of 'arrested criminals' and 'Taliban'. He and his henchmen would drag young men off the street and then rape them until they coughed up information. Our American pride was sated by extracting a promise that this behavior would ONLY be used with the Taliban. Bachachan has been promoted through the ranks in the Afghan Police forces, and, with the withdrawal of US forces, his district has been sorely pressed by the Taliban (with plenty of local support). Again, its not like we were unaware of this guy's behavior.
Now stop for a second and imagine how an American community would react to having a police force that was dragging young men off the street and gang raping them into confessions and sometimes murdering them? Ferguson, MO would be a picnic. Yet was asked people in Afghanistan to accept this as BETTER than the Taliban?
In fact, time and time again, we ask local populations to reject our enemies. Yet the alternative we offer them is a bunch of corrupt goons whose sole purpose is to extract wealth from the local populace. We, with all our violent capabilities, do nothing about this. Not a thing. We often, in defiance of our own values, use of force to prop these guys up, breeding even more resentment.
To be fair, there are incredibly capable people in thee countries. I, for example, got to work with LTG Hussein Al-Awadi. His resurrection of the National Police is proof positive of what happens when honorable men lead local forces. To our credit, we supported LTG Hussein, but I am still trying to figure out why we spent so much effort on LTG Ali-Gadan?
The question is what to do about all of this? I will submit that we are very, very good at removing bad guys. I will submit that 'bad guys' include those would nominally sign up for our side, but do so only to extract wealth from us and their own people. We have the ability to make these guys go away. We have the ability to do it with plausible deniability (locals must be pissed about his corruption, eh?)
Why aren't we?
Why are we instead fostering regimes ripe with corruption? Regimes that steal our efforts our from under us, even as our enemies cannot defeat us on the battlefield? Why do we ask local people to choose between brutal regimes and corrupt and brutal regimes?
If the US is serious about tackling issues in the ME and Afghanistan, then it needs to focus less on kinetics and more about rooting out the fifth column of corrupt 'leaders' sitting right next to us and undermining everything we are doing. Simply put, why we let Ali-Gadan extract wealth from the force WE created for almost a decade, leaving a hollow shell behind, is incomprehensible. It took the fall of Mosul and the complete collapse of the Iraqi ground forces to 'see' the damage he did. Yet no where is this being talked about, even as we 'retrain' and 'rebuild' the Iraqi forces to take on ISIS.
Maybe we should deal with the larger problem of corruption first?
