I think it’s a combination of all those things. The U.S. military traditionally loathes nation-building, and it sees its primary mission as fighting and winning the nation’s wars, by which I mean conventional, inter-state war. The comfort zone of the U.S. military is a Gulf War, World War II-style operation. The reality is that the U.S. military spent many years doing different kinds of nation-building and insurgency missions, but it’s never embraced those missions. It’s always been [seen as] a kind of deviation from its true mission.
What we tend to see after these missions is a kind of backlash, like after Vietnam, where the U.S. military actually destroyed its own notes on counterinsurgency—the idea being that if we can’t do it, we won’t actually do it.
Meanwhile, political leaders are not very enthusiastic about nation-building. People on the left often see it as imperialism; people on the right see it as big government social engineering. It’s not a very popular endeavor. The end result is that the U.S. is a reluctant nation-builder and tends to want to end these missions as quickly as possible.
Why do we task the military with nation-building? It seems strange to expect a single institution to attack countries and to rebuild them.
Well, the U.S. military certainly wouldn’t be the only [institution] involved in nation-building. They have a range of other government agencies, like USAID and the State Department. But the military will always play a critical role in these nation-building operations because it has the capabilities. Especially in the immediate aftermath of regime change, there’s nobody else who provides security. Without security, really all of the other pieces of the nation-building jigsaw are not going to fit in its place.
So there’s no alternative to the military playing a key role, and therefore the military needs to train and prepare for these kinds of situations. It may be resistant to doing it, but you look around the world, and 90% of the wars today are civil wars. The kind of campaigns that the military and perhaps the American public wants to fight are very rare, and the kind of campaign that the military doesn’t want to fight is extremely common. Let’s be ready for these kinds of operations, because they’re almost inevitable.
You’ve written a smart book, and clearly there are lots of smart people in the military. But I keep wondering if there’s something about warfare that makes smart people do dumb things. No matter how much smartness we have, is that actually sufficient to bring about change?
There are plenty of smart people in the military, and yet when we look at these recent wars—Paul Bremer disbanding the Iraqi military in 2003, or the De-Baathification campaign—these were just genuine mistakes that were made in a tough situation. But then of course you have to cut slack to the leaders who were operating in a time of great uncertainty. It’s very easy for us to kind of Monday morning quarterback these campaigns years later.
On the other hand, before we went into Iraq, smart analysts raised questions and doubts about strategies and they were just ignored. So when you see these questions and these issues being raised, and see that the administration has just sidelined critics, I think it’s fair to be critical of that.
At the moment, when a war goes wrong, and the wheels start coming off, there’s basically nothing. There’s no guidance for a president; they basically just improvise their way out and that has not worked. So the idea behind the book is that there’ll be some kind of guidance, some kind of framework to understand this based on past experience, so that the president has to break the in-case-of-emergency glass, and there will be something there.
Something that has struck me about a lot of coverage of conflicts, including your book, is how few of the interviewees are from Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. Is it possible get a complete picture without hearing their views of the conflicts?
There are large parts of the [Iraq War, for example,] that would be impossible to understand without doing a lot of interviews in Iraq. You wouldn’t quite understand the dynamics of the Sunni-Shiite divide, and of course you couldn’t simply rely on U.S. analysis. Many of the books that I read cover these topics and are woven into the analysis.
Probably the most useful [interviews for this book] are the primary American [military leaders], in terms of understanding the dilemma from their perspective; after all, that is the perspective that the book looks at. But I deliberately tried to broaden my analysis a bit: I traveled to Israel and talked to the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli leadership about the Gaza exit [in 2005], deliberately to take a case that was outside the of the U.S. experience.
Shifting to contemporary, or ongoing conflicts, if you were invited to the White House to talk to Obama about ISIS, what issues would you focus on?