We Must Fight the War on Two Popular Fronts

By Matt Rowe, Executive Director, WinTheGWOT.org

When a foreign military force attempts to mitigate an insurgent conflict abroad it faces two major fronts in terms of popular support. The first is obvious—the host nation populace most affected by the conflict. The second front is back home where its underlying moral, political, economic, and material support comes from.

By now most Americans are familiar with the phrases “winning the hearts-and-minds” or “winning over the popular support of the people” as they pertain to counterinsurgency. These are absolute truisms and go to the heart of the challenge. Insurgents can only operate effectively if they enjoy some significant measure of active or passive support from the local populace; or if they can exploit issues like important political, ethnic, or religious tensions. Counterinsurgents can only be successful if they somehow deny that support to the enemy. Unfortunately, a foreign force cannot mitigate the root causes of someone else’s civil conflict. Only the host nation belligerents can do that—assuming they are capable and willing.

Unfortunately, in Iraq and Afghanistan, indiscriminate military and political actions by coalition forces have mostly served to alienate the populace rather than embrace it, and the ability of the militant and political factions to work out some sort of modus vivendi is in doubt. The amount of violence Iraqis have so far endured and perpetrated upon each other makes it fairly clear that much more is required than a foreign imposed and likely temporary “security” zone.

On the home front, the foreign military force can only continue its effort if the people paying for and fighting in the conflict believe that it is a worthy and winnable cause. American popular and political support is waning after four unproductive years of war. This is especially the case since some of our most senior military commanders have acknowledged that we were not institutionally prepared for this type of war and the reasons for going in the first place are so questionable.

Further, there is the grave absence of non-military and non-governmental support in theater for the effort to restore effective Iraqi government and social services. Human Rights violations at home and abroad and morally questionable decisions and legal interpretations by the current administration continue to destroy our nation’s credibility. This is all resulting in the significant loss of vital popular support from the home front.

Assuming that it is not yet too late, the US must change how it strategically manages the “war on terror,” both in the theater of operations and back home in the theater of perceptions. Until we and our allies begin applying the right tactical principles in both theaters we will not be any more successful. This is a tremendous shame, because General Petraeus understands all of this, but he has inherited two extremely challenging fronts for which he simply does not have the level of support required. Nor is he likely to receive it anytime soon.

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A Declaration The President Ignores

By John Fabian Witt
Published with the author's permission.
Originally published in the July 4, 2007 Washington Post

As we gather around picnic tables and backyard barbecues today, we should pause to consider a forgotten dimension of the occasion—one that is as important now as it was on July 4, 1776.

We all know that the Declaration of Independence announced the United States' freedom from the British Empire. We all remember that it declared certain truths to be self-evident. But what you probably haven't heard is that the declaration also advanced an idea about war. The idea was that war ought to be governed by law.

In late June 1776, as the first detachments of what was to become a sizable British force were landing 90 miles away in New York, Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress in Philadelphia drew up charges denouncing King George III to the world. The accusations were to serve as the core of the declaration. The climactic final charges, for which the rest were prologue, indicted the king for war crimes.

Britain's navy, wrote Jefferson and the Congress, had "plundered our Seas," while its armies had "ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People." Jefferson accused the British of employing legions of foreign mercenaries to commit acts of death and desolation "scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages," acts unworthy of civilized nations. He charged British forces with taking Americans hostage and compelling them to bear arms against their own country. He and the Congress concluded their litany of war crimes by condemning the king's two most fiendish offenses against the laws of war: inciting slave insurrections and encouraging attacks by "merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions."

Jefferson's original draft added a further war crime allegation that did not make it into Congress's final version: the "piratical warfare" of the English slave trade, which was a "cruel war against human nature itself." Delegates from Georgia and South Carolina insisted that the passage be removed. But as Jefferson conceived it, the slave trade was akin to piracy, the most treacherous violation of the 18th-century laws of war.

The declaration was the beginning of a remarkable but now little-remembered American tradition in the laws of war. In the 1780s, a treaty with Prussia committed the United States to follow European rules of warfare. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln published a code for the Union Army that serves to this day as the foundation for the law of war around the globe.

In the 20th century, Americans took a lead role in establishing the modern law of war. Franklin Roosevelt directed the creation of the Nuremberg tribunal for high-ranking German war criminals, and his aides wrote the U.N. charter's rules for the use of force. In this century we can see traces of Jefferson's charges in the law of naval warfare, in the distinction between combatants and civilians, in international law restricting the use of mercenaries and in the Third Geneva Convention's rules on prisoners of war.

Today, of course, much of the world thinks that the United States has traded places with George III's British Empire. We are the global hegemon, and since Sept. 11, 2001, we have become infamous the world over for eschewing the law of war in the name of patriotic self-defense. At Guantanamo, in shadowy secret CIA prisons, at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, leaders in the White House, the Justice Department, and the intelligence agencies have disowned the laws of war as unacceptable constraints on the pursuit of national security.

The tragedy of the post-Sept. 11 American assault on the laws of war is that it seems to have been not only shameful but self-defeating. Disrespect for what the declaration called "the Opinions of Mankind" has fueled anti-American sentiment and spurred terrorist recruitment in North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Illegal interrogation tactics seem to have produced disappointingly little intelligence. And extraordinary renditions to secret prisons have disrupted the cooperation of many of our most important allies in the war on terrorism, producing arrest warrants against U.S. intelligence agents in Germany and Italy. Patriotism at the expense of the laws of war seems to have gone badly awry.

For the delegates to the Continental Congress in 1776—as for Lincoln and Roosevelt in subsequent centuries—patriotism and the laws of war went hand in hand. Since the revolution, Americans have helped shape a law of war that advanced the nation's interests. In moments of great crisis, our finest leaders have forged a powerful union between the security of the nation and the laws of war. It's a lesson from the first July 4 that we could sorely use again this year.


John Fabian Witt, a professor of law and history at Columbia University, is writing a book on the laws of war in American history. His research and teaching interests focus on the history of American law. He is the author of two books: Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Harvard Press, 2007), which explores law and American nationalism at key moments in legal history since the Founding, and the prizewinning The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard Press, 2004). His articles have appeared in the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the New York Times, Slate, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book on the history of the law of war. Professor Witt joined the Columbia faculty in 2001 after clerking for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He received his B.A. (1994), J.D. (1999), and Ph.D. in history (2000) from Yale University.

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NATO Does Not Assume Enough Risk in the War in Afghanistan

By Matt Rowe, Executive Director, WinTheGWOT.org

According to the AP, official investigations after recent fighting in Afghanistan between US forces and the Taliban have led to 62 enemy deaths and some 45 collateral civilian deaths. The death toll appears to have resulted from airstrikes that hit civilian homes in a village in which the Taliban had moved after an ambush of NATO forces. Unfortunately, in a counterinsurgency where main focus is to win over popular support from the insurgent enemy, the math of 62 enemy troops killed minus 45 civilians killed does not equal a net reduction in enemy supporters of 17. In this case, the 45 civilians that were killed conservatively translates into some 200 surviving family members and friends who will now either actively or passively support our enemies—a net gain of more than 130 motivated enemy supporters (not counting the family and friends of the actual enemy troops killed).

Making matters worse, in an effort to win over the populace, “the war of perceptions” is tremendously important and local Afghan officials claim that the civilian death toll is much higher. Whether they are right or wrong does not matter—what the local populace believes is what matters and they are certainly going to discount the results of any official investigation by NATO. The Afghan national government has made complaints in recent months about the number of collateral civilian deaths, injuries, and property damage resulting from NATO actions, so the popular mood is already arrayed against us. If NATO continues to fight the war in Afghanistan in the conventional manner that it has we will ultimately lose the struggle for the hearts and minds of the populace.

Even the new Army and Marine Corps Field Manual on Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24) states that in a counterinsurgency more risk must be accepted by the counterinsurgent. This means that it is no longer appropriate to call for relatively indiscriminate airpower in a populated area when a patrol or convoy comes under attack. A much more restricted response is called for in which NATO forces respond in a highly selective manner, and which puts our troops at much greater personal risk for the sake of protecting non-combatants. Nonetheless, this is the price of winning in a counterinsurgency, but whether NATO nations are willing to accept a higher casualty rate among their troops is not clear.

In fact, it remains to be seen whether NATO can even conduct a proper counterinsurgency. Colonel Hy Rothstein, a 30-year veteran of US Army Special Forces now teaching in the Naval Post Graduate School and author of the book, Afghanistan & the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare, has studied NATO operations in that country in significant detail. Professor Rothstein reports that “…the focus on attrition, the lack of security, and the overriding force protection concerns have severed the link between coalition forces and the indigenous population, eliminating the most valuable source of operational intelligence—the population—and inhibiting the ability of the coalition to locate and destroy the insurgents.”

So killing civilians not only increases the number of enemies that we face, but also makes it more difficult to pin them down and eliminate them. To change this paradigm, NATO must commit itself to assuming much more operational risk on the battlefields of Afghanistan. This is certainly no indictment of the amazing courage that our troops show on a daily basis. They will—and always have stepped up to the required level of personal risk to get their difficult jobs done. What is required is that NATO political and military leaders accept the increased risk and develop the appropriate tactical actions to mitigate it as much as possible. Otherwise, all of the risk and loss to date will amount to a strategic failure in Afghanistan.

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Are We Now Pushing a Rope Uphill in Iraq?

By Matt Rowe, Executive Director, WinTheGWOT.org

More and more political leaders from both parties appear to be withdrawing their moral support for President Bush and the “surge” of US military forces in Iraq. Could this be the signal that the collapse of virtually all US support for the war is imminent? Most Americans can read the strategic and political situation we face there fairly well, so if the US is truly attempting to push a rope uphill then a partial withdrawal of US forces may simply be the most practical answer. After all, who is to say that a civil war would not have broken out had Saddam simply died of a heart attack and US troops were not even there? Nevertheless, our military actions clearly precipitated and created the environment that the Iraqis face today, so we have some duty to mitigate the situation as responsibly as we can.

Without a doubt, the Iraqis have the most responsibility to manage their affairs, but a withdrawal of the majority of US forces would go a long way toward easing the burden upon our own country while allowing the Iraqis to settle their own issues. However, maintaining a couple of army divisions in Iraq would allow us to keep some pressure on the situation. The knowledge that we could quickly redeploy more forces—should the situation warrant it—would discourage the involvement of neighboring countries, like Iran—which in reality, is more of an unconventional threat than an actual invasion threat. For example, the Iranian military is in relatively bad shape overall, so a limited military presence combined with heavy political and economic pressure could help keep the conflict contained in Iraq. Our ability to provide humanitarian relief could help mitigate the blame we share for the current situation as well.

Clearly, we cannot simply claim that the Iraqi government, its military, and its police are strong enough to manage the country in the same way that we did in Viet Nam at the end or our involvement there. A complete pull out would be folly and likely lead to a bloodier civil conflict that would drag on for some time. Neighboring countries could very well be drug into it, but US political and economic engagement with them would be far less costly and more politically sustainable than continuing along the current path of large-scale military occupation. Remember that no unconventionally based civil war has ever ended in anything less than a number of decades, and the end of this war is going to be ugly no matter what we do now.

Perhaps it is better to get to the end sooner rather than later and refocus our strained resources on the terrorists who actually threaten the United States.

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