Center for a New American Security

John Tirman has an important if flawed op-ed in today's New York Times. He urges U.S. military and political leaders -- as well as the general public -- to be honest about civilian casualties in war. Tirman argues that U.S. military officers need to be wary of civilian casualties for strategic reasons, and here the two of us are in violent agreement. Tirman also argues that the U.S. public and its leaders need to consider the total human cost associated with war for moral reasons, and here too we are in violent agreement. Whenever I speak about the war in Iraq -- whether it is over dinner with friends last night or on NPR a few weeks ago -- I always make sure I mention the terrible loss of Iraqi lives. We Americans have to be honest about this. Last night, someone asked me if I thought the Iraq War had been worth it, and though I said the Iraq war had accomplished certain things (the fall of Saddam, a nascent democratic system of government), it most certainly had not been worth it. The three pieces of data I went on to cite were a) the $1 trillion spent, b) the 4,484 U.S. military lives lost, and c) the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives lost. I could have gone on to cite coalition casualties, the Iraqi refugee crisis, and wounded soldiers and civilians, but you get my drift: I am sympathetic to the aim of Tirman's op-ed.

But then Tirman writes this:

In 2006, two separate household surveys, by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, found between 400,000 and 650,000 “excess deaths” in Iraq as a result of the war. At the time, however, the commanding general in Iraq put the number at 50,000 and President Bush had claimed in late 2005 that it was just 30,000.

As Tirman has to know, that Johns Hopkins / Lancet survey was incredibly controversial when it was released and remains controversial today. It relied on cluster sampling, in Iraq, at the height of that country's civil war. I cannot think of a poorer environment in which one could do that kind of survey. Yes, it was peer-reviewed, but an academically sophisticated methodology cannot compensate for poor data. (Garbage in = garbage out.) Both Gen. Casey and Pres. Bush were likely much closer to the mark, as the iCasualties figures from the very height of the war in Iraq -- 2005-2007 -- are way lower than the figures from either of the studies Tirman cites. (And if Tirman thinks the Iraqi Min. of Health had the capacity, in 2006, to accurately measure the cost of the war on the Iraqi civilian populace, he needs to spend more time in peacetime bureaucracies in the Arabic-speaking world. I apologize for painting with such a broad brush, but those with experience dealing with large state bureaucracies in Egypt or Syria know of what I speak.)

Tirman's op-ed is basically a call for the United States to use violence more selectively, and it's a pity he overstates his case (as tends to happen in New York Times op-eds), because I agree with him. As has been demonstrated time and again, the use of indiscriminate violence in civil war environments confuses the population, scrambles incentive structures for behavior, and tends to inflame the population against the force using the violence. Selective violence is much more effective.

That's the strategic argument. The moral argument is that the U.S. public needs to understand the total human costs associated with its wars. That may lead the United States to be more selective as to when it applies U.S. military power abroad and how it does so. On the other hand, it might also lead the United States to think carefully about how it ends its wars as well. There is a fashionable sign in my neighborhood, for example, that reads "End the War in Afghanistan." I assume this sign is meant to read "End U.S. Involvement in the War in Afghanistan," because I myself am unsure as to whether or not the U.S. withdrawal will ameliorate or worsen the conflict there. Progressives like Tirman should keep that in mind: the U.S. military is only one actor in environments like Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. presence is not the only driver of conflict. It is even possible -- whisper it -- that increased U.S. combat presence and operations might actually serve the interests of the civilian population in some cases. That's certainly the case, at least, in most stabilization operations.

Anyway, my congratulations to John Tirman for this important op-ed.

UPDATED: One of the folks in the comments section points out that Tirman directed the funding for the Lancet/JHU study. Well, that explains it! (I wish he would have disclosed this small but significant point in his op-ed.) Tirman apparently believes between 800,000 and 1.3 million Iraqis were killed in the war, which is a simply incredible claim. No one else puts the number that high. The Associated Press (110,600), the Iraq Body Count Project (103,536 — 113,125), and the Wikileaks logs (109,032) all put the number much, much lower. At what point does someone admit that their numbers just might be off and that their own study had deep flaws? I mean, only 87,000 death certificates were issued in the worst years of the war (2005-2008). Tirman might be the only guy left who references the Lancet/JHU study as having been sound.

Small Wars Journal has a thought-provoking post by Michael Cummings that takes issue with something I have often argued: 

[W]hen it comes to counter-insurgency, military theorists continue to ignore humanity’s underlying irrationality. Consider Andrew Exum’s article in the Daily Beast:

 

“Populations, in civil wars, make cold-blooded calculations about their self-interest. If forced to choose sides in a civil war—and they will resist making that choice for as long as possible, for understandable reasons—they will side with the faction they assess to be the one most likely to win.”

I dub this the “Chicago School of Counter-Insurgency”, the idea that in warfare--with death and subjugation on the line--mankind’s rationality trumps his unconscious thoughts and emotions. ...

 

We cannot pretend that killing people won’t cause emotional reactions. We cannot pretend that in a war zone people always act rationally, because people don’t. As a counter-insurgent, we must balance our views of insurgents and the population as both rational and emotional actors.

Cummings has a point, of course. But what Cummings calls the Chicago School would better be described as the New Haven School. For a long time, the scholarly literature on civil wars discussed political allegiance in civil wars as primarily exogenous. In 2006, though, a scholar at Yale named Stathis Kalyvas published a book called The Logic of Violence in Civil War that argued the precise opposite. Anyone who knows my own work knows that I find the argument advanced by Kalyvas to be compelling. And a large-N analysis of population behavior in civil war environments would, I believe, lead to similar conclusions. But as many people know, I did my own graduate work in and on southern Lebanon, where all kinds of "irrational" factors like religion motivated the population. So what gives?

I heard Steve Biddle describe the state of civil wars scholarship well last summer when he said that what Kalyvas and his work did was to effectively swing the literature from the all the way from the exogenous end of the spectrum to all the way over to the endogenous end. As more work is done, Steve said (and I agree with him), the literature would likely end up somewhere in the middle. Or right back where it started, when Thucydides noted man is motivated to go to war by fear, honor, and interest -- only one of which is covered in most economics textbooks. For now, I have yet to read a good corrective to Kalyvas that would lead me to radically change my own views about popular behavior in civil wars in general.

(Cummings, alas, goes on to argue that "foreign occupation triggers suicide attacks." Let's all agree not to tell Daveed Gartenstein-Ross.)

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The subtitle given to the Cummings article on the Small Wars Journal webpage was "It's time to stop listening to CNAS." So ... no Christmas card from Small Wars Journal this year?

Update: the original Michael Cummings post was here.

This relatively easy-to-understand paragraph is from that article I mentioned below:

Civil wars are military contests where each side's military capacity shapes the type of military interaction and, therefore, the nature of the conflict. Both insurgent and counterinsurgent strategies vary accordingly, and yet their "lessons" are conditional on the prevailing technology of rebellion. For example, the combined experience of Iraq and Afghanistan has led the U.S. military to focus single mindedly on irregular war. However, the lessons of Afghanistan are not necessarily transferable to [a symmetric nonconventional] conflict such as the Somali one. Our analysis also implies that, as they consider peacekeeping and peace building operations, policy makers must be aware of the variation in technologies of rebellion, as well as the transformation of internal conflict after the end of the Cold War. For instance, neither conventional nor [symmetric nonconventional] civil wars correspond to the popular image of a quagmire associated with irregular wars, which have deterred international intervention in the past.

The question I would have for Kalyvas and Balcells would be the following: Yeah, this is all fine and good, but speaking in plain English, if the United States were to intervene in a conflict, might that external intervention change the conflict in unpredictable ways? Maybe it boosts the capacity of one party, and maybe a rival party (say, Iran) jumps in and boosts the capacity of another party. Maybe, before we know it, the conflict has morphed into a robust insurgency in which one actor is employing irregular means. And maybe policy-makers should internalize the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan lest they lead the U.S. military into another, ahem, quagmire. Because the war in Afghanistan, to use one example, is not one conflict that you can code just once in some database but rather a series of conflicts that has been fought using a variety of "technologies" from 1979 to 2010. I myself saw a very different war in 2002 than the one I saw in 2004. And I saw an altogether new war in 2009 in large part because an external actor (Pakistan, in this case) jumped into the conflict in the five years between my second and third stints to Afghanistan and boosted the heck out of the capacity of the insurgent actors.

Another thing: if you really think something is important for policy makers to understand, why the hell write about it using highly specialized vernacular in a journal no actual policy maker reads? Please tell me this APSR article will be followed up by an article in International Security or, even better, in a paper for a humble policy-oriented think tank.

None of these questions, by the way, should detract from a really excellent article with potentially important implications.

I interrupt my blogging hiatus to bring you the following report.

Christopher Buckley, one of my favorite authors, read Matthew Hoh's letter and is now calling for us to withdraw from Afghanistan. All fine and good. But he chooses an unfortunate historical analogy:

Reading [Matthew Hoh's] letter, I thought of the famous exchange between the Confederate soldier and his Yankee captor.

 

Why do you hate us so, Johnny Reb?

 

Because this is our land, and you’re on it.

Ah, yes, I remember the Great Southern War for Independence. How the Union Army, fearing quagmire, realized its errors and so wisely withdrew from the newly declared Confederate States of America... uh, hold on... what?! Maybe Christopher Buckley has read different histories of the U.S. Civil War than I have, but I think the Union Army ended up sacrificing a couple hundred thousand dead to affirm federal supremacy, preserve the union and end slavery. I'm not saying Afghanistan is in the same ballpark or even in the same sport in terms of importance, but we can all agree Buckley would have been wiser to have stuck with the tried-and-true Vietnam analogies on this one.

There is something disturbingly reassuring in watching real honest-to-goodness traditional propaganda. It gives you a false sense of superiority, in a sort of twisted way, to chuckle at some of the better examples of ham-fisted story twisting, either of the deliberate or the accidental sort.

The past masters of this, of course, were the Soviets. And for sheer amusement value almost nothing could surpass the antics of Baghdad Bob . So admittedly, in comparison to these masters, the efforts of the Ministry of Defense of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka are somewhat thin gruel.  Still, it can be worth a chuckle to follow the twists and turns that propaganda may take.

Most recently the Washington Times, one of the most conservative papers in the US, has the curious distinction of publishing an op-ed in favor of a Socialist government which just won the conventional phase of a civil war with the heavy backing from Communist China (which came about after the US cut off military aid and advice back in 2007). That Monday Op-Ed is now highlighted, in turn, by the Socialist government, albeit with some confusion about the difference between the Washington Times and the Washington Post.

Here’s the front page of the Sri Lankan MoD.

Here is the MoD’s extracted synopsis of how the “Washington Post” (apparently some confusion there with the Times) supports the Sri Lankan way of war.

And here is the Washington Times original.

Strange bedfellows indeed.

On a more directly topical note, how many think that what was happening in Sri Lanka these past four years (out of more than 20 years of conflict) was an insurgency? How many understand it to have become a traditional conventional Civil War with some terrorism thrown in? And what is or should be the role of propaganda for either side? In the US we have laws about propaganda, mostly as a backlash to the First World War. But is there a legitimate role? When does "information" cross the line into "propaganda"?