Live with TAE: Robert Kaplan (Do yourself a favor)

Born in Brooklyn 53 years ago, Robert Kaplan was raised in a working-class section of Queens where his father was a truck driver and his mother a homemaker. Recruited as a swimmer, he attended the University of Connecticut, where he took not a single history, economics, or political science course, but learned to write. He started in journalism at the Daily Herald of Rutland, Vermont, and commenced to energetically educate himself in world affairs.

A vagabond investigator of some of the world’s most troubled regions, he has written a host of books on places like the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. Reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s, he was one of the first journalists to profile contemporary Islamic radicals. His latest book, Imperial Grunts, is a ground-level portrait of American infantrymen serving around the globe.

TAE: Tell us how you got started writing about some of the world’s most benighted places.

Kaplan: Starting not long after college, I spent 16 straight years overseas living out of cheap hotels and youth hostels as a freelance reporter, sending in stories by mail and yellow telex tapes. I spent lots of time in North Africa and the Middle East, and two years embedded with the Israeli military. In 1988, I had my first book published. And then it just went from there.

Today, I live in western Massachusetts, mainly because of the solitude it provides. The more isolated a writer’s environment, the more powerful and honest the results—because writing, above all, is ferocious truth telling. And each year, I spend about six months overseas.

TAE: What draws you to the topics of war and ferment in which you’ve specialized?

Kaplan: I’m very curious. And travel is more than just going to different places. All too often, people who travel all over the world only socialize with elites like themselves. For me, that’s not travel. Travel requires getting to another socioeconomic class than the one you inhabit. And that means getting away from stable places with very affluent business communities and getting to war-torn places where you have to make a sociological and cultural adjustment.

I also find that places on the brink of collapse are intellectually fascinating because they’re like a real-life experiment with Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Ibn Khaldun. You can’t really understand Hobbes unless you’ve been to Sierra Leone when it’s cracking up. Hobbes once said that “life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And he’s exactly right, because freedom is nothing without authority. That concept has no real meaning in the classroom unless you’ve seen a place with no authority—where just walking down the street is absolutely terrifying. That’s why the most fundamental human right is personal security. That’s something that is very hard to communicate to people who’ve never been outside of an affluent, physically secure environment.

TAE: For all the talk of American imperialism, isn’t the main “foreign influence” in Iraq today—the main outside threat to Iraqi self-determination—the international jihadis who make up the al-Qaeda resistance?

Kaplan: Absolutely. One of the big myths of the Left is that we have troops around the world propping up dictatorships. This reflects a 1970s time-warp mentality. In every case I can name—from the Philippines to Georgia, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East—we’re stationed at the request of newly elected, internationally recognized, democratic governments. And this makes sense: You can’t have a stable democracy without a professional military.

If the United States were to pull out of Iraq you would have a real bloodbath, plus a reversal in a lot of the positive trends towards liberalization we’ve seen in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Dubai, and many others. I mention all these places individually because they’re not getting enough coverage in the media. Even Syria—despite all the trouble we’re having—is a much less autocratic place now than it was four years ago. None of this would have been possible if the United States had cut and run Mogadishu-style once things got rough in Iraq.

TAE: Is it plausible that the elections and constitutions and various liberalizations now taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan are inspiring a kind of “Arab Spring” in the places you just mentioned?

Kaplan: Yes. Three weeks after the first successful Iraqi election, Lebanon’s Walid Jumblatt stunned the world by saying “this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq.”

But because we’ve had such a surge of democratization in the Arab world in such a narrow frame of time, we’re going to have to stick it out in order for the progress to hold. If we don’t stick it out in Iraq, Lebanese democracy is just ephemeral; the Syrians will ultimately reconstitute Lebanon in their own totalitarian image. If we don’t stick it out in Iraq, Libya will go backward after going forward, and in Egypt Mubarak will be succeeded by another Brezhnev-type leader. And on and on.

TAE: What are the chances that the strong underground forces for freedom that are bubbling in Iran will push aside that nation’s theocracy in the next ten years?

Kaplan: I used to be optimistic. In the mid-1990s I saw an Iranian counterrevolution as the biggest coming surprise. But I was wrong. At this point, the theocracy is a system with divisions of power that are very well entrenched, and hard to overthrow.

And Iran is not Iraq—we couldn’t just go in there and topple it. There’ll be a slow evolution at some point, but I think the reality is that as long as we’re overextended in Iraq, we have to try to get as far as we can in Iran together with our allies. And only when the Iranian regime crosses a line in the sand with regard to their nuclear development should we—or will we—take any action.

TAE: Have you spent enough time with Iraqis recently to have drawn any conclusions on their current state of mind?

Kaplan: I think there’s a large, silent majority in Iraq whose worst nightmare is that we’ll leave abruptly. They don’t want us there with 140,000 troops, but they don’t want us to leave either. They essentially want what the Administration and responsible Democrats want—a gradual takeover by their own forces over a few years.

TAE: If we gave you only two options, would you say that over the last three years in Afghanistan and Iraq the U.S. has achieved more than we should have expected, or less than we should have expected?

Kaplan: In Afghanistan we’ve achieved more than we should have expected. You have to compare today’s Afghanistan to the high-water mark of its own governance in the 1950s and 1960s under King Zahir Shah. Even then, the government did not control the whole country and did not extend its writ into villages and towns. By that standard, we’ve achieved a lot more than anyone could have expected. And among the Afghan people, there’s relatively little anti-Americanism.

In Iraq, we’ve achieved a lot more than we have in Haiti or Kosovo—but still achieved less than we should have expected. My litmus test for Iraq is the flak jacket. As long as we still have to wear flak jackets all the time, then we’re not where we need to be.

TAE: How rapidly should U.S. forces be withdrawn from Iraq over the next few years, and what should the criteria be?

Kaplan: First of all, I don’t believe in a timetable. Troops should only be withdrawn as rapidly as the situation allows. And when we do pull down the number of troops—which we will—it’s important to get the political body language right. We cannot seem as if we’re cutting and running.

When Prime Minister Barak of Israel withdrew from Lebanon, for example, he got the political body language wrong. That resulted in the Palestinians misunderstanding his actions, and it became a significant cause of the first intifada. The Israeli prime minister was right to withdraw, but it wasn’t couched in the right phrases with the right context. So we have to be very careful about our withdrawal.

TAE: We hear much in the establishment media about morale problems in U.S. military ranks, and reporters often seek out disenchanted troops to put in front of microphones. Have you encountered widespread morale problems among American fighters in Iraq?

Kaplan: Absolutely not. I’ve only met two kinds of soldiers in the combat arms community: Those who have served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and those who are pulling every bureaucratic string to get deployed there.

I spent the summer of 2004 with a group of marines in Niger and sub-Saharan Africa, and every marine in that platoon was trying to get to Iraq. A few months later, one of them got lucky and ended up leading Iraqi forces into combat in the second battle of Fallujah. He was a sergeant from Georgia, and after the battle, he sent me a long e-mail flush with pride. And that’s not just a cutesy-pie story—that’s basically what I encounter all the time.

The only disenchantment is found in the Reserves and the National Guard, mainly because they signed up for a short time and end up serving many months. That’s a system that needs reform. But generally speaking, morale is better than it’s been in a very long time.

Keep in mind there is very little combat going on now. Most deployments feature more humanitarian missions than combat. Even in Iraq, the troops really have to search far and wide to find combat activities.

TAE: How do our soldiers understand for themselves, and explain to others, the value of the work they are doing in Iraq?

Kaplan: Soldiers are very aware of why they’re fighting—and that awareness stems from their own practical day-to-day experience, which is not killing people. By and large, they’re rebuilding, patrolling, and helping the Iraqi people.

Second, it’s important to realize that most soldiers don’t sit around discussing abstract questions like whether or not we should’ve intervened. They do, however, take policy and command directives, break them down, and then argue, complain, and fervently discuss them.

Since the dawn of time, the most popular hobby amongst soldiers has been complaining at night in the barracks. If you don’t hear complaints, then you know morale is bad—because that means people are silent. And I think that many journalists misconstrue this, because they don’t understand—and they haven’t read the history of—barracks life.

TAE: As in any institution with millions of members, there are rogue soldiers—and today we know their names and faces very well, as with Lynndie England. At times this has threatened to paralyze our war on terror. How common are rogue soldiers, compared to soldiers who do the right thing?

Kaplan: They’re statistically infinitesimal. This is the most disciplined, restrained military the U.S. has ever had, under more scrutiny than it’s ever had. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: Nothing was a greater privilege in my professional life than being with 18- and 19-year-old marines as they turned into restrained adults the minute that combat commenced. To say that we shouldn’t give our soldiers authority is like saying we shouldn’t fly planes because they occasionally crash.

TAE: Have you talked to any of the troops about their feelings on Abu Ghraib?

Kaplan: Yes, and there are several levels to this. First and foremost, every soldier I’ve talked to has wanted to scream, “What were those idiots thinking? Who were their commanders? They should all be put in prison because they’ve besmirched our name! And even though 99 percent of what we do is good, nobody is writing about it because of these few idiots!”

That’s the first level. The other level is that after about six weeks of blanket coverage, they started disliking the media. They knew that the first few days of coverage were legitimate, because this was a terrible abuse. But after a few weeks, when the new revelations became smaller and smaller and less and less significant, the continuing blanket coverage obscured the great work that the U.S. Army was doing.

At that time, for example, they were involved in very restrained, close-quarters urban combat in Karbala, fighting that made Black Hawk Down look easy. Yet very little was written about it. And that’s when I heard soldiers start saying that the media was part of the problem.

TAE: You argue in your new book that evangelical Christianity has played an important role in making the U.S. military more moral, more disciplined, and more discerning. Explain that for our readers.

Kaplan: After Vietnam, one of the many motors that helped transform our military into a disciplined organization capable of complex exercises was the resurgence of religion. Perhaps most importantly, religious Christianity cut down on drinking and misbehavior. That in turn weakened the lure of the officers’ clubs, which narrowed the barrier between officers and enlisted and non-coms. I attended quite a number of religious services during my reporting for Imperial Grunts, and I never found them intimidating, proselytizing, or coercive. And the religion bucked up morale during difficult moments.

TAE: Is Islam a religion of peace, or is there is a bellicose spirit right at the heart of Islam?

Kaplan: Islam is a religion that’s willing to fight. It’s a great religion for poor, downtrodden people, and there are so many around the world. It’s direct. It’s stark. It’s in a specific language. The Koran has fewer ambiguities than other religious texts. In a way, it’s very populist. It actively proselytizes. And even though I wouldn’t call it a war-like religion, it can adjust itself to war more easily than others.

But Old Testament-oriented Christianity can also do that. The Old Testament is all fire and brimstone, while the New Testament is more milk and honey. And evangelicals put a significant emphasis on the Old Testament.

TAE: Where are the moderate Muslims today? Why don’t we hear more from them after outrages are committed in the name of Islam?

Kaplan: I think they’ll be more outspoken if we can stick it out in Iraq. Look at the fact that some Sunnis were bombing mosques during Ramadan. How come nobody’s protesting in the Arab world? But once our success is assured, I think they’ll speak up.

Meanwhile, we do have Ayatollah Sistani. If Nobel Peace Prizes actually went to people who deserved them, it would have gone to him this year. Sistani exercised tremendous enlightened restraint in the face of so much violent provocation, and he really kept his community together. I do think we’ve gotten lucky with the Shiite leadership in southern Iraq.

TAE: You’ve argued that Democrats will not be trusted to wield the sword of U.S. national defense so long as a fierce U.S. combat soldier who draws inspiration from the Bible is something that makes them uncomfortable. Why are the Democrats seen as so weak on national security, and will that change?

Kaplan: Look at last year’s election, which, to a certain extent, was a referendum on the Iraq war. More than 70 percent of active-duty military personnel, Reserve, and Guard voted for the Republicans. And from my anecdotal experience—which was with the front line infantry and the Special Forces, who have always been more conservative—the Republicans probably received more than 90 percent of the vote.

With numbers like those, you have to ask yourself why. It wasn’t for policy reasons; a lot of people in the barracks will openly say that Bush and Rumsfeld made a number of mistakes. It was cultural. People in the military don’t feel like the Democrats are one of them. They feel as if the Democrats are from another America—from the same America as the elite media.

So the Democrats have a cultural hurdle to overcome, and it’s essential for the well-being of our democracy that they overcome it. A two-party democracy is only as strong as the opposition party, and if the opposition party simply can’t get elected, then the party in power starts performing worse and worse because it doesn’t feel the competition. It’s happened in other democracies, and I’m afraid of this happening in the U.S.

It’s also important that the military doesn’t become associated for too long with one political party. But for that to change, the Democrats must overcome their cultural problems. And generally speaking, that means changing their skewed ideas of what it means to be a Southerner or an evangelical in uniform.

TAE: Why do so many reporters, academics, and some everyday Americans think that people who go into the Army or Marines must be folks who didn’t have bright prospects in college or the civilian work force?

Kaplan: To be diplomatic, I think it’s class prejudice and snobbery. Because most of the people I meet in the lower ranks aren’t poor or from the ghetto—they’re the solid working class, which does still exist. They’re from non-trendy places in between the two coasts, or from working-class urban neighborhoods.

Look, for example, at one of the Special Forces teams I was with in Algeria. The executive officer, a graduate of The Citadel, was from a farming family in Indiana. The master sergeant was from a farming family in New Hampshire. The warrant officer grew up in an Italian section of Queens, New York. That’s America. Whites in the barracks get very insulted if you confuse them with so-called white trash, and African Americans in the barracks get tremendously insulted if you confuse them with people in the inner city. With both groups, some of them may have come from the underclass, but they’ve long since separated themselves from it. They have no class envy.

TAE: Most European democracies have completely lost their fighting spirit, and are thus left with unimpressive military forces. Why is the U.S. a comparative exception today among modern Western nations in the survival of a righteous martial spirit among its population?

Kaplan: I think Australia still has it, and Japan is regaining it. People are a little uncomfortable with that, given Japan’s military history, but their reconstituted spirit is understandable given their terrific fear of a reunited greater Korea. And even Singapore has a very feisty, strong military. So we’re not the only ones.

But in all these cases, I think it’s because there is a sense of specific nationhood, anchored to a specific geography, which gives it a moral accountability. Once you’re de-linked from geography and you only think in terms of universal values, you’re no longer motivated. That’s why Europe has a specific problem. The old nation exists less and less in Europe.

TAE: Much of the American elite has also lost its “martial spirit.” How has the American elite changed over the years, and why do you think they have?

Kaplan: In the early 1960s, I remember hearing my truck-driving father talk about the “Establishment”—people like Averil Harriman, John McCloy, Charles Bolin, George Tannin. Even though these people were very liberal, they saw themselves as Americans. Today’s similar figures wouldn’t see themselves in the same light, because they so often socialize and cross paths with people from other countries.

So the American elite exists less and less as an institution, while the global elite exists more and more. Today’s media elites, for example, care more about the thoughts and writings of their “esteemed” colleagues in Britain or France than their counterparts at the Chicago Tribune or the Omaha World Herald. That was not the case when I was growing up.

TAE:Do you think part of the problem that elites have with George Bush is the fact that he comes across as so American?

Kaplan: Definitely. The reality is that President Bush comes across as a kind of throwback, an archetypal figure from an earlier America. So no matter what he says, post-national elites in Washington and New York are going to feel culturally alienated by him. That’s something he just has to deal with.

Kaplan: We live in an increasingly large and complex society, and it’s becoming separated out into fragments. And each group—journalists, lawyers, soldiers—tend to socialize with each other, to date each other, to marry each other.

But journalists have a problem that other professional groups don’t have, because their job requires objectivity. As they become one social caste whose elite members tend to live in certain places, with similar zip codes, in similar high-income environments, that becomes very hard to get around.

Moreover, newspapers like the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Baltimore Sun used to be almost as significant as the New York Times. Those days are over. So the elite newspapers—which are only on the coasts, not in the heartland—now drive the debate. The result is that journalistic objectivity has become very problematic.

TAE: Give us some guesses as to what the world’s flashpoints and hotspots will be ten years from now, in 2016.

Kaplan: I think the focus of our military and security concerns is going to move to Asia, because the strength of the Chinese economy will have military consequences. They’re going to spend a lot of money on submarines—both diesel and nuclear—and develop an imperial navy. Over the next 50 years, the Pacific Ocean will no longer be the American lake that it’s been for the past 50. Unless we begin military cooperation with Indonesia, for instance, at some point the Indonesian military will be captured by the Chinese in some form.

We have to figure out how to manage the re-emergence of China as a military power. I also think that the Indonesian, Malaysian, and southern Philippine archipelago will grow in importance as possible venues for world terrorism. And I think that President Chavez of Venezuela is a potential Castro. Because he’s got a continental nation rather than an island, he could be more dangerous than Castro ever was. I think we need to develop a more realistic outlook on India. The future of the Middle East will be determined by Iran, and any major shift there will have consequences across the region. Even a subtle pivot by Iran toward greater cooperation with America would deal a serious blow to radicals through the region.

I've been pushing "Imperial Grunts"

Imperial Grunts

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200510/kaplan-us-special-forces

With the Army Special Forces in the Philippines and Afghanistan—laboratories of counterinsurgency
by Robert D. Kaplan

.....

merica is waging a counterinsurgency campaign not just in Iraq but against Islamic terror groups throughout the world. Counterinsurgency falls into two categories: unconventional war (UW in Special Operations lingo) and direct action (DA). Unconventional war, though it sounds sinister, actually represents the soft, humanitarian side of counterinsurgency: how to win without firing a shot. For example, it may include relief activities that generate good will among indigenous populations, which in turn produces actionable intelligence. Direct action represents more-traditional military operations. In 2003 I spent a summer in the southern Philippines and an autumn in eastern and southern Afghanistan, observing how the U.S. military was conducting these two types of counterinsurgency.

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