By Bernd Debusmann
Reuters, 16 May 2006
U.S. forces in Iraq, locked in a war that cannot be won by military force alone, are facing a weapon that tends to favor insurgents -- time.
The war is in its fourth year and public support is waning. According to opinion polls taken in May, a majority of Americans think that invading Iraq was a mistake and that things in Iraq are going badly. The souring public mood does not bode well for the prospects of prevailing over an insurgency U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said could last another decade.
Military officers and experts involved in drafting a new counterinsurgency manual for the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps say that patience is one of the keys for success in winning against the kind of enemy the U.S. is facing in Iraq.
"The (counterinsurgency) effort requires a firm political will and extreme patience," says the draft, now going through revisions and expected to be issued in summer. "The insurgent wins if he does not lose, while the counterinsurgent loses if he does not win. Insurgents are strengthened by the common perception that a few casualties or a few years will cause the United States to abandon (the effort)."
Military history shows that past counterinsurgency campaigns in other parts of the world have taken between five and 15 years.
The manual, the first new edition for the Army in 20 years and for the Marines in 25, is being written against the background of what the army describes as its most profound transformation in half a century, a massive program to change mindsets away from traditional army-against-army warfare to the type of irregular conflict the United States is confronting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a fundamental change in policy, the Pentagon last year also declared that establishing order and security, restoring essential services and meeting the humanitarian needs of the population of a vanquished country were a "core U.S. military mission." In other words U.S. soldiers should be equally adept in fighting war and making peace.
"None of this can be done quickly," said a Special Forces officer just back from Iraq who requested anonymity. " And one can only hope we will be given enough time to do it. What we now have in Iraq is incredibly complex -- elements of a failed state, an insurgency and terrorism."
"EXTREME PATIENCE" NOT TYPICAL U.S.TRAIT
In past conflicts the United States has often lacked the "extreme patience" prescribed in the new manual, largely because of pressures from a public clamoring for swift, decisive victories. Both in Vietnam and Korea, public support ran high for the first two years and then dropped steadily in the perceived absence of fast progress.
In a recent study published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, scholar Colin Gray noted that "time is a weapon, (and) the mindset needed to combat an enemy who is playing a long game is not one that comes naturally to the American soldier or, for that matter, to the American public."
"To wage protracted war is not a preference in our military and strategic culture, " he said, and it is difficult to explain and defend to a doubting and increasingly impatient public.
Doubts and impatience, the polls indicate, stem from a steadily mounting casualty toll -- nearing 2,500 -- and the perception that the United States is bogged down in Iraq and getting sucked into a vortex of sectarian violence between Iraqi factions who have been unable to form an effective government.
The U.S. government has shied away from estimating how long the insurgency in Iraq might last since Rumsfeld said, in June last year, that it "could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years."
Andrew Krepinevich, a retired army officer and professor at Washington's George Mason University, estimates that defeating the insurgency in Iraq would take at least a decade, hundreds of billions of dollars and longer casualty rolls. "Are the American people and American soldiers willing to pay that price?" he asked in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs.
The crucial role of time was discussed at a recent Washington seminar of military officers and academics. They touched on the need for patience and the tension between the military's traditional desire for quick short-term results and the requirements of fully understanding the environment before acting.
To underline the different concept of time in different cultures, one of the participants cited a saying he attributed to the Taliban in Afghanistan, where the United States has been fighting for the past five years and the insurgency is strengthening.
"The Americans have the wristwatches," the saying goes, "but we've got the time."
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Citation: Bernd Debusmann. "In Iraq war, time is a weapon," Reuters, 16 May 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060516/us_nm/usa_war_time_dc
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