September 23, 2005
Pg. 16

Classic Imperialism

By Robert D. Kaplan

This past summer, I observed a U.S. Army Special Forces exercise in Africa that represented the quintessence of imperialism as it has been practiced throughout history and yet which no modern liberal could oppose. Almost 200 Green Berets fanned out across the Sahara to train with soldiers from nine North and West African countries. It was part of a broad effort to professionalize the troops of fledgling democracies, assist them in hunting down Islamic terrorists in unruly borderlands, and deal with future humanitarian catastrophes like Darfur.

I embedded for a month with a Special Forces A-team in southern Algeria, the first U.S. military opening in that erstwhile radical Arab state since the Allied invasion of North Africa in 1942. I watched as one captain, one warrant officer and nine sergeants worked and lived with an Algerian Special Forces company on an equal basis, eating each other's food, shooting each other's weapons, and trying out each other's field techniques. The Algerians won a counterinsurgency struggle in the 1990s against terrorists more vicious than those in Iraq, a war that Middle East area experts doubted could be won; they were obviously worth training with. And the A-team provided a deft hinge for the further improvement of U.S.-Algerian relations, a process spurred by the collapse of the non-aligned movement and the common experience of fighting Islamic insurgents.

To Algeria's south, in such countries as Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad, the Special Forces teams weren't training with host nation troops so much as mentoring them, owing to their rudimentary state. For a relatively small outlay in men and expenditures, the U.S. military has begun developing a badly needed, pan-African intervention force.

This is happening not just in Africa but throughout the world. U.S. Marines have engaged a two-year modernization of the Georgian armed forces to secure democratization following the Rose Revolution. In the southern Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf Islamic group has been marginalized by an Army Special Forces program that emphasized humanitarian relief in villages where the group had been most active, coupled with training of the Filipino army. In Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe's military and police units are being trained by Special Forces in the fight against narco-terrorism. In Nepal, from where I've just returned, a U. S. Air Force medical team was training emergency responders in the event of an earthquake.

Such small-scale, bare-bones missions are far more indicative of how the U.S. military actually operates across the world than is the fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. Without the experience of such missions, many of which are humanitarian, troops in New Orleans would not be able to perform as expertly as they have. National Guardsmen with whom I embedded in Afghanistan are now in the Big Easy.

All of this -- not military occupations, with their attendant proconsuls -- is what constitutes classic imperialism: by, through, and with the "indigs," as the Special Forces phrase goes. Local alliances and the training of indigenous troops, since time immemorial, are what has allowed imperial powers to project their might at minimum risk and expense. It was true of Rome even in adjacent North Africa, to say nothing of its Near Eastern borderlands; and it was particularly true of imperial France and Great Britain, two-thirds of whose expeditions were composed of troops recruited in the colonies. Iraq, especially when the Coalition Provisional Authority was in control instead of the Iraqis, is a perversion, not an accurate expression, of traditional imperialism.

Who could possibly be against such classic imperialism, provided, of course, that the term itself is not used? Not the Democrats, certainly. After all, it was Sen. John Kerry who called for a dramatic increase in Special Forces in the last election. Anyone truly opposed to most U.S. military missions abroad will have to find a fringe candidate to support next time around. For in the overwhelming majority of cases, U.S. troops are acting upon requests from struggling democratic governments to take in hand their armed forces, so that their soldiers will defend democracy, not subvert it. This was particularly true in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, where American troops conducted the bulk of the training missions rather than NATO per se.

Moreover, given that humanitarian disasters increasingly occur in anarchic zones, the militarization of relief aid is not a trend to disparage. It is a fact to admit. It goes beyond the National Guard in New Orleans or U.S. sailors and marines in tsunami-wracked Indonesia: The situation is similar in many African countries, where civilian relief agencies often operate only in the vicinity of the capital cities for their own safety, leaving the rest of the countryside for militaries to handle.

This is to say nothing of conventional military deployments; like, for instance, sailing carrier battle groups through the Strait of Malacca to keep the sea lanes open that allow globalization. The oft-heard plea against the imperialist role of the American military is less an expression of a serious, case-by-case analysis of its deployments world-wide, than it is an emotional response to the difficulties in Iraq.

It does not help public awareness that the media gives almost no coverage to the activities of the American military beyond a few obvious places. No other correspondents of major media outlets, for example, chose to embed anywhere in Africa during this summer's operation, even though European Command made most of the A-teams available to reporters. Given such editorial judgments, how can the policy elite -- whose members have little personal contact with the middle and lower ranks of the armed forces that staff these missions -- be sufficiently aware of what is actually going on?

Imperial overstretch may be a reality in Iraq. Not so everywhere else. The mundane, tactical reality of our overseas military is small numbers of force-multipliers scattered across the globe -- from a single defense attaché in many a Third World country to the sub-thousand soldier units in places like Colombia, which constitute the high manpower-end of the scale. The 11-man Green Beret mission that I witnessed in Algeria is most typical. Indeed, what I have learned over several years of embedding almost nonstop with the U.S. military around the globe is that the smaller and more low-key the deployment, the more the taxpayer gets out of it.

Nation-building, democratization, regime stabilization -- whatever one wants to call it -- must always involve a military training component. And business is booming. If Libya's transition away from radicalism is to be consolidated, at some point it will require an Army Special Forces or Marine mission. (European Command, with responsibility for most of Africa, is already talking about it.) With Indonesia now a democracy and the Chinese navy expanding its reach nearby, at some point there will be a dramatic upsurge in U.S. military training exercises there, too. The Marines are already planning to develop more area experts within their ranks to keep up with demand.

Classic imperialism is not merely an option, but a tried-and-true necessity for a better, more stable world. The danger is not that classic imperialism will undermine our financial solvency or our democratic values, but that it itself will be undermined by the drain in resources caused by the necessity of continued high troop levels in Iraq.

Mr. Kaplan, a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground" (Random House, 2005).

Perhaps I've missed it, but has there a debate in Congress followed by a decision by the U.S. government to buildup the U.S. military as part of a strategy to advance "classic imperialism" around the world? Has the Department of Defense been renamed the Department of Nation Building? When did that take place? Kaplan, formerly a travel writer, seemed to have transformed himself into a military philosopher, a Clausewitz wannabe who is promoting an antidemocratic militaristic agenda that runs contrary to basic American values. And in any case, what the world that supposedly can't wait to be invaded and "democratized" by American troops will remember after the U.S. leaves Iraq can be summarized in two words: Abu Gharib. In case you missed it, pasted here is Andrew Bacevich review of Kaplan's new masterpiece. Leon Hadar


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050926/bacevich


Robert Kaplan: Empire Without Apologies
by ANDREW J. BACEVICH

[from the September 26, 2005 issue]

To a degree that other mere scribblers can only envy, Robert Kaplan is a writer whose views command attention among movers and shakers. For Clinton-era officials grappling with the crisis of a disintegrating Yugoslavia, Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, published in 1993, served for a time as holy writ. The essays collected in The Coming Anarchy, released in 2001, offered a bleak but influential depiction of the disorder roiling the planet after the cold war. Restlessly trolling the world for stories, Kaplan has become much more than a reporter; he is a public intellectual who happens to live out of his rucksack.

With his new book, Kaplan turns from describing the world's ills to proposing a remedy. The antidote to anarchy is empire, policed by American soldiers holding an assault rifle in one hand and offering candy bars with the other.

Kaplan began Imperial Grunts intending to "take a snapshot for posterity," recording what it was like to be a GI "stationed at remote locations overseas at the beginning of the twenty-first century." The result, however, is less a snapshot than an album of impressions collected during the course of travels that take Kaplan from the jungles of Colombia to the deserts of Iraq, with forays in between to the Philippines, Yemen, Djibouti and Mongolia. At each stop along the way his subject is the American soldier, whom he observes, interviews, explains and venerates.

A journalist who displays his contempt for phonies and frauds like a badge of honor, Kaplan wants above all for his readers to accept his snapshot as genuine and truthful. He prides himself on reporting that is immediate, personal and even intimate. In this case, tracking US troops across various hot spots obliged Kaplan to endure any number of indignities, all of them carefully enumerated: He subsisted on combat rations, went without showers, jostled around in drafty cargo planes and cramped Humvees and slept on dirt floors using a helmet for a pillow. So this purports to be the real deal.

Among the effusive endorsements adorning Imperial Grunts is one by Bing West describing Kaplan as "America's Kipling." Like Kipling, Kaplan is smitten with barracks rooms, mess halls and the "world of beer, cigarettes, instant coffee, and chewing tobaccos" that soldiers ostensibly inhabit. In a nation crowded with charlatans, soldiers--"people who hunted, drove pickups, employed profanities as a matter of dialect, and yet had a literal, demonstrable belief in the Almighty"-- retain for Kaplan an authenticity otherwise fast disappearing from American life.

Authenticity in this context connotes masculinity and self-abnegation. In an age redolent of sham and corruption, soldiers--having "taken a veritable monastic vow of poverty"--retain an "unapologetic, literal belief in God...tempered and uplifted by the democratic experience." As a consequence, they are compassionate as well as brave, rough around the edges but also refreshingly honest.

If Kaplan is a romantic, he is also a populist and a reactionary. He dotes over the career sergeants who come out of rural America and the "generic working class," in Kaplan's eyes "the Great Preserver of the oldest, simplest virtues." He endorses the muscular Protestant fundamentalism that over the past thirty years has tacitly established itself as the quasi-official religion of America's armed forces, its abiding theme not love thy neighbor but smite thine enemy. He notes approvingly that in today's military the spirit of the Old South lives on, with the very best captains and majors finding their role models in "the gleaming officer corps of the Confederacy." Indeed, Kaplan locates the "true religious soul" of present-day professional soldiers in "the martial evangelicalism of the South."

Reactionary populists idealize the past because they loathe the present. Kaplan proves no exception. Fawning over soldiers as a virtuous remnant of a lost, better age, he misses no opportunity to express his contempt for his contemporaries who do not share in the austere existence of the classic man-at-arms. The targets of his wrath include, but are by no means limited to, narcissistic intellectuals, risk-averse politicians, micromanaging generals, bean-counting bureaucrats, wimpy journalists who have never visited Djibouti or Mongolia, the entire "policy nomenklatura in Washington and New York--in its cocoon of fine restaurants and theoretical discussions," and all manner of effete civilians, especially those residing in New England, which Kaplan, who makes his home in Massachusetts, describes as awash with pacifists.

Why are such people worth defending? How is it that a warped and decadent society manages to produce such sturdy warriors? Hovering in the background of his snapshot, these questions do not interest Kaplan. He prefers to focus on the American soldier in the field, where the order of the day has less to do with defending the country per se than with managing a global empire.

On that empire Kaplan is bullish. He views the global war on terror as an opportunity to push out its boundaries--if the policy-making twits in Washington will simply give dirty-boots soldiers the latitude to do so. "To be an American in the first decade of the twenty-first century," he writes, "was to be present at a grand and fleeting moment." The events of September 11, 2001, inaugurated what Kaplan calls America's "Second Expeditionary Era"--the first had begun with the expansionist surge of 1898--in which US forces once again sally forth to take up "the white man's burden," a phrase that he employs without irony or apology.

Kaplan laces his narrative with ostentatious references to emperors and adventurers, proconsuls and viceroys, ranging from T.E. Lawrence to "Ligustinus, the Roman centurion." The cumulative effect is to suggest that the United States today is simply doing what empires throughout history have done: shouldering "the righteous responsibility to advance the boundaries of free society and good government into zones of sheer chaos." To imply that other, less exalted considerations just might enter into the equation--power? profit?--becomes unseemly. For Kaplan, the essence of empire is helping those unable to help themselves, creating order out of anarchy and uplifting the downtrodden.

In this sense, as Kaplan sees it, 9/11 returned the US military to its nineteenth-century roots when advancing the boundaries of free society meant removing any obstacles impeding the westward march of the young Republic. Today's war on terror is "really about taming the frontier," with the frontier now literally without limits. According to Kaplan, the vast swath of Islam, stretching from Africa across the Middle East to Southeast Asia, now qualifies as "Injun Country." The "entire planet" has now become "battle space for the American military."

Buried in all of this chest-thumping jingoism and celebration of soldierly virtue is an argument of sorts. The essence of the argument is as follows: America's unconventional warriors hold the key to governing its global imperium. On the outer rim of empire, cultural sensitivity and familiarity with the local languages matter more than firepower. The efforts of the guy on the ground sipping tea with the local warlord count for more than airy pronouncements issued by the Pentagon or the White House. Quality outweighs quantity. Rather than the large, fixed installations favored by what Kaplan contemptuously refers to as the "Big Army," better to establish a small, austere footprint. Only the US military has the ability to run the American empire, but "the fewer troops that policed it the better."

According to Kaplan, the world's sole superpower doesn't especially need tanks and fighter-bombers, artifacts from a military age now past. Instead, it ought to be investing in something akin to a "Peace Corps with guns." During the course of his travels, he discovers that the nation already has this capability in its Special Forces and Marine Corps--elite organizations optimized for imperial policing. All that's required is to turn them loose and to get out of the way. After all, as Kaplan explains in an assertion sure to come as news to the Air Force and the Northern Alliance, a mere handful of special operations troops "conquered Afghanistan by themselves."

Kaplan's reporting, however, belies his thesis, both as to the imperial past and the military imperatives of the present. Two examples will suffice to make the point.

Kaplan's chapter on the Philippines details his stay in Zamboanga, where Filipino authorities have been engaged in a never-ending struggle against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. After 9/11 Washington classified the Moros as part of the global terrorist conspiracy and dispatched a contingent of military advisers to assist the Filipino army. For the Pentagon the southern Philippines became, in Kaplan's words, "a laboratory for drying up an Islamic insurgency, as well as for small-scale nation-building."

This is not, to put it mildly, the first time that American soldiers have undertaken such an enterprise. For well over a decade during the "First Expeditionary Era," Zamboanga had been the headquarters for khaki-clad Americans tasked with pacifying what was then called the Moro Province. US Army forces, under a succession of famous commanders such as Leonard Wood, Tasker Bliss and John Pershing, employed the "Peace Corps with guns" approach, combining naked coercion with ambitious programs of political reform, social engineering and economic development. Although the phrase "humanitarian intervention" had yet to be invented, the American officers sent to deal with the Moros had no doubt that their own intentions were humane and high-minded.

The effort yielded a meager harvest. Although the Americans killed plenty of Moros, including notoriously large numbers of women and children, resistance to US rule proved to be inextinguishable. Imaginative and energetically implemented nation-building programs had a negligible impact. Several decades of colonial tutelage produced a present-day Philippine nation that Kaplan himself describes as "dysfunctional, intractable, and poverty-stricken," not to mention "pathetically corrupt." Indeed, Kaplan observes--correctly--that "from 1902 to 1913, America's attempt to impose democracy had led to a more militant Islam." Why will present-day attempts to dry up this perpetual insurgency yield a different result? He does not say.

Kaplan conceived of his visit to Iraq as an opportunity to witness US Marines, tapping their rich history in "small wars," winning Iraqi hearts and minds. But unforeseen events intervened. When insurgents murdered four American contractors in Falluja on March 31, 2004, priorities changed: Cultural sensitivity suddenly mattered less than brute force. Battering Falluja into submission saw Marines resorting to the "Big Army" methods that Kaplan had earlier disdained, complete with tanks, fighter-bombers and an abundance of firepower. The assault on Falluja was the "classic, immemorial labor of infantry" reminiscent of Vietnam and World War II. It wasn't tea with warlords; it was a bloodbath.

On whether the effort advanced the boundaries of free society and good governance, Kaplan remains silent. But certainly the successive battles for Falluja--indeed, the mess that is present-day Iraq--calls into question Kaplan's contention that scattering Special Forces teams hither and yon will enable the United States to bring the Injuns to heel. There will always be recalcitrants willing and determined to fight.

Kaplan introduces Imperial Grunts with this typically bold assertion: "By the turn of the twenty-first century, the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's notice." Whether such an assessment of US military power was ever accurate is doubtful. By 2005, however, it had become demonstrably false. Hard-pressed to hold on to the new provinces to which today's architects of empire have laid claim, America's armed forces are in no position to appropriate more. As for the Pentagon's ability to flood additional obscure quarters of the earth, the troops required to do so simply do not exist.

The real story of the present-day US military, which the peripatetic Kaplan somehow has managed to overlook, is one of power squandered--lives lost, dollars wasted, a glittering reputation sullied. It's enough to suggest that a militarized empire might not be such a great idea after all.

Yeah. Let's hear it for IMPERIALISM.

"We have met the enemy - and they are us." - Pogo

Yes, and by the way – the Algerian military as exemplars of successful anti-insurgent operations, according to Kaplan? Have we forgotten what they got up to in the mid-1990s? Is Kaplan suggesting that the US emulate this?



Anatol Lieven