Using American Force in the Middle East

As the uprisings of 2011 continue to roll across the Middle East, one inevitable question seems to center on whether, or in what cases, the United States should contemplate the use of American forces to intervene in the situation(s). Eqaully inevitably, there is widespread disagreement about answers along fairly predictable ideological lines.

Because so many of the country’s land forces either are tied down in or have been exhausted by a decade of fighting two wars in the region in Iraq and Afghanistan, nobody of note has openly advocated putting American “muddy boots” on the ground in any of these conflicts. This admirable show of restraint is not because the civil uprisings are much less important to the United States or the world (it is not difficult to argue that most of the countries experiencing violence are as important to the United States as Iraq in particular), but because either the force is not available or the calculation is that even the American public would support such action. Still, on one side exemplified by John McCain (who could, one is reminded with a shudder, could be president of the United States) hectoring General Carter Ham, the Pentagon’s front man in this situation, about whether imposing (with American air forces) a no-fly zone in Libya might have brought about a different result (a Qadhafi overthrow) than the current impasse. General Ham, who is a bright guy, to his credit refused to rise to the bait on this one, sardonically telling the Senator such determinations were not military and thus not part of his portfolio. (Personal note: General Ham was a student of mine at the US Air War College in  1996-97, and was then a very perceptive student of the utilities and limits of military power.) The political left equally predictably decries any use of force in the current situation, arguing either that these are civil wars (they are) where our interests are not clear (which they are not) and that it is not clear whether our intervention might help under any circumstances (equally true).

Even the suggestion that the United States might use force to affect the outcomes of these various uprisings is curious. For one thing, they are all internal, civil affairs, with autocratic governments under varying degrees of siege from suppressed populations who want the old leader out, replaced by some alternative they we (and they) cannot define. These are, in international legal terms, strictly speaking none of our business, and although we may oppose dictatorial rule in principle, it is not clear we support an as-yet undefiined alternative. Who, for instance, is the alternative in Egypt? Moreover, our past catches up with us: if dictatorial leaders either professed anti-communism, ant-terrorism or both, we have probably supported them, making changing horses embarassing. We did pull the plug on Mubarak,but can we do so with Saleh in Yemen, where we clearly have no clue about the dynamics or other consequences of various outcomes (other than fearing Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula–AQAP–might benefit). Thus, the question “force for what?” has to be asked.

Stephen Walt, in a posting in Foreign Policy (online) dates April 4, 2011, offers some insight into why these questions even arise. In the article, he lays out five reasons the United States employs force so much, and he comes up with five answers that help frame the application of force to the Middle East. First, Walt argues, we use force “because we can.” The U.S. has lots of sophisticated military capability (most of which no one else has), and it is pretty easily available. Second, “the U.S. has no serious enemies,” which has two implications. One is that we don’t need our forces to deter non-existent enemies, and the other is that there is nobody who can–or wants to–oppose us when we do. The third reason is the existence of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF). Its existence largely removes the restraint of public displeasure, since nobody is involuntarily forced to implement force decisions. The fourth, “It’s the Establishment, Stupid!” argues that our political establishment has become in essence “force-happy,” seeing military solutions as the answer to all our problems (the neo-conservatives are singled out as the leading evangels of this phenomenon). Fifth and finally, “Congress has checked out,” meaning the Congress no longer asserts its constitutional perogatives to approve or disapprove applications of force. Taken in combination, Walt argues, the result is a green light for the U.S. government to view almost everything as a military problem with military solutions. Why should the current situation in the Middle East be any different?

Well, there are three differences. One is that there is some evidence the American public is becoming war weary enough that appeals to force do not resonate so well today. I have not, for instance, seen any groundswell behind the McCain position on no-fly zones (admittedly, I never listen to or watch Fox “News”). Second, it is indeed not at all clear what American interests are in this situation or how U.S. military action would positively achieve achieving whatever goals we might have in the area. 

The third reason may be the most defining: the budget crisis. Any U.S. application of force in the current uprisings is going to be expensive at a time when there is great pressure to bring down government spending. The Tea Partiers exclude (hpyocritically, in my view) defense spending in budget cuts to bring down deficits, but any serious advocacy of added defense spending to support military adventurism in the Middle East at a time when other budget oxen are being gored is probably politically unsupportable. Moreover, as Papa and Baby Paul would quickly point out in their libertarian way, overseas military activities are not exactly how one shrinks government. It thus may be that an unlikely coalition of the right and left, starting from opposite motivations, may come together to torpedo any dreams/nightmares that are entertained about inserting American force into the uprisings of 2011.

Bombing Al Qaeda

The contest against Al Qaeda (the “war on terror”) has moved to Yemen, where a franchise of the original organization, Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has set up shop and is organizing and dispatching terrorist missions against the United States (Ft. Hood, the Christmas underwear bomber) and apparently Great Britain, resulting in their upgrading of their terrorist alert level to the American equialvent of an “orange” alert. The question is, what to do about it?

In one sense,as noted last week, this is not an entirely new problem: Al Qaeda has been present in Yemen for awhile, and the United States and others have been investing in helping the Yemenis to beef up their capability to deal with this sort of problem. They have done so without great apparent enthusiasm, since anti-Americanism is alive and quite healthy in the desert country. Moreover, Yemen is geographically one great big Badlands of deserts and barren mountains, both of which provide protection for AQAP activities.

The first reaction by some Americans, of course, has been to send in the Marines (or Army), but our forces are more than occupied in those other ”fronts” of the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, so there really aren’t any spare troops just lying around waiting to be deployed. Sending assets to aid in Haitian relief only empties the availability of forces reservoir a bit more. Conterterrorism and antiterrorism efforts continue quietly by the intelligence and law enforcement assets of the U.S. (the CIA, FBI, and ICE), but those efforts are below the public radar. What can be done dramatically to address the situation?

The likely American response, in the U.S. tradition for half a  century or more, is to bomb them. Traditionally, of course, that meant dispatching the Air Force from friendly bases in the region (such as they exist) or launching airplanes or cruise missiles from aircraft carriers floating around the region. Increasingly, of course, the weapon of choice, available both to the military and the CIA, is the use of pilotless Predator drones armed with precision munitions.

Is this a good idea? Certainly, it has its attractions. For one thing, it is something we can do, and the simple fact of responding has a certain feel-good aspect to it. Second, it is an action that can be undertaken without engaging and thus further stressing American ground assets, who are not involved in such actions (other than the occasional use of Special Forces as spotters). Third, while overflying Yemen (or anywhere else) violates the sovereignty of the air space through which we fly, the violation is nowhere nearly as great as if ground forces are involved. Granted, the Pakistanis have complained so much that the United States no longer officially attacks Al Qaeda targets in the frontier areas any more, and the Yemenis have politely informed the U.S. not to send Predators over their soil, as they prefer attacking AQAP themselves (they would not mind being sold or given a few Predators of their own to do this). Nonetheless, the option is at least partially available. Finally, Predator air strikes are comparatively cheap, certainly more so than ground forces.

There are, however, some problems. First, it is not at all clear how effective these attacks are against the opponent. The United States has, after all, been trying to kill Usama bin Laden for nine years this way, and we have yet to succeed. Second, it is not clear that such attacks do not make matters worse rather than better. Whenever the U.S. has attacked supposed hostile targets in the region in the past (including Pakistan and Afghanistan), the result has been fairly considerable (depending on whose accounts one believes) collateral damage: the killing of innocent civilians who just happen to be in the area under attack.

The 2007 Counterinsurgency Manual (Army FM 3-24, Marine Warfighting Document 3-33.5) warns specifically about the problems this creates (Appendix E-5): “Bombing…can cause unintended civilian casualties. Effective leaders weight the benefits of every air strike against its risks. An air strike can cause collateral damage the turns people against the host-nation (HN) government and provides insurgents with a major propaganda victory.” In addition, the survivors of these attacks often become prime recruitment targets of the survivors. There is little reason to believe that aerial bombardment kills more Al Qaeda than the recruits it creates.

What to do about AQAP–and wherever the next Al Qaeda cell pops up–is not an easy task. “Bombing them back to the stone age,” in Curt LeMay’s charming entreaty, may sound macho and feel good, but it is not clear that it does not do more harm than it causes. Let’s hope that cooler heads prevail as an anti-AQAP response is honed.

Yemen, Anyone?

The revelations that the Ft. Hood massacre committed by US Army Major Nidal Malik Hassan and the Christmas underwear bombing attempt by Nigerian Umar Frouk Abdulmutallab may have been inspired by the rhetoric of an expatriate American living in Yemen (Anwar al-Maliki) placed that poor country on the southern end of the Arabian peninsula in the cross-hairs of the American war on terror. Yemen, we quickly learned, is the ancestoral ground from which Usama bin Laden came, and suddenly we began to talk about yet another Hydra-head of Al Qaeda, this time Al Qaeda in Yemen.

The question is that the United States should do about the situation in Yemen. To begin with, although the discovery of radical, terrorist actions emitting from the desert country may have come as a revelation to average Americans, it was certainly no secret to the U.S. government. Even a casual recollection reveals that one of the most notable pre-9/11 terrorist attacks against the U.S. occurred in a Yemeni port (the USS Cole), and one of the first successful drone attacks against Al Qaeda occurred there when a CIA-operated Predator took out some leading members of the terrorist organization. The forbidding, barren mountains of interior Yemen have long been a “badlands” in which radicals have set up shop and have been an inviting hiding place for some time. The government of Yemen has, without many Americans noticing, been receiving military anti-terrorist training support from the US government: this past year, it received $74 million in such aid, second only to that dispensed to Pakistan. Yemen may not have been on your radar or mine,  but it ceratinly has been under the watchful eye of Uncle Sam.

Given this history and the apparent rise of activism in Yemen, what is the United States to do? The first, knee jerk reaction was to ask if the American military should be sent. If one thinks the military problem of dealing with the mountainous regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan straddling the Durand Line are, to put it mildly, challenging, one should contemplate military operations in the undefined, largely uninhabited, and extremely harsh mountainous desert of Yemen. The Tora Bora is a lush and inviting landscape by comparison! Moreover, given American military overcommitment in the area generally, it is not clear where any military assets could be found. These realities, of course, have not still or even slowed down right-wing screeds against the Obama administration for alleged lack of due diligence. They have, however, quieted more analytic minds.

Right now, there is very little the United States can do about Yemen. A few more American trainers may be possible to insert, although anti-American sentiment is great in the country, so it must be very low-profile. The United States can share aerial intelligence (satellites, overflights) with the Yemeni armed forces (which we are doing), but it is probably best that any American strikes against targets in Yemen be adequately clandestine that the Yemenis themselves can claim the credit (if the attacks work). It is also probably possible to improve American intelligence abot who comes and goes to and from the country, thereby enhancing our potential ability to identify more terrorists being trained in Yemen and then dispensed to the United States (or elsewhere) to carry out their deadly missions. Beyond these kinds of actions, it is difficult to imagine other actions that would either work or not make the situation worse.

Effectiveness and productivity or counter-productivity are sobering criteria to apply to Yemen or to other future like situations (which, to the extent the United States is successful in dislodging Al Qaeda from places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, are inevitable). What the United States does not know about fighting and “winning” (whatever that means) in Yemen would fill a much larger volume that what we do know. All the military “can do” attitude in the world is hard to extrapolate into a likely success of American military efforts. What such efforts would almost certainly do, however, would be to inflame more anti-Americanism by our presence, thereby effectively taking a leaf from the long-practiced Israeli playbook of taking actions that make situations worse than they already were.

Our culture is activist and has a hard time dealing with situations and conditions which we cannot “fix.” That American can fix almost anything is ingrained in our worldview, but the intractability and inscrutability of the situation in the Middle East should be creating some sense of limitson out enthusiasm and optimism. The answer to “Yemen, Anyone?” should be a polite, but firm, “No thank you.”