Archive for the 'Religion' Category

The Holidays are certainly a time to remember those who serve us, especially those in the way of harm.  It is quite appropriate for a Military blog to convey love, deep gratitude and sincere appreciation for the hard service of being in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan any time, but so much more during the holiday season.  This is an especially hard time for the troops who wish more than anything else to be with loved ones.

But the purest love is given to us by God in His son, Jesus Christ, the Word incarnate, and this is what we celebrate during the Christmas season.  When so many are confused about what true religion means, it should be remembered that the message is not that mankind needs the perfect example, although the life of Christ was perfect.  Rather, it is that mankind needs a savior, and this was the reason He came to earth.

” … and she will bear a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for it is He who will save His people from their sins … Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, which translated means, ‘God with us’.”  Matthew 1:21-23.

I wish all of my readers a very merry Christmas this holiday season, and leave you with a video of beautiful music.  May you be joyful and with family.

In June of 2007 we discussed Constabulary Operations and Prison Overcrowding, in which I said that “I do not believe in the healing, therapeutic or rehabilitative powers of imprisonment,” but that we were facing a prison overcrowding problem of major proportions going forward if we continue to engage in constabulary operations in Iraq.

In the following articles:

Religion and Insurgency: A Response to Dave Kilcullen
Smith Responds
A Modest Proposal

I discussed my views concerning religion and insurgency, and that contrary to Kilcullen’s view that there isn’t a single fighter who actually fights for the insurgency in Iraq for religious reasons, religion can provide a robust understanding of the motivations of all peoples in all of their actions, not just insurgents.

It appears that the commanders who are concerned with pragmatic affairs and who are faced with actual, real life day-to-day problems are following counsel that is similar to my own as it regards prisons (they need to be emptied or more need to be constructed) and religion (we need to know and act on what the enemy believes).

Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, commanding general of detainee operations in Iraq, is fighting what he has called “the battlefield of the mind.” He has instituted extensive screening of incoming prisoners and has made available about 30 training and education courses, including religion and civics, to the 25,188 prisoners under his control.

At a news conference last week, he said that once a person is in custody at his facilities, Camp Cropper near Baghdad and Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, “we spend a lot of time learning about them now, studying their motivations . . . why they’re fighting, who they fight for — more so than we’ve ever known before.”

At Cropper and Bucca, he said, there is “an assessment phase, and we take 72 hours and then we work really hard on categorizations.” Based on those assessments, which include having imams evaluate prisoners on their religious beliefs, a decision is made about where to house them in the detention facility.

As Stone was describing his program, the Multi-National Force-Iraq Joint Contracting Command was advertising for 12 contract intelligence analysts to work for Stone at Cropper and Bucca for six to 18 months, beginning in March.

Their jobs will be mainly to “conduct in-processing assessment of new detainees coming into the theater internment facilities,” according to the statement of work. They will screen the circumstances of each detainee’s capture and any sworn statements or intelligence about the person contained in an accompanying packet.

After that, the work statement says, the contracted analysts will “determine what category a detainee is assigned to based on age, religion, threat level and insurgent group affiliation.” They will also decide “where to place the detainee in the segregation plan.”

Stone said the compounds are not organized by geographical areas, so most prisoners “don’t really know each other.” Because extremists are “generally the guys that know each other . . . and they come in to set up kind of a gang court,” people from the same areas are spread out across the prison.

The courses they take, almost all of which are voluntary, include basic education, vocational training and religion. The religion course, run by one of 43 imams working on the program, lasts four days.

The civics course, which each detainee must take before he is released, covers “why you should try to get an education — why you should try to have a job,” Stone said. Other courses touch “on how you control anger, the oath of peace, the sacredness of life and property and references back to the Koran,” he added. The demand for classes has “stripped” the 150 teachers he has available.

“I don’t change people,” Stone said. “Those people or God changes them, not me, but we do set in motion the ability to have that change take place.”

Stone sees the overall program as working with detainees so that “they cannot conduct an insurgency inside the wire.” He added that he hopes that detainees “someday maybe even work with us and, of course, by telling us who the bad guys are.”

One result already seen, he said, is that moderates in the prisons are identifying extremists, thus facilitating their segregation from the rest of the population. At Camp Bucca, about 1,000 extremists were identified and pulled from among the 21,000 prisoners, and “that made a big difference,” he said.

In addition to being theologically and anthropologically sound, this approach is pragmatic – and it is the approach we have advocated from the beginning.

There is yet another discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal that convinces me that I must try one more time to explain the involvement that coalition forces should have with culture and religion in a counterinsurgency campaign.  Much confusion swirls around this issue because, in part, people reflexively respond (a) by assuming that you are calling for a holy war, or (b) assuming that your mindset is one of a social scientist hunting for another lever to pull or button to push to cause certain reactions.  The former category reacts to my modest proposal by denying that religion should have any role in how one man relates to another, with the later category honestly attempting to engage the issue, but as counterinsurgency professionals using ideas such as center of gravity and societal power structure.  Neither camp really gets it yet.  So let’s use two simple examples that might show how religion and cultural understanding might aid the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq.  These examples are not meant to be sweeping or comprehensive, nor am I constructing doctrine in a short, simple little article.  I am attempting to make this simple rather than complex.

In the first example, I will imagine that I am a chaplain in Iraq serving U.S. troops.  I will endeavor to ensure that the spiritual and life issues of the men under my responsible charge are squared away, but along with this, I approach my Commanding Officer and ask to arrange a meeting between the local Imam and me.  The meeting is arranged, and begins with me thanking the Imam for meeting with me, and telling them that even though I am Christian, I am very impressed by the ‘smartness’ of the Kalam cosmological argument, and that the Islamic scholars who teach this have reason to be proud.  We share food and talk about family, and then I request that he teach me something of his faith.  The reason, I share with him, is that I want to ensure that the men who represent the United States act with honor.  There will be many cultural and religious things of which they are unaware, and families, the man of the house, and women might take offense to actions behind which there was no intention of causing such a reaction.  He can tell me things that he would not say to the Commanding Officer, I tell him, and he can trust me with confidentiality.  I will work with the CO or simply with the men, but work I will, very hard, to ensure that no offensive action is taken that would violate the religious sensibilities of his people.  I know that this can work, since a national religious conference has already occurred, put on by the Department of Defense at the request of Muslim clerics who approached our Chaplains as fellow holy men.  I am but a single Chaplain, but I believe that I can take the intent behind the national conference and apply it at a local level.  Finally, I end my meeting with the Imam by requesting a series of meetings so that I can learn his faith and work with him and his people to ease their suffering to the extent that I am capable.

In the next example, it is the year 2004 and Sadr is in the custody of U.S. Marines (the Marines of 3/2).  I know that there is a large group of Shi’a who are moderate, and in fact, many Sunni look upon them as uncommitted Muslims.  I also know that many see the Sunni as hardened Muslims who follow the Salafist or Wahhabist jihadist traditions.  But as a religious man who has his attenna up with these things, I know that these generalized views can lead to very wrong conclusions.  I know that the Sunnis of Western Iraq are much more secular than the Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, and want none of the radicalism of the hard line schools.  Recently slain Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reesha was a chain smoker whose hands would have eventually been cut off by the jihadists to stop him from his smoking.

On the other hand, I know that Sistani has not yet met with coalition forces or representatives of coalition forces because we are the “great Satan.”  Likewise, Sadr is a believer in a form of radical Shi’ism that comes from the Mullahs in Iran, and can be trusted only to subvert a stable Iraq that allies with the West against religious extremism.  I manage to convince coalition authorities not to release Sadr.  In this example I manage to use my knowledge of religion to diagnose which sect can be trusted and which cannot.

Such can be the results of a religious understanding between coalition forces and the people of Iraq.  This understanding can be there if it is not contrived or forced, as some sort of tool of counterinsurgency appealing to societal power structures or centers of gravity in order to persuade the Iraqis to do something or be a certain way for us.  I am in favor of honest and open dialogue in military matters concerning the enemy, and likewise in matters religious and cultural.

Chaplain (CPT) William Johnson, the 1-8 Combined Arms Battalion chaplain, gives candy to Iraqi children on the streets of Balad.

See also Chaplains as Liaisons with Religious Leaders: Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan.

W. Thomas Smith, Jr., has yet another great article, this one timely and encouraging.  It concerns religion on the front lines.  An excerpt follows:

… Combat soldiers and Marines prayed openly and unashamedly, as did their officers. Not all of them mind you, but a noticeable number. Even the ones who cursed, pardon the cliché and the reference, like sailors.

As I mentioned at “The Tank,

The recent British airport bombing suspect, a highly-educated doctor, was also an eager religious radical, calling into question again the paradigm of disenfranchisement as the motivation behind such terrorists.

Armed with off-the-charts intelligence, Bilal Abdullah entered this world with the kind of family pedigree and privilege few Iraqis enjoy.

But he may have intended to leave this world a martyr in the name of radical Islam.

On Saturday, Abdullah was charged with planting two car bombs in London and riding shotgun in the botched suicide car-bomb attack on Glasgow International Airport late last month.

Investigators in Britain and Australia are questioning seven other suspects in custody.

The case may further dispel a still widely held Western perception that Islamic radicalism is the province of the disenfranchised and uneducated.

Shouts of ‘Allah, Allah’ could be heard as the suspects were apprehended.  The view that poverty, disenfranchisement and dislocation is beind global “jihad” is popular and in vogue.  The issue of religious motivation is behind the dispute discussed in (1) Religion and Insurgency: A Response to Dave Kilcullen, (2) Smith Responds, and (3) More on Dave Kilcullen vs. Smith.  Kilcullen claims that the insurgency in Iraq is “entirely political.”  I have argued to the contrary, i.e., that there are at least some of the insurgents who fight due to religious motivation.  The seminal thesis that guides Kilcullen’s thinking was outlined several years ago in a monograph entitled Complex Warfighting.

Globalisation, during the last decades of the twentieth century, has created winners and losers.  A global economy and an embryonic global cultural are developing, but this has not been universally beneficial.  Poverty, disease and inequality remain major problems for much of the world, and the global economy has been seen as favouring the West while failing developing nations.  The developing global culture is perceived as a form of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism: corroding religious beliefs, eroding the fabric of traditional societies, and leading to social, spiritual and cultural dislocation.  This has created a class of actors – often non-state actors – who oppose globalisation, its beneficiaries (the developed nations of the ‘West’) and, particularly, the U.S.

But the problem with this view is the same as the one with the claim by Congressman Ron Paul who believes that American hegemony, imperialism and interventionism led to the events of 9/11.  It simply doesn’t comport with the facts.  Prior to 9/11 U.S. forces had armed the Muslims in Afghanistan to enable them to drive the Soviet Union from their midst, saved the Muslims in Bosnia from extermination, assisted the Shi’a in the south of Iraq (due to the Southern no-fly zone), and saved the Kurdish Muslims in Northern Iraq from extermination (due to the Northern no-fly zone).

In an interesting discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal, the subject of religion comes up again, except in (first) pejorative terms, and then in clearer terms.  First, commenter Mark O’Neill on justification of Operation Iraqi Freedom as being Jesus telling us to “help the poor and downtrodden.”

I wonder what the large number of non-christian Americans would think about this as a justification for national policy or strategic planning? You wouldn’t last 10 seconds in Australia trying it.

Thankfully, I have never seen anyone successfully argue a conops in our Army or security policy establishment on the basis that “Jesus would want me to do it”. Our mob tend to be a bit secular and stick to the more mundane, rather than the divine… you know, good old fashion simple things like sound military strategic planning principles.

Each man has a right to his own value-system, and O’Neill should study Good Wars by Professor Darrel Cole and expand his horizons a bit.  But the comment is tantamount to saying that either (a) there has never been a national conversation in Australia about just war theory or the justification for sending troops into Afghanistan and Iraq, or (b) there have been such discussions, but O’Neill (and Australia) would allow any value-system into the fray but Christianity, a rather bigoted position.  In either case, this is a barren world view.  Finally, military strategy is not related to just war theory.  It is possible to engage in a discussion of both, O’Neill’s position notwithstanding.

But Steve Metz gets it.  Mr. Metz might now claim that he is misunderstood, or had a bad day, or had a little too much wine at the time, but the comment cannot be undone, and his prose is raw, thoughtful and informative.

… that illustrates what I think is THE key dilemma of the “war of ideas” against Islamic extremism: our enemies are offering their followers eternal bliss and we’re offering satellite television. But if we cannot compete in a LTG Boykinesque religious-ideological war because we are multi-faith/multi-cultural nations.

It’s really depressing, but the only long term solution I can see is radical action to wean overselves off of petroleum, disengagement from the Islamic world, and treating people from that region like we treated Soviets during the Cold War, i.e. with no expectation of unfettered rights. We haven’t reached the point of taking such admittedly adverse steps yet, but I think we’re one WMD terrorism incident away from doing so.

Ron Paul believes that we can trade with Iran, Syria and the rest of the Islamic world.  But it isn’t about Christianity, per se.  Whether the export is pure Christianity, the unadulterated smut and filth of Hollywood, democracy, satellite television or female suffrage, there isn’t any Western export that is acceptable to radical Islam.  Not a single one.

It doesn’t have to be about religion to Western eyes for at least part of the conflict to be about religion (or a radicalized form of it).  In this case, it doesn’t take two to Tango.  It only takes one.  Metz is right.  For the Ron Paul vision of the world to work, total disengagement (viz. Patrick Buchanan) would have to occur in order to prevent all Western exports, not just religion.  While Kilcullen has gotten it wrong about jihad being exclusively about poverty, he has gotten it right about globalization.

My very astute reader, Dominique, has left a smart and sweeping comment on my article Religion and Insurgency: A Response to Dave Kilcullen (which is followed up by article Smith Responds).  The response is important enought to warrant its own article.  The comment is published here entirely.

Just for the sake of clarity, let’s continue this a bit further.  I do not advocate – and have never advocated in anything I have published – that we expend attention, resources, effort, largesse, or the time of our armed forces to attempt to (a) change the minds of adherents of Islam, (b) tell Muslims what the Quran says, (c) evangelize Muslims, or (d) war against Muslims because they are adherents to Islam.  I am not charging you with this misunderstanding, but some of the commenters have made this error, failing to read my prose with a clear head and open mind.

My basic presupposition has been that there are some insurgents who are religiously motivated, mainly because they have told us so (and this, not in communications to us, but communications to themselves such as the letter from al Qaeda high command to Zarqawi that we intercepted).  This fraction is less than unity, but greater than zero.  For the sake of argument, I am willing, even, to grant my detractors the point that this fraction (FR, or fraction that is religiously motivated) is less than unity by a non-trivial amount, even though I am not sure that this is the case.  For this fraction FR, whether right or wrong, their hermeneutic forces them to do what they do under the rubric of religion.  For FR, religious commitment is more important than security or largesse.  Therefore, FR will not be amenable to our efforts at WHAM (winning hearts and minds).

The other insurgents (fraction not religiously motivated), FNR = 1 – FR, will be amenable to WHAM under this formulation.  It pays to understand enough about the culture and religion to know how to ascertain which schools of thought the fraction FR represents and how we might identify these subsets up front.  For example, given the religious motivation of Ansar al Sunna, it is a good bet that they are in the category of FR.

This is a simple formulation, and one that I think makes good common sense.  The readers and commenters who think I am calling for a holy war are reactionary, stolid and mentally dense.  Again, Dominique, you are not in this category, but some of my readers have been.  For those readers who are in this category, I can only say, please, try to keep up with me as the conversation advances and moves forward.  You’re slowing the train down.

Kilcullen, on the other hand, has proposed that there are no insurgents who are religiously motivated, and thus arrives at the conclusion that all insurgents will be amenable to efforts at WHAM.

The differences are fairly clear, and the reader can make up his or her own mind.  In the future, I will publish another article that discusses the published U.S. military doctrine concerning religion and insurgency and how this changed in favor of the more secular view after the events of 9/11.

In Religion and Insurgency: A Response to Dave Kilcullen, Smith continued a conversation that Kilcullen started at the Small Wars Journal on the role of religion in the impetus for an insurgency.  Every now and again a dust-up develops over the web, and a response is necessary to set the record straight.  In this article Smith responds to the comment thread at the initial article at The Captain’s Journal and The Small Wars Manual.

Smith finds the discussion at least mildly amusing with the fabricated stories about what Smith believes or what surely must be the consequences of his reasoning, but beyond a little chuckle, the work of thinking clearly is serious business and requires us to roll our sleeves up and expend a little energy.  As one who has had some formal graduate level training in religion, Smith has something to offer to questions on the role of religion.

To rehearse Kilcullen’s article, he has it as his project to demonstrate that the traditional methods of winning hearts and minds in a counterinsurgency are useful for the Iraqi population, i.e., that religion doesn’t prevent traditional methods from producing fruit.  Insofar as the project is careful, judicious, and open-minded, this is a legitimate project.  But Kilcullen didn’t stop at a judicious conclusion.  The insurgency in Iraq, said he, was “entirely political.”  That is, there is no religious aspect to the insurgency.

Kilcullen’s error is one of attempting to use inductive evidence to prove a universal negative, or in other words, he committed a formal logical fallacy.  Or said in a bit more formal manner, a deduction with a universal conclusion must have two universal premises.  This formal error particulary preys upon people who begin the process of reasoning (or, if you will, the scientific process) with an emotional or ideological commitment to a premise that they want to prove.  Just for the sake of clarity, one could also say that Kilcullen commits the fallacy of composition, where one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole.

At the discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal, Smith continued to outline the most egregious failures of the new counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24.  Said Smith:

In summary, the two most important failures in FM 3-24 in my opinion are:

1. Failure to incorporate the things that religion can teach us in a counterinsurgency campaign, and

2. Failure to address how protracted engagements affect troop morale and public sentiment at home (not, by the way, a failure of the Small Wars Manual as I have written about in “Observations on Timeliness from the Small Wars Manual”). I do not believe that the nation will ever again give us ten years to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign. To the extent that FM 3-24 assumes this, our proverbial heads are “in the sand.”

Concerning the second point, the current Marine Commandant (apparently about simultaneously with Smith) warned that there was a disconnect between the needs of the classical counterinsurgency and what the nation would allow in terms of duration or longevity (see also here and here).

“The difference in the time we in uniform need for success in Iraq and the amount of time our countrymen are prepared to invest is a disconnect that’s troubling,” Conway said.

He pointed to progress in western al-Anbar province, a hotbed of the Sunni insurgency where some tribal leaders have recently turned against al-Qaeda extremists and joined forces with US troops.

The province was once considered the last in line to be turned over to Iraqi security forces because of the intensity of the insurgency, but Conway said that has changed with Sunnis joining the Iraqi army and police in large numbers.

US commanders will have to decide whether 4,000 additional marines that were supposed to deploy to the province as part of the surge will still be needed in Al-Anbar, he said.

Whether security for Al-Anbar can be turned over to Iraqis sooner is “very much an open question at this point, but I’m optimistic about all those things,” Conway said.

Conway argued that a US failure in Iraq would damage US credibility and leave the world “a less safe place.”

But he said insurgencies typically take nine to 10 years to defeat.

“I think there is less of an appetite in our country than we, the military, might think we need to sustain that kind of effort over that period of time. That’s the basic disconnect that I was talking about,” he said.

Smith’s initial article argued that religion was a fundamental motivator of men, and in order completely to understand man’s actions, religion had to be considered as at least one of the elements, if not the most important.  The comments on Smith’s views fell into logical errors, constructed straw men and fabricated stories about what Smith advocated.  First came “emjayinc.”  To emjayinc, religion as a motivator seems “too deterministic.”  How this is so is not explained, but his objection falls moot when he puts forward other deterministic motivators for man, including the procurement of resources.  For no reason that is explained, emjayinc favors the determinism of resource seeking over the determinism of religion.

The fallacy of using anecdotal evidence to make universal conclusions takes it next prey. emjayinc then makes a patently false statement in asserting that “religion … appears nowhere in most modern constructs of man’s motivating needs.”  Debunking this is difficult because Smith is left to wonder which single book, person, society or scholarly article to cite, when there are so many hundreds of thousands available.  In order to bring this to a more rapid conclusion we will leave emjayinc to consult with the Society of Christian Philosphers.

Next, emjayinc falls prey to the genetic fallacy when he appeals to the idea that “many people believe that men use religion to satisfy needs.”  What he alleges “many people” to believe is, for purposes of this argument, quite irrelevant.  Next comes emjayinc’s straw many to substitute for Smith’s real arguments.  Said he, “if it’s about religion, then its (sic) the Christians against the Muslims.”  Here emjayinc is pretending that Smith called for a holy war between Christians and Muslims.  This needn’t waste any more of our time, since this call for holy war was neither present in Smith’s article nor subsequent comments here or at the Small Wars Journal.

Next in line is “Kat-Missouri” (abbreviated here as “Kat”).  Kat engages us in a somewhat far-reaching discussion about what he feels to be how the U.S. might engage a culture in a counterinsurgency.  This discussion is moderately interesting, but again, quite irrelevant.  Kat has constructed a straw man.  The specific location at which believers might congregate a couple of hours a week is not germane to the argument, because Smith didn’t discussion Churches, Mosques or Synagogues.  Smith discussed religion.  All of the discussion on anything else is wasted insofar as it is intended to be a rebuttal of Smith.

Next, Kat falls into a non sequitur, saying after this discussion that “emjay and Kilcullen would be correct in saying that politics, not religion, is the basis through which we should engage.”  The first problem with this conclusion is that it isn’t supported by any of the antecedent discussion.  The second problem with this conclusion is that the antecedent discussion is consumed with the Mosque, but the conclusion introduces a new subject: religion.  The two are not the same.  Power is indeed an insidious thing, ensnaring men who have it to keep it and obtain more of it.  Kat’s discussion on power structures — whether political or in the religious community — warrants its own study.  But Smith’s article didn’t touch on this issue.

Religion, or world view, far from being identified with institutions, is what orients and motivates a man’s life when he is not in public places of worship.  It has to do with world views, or belief- and value-systems.  This is true even of emjayinc’s and Kat’s position (even if for example they are humanists, Smith’s definition includes humanism within the scope of religion; for the right to do this, see Gordon H. Clark, Religion, Reason and Revelation, Chapter 1.)  Smith’s detractors make the case that men are motivated by anything but religion, and especially stuff; we might call it the “give them stuff and they will come” approach to counterinsurgency.  But of course, counterinsurgency is more difficult than merely giving people stuff, and rather than Smith it is his detractors who oversimplify the matter.  Religion is currently the basis for an insurgency in Thailand.

The violence in the south is increasingly directed more at Moslems, as the terrorists try to eliminate government informers, and non-Moslems increasingly organize death squads to carry out reprisal attacks. Most of the Moslem population wants all the violence to stop, as this sort of thing has happened before. Since the Moslem Sultanate was taken over by Thailand a century ago, there have been uprisings every few generations. In the past, these rebellions were put down with much violence by the Thai government. It’s not for nothing that Thailand is one of the few nations in the region to never be colonized. The Thais are tough, determined, and vicious if provoked. However, times have changed, and “vicious” doesn’t play as well as it used to. So the Thai government is telling the southerners to cool it, and is sending money and other economic aid as peace offerings. In times past, this might have worked. But this time around, it’s not just ethnic (the southerners are Malays) and religious (some 95 percent of Thais are Buddhists) differences, but the presence of Islamic radicals who want to convert all Thais to Islam …

The third problem with Kat’s conclusion is that it extends the scope of the conversation into areas previously uncharted.  Stricly speaking, the subject has been whether religion can be said to be a motivator of man and whether traditional WHAM tactics, techniques and procedures can be effective on those who are religiously motivated.  Kat extends this conversation to the point that it now encompasses an entirely new subject: whether we should engage religion at all in our counterinsurgency techniques, whatever the term “engage” is supposed to mean to Kat.

Kat ends his far ranging discussion with the following exaggeration: “To imagine that we should engage the religious nature of a community without the requisite moral authority, even as a proxy on its face, is the epitome of arrogance.”  Contrary to this view, to send soldiers and marines to win hearts and minds of a population without at least some cursory understanding of the population is the equivalent of blinding them and then turning them loose with firearms.  Based on Smith’s premise, some Muslims will follow a hermeneutic that requires them to war on others to extend their faith (AQI and AAS would be examples).  This isn’t true of all Muslims, and in fact it may only be a small fraction.  Still others will not be amenable to negotiations with the U.S. armed forces or the political structure (this list may include, for example, Sadr, Sistani, the Mullahs in Iran, the Badr force, etc.).  Still others will be amenable to our efforts at WHAM (the Sunni tribes), and still others might be an ally in our struggles.  It pays to know your enemy.  It may pay even more to know those whose hearts and minds you wish to win.

The responses to U.S. efforts will range across the spectrum, with a whole host of reasons for the various reactions, religion being among them.  Further, an understanding of the religious landscape means more than gaining a knowledge of motivations.  It also means being sensitive to U.S. tactics, techniques and procedures on the population and ensuring that TTPs that are inherently offensive are minimized to the extent practical (e.g., see Smith’s article Religious and Cultural Sensitivities in Counterinsurgency). Engaging the culture (despite the straw men set up by Smith’s detractors) doesn’t mean U.S. soldiers evangelizing Muslims, or attempting to tell them what their own religion expects of them, or expecting every adherent to be a radical militant.  Building straw men and then deconstructing them makes for good entertainment, but doesn’t add anythng meaningful to the conversation.

The Small Wars Manual, concerning engaging the religion of the locale in which U.S. forces are deployed, says:

1-31.d: Akin to politics is the subject of religion.  The people of many countries take their religion as seriously as their politics … 1.11: A failure to use tact when required or lack of firmness at a crucial moment might readily precipitate a situation that could have been avoided had the commander been familiar with the customs, religion, morals, and education of those with whom he was dealing.

Sometimes the best counsel is the oldest.  Smith’s argument concerning the duration of counterinsurgency and public sentiment is similar to that of the Marine Corps commandant (even if  somewhat unrelated to the initial subject of Kilcullen’s commentary).  Smith’s views on religion and counterinsurgency – far from being debunked – have not yet even been engaged.

On April 15, 2007, Dave Kilcullen authored a commentary on Edward Luttwak’s commentary entitled Dead End: Counterinsurgency Warfare as Military Malpractice.  Kilcullen invokes this discussion in his most recent commentary entitled Religion and Insurgency at the Small Wars Journal; Kilcullen puts forward a series of interesting thoughts on the role (or lack thereof) of religion in the current insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Without studying these articles, my commentary will be read in a vacuum.  It is recommended that you spend the time necessary to understand Kilcullen’s arguments before tackling my response.  In the lengthy article that follows, Smith responds to Kilcullen; first to his views concerning the relationship of Islam and the insurgency in Iraq, second to his views concerning the Peters / Luttwak position, and finally the current state of affairs concerning rules of engagement and the Petraeus letter to the troops concerning the same.

The three central theses of Kilcullen’s commentary follow:

First, there is solid field evidence that modern counterinsurgency methods, properly updated for the new environment, actually are effective against current insurgencies. Second, insurgents in both Afghanistan and Iraq are not actually particularly religious — certainly, they are no more religious than the societies they are attacking. Indeed, there is an empirical problem with the whole notion of a “religious

I have extensively covered and commented on rules of engagement for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I doubt that there are any other weblogs for which seven articles have been published under the subject tag.  The comments (totaling in the hundreds now) range across the spectrum, but one thing has become clear.  The commenters (and this author) are talking past each other because of failure to engage the discussion at its root: pre-theoretical commitments.

Permit me a bit of philosophical meandering, and forgive me for what will be a long article.  The problem lies not in whether the ROE are “right” or “wrong,” as there are NCOs, officers, and civilians who, regardless of the so-called “evidence” that there are problems, will deny it and assert with full confidence that the ROE are fine, or regardless of the testimony in favor of the current ROE, will assert that there are problems.  This is not surprising, and points to commitments or beliefs that philosopher Alvin Plantinga would call properly foundational or basic, not being subject to “proof” since they are in fact used as axioms or presuppositions to prove the consequent(s).

So that we don’t remain in the realm of the incomprehensible to most people, let’s tackle a couple of examples, the first coming from my sniper coverage.  There has been an evolution even during OIF in how the sniper threat is treated when potential non-combatants are in the vicinity.  The first example comes from Camp Habbaniyah and Lt. Col. Desgrosseilliers’ Battalion after it had sustained a sniper attack.

Within eight minutes, the jump team slid to a stop in front of the surgical unit at an air base near Camp Habbaniyah. Desgrosseilliers joined several jump-team Marines and orderlies in carrying the wounded man inside on a stretcher.

After a few minutes, Grant came out, blood all over his jumpsuit, and sat on the ground, wordless.

Later a doctor came out and told Navy corpsman George Grant it looked as if the Marine would live, that he’d been stabilized and would be flown to a larger hospital. 

Desgrosseilliers emerged and stood silent as Mueller gathered the members of the jump team in a circle and told them that they’d done a good job and he was glad they were safe.

Earlier in the war, maybe, or under a different commander, the Marines might have returned heavy fire in the general direction of the sniper to make him stop.

This time, they hadn’t fired, not even once. No one could see exactly where the shots were coming from, and a stream of bullets into the town could have hit innocent civilians and seriously damaged Desgrosseilliers’ plan to calm the area.

Back in camp, he said he was proud of his men for being so disciplined.

“I think the insurgency is trying to get us off our message by getting us to return fire and maybe kill some innocent people,” Desgrosseilliers said. “But it’s just not going to work.”

The second example describes a soldier’s reaction to a non-lethal standoff weapon that causes the skin to feel as if it is at a very high temperature – the “ray gun.”

Airman Blaine Pernell, 22, said he could have used the system during his four tours in Iraq, where he manned watchtowers around a base near Kirkuk. He said Iraqis often pulled up and faked car problems so they could scout U.S. forces (italics mine).

“All we could do is watch them,” he said. But if they had the ray gun, troops “could have dispersed them.”

Before we query ourselves concerning these examples, there are a few interesting revelations that have developed over the last few weeks concerning ROE.  First, a Washington Times commentary appeared on January 26th, entitled Untie military hands, which I discussed in my last article on ROE and in which Admiral James A. Lyons outlined a set of conditions that must be met before the enemy could be engaged.  Since I have discussed this I will not rehearse the arguments here.  Subsequently to this (beginning on the next day and extending until just recently), there has been a flurry of activity on this web site from military network domains.  Some of this activity came from repeat visitors and came in from referrals or direct access, but of the ones that came in via “organic” means (e.g., Google), it is possible to see the word searches that brought the readers to my site, what articles they read and how long they stayed (among other things such as network location, information about their computer, etc.).

Since I believe that denoting the specific network domains, locations and keywords that were used could possibly be divulging information that should remain undisclosed, I will not publish that information.  However, I can say that rules of engagement has been a top interest of serious readers for a couple of weeks, and the readers didn’t quickly leave this site.  Some serious time was spent studying the issues of ROE.  The culmination seems to be seen in a recent press release by Major General William B. Caldwell.  In this press release, Caldwell takes direct aim at the Washington Times commentaries:

Two separate articles from Jan. 26 editions of The Washington Times offer contradictory assertions concerning rules of engagement for U.S. forces in Iraq. The first article asserts that the rules are too specific and demanding, placing troops at risk. The second article argues that the rules are vague and confusing, endangering troops who must make life and death decisions in an instant.

Both assertions are wrong.

Contrary to the claim in “Untie military hands,” the rules of engagement in Iraq do not require U.S. service members to satisfy seven steps prior to using force. Instead, the overriding rule for all service members is that nothing in our rules of engagement prevents our troops from using necessary and proportional force to defend themselves.

This foundational concept of U.S. rules of engagement (ROE) is provided to every service member on a pocket-size ROE card. More important, service members are trained to understand this rule and its application in life or death situations. While I cannot rule out the possibility that a leader at a lower level may have issued the restrictive guidance stated in the article, such guidance is in direct conflict with both current ROE and command policy.

The law of armed conflict requires that, to use force, “combatants” must distinguish individuals presenting a threat from innocent civilians. This basic principle is accepted by all disciplined militaries. In the counterinsurgency we are now fighting, disciplined application of force is even more critical because our enemies camouflage themselves in the civilian population. Our success in Iraq depends on our ability to treat the civilian population with humanity and dignity, even as we remain ready to immediately defend ourselves or Iraqi civilians when a threat is detected.

If someone levels an AK-47 at our troops, or if our forces receive hostile fire, the current ROE unambiguously allow our troops to fire immediately in self-defense. In either situation, our forces are trained to recognize the threat and respond with appropriate force to eliminate it. This does not mean “firing wildly”; instead, the individual perceiving the threat identifies the source of that threat, and engages with disciplined shots. “Positive identification” of a threat has nothing to do with membership in a particular ethnic or sectarian group, and has everything to do with recognizing hostile intent. U.S.Iraq have never had limitations beyond that.

“Vague rules,” on the other hand, asserts that vague rules of engagement endanger our troops. The article focuses on the words “use minimum force necessary to decisively eliminate the threat.” Although this phrase articulates the self-defense principles of necessity and proportionality — principles that are especially relevant in the current counterinsurgency fight — it neither appears nor is discussed on the ROE card issued to U.S. service members in Iraq.

We (the public) seem to be in the middle of a bare-knuckles brawl between the Washington Times commentaries and OIF command.  It would seem that at least some of the brawling is targeted towards gaining the understanding and sympathy of the civilian population (as is the case with some of the word searches I cited).  Let’s think a bit about the examples I give above and the Multi-National Force web site press release on ROE.

Regarding the charge of “firing wildly” at perceived threats, a better example of this than the U.S. forces might be the Iraqi troops.  The now deceased Marine Captain Robert Secher describes this for us in one exchange with an enemy sniper.

Anytime an American fires a weapon there has to be an investigation into why there was an escalation of force. That wouldn’t have stopped us from firing, but it prevents us from just firing indiscriminately. We have to have positively identified targets. That is why I am now a big fan of having the Iraqis with us. They can fire at whatever the hell they want, we call it the “Iraqi Death Blossom.” These guys receive one shot and the whole unit fires at everything in sight until the attached American unit gets them to control their fire. That’s fine with me.

Apparently, Captain Secher felt safer with the Iraqis and their ROE than he did with his own.  Note that in an instance such as this the U.S. ROE prevents even the firing in the direction of the sniper shots for fear of civilian casualties.    Note also that when it is understood that the ROE places U.S. troops in an environment that is less safe than otherwise would be the case if we adopted more Iraqi-like ROE, the discussion usually shifts from what is perceived as “right” to a more utilitarian approach.  When the discussion shifts to the utility of the ROE (e.g., heavy-handed tactics that creates more insurgents than you kill, failure to “win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis,” etc.), the conversation is advanced, because at least the pre-theoretical commitments are laid bare.  If the focus of the discussion becomes what works or doesn’t work versus what is right or wrong, at least there is clarity.

Leaving this instance for a moment and turning to an instance that may be clearer than this one, another observation about Caldwell’s press release is that it focuses on the neat, clean, decisive action of “distinguishing” the enemy.  For the mathematically inclined, it is the Heaviside step function in Caldwell’s equation.  It is a one or zero.  It is on or off.  Either the enemy has been clearly identified and is leveling an AK-47 at you, or they are non-combatants worthy of protection.  It is as simple as that.  Or is it?

In my opinion, the best, clearest, most informative and most compelling war reporting from Iraq is coming from Michael Yon, Bill Ardolino, and David Danelo and Andrew Lubin of US Cavalry On Point.  Turning at the moment to David Danelo’s recent article A Day in Ramadi:

The patrol left Camp Hurricane Point an hour ago.  We have two missions; pass out candy in a friendly neighborhood and “strongpoint

Eschatology, or the study and philosophy of the last things, is key to the proper understanding of counterterrorism warfare, but not usually mentioned in the same breath. Theologians do not usually engage in discussions of military strategy, and infantry officers do not usually read books in religious philosophy. Yet, on a grand scale, the two are intimately connected, and eschatology is the determinative factor in the motivation of the terrorist, even if his view of the end only involves the fulfillment of secular goals such as the will to power.

The Baathists had threatened to retaliate should the “crime” of executing Saddam Hussein be committed, saying that “The Baath and the resistance are determined to retaliate, with all means and everywhere, to harm America and its interests if it commits this crime.” FNC had reported just prior to Saddam’s execution from they U.S. officers in contact with the tribal leaders supportive of anti-coalition efforts that these tribal chiefs were propositioning them to “release Saddam, and he and the U.S. would handle the Iran problem together.”

Even for those who rejected the religious eschatology of victory embraced by al Qaeda and Ansar al Sunnah, they were loyal to the end, and hopeful for a resurgent Sunni rule in Iraq led by Saddam. Those who sided with the terrorists (Saddam’s secret police and the Fedayeen) merely found expediency in objectives: the driving of the coalition forces from Iraq.

So determined are the anti-coalition forces that they are willing to pursue a “scorched earth” policy to achieve their objectives. It was reported on October 23, 2006, that 500 000 Iraqi citizens had fled Iraq (primarily from the Anbar Province) to Syria. As of December 3, 2006, it is reported that 700 000 Iraqi citizens are in Syria and another 700 000 in Jordan, for a total of 1.4 million displaced citizens. One anecdotal piece of evidence is given to us by an otherwise non-remarkable person in the Anbar Province:

The gunman stood at the foot of his bed. “Are you al-Jaboury?” he yelled. It was 2 o’clock on a stifling July morning, and al-Jaboury had been sound asleep next to his wife. After hearing his name, the young Iraqi police officer didn’t hesitate. Grabbing the gun he had been stashing under his pillow every night since he’d joined the police 18 months earlier, he shot the intruder in the throat. The gunman’s accomplices all fled.

But the danger wasn’t over. “I knew the insurgents would come back, and maybe they would blow up the whole house,” al-Jaboury says. “My wife blamed me for joining the police. She said that I am a Sunni and that I know that the insurgents don’t like this, and that I would get killed sooner or later.” The next day, al-Jaboury left his wife, his daughter, and his home in the troubled Diyala province and took off in a neighbor’s pickup truck, loaded with fruit, and headed for Syria. He had $300 in his pocket.

Literally splitting families apart, the insurgents are willing to destroy the population and infrastructure to effect their end. They are willing to do this for the same reason that the 50 million dollar bounty on the head of Bin Laden is meaningless to those with whom he lives. They believe that they will win.

Until they are no longer convinced that victory awaits them, U.S. government largesse means nothing to the insurgents. No amount of so-called “nonkinetic” operations on the part of U.S. forces will “win the hearts and minds of the people” when wives are concerned about their husbands siding with the police for fear of them getting killed by insurgents.

This problem is exacerbated and compounded when religious pre-commitments are involved. Secular eschatology doesn’t compare in strength to religious eschatology. The Baathists need to see tangible results in time and space. When final defeat becomes obvious, although not yet fulfilled, the remnant might be persuaded to stand down, or simply disappear from the scene. Those who have a religious commitment need not see tangible results in time and space, and so nothing can dissuade them from their deadly adventures.

Guerrilla warfare is not the unique development of the twentieth century. Francis Marion fought the forces of Cornwallis to a standstill in the swamps of South Carolina, with an eschatology that was at least in part based on religious commitment. Even in the twentieth century, Vietnam was not the first example of such tactics. In my studies of World War II many years ago, I was fascinated to learn about the existence of “Hitler’s Werewolves.” A brief description of their accomplishments follows.

What did the Werwolf do? They sniped. They mined roads. They poured sand into the gas tanks of jeeps. (Sugar was in short supply, no doubt.) They were especially feared for the “decapitation wires” they strung across roads. They poisoned food stocks and liquor. (The Russians had the biggest problem with this.) They committed arson, though perhaps less than they are credited with: every unexplained fire or explosion associated with a military installation tended to be blamed on the Werwolf. These activities slackened off within a few months of the capitulation on May 7, though incidents were reported as late as 1947.

… Goebbels especially grasped the possibility that guerrilla war could be a political process as well as a military strategy. It was largely through his influence that the Werwolf assumed something of the aspect of a terrorist organization. Where it could, it tried to prevent individuals and communities from surrendering, and it assassinated civil officials who cooperated with the Allies. Few Germans welcomed these activities, but something else that Goebbels grasped was that terror might serve where popularity was absent. By his estimate, only 10% to 15% of the German population were potential supporters for a truly revolutionary movement. His goal was to use the Werwolf to activate that potential. With the help of the radical elite, the occupiers could be provoked into savage reprisals that would win over the mass of the people to Neo-Nazism, a term that came into use in April 1945.

And from an article on Minutemen of the Third Reich.(history of the Nazi Werewolf guerilla movement) The Werewolves specialised in ambushes and sniping, and took the lives of many Allied and Soviet soldiers and officers — perhaps even that of the first Soviet commandant of Berlin, General N.E. Berzarin, who was rumoured to have been waylaid in Charlottenburg during an incident in June 1945. Buildings housing Allied and Soviet staffs were favourite targets for Werewolf bombings; an explosion in the Bremen police headquarters, also in June 1945, killed five Americans and thirty-nine Germans. Techniques for harassing the occupiers were given widespread publicity through Werewolf leaflets and radio propaganda, and long after May 1945 the sabotage methods promoted by the Werewolves were still being used against the occupying powers. Although the Werewolves originally limited themselves to guerrilla warfare with the invading armies, they soon began to undertake scorched-earth measures and vigilante actions against German `collaborators’ or `defeatists’. They damaged Germany’s economic infrastructure, already battered by Allied bombing and ground fighting, and tried to prevent anything of value from falling into enemy hands. Attempts to blow up factories, power plants or waterworks occasionally provoked melees between Werewolves and desperate German workers trying to save the physical basis of their employment, particularly in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia.

In the end, the “Werewolves” were merely Hitler youth, lacked moorings and leadership, and lacked a cogent world view, and within a year or so they were finished. This is instructive. They saw that they had no chance to succeed, and vanished into the landscape in short order, lacking a vision for victory.

In this time of post-Saddam Iraq, we now have the knowledge that we have destroyed the only true enemy of Iran. Does the vision for the GWOT include considerations for the future of U.S. forces in the region to impede Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon? Does victory in Iraq include the notion of the creation of an ally in the GWOT? Does victory in Iraq mean that the Iraqis are able to stand on their own immediately, or is the lesser goal adequate – that of the U.S. providing security now so that some day this might take effect? And if we bring security, how would we do this? The casualty rate in December of 2006 rivals the casualties in the first and second battles for Fallujah.

It has been said to me recently by one serviceman that “since we were battling Saddam’s forces, defeat of the remaining Sunni insurgency in Anbar means victory.” This is true, given a minimalist definition of victory. But when the generals themselves cannot define an eschatology of victory, the servicemen are left to devise their own. With nuances, there will be as many definitions as are there are servicemen.