Apparently, the counterinsurgency manual needs a rewrite

My Fletcher colleague Richard H. Shultz co-authors an op-ed in the New York Times the Army's efforts to develop a new manual about about counterinsurgency tactics from its experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some sobering highlights: In today?s internal wars several different types of armed groups ? not just traditional insurgents bent on changing a national regime ? engage in unconventional combat. Iraq is illustrative. Those fighting American forces include a complex mix of Sunni tribal militias, former regime members, foreign and domestic jihadists, Shiite militias and criminal gangs. Each has different motivations and ways of fighting. Tackling them requires customized strategies. Unfortunately, well into 2005, the American military subsumed all these groups under the rubric ?insurgents? and planned its strategy accordingly. It didn?t imagine or prepare for the possibility that former regime members had their own ?day-after? plan to fight on even if they lost the conventional battle. It didn?t imagine that Iraq would become a magnet for international jihadists, so it failed to seal the borders. It didn?t imagine the Sunni tribal militias would react with such violence to the American presence, so it failed to take the pre-emptive economic and political steps to address their grievances. And it failed to understand that there were radical elements within the Shiite community that would use force to try to establish a theocratic system. These acute miscalculations gave those who seek to defeat us time to marshal their forces, and seriously undercut Washington?s overall efforts to stabilize Iraq. The Pentagon?s new counterinsurgency manual suffers from similar flaws. It focuses almost exclusively on combating cohesive groups of insurgents who share the same goals. Yes, there are traditional insurgent groups in Iraq, like cells of former Baathists. But the foreign terrorists, religious militias and criminal organizations operate from very different playbooks. We have to learn to read them the way other nations faced with insurgencies have. This part is particularly interesting: Meeting and defeating terrorist groups requires a far deeper understanding of their factions ? and the exploitation of the rifts between them. Consider how such profiling led to the demise of the Abu Nidal organization, which 20 years ago was the world?s most lethal terrorist group. As it reached its peak strength, the organization began to experience serious fissures among its leaders. Several key members felt that Abu Nidal himself was siphoning off funds. He in turn accused them of plotting to assassinate him. Eventually he had some 300 hard-core leaders and operatives gunned down or otherwise dispatched. By the early 1990?s, the group had been effectively neutered. How did this come about? In part because American and other Western intelligence agencies ? with the help of local Arab intelligence services who were able to get operatives close to key members of the group and spread paranoia and suspicion ? successfully grasped and manipulated factional rivalries. A key for America should have been to get such information about schisms and unhappiness inside the insurgent groups we face, particularly in their formative stages when they were most vulnerable. An interesting question to ask is the extent to which western and Arab intelligence agencies have managed to penetrate Al Qaeda's network -- and whether such penetration is more difficult because of the Islamist nature of that organization. It might be tougher to penetrate networks where the identity rests on a theocratic foundation. Intriguingly, this problem has the potential to cut both ways. Dexter Flikins' review of Lorenzo Wright's new book contains the following nugget of information: Al Qaeda?s leaders had all but shelved the 9/11 plot when they realized they lacked foot soldiers who could pass convincingly as westernized Muslims in the United States. At just the right moment Atta appeared in Afghanistan, along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ziad al-Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, all Western-educated transplants, offering themselves up for slaughter.