[R-G] The Rand Papers on Iraq and Afghanistan: The Banality of Occupation
Anthony Fenton
fentona at shaw.ca
Thu Mar 5 12:47:23 MST 2009
http://counterpunch.org/jacobs03042009.html
March 4, 2009
The Rand Papers on Iraq and Afghanistan
The Banality of Occupation
By RON JACOBS
Recently, the online site known as Wikileaks (which frequently
publishes documents from government and corporate think tanks not
meant to be seen by the general public) released a Rand Corporation
report on Iraq and Afghanistan counterinsurgency operations titled
Intelligence Operations and Metrics in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although
unclassified, the document is marked "For Official Use Only" and was
distributed to various high officials in the United States and other
"Coalition" governments. In one respect, it can be argued that this
paper, along with a series of three or four other Rand reports, could
be considered in the same vein as the Pentagon Papers on their release
in 1971. A more accurate appraisal, however, would characterize this
318 page report as a summation of what the US military and
intelligence agencies could have done more effectively.
This report is essentially an analyst's blueprint for perfecting the
occupation of a country with the idea that the eventual result will be
domination of the locals' minds, culture and economy, with the
domination of the geography of secondary consideration or of no
consideration at all. Like the television show Numbers that features a
mathematician who works with the FBI by providing mathematical
thinking to human endeavors like serial killing, drug smuggling, etc.,
the RAND study ignores the human and creative face of resistance by
reducing ever element to a quantitative possibility with only so many
possible outcomes. The numbers it quotes and the classifications it
makes hide the true intent and outcome of the imperial military's
actions much like the statistical sheets maintained by men like Adolf
Eichmann hid the true nature of the crimes against humanity
perpetrated in the removal of Jewish Germans from the fatherland. The
report draws from counterinsurgency experiences in Vietnam,Northern
Ireland, Malaya, and of course, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The contradiction rampant throughout the report can be best phrased in
the words of US Army Major Justin Featherstone who told the report's
writers after his extensive work with the urban population in
southeastern Iraq: “Humanity is what it’s about, a genuine desire to
do good by the good people, which can sit side-by-side with killing
the people [whom you’re there to kill].” In other words, the task is
to kill those who don't want you there and convince the others that
they are either better off with the occupier or at least not as bad
off as they would be without them. Despite the constant warnings
throughout the report's recommendations to avoid killing noncombatants
(without every providing a single definition of who composes this
element), the report ultimately returns to this statement:
War, however, is the realm of destruction. Here will be instances in
which these men and women will have to put innocents and their
property at risk. In such cases, there may be no good outcome, no
alternative that promises to benefit all desired ends, but rather one
only less undesirable than its alternatives. A pilot might select the
alternative of engaging only a few rooms instead of destroying an
entire building, with the appropriate airframe and munitions being
called on for the task. In lieu of devastating a town, a ground-force
commander could find that a limited number of enemy concentrations
provide the opportunity to wreak destruction over only a few blocks.
In other words, the occupier's job remains one that depends on its
overwhelming force. Even if the suggestions and lessons learned that
are described in this report were to be put into place, the deciding
factor in favor of the US occupying forces is their ability to kill
with overwhelming force. Naturally, the indigenous population is aware
of this--a fact which causes many to go along with the occupier merely
as a means to survive. This is not a report about operations in Iraq
and Afghanistan and their often bloody results so much as it is a
review of the perceived success or failure of those operations. The
primary intent of the report is to repeat already familiar lessons
about how to construct and maintain an occupation of a country that
minimizes the occupiers casualties, maintains domination via fear,
cajolery, and manipulation of the personal and tribal relationships of
the occupied while simultaneously convincing at least a sizable
minority of the population of the occupying nation that their military
(in league with the occupier) is working in their interest.
Written in what can best be described as something akin to a technical
writing assignment, the report echoes the recent statements from US
generals in the Iraq/Afghan theaters and is reflected in the recent
decision by Barack Obama to reduce the numbers of US troops in Iraq to
50,000 over the next 16 months and escalate the battle to subdue
Afghanistan. If there is one thing that this document makes clear, it
is that the Pentagon and its civilian enablers have no intention of
leaving Iraq or Afghanistan on their own. Furthermore, it is their
intention to take the lessons they believe they have learned in those
two countries and apply them to Pakistan and wherever else their
manifest destiny compels them to subdue.
This is not the Pentagon Papers of the Iraq and Afghanistan
occupations/wars. It is a document that hides the nature of the US
operations in those countries behind an emasculated technospeak,
rendering the true nature of the killing and destruction done in the
name of the people of the US and the west. The contemporary version of
the policy discussions that were revealed in the Pentagon Papers about
the US operation in Vietnam are not here. Nor are the cables and
directives that sent men off to kill and die. Those documents have yet
to be uncovered. The usefulness of this report is in its look into the
mindset of a modern imperial machine: a machine that never questions
its mission or the human misery it causes but keeps its mind trained
only on how to carry out that mission as efficiently as possible. The
banality of the evil of modern warfare is contained in every neutered
sentence of this document and the thousands of others like them. It is
repeated in the newspeak of government officials and the sycophantic
media that reports their words without challenging their consequences.
The circle of complicity is completed when the public accepts the
arguments made by those officials and media as being the only argument
that exists.
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the
Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay
on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music,
art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order
Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625 at charter.net
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