[R-G] The Rand Papers on Iraq and Afghanistan: The Banality of Occupation

[Anthony Fenton]

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