Matthew Yglesias » Eating Soup With a Knife: A Neat Trick, But Fundamentally Something To Be Avoided

Sep 8th, 2008 at 8:24 pm

Eating Soup With a Knife: A Neat Trick, But Fundamentally Something To Be Avoided

This subject really deserves a treatment longer than a blog post, but let me recommend my colleague Matt Duss’s post on Bob Woodward and the perversity of that burgeoning establishment consensus that the main lesson of Iraq is that, whether or not we should have gone to war in the first place, we’ve now learned a bunch of awesome counterinsurgency techniques that will allow us to subdue future adversaries near and far.

I know he disagrees with this interpretation, but I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense to dwell on the fact that the title of COIN guru John Nagl’s excellent book on the subject is Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. One thing you might ask yourself, of course, is why would you do that? And it’s hard to say. I mean, even a starving man with a bowl of soup and no spoon is just going to drink directly from a bowl. Of course you can devise some kind of scenario in which it might be necessary to eat soup with a knife, but your basic gameplan in life is going to be to avoid being in those kind of situations. And much the same, it seems to me, with the lessons of counterinsurgency. This is very difficult stuff. Like eating soup with a knife. Your top policy priority should be to avoid the situations in which it arises.

Comments
35

Filed under: COIN, iraq,

35 Responses to “Eating Soup With a Knife: A Neat Trick, But Fundamentally Something To Be Avoided”

DCreader Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Kind of like war itself, right? I mean, even more than eating soup with a knife, going into a situation in which large numbers of people will die horribly is something to be avoided.

More seriously, would you rather the military focus on COIN or great power conflict with China? My vote is for COIN. It would be useful in all kinds of liberal internationalist scenarios involving stopping genocide or supporting nascent democracies against internal opponents. Great power conflict is much worse than eating soup with a knife.
Kenneth Almquist Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Unfortunately we are stuck fighting a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, so the next few years may provide us with yet more evidence that counterinsurgency is hard.
rapier Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
I thought the counter insurgency fight in St Paul was an astounding success. Iraq and Afghanistan not so good.

I’m no student of COIN but doesn’t it presuppose that we have an ally in the theater were fighting in? Who might that be in Iraq?
Jack Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Hmm, by the soup analogy the trick would be to pay some half-mad Sunni tribal militias to suck the soup out through a straw and, uh, well, you know.
heiwa Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
The title comes from a T.E. Lawrence quote: Making “war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.”

Makes a lot more sense that way. I think he agrees with you.
Bullsmith Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
You’ve got it all backwards. If you’re looking for an excuse to lick a knife (ie have a war because it’s sexy), what could be more wholesome than soup?

Who doesn’t like soup? Bombs away.
Ed Marshall Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
I thought the counter insurgency fight in St Paul was an astounding success.

The use of “pain compliance” just warmed my heart. If there is a just God, every last one of the morons who watched too much 24 and gibbered their little hearts out about how torture was good will wind up enjoying it’s new domestic offspring.
pacer521 Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
yeah — I’d try to avoid that.

http://culturedecoded.wordpress.com/
some dude Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Just for fun, let’s suppose that Woodward’s right on the advent of some secret sci-fi method of warfare that no one else has written about despite there being it being known to (at least) tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans. What could it be? I propose… space lasers! If America could zap jihadis from outer space with ray guns that really would be a game changer on par with the advent of the airplane or tank.

Most likely ol’ Bob is full of shit, of course.
Richard Steven Hack Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
What did the US learn in Iraq? That if you’re willing to piss billions down the drain you can bribe (some of) your enemies to stop shooting at you?

That’s about it. Nothing else was learned in Iraq except that the US military is full of murdering morons who like bombing civilians and who otherwise can’t fight their way out of paper bag without massive air support.

Meanwhile, the same lessons are being taught in Afghanistan against an enemy that hasn’t lost in a thousand years – and Matt’s beloved Obama is going to relearn those lessons yet again at the taxpayer’s cost in lives and money.

The only lessons anyone needs to know about COIN is what I’ve said repeatedly:

1) COIN CAN NOT be conducted by a foreign occupying military force. It can only be conducted by the local population’s military and only if the government has credibility with the civilian population.

2) COIN requires the ability to put a platoon in every neighborhood in the country – a platoon that speaks the languages, understands the culture, and can blend in with the neighborhood and work with the neighborhood to isolate, identify and locate the insurgents.

3) COIN requires that the insurgents have less credibility than the government.

None of which has been true in any COIN operation the US has engaged in, from the Philippines to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq – and upcoming, to Iran and Pakistan.

U.S. steps up Afghan air raids, more civil deaths-report
http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=334445

Money Quotes:

The United States has stepped up its use of air strikes in the war in Afghanistan, resulting in a high number of civilian casualties, a human rights group said on Monday.

Anger has mounted in Afghanistan over a spike in civilian casualties in recent weeks and has led to a rift between President Hamid Karzai’s government and its Western backers.

“The U.S. … has increasingly relied on airpower in counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations,” the New York based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report.

“The result has been large numbers of civilian casualties, controversy over the continued use of airpower in Afghanistan, and intense criticism of U.S. and NATO forces by Afghan political leaders and the general public,” it said.

The report comes weeks after U.S.-led coalition forces carried out an air strike in the western province of Herat which the Afghan government and the United Nations say killed 96 civilians. The U.S. military says five to seven civilians were killed.

The incident sparked off public protests in the country and caused the Afghan government to call for a review of the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan.

Civilian deaths as a result of foreign air strikes almost tripled in 2007 compared to 2006 with 321 people killed, HRW said in its report. In the first seven months of this year, at least 119 civilians were killed in air strikes, it said.

The figures for this year do not include the Herat incident in August. About 2,500 people, including 1,000 civilians have died in the conflict in the first six months of this year, aid agencies say.

Twice as many tons of bombs were dropped in 2007 than in 2006, HRW said, citing U.S. Air Force data. More people were killed by air strikes in 2007 than by U.S. or NATO ground fire.

“There has been a massive and unprecedented surge in the use of airpower in Afghanistan in 2008. In the months of June and July alone the U.S. dropped approximately as much as it did in all of 2006,” it said.

Evidence Points to Civilian Toll in Afghan Raid
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/world/asia/08afghan.html?_r=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

Money Quotes:

To the villagers here, there is no doubt what happened in an American airstrike on Aug. 22: more than 90 civilians, the majority of them women and children, were killed.

The military has said the raid on Azizabad mainly killed militants.

The Afghan government, human rights and intelligence officials, independent witnesses and a United Nations investigation back up their account, pointing to dozens of freshly dug graves, lists of the dead, and cellphone videos and other images showing bodies of women and children laid out in the village mosque.

Cellphone images seen by this reporter show at least 11 dead children, some apparently with blast and concussion injuries, among some 30 to 40 bodies laid out in the village mosque. Ten days after the airstrikes, villagers dug up the last victim from the rubble, a baby just a few months old. Their shock and grief is still palpable.

For two weeks, the United States military has insisted that only 5 to 7 civilians, and 30 to 35 militants, were killed in what it says was a successful operation against the Taliban: a Special Operations ground mission backed up by American air support. But on Sunday, Gen. David D. McKiernan, the senior American commander in Afghanistan, requested that a general be sent from Central Command to review the American military investigation in light of “emerging evidence.”

That isn’t COIN – it’s war crimes.
along Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
um, because you don’t have a spoon? where spoon = 500,000 troops?
Just a thought.
Ed Marshall Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 12:26 am
um, because you don’t have a spoon? where spoon = 500,000 troops?
Just a thought.

Nah, read the original T.E. Lawrence. Your spoon would be like a one to one ration of occupiers to population where you had someone to personally hold an M-16 to everyone’s head all day.
Comment Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 12:51 am
If you liked “Eating Soup With a Knife”

then you will love Nagls part 2:

“Wiping Your Ass With Brillo Pads”
Comment Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 12:54 am
Why use your knife to eat some wussy soup when you can better use it KILL SOME TERRORISTS!
toby Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 2:44 am
I’d trust the British on this one … the British have fought numerous counter-insurgency wars in the 20th century … from South Africa against the Boers in 1900 to Northern Ireland against the IRA in the 1990s. In between, they fought Chinese Malayan Communists, Kenyan Mau Mau Rebels, Palestinians in the 1930s, Israelis in the 1940s, Cypriot separatists, Yemeni communists, and the IRA from 1970 to 2000 roughly. Now they are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet, they were a mixed success in Basra, and would not claim Northern Ireland as a “victory” despite peace eventually coming.

With counter-insurgency, even when you win, you lose enough to make you wonder if it was worthwhile.
Comment Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 3:00 am
“I’d trust the British on this one … the British have fought numerous counter-insurgency wars in the 20th century …”

The fact that British have had to fight illustrated Matt’s point – Fighting = Failure.

In 1998, the UK effectively surrendered to IRA and ended 800 years of attempting to crush all of Ireland. For what?

Yes they claimed victory, but 20-40 years from now N. Ireland will peacefully link up with the Rep of Ireland. Wales and Scotland are moving away.

Almost every border area that Brits left in Pak/Afgan – India/Pak/ Kashmire – Cyprus, Palestine etc –

A complete mess – ultimately all for God and Country and Empire – but no one believes in God in England anymore and the Empire is gone and the Monarchy is for tourists.
ajay Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 5:06 am
In 1998, the UK effectively surrendered to IRA and ended 800 years of attempting to crush all of Ireland.

…wow. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Obama must make his top priority improving the American education system.
stefan Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 8:02 am
Similarly, my take on ‘morality’ is that leading a moral life is mostly about staying out of situations that require a lot of moral fiber and that a moral society should make these situations rare as well.
Bragan Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 8:55 am
or fighting an insurgency with pallets of c-notes.

I love how the Woodward article doesn’t even mention the roughly $900,000,000 we spend a month to keep the Sunni awakening from becoming an American nightmare ($300 per day for 100,000 Sunni tribesman/miliamen).
Hedley Lamarr Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Matt, what do you make of Woodward’s reference on 60 Minutes to some military “breakthrough” that has been implemented in Iraq that has the evil-doers wetting their pants?
Devo Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
AWESOME. This is the kind of post for which the popular Jiu-Jitsu metaphor was coined.
skeptonomist Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
We, if we had ever really had effective military counter-insurgency and counter-guerilla tactics and strategy we would have won the war in Vietnam and the Iraq insurgencies would never have got off the ground.

But there is no evidence that we now have such knowledge – all things come to an end, including insurgencies, and if and when the Iraq insurgency tapered off the Bush administration was going to claim credit for whatever they were doing at the time. Buying off the enemy with arms and money is not a military strategy and it is not new – the Romans did it and were ultimately taken over by the barbarians.
Comment Says:
September 10th, 2008 at 7:55 am
Ajay – you missed the point of what was meant by “effectivley.” That’s okay – but if you want to blame the USA – you should know that Peter Hitchens in the UK is someone who says the same thing.
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