The Lessons of History
Spencer Ackerman observes the influence the lessons of Iraq are having on American operational thinking:
Second, yes, again: assuming what “worked” in Iraq will “work” in Afghanistan is to delude yourself, and to do so deliberately. Everyone says that he or she is not simply applying role lessons from one war to a different one, but I see more evidence, on balance, that that’s exactly what’s happening. How many times did I hear at the Marine Corps University’s COIN conference last month about what the lessons of Iraq were and how experience showed this-or-that. And that’s natural! You want to apply the benefit of experience — that’s what smart people do. But it’s also fraught with peril, and we all need to be rigorous here about checking our assumptions.
I think appeals to “the lessons of history” are, in general, dangerous. Efforts to make predictions based on observations of human history tend to fail. But it’s especially difficult when you’re basically talking about learning lessons based on a single case.
17 Responses to “The Lessons of History”
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October 31st, 2009 at 8:38 am
I think it was clear from when it began that the way the “SURGE” (BUT YOU WILL ADMIT THAT THE SURGE IS WORKING) debate occurred, how it was framed, and how it has since been interpreted will continue to be damaging in national thought, particularly among our notoriously dumb foreign policy establishment, which never hesitates to learn the absolute wrong lessons of history as long as it occurs with their fantasy ideologies.
October 31st, 2009 at 8:42 am
yup. this “learning from iraq” stuff starts by falsifying the experience we had in iraq.
the surge was an utter and complete failure. it failed on every one of the objectives that bush set for it.
but of course, the pundits decided to lie and say that the surge was a success, and it looks like the military has also decided to lie and say the surge was a success.
so, given that they are starting from falsehoods, and extrapolating from there, i don’t think this “learning from (made-up) history” game is going to work out so well.
October 31st, 2009 at 10:22 am
There’s also a problem here with “playing results” the way an amateur poker player does.
A good professional poker player keeps track of his winnings and losings over a long period of time to see what is working and what isn’t. An amateur player hits a bad patch, changes his strategy, and then draws conclusions about the result of the strategy change based on the next couple of sessions.
The problem is, there are too many confounding factors for this to work. One is the statistical problem Matt mentions – lack of a large enough sample. But there are human problems too – not least the DESIRE the player has to conclude that his strategy change has helped him.
That can lead to, among other things, cherry picking of data (for example, ignoring an early rough patch on the grounds that you were “getting used to” the new strategy).
The point is, in a complex system with a lot of variables, you need a rigorous system to measure success and failure, one that removes as many independent variables as possible and focuses on the strategy and its effects. We don’t have that for our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures – we have trending and playing results and all the stupid things amateurs do when they’re trying to convince themselves that if they just throw a little more money into the pot in a new way, they’re going to magically start winning.
October 31st, 2009 at 10:28 am
Obama should sack McChrystal. And I don’t mean that casually. McChrystal has gone far past airing his opinions. He’s gone past the point that Truman sacked MacArthur for.
October 31st, 2009 at 10:40 am
History tells us that whatever happens in Afghanistan our civilization will survive. Thats not the kind of super specific prediction we would like, but its probably the best we can do with any confidence.
October 31st, 2009 at 10:56 am
The surge failed and that’s why we have to surge in Afghanistan.
October 31st, 2009 at 11:04 am
Popper was wrong. That is all.
October 31st, 2009 at 11:07 am
It’s like a guy who walks halfway to his destination on a rainy day before remembering he has an umbrella (who would have been better off not walking at all), deciding from the experience that he can just take a shortcut across the lake.
October 31st, 2009 at 11:33 am
I love the fingers in the ears thing vis-a-vis Iraq. The surge (and surrounding strategy) did reduce violence levels; they remain below the levels they attained in 2005-2006. Whether that lasts or not is a good question; the main reason I supported the surge was the “you broke it, you bought it” theory – having invaded Iraq, I thought we were obligated to at least try and put the pieces back together in such a way that we could then leave (as we are slowly starting to do now) and leave the responsibility where it belongs – with the Iraqis.
Having said that, it doesn’t appear to me that any equivalent strategy could easily be applied to Afghanistan. Instead of 2 main groups, we have many, many tribes. Instead of a problem mostly constrained to a small number of cities (and largely to Baghdad), we have a problem spread throughout the countryside, and across a border (Pakistan) that we can’t just cross at will. That makes this problem much more difficult.
I still think the right thing to do is to leave Afghanistan, with a warning to all parties not to sponsor terrorist groups “or else” – where the “or else” is largely predator drones.
The recent uptick in foiled terrorist attempts here in the US shows one thing clearly to me: the problem isn’t Afghanistan, it’s our immigration policies. We would do well to adopt the sort of skills based criteria that Canada uses, rather than the “let anyone in who can get here” policy we have now.
October 31st, 2009 at 12:07 pm
The problem is that any highly visable foreign policy will be constantly used by our partisan political culture for narrow political gain. So the effect on near term partisanship can never be off the analysts mind. Even if they want to do a dispassionate analysis, their political masters will just keep pressuring them for ammo in the partisan wars back home. So short term and narrowcast political considerations always intrude, and good policy can be much harder to implement than it is to figure out.
October 31st, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Re: JR @ 9
Actually the conclusion that “the surge” reduced violence is an excellent example of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” thinking.
And not too accurate on the “post” part either. IIRC, violence was already starting to drop even as the surge started since the violence had already achieved its objective – driving Sunnis out of mixed Sunni/Shia neighborhoods. Mission accomplished, stand down, boys.
October 31st, 2009 at 2:45 pm
The amusing thing about James “there’s no end to the bloodshed I will cheer” Robertson is that there is not a single right-wing lie about Iraq that he doesn’t believe. It is very important to him to defend the slaughter of innocent Iraqis, though he can not find it in himself to explain why it actually came about.
I mean, sure he can cite WWI as the reason why Bush had to start murdering people, but he can’t actually connect the dots without bringing in total fucking nonsense like that.
For James Robertson to start using logical fallacies is actually an improvement – it has the word “logic” in it – so he’s closer than when he simply lies (which is his main technique).
October 31st, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Butch makes my point more explicitly.
“We did X, then Y happened” is the most common way of evaluating a change in strategy. It’s a natural enough way to approach things; it just so happens that it’s completely bogus.
No one knows what would have happened if troop levels had stayed the same, been lowered, or been raised twice as much as they were. No one knows the degree to which other tactical and strategic changes contributed to the observed effects.
We could find those things out if we sincerely thought the answer was important. What we do instead is find a way to convince ourselves that the answer is what we want it to be.
It’s a good way to lose. Anyone who’s ever played a significant amount of poker knows it. Humorously, though, you never seem to meet a losing poker player. Every poker player is up eight grand “this year.”
What happened last year? The year before? Not relevant. He changed his strategy! Everything’s cool now.
October 31st, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I concur with Scott P at 7: Karl Popper was a dumbass –whose arguments were highly praised because they were convenient for the Western powers at the time in their fight against the Commies.
Popper, for example, saw human societies as a mass of random, unpredictably change. But an engineer,Vilfredo Pareto, noted that in any human society, a few actors have most of the wealth and most of the power. THEIR self-serving behavior is often predictable.
And it was kinda hilarious for someone so honored by the British Empire to criticize the “authoritarianism” of the historicists.
October 31st, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Although I do like William Bartley’s idea that Karl Popper proved that Matthew’s Harvard degree in Philosophy is worthless.
Decades before Matthew spent $150,000 and 4 years of hard work acquiring it. hee hee
“Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over has wasted or is wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper’s way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology.”
October 31st, 2009 at 4:03 pm
MY “I think appeals to “the lessons of history” are, in general, dangerous.”
I respectfully disagree. For instance, if we are trying to draw lessons from Iraq going forward, we could easily make out a list a thousand pages long just in the category “Things Not to Do.”
The list of “Things Not to Do ” might start like this.
Lesson Number 1: Never allow your leader and primary warlord, the President of the United States, to stand on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier under banner “Mission Accomplished” and declare that hostilities are essentially over, when in fact, inevitable and intense hostilities are about to commence.
Lesson Number 2: When occupying a foreign country, do not purposefully destroy its economy and create 70% unemployment. This will result in inevitable hostilities, and particularly intense hostilities if the population happens to be heavily armed.
Etc…
November 1st, 2009 at 12:45 am
Well I guess that means the end of sociology, psychology, economics, strategy, confucianism, and Sun Tsu. Pity