Australian adviser to US military provides chilling insight into neo-colonial mentality

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Australian adviser to US military provides chilling insight into
neo-colonial mentality
By James Cogan
19 September 2009

David Kilcullen, a top Australian-born advisor to the US military,
delivered the annual Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture at the University
of New South Wales in Sydney on September 3. His remarks provided an
insight into the methods and mentality of those directing the US-led
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kilcullen, 42, has had a rapid rise to international prominence. In
2004, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army, with
experience in the Australian occupation of East Timor in 1999 and
academic study in the field of counter-insurgency (COIN) warfare. His
PhD thesis involved a study of Islamic extremism in Indonesia. He was
seconded to the Pentagon and soon left the Australian armed forces to
work for the Bush administration as a “chief strategist” for the State
Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, reporting to then
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Kilcullen’s assessment of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars broadly
parallels that of a layer of top US commanders. In February 2007, he
was employed as a counter-insurgency advisor to General David
Petraeus, who had been appointed overall commander of US forces in
Iraq. Throughout much of that year, Kilcullen was responsible for
monitoring the COIN tactics that were implemented during the so-called
“surge”.

This year, Kilcullen has published a book, The Accidental Guerilla,
which has been praised in foreign policy and military circles as a
summation of the counter-insurgency lessons from the two wars. In the
coming months, he is scheduled to take up a position as a senior aide
to the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley
McChrystal, who has begun implementing the first stage of the Obama
administration’s “surge” in that country.

The theme of Kilcullen’s lecture was “Defeating Global Terrorism”.
What it actually contained was a presentation of the tactics that were
used in Iraq, described as “clear, hold, build” in current military
manuals, and outlined how they should be applied in Afghanistan. The
central tenet of Kilcullen’s COIN theory is “support follows
strength”—in other words, that force convinces. Perhaps sensing the
audience had not grasped his meaning, he cited Mao Zedong’s dictum
that “power comes from the barrel of a gun”.

Kilcullen asserts that most armed resistance to the US-led occupations
of Afghanistan and Iraq is carried out by “accidental
guerillas”—people who are fighting only because foreign powers “are
intruding in their space”. This formulation deliberately obscures the
fact that insurgencies reflect a legitimate, political rejection of
neo-colonial oppression by the occupied populations. According to
Kilcullen, people are primarily motivated by self-interest and will
therefore “do almost anything or support anyone for the gift of
safety”. Providing the occupying forces prove they are stronger than
the insurgency, the population will ultimately accept being ruled by a
US puppet state.

To defeat the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, he told the audience,
it was necessary to establish a “permanent presence” at the local
level, particularly in the main cities and towns. Rather than
operations to hunt down insurgents, occupation forces should focus on
the controlled areas, constructing the framework for a functional
puppet state that can ultimately replace them, including reliable
police, courts and local government. Moreover, the insurgents would be
forced to attack the foreign troops in populated areas. The likely
civilian casualties would lead people to turn against them.

At the same time, bribes would be offered to sections of the
insurgency to change sides, and areas under insurgent control
subjected to collective economic punishment, such as denying them
access to goods and essential services. The calculation behind this
particular tactic is that sections of the population will blame the
insurgents for their deprivation and voluntarily seek out occupation
control.

Translated from his clinical, pseudo-academic language, Kilcullen
advocates overwhelming violence and repression against the Afghan
people. The overall aim is to kill, buy-off or terrify all those who
oppose the occupation—the vast majority of the population—until
everyone submits to the occupiers’ “system of control”.

In line with Washington’s recriminations against the current Afghan
puppet President Hamid Karzai, Kilcullen labelled his administration
as “corrupt and dysfunctional” and stated there was “a crisis of
legitimacy” because “the same warlords are back in power who the
Taliban overthrew in 1996”.

In much of Afghanistan, he said, the Taliban have established a shadow
government that has “outgoverned” Karzai. Without a major change in
occupation tactics, there is “little doubt we are eventually going to
lose”. A “window of opportunity” nevertheless existed, he declared, to
“fix what is wrong at the local level” and establish the “rule of law”.

Kilcullen did not state how many more US, European and Australian
troops he thought should be sent to Afghanistan, or for how long they
would need to stay. There is little doubt, however, that his figure
would be large and the time frame long.

Even when all the 21,000 reinforcements sent by the Obama
administration arrive, there will be barely 100,000 foreign troops in
the country, along with a dysfunctional 85,000-strong Afghan
government army. The Iraq surge, by contrast, was implemented by a
force of 160,000 American personnel, tens of thousands of armed
mercenary contractors and a 200,000-strong Iraqi army.

According to Kilcullen, the Iraq surge was a “success” because it
resulted in some 100,000 Sunni Arab insurgents ending their resistance
and enlisting in US-paid militias that came to be known as the “Sons
of Iraq” or sahwa.

The main factor behind their surrender, however, was the killing,
repression and displacement of Sunni civilians by the US military and
pro-occupation Shiite militias over the previous four years. Long
before 30,000 additional American troops arrived in the country, tens
of thousands of ordinary people had been murdered and as many as two
million forced from their homes, especially from the Sunni suburbs of
Baghdad, where the insurgency had its main base of support.

The “clear, hold, build” tactics consisted in enclosing entire suburbs
behind 12-foot high concrete walls, denying the population electricity
and food supplies and systematically slaughtering any who continued to
resist. While Kilcullen did not mention it, the COIN tactics he
monitored in Iraq relied heavily on the use of special forces units to
assassinate alleged insurgent leaders, commanders, financiers and
technical personnel, and to generally terrorise the population.

After the Sunni population was subdued, opposition to the occupation
among the largely Shiite working class was crushed in similar fashion
in Basra and Baghdad’s Sadr City district. In the first months of 2008
alone, according to the Iraqi government, over 2,000 members of the
Shiite Mahdi Army militia were assassinated or killed in combat
operations.

Kilcullen justified his call for the escalation of the war in
Afghanistan with the claim that the “West” had a “moral obligation” to
the Afghan people. The reality is that it will require mass killing in
both Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan to duplicate the
terror that prevailed in Iraq in 2007 and led insurgents to accept the
occupation’s “system of control”. The displacement of over two million
people from areas of North West Pakistan and the recent reports of
pro-government death squads operating in Swat Valley is evidence that
it is already well underway.

Men like Kilcullen are well aware of the real motives behind these
predatory wars of imperialist plunder. He would be intimately familiar
with the voluminous writings by US strategic thinktanks following the
Cold War on the importance of US imperialism’s domination of the
Central Asian region and the necessity of controlling the flow of oil
from Middle East. The war on terrorism is simply the pretext to
accomplish these neo-colonial aims.

In a revealing part of his lecture, Kilcullen referred to his studies
of the tactics of German commanders responsible for the occupation of
areas of Eastern Europe during World War II. The problem they had
faced in curbing insurgencies, he said, was that the “rapacious
nature”, “economic interests” and “genocidal policies” of the Nazi
state had thwarted their local level efforts to win over the occupied
peoples.

The character of counter-insurgency, he stated, “mirrors the state
carrying it out”. While damning Nazi Germany, Kilcullen simply
asserted that the US and its Western allies were “good states”.
However, if one follows his logic and considers the character of the
US-led counter-insurgency, with its countless atrocities and the
deaths of an estimated 1.2 million Iraqis and unknown numbers of
Afghans, then one would have to conclude that US imperialism is just
as “rapacious” in its drive for “economic interests” as its German
counterpart.

David Kilcullen is coldly indifferent to the criminality of US foreign
policy and the immense suffering it has caused. In his book, he writes
that “the task of the moment is not to cry over split milk but clean
it up” and “not to second-guess the decisions of 2003 but to get on
with the job at hand”. In helping to devise and carry out these war
crimes, Kilcullen is remarkably similar to the Nazi officers who also
“got on with the job at hand”.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/kilc-s19.shtml

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