Kaplan on Nation Building.

Robert Kaplan has another installment on army transformation and building civil societies out of anarchy. The Atlantic also has an interview with Kaplan as an on-line extra. I find over and over again that Kaplan understands what is required to combat insurgency and can describe it with clarity. My own approach is historical, from that greatest of all counter-insurgencies, the Gallic wars, the English conquest of Wales, the Penninsular War to the winning of the American West, the Philippines, Vietnam, and so on. Kaplan's obviously much more anthropological, at least in the sense that he spends most of his time on contemporary insurgencies and hot spots. Yet the results are the same. The force with the most will to stay its course prevails. This is far, far truer in insurgency than it is in conventional warfare. In such contests, what Victor Davis Hanson calls, the Western way of war, opposing forces stand up against one another and test their resolution in a main battle. By presenting yourself as a target, you demonstrate a certain fearlessness, but you can also get killed. The guerilla war is much more a war of wills.

Once you have the will to fight, or to stay, you can stay in the game. But will does not mean victory, only a continued struggle. Victory requires right actions taken at the right times. Marshal Suchet pacified Catalonia while Soult, Ney, and the other marshals failed. David Chandler attributed this to Wellington and the English Army he commanded out of Lisbon.

On this subject of will, we speak not only of the will of leaders, or of soldiers, but of institutions. Old, established, strong institutions on the one hand, and weak, fragile institutions on the other. Sometimes the strongest institutions are the most primative. One of the key reasons for Allied success in WWII was the friendship of Churchill and Roosevelt. Another was the cultural similarities of the Americans and the Commonwealth. From 1939 to 1941, the totalitarian states were united against the democratic states. But Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union were not united in any firm sense. All that united them was a mutual self interest and opposition to the democracies. Cleavages between these powers resulted in Italy being flipped and Russia being dropped. Japan and Germany, on the other hand, had elements of suicidal commitment to resistance. Both Japan and Germany could have made the terrible switch to an insurgency. Japan was activly making plans for it. This is one of the reasons for the use of the A-bomb. In Germany, Hitler was so disapointed in the conventional failures that he pursued the destruction of the whole German nation. Imagine WWII in which Hitler and Stalin, especially, had a cordial friendship in the vein of Roosevelt and Churchill.

Friendships, cultural similarities, and even kinships, are a more primitive basis for social order, but being more natural, can exist without the effortful cultural creations of the West. Commitment to abstract principles requires habituation. Commitment to kin groups is ab initio.
Kaplan describes how tribal leaders are employed to get things done while the civil authorities take root.

Kaplan describes how in Nimrud, LtC Norris first relies on a thuggish police chief, Salim, but gradually nudges him aside in favor of the more democratic and lawyerly Mayor Isa. One of his other themes, which also appeared in Imperial Grunts, was that order must preceed civil development, or that order must proceed freedom. This is a most Hamiltonian observation.