The United States military is preparing for the "long war" by shifting its tactics and expanding its ambitions.
The agreement on 22 April that Nouri (formerly Jawad) al-Maliki will replace Ibrahim al-Jaafari as the new Iraqi prime minister appears at last to mark progress towards a stable government. That is certainly how it has been presented by United States leaders, two of whom Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad on 26-27 April to meet the new leader and reinforce the message of an improving Iraq as well as a united administration.
It is likely, however, that the formation of a new government will be as protracted a process as the choice of prime minister. This is in part because of the deep political differences among Iraq's political factions, but also because of the security context in which these differences are expressed: in particular, the unstable combination of a continuing insurgency coupled with rising intercommunal violence.
An important feature of this instability is the growth in insurgent attacks on the oil infrastructure. An early expectation of the US occupiers in 2003 was that Iraq's oil wealth would quickly by consolidated into the financial base for the new economy, as well as serving as a highly profitable area of activity for US construction companies and oil-industry multinationals. They were to be surprised by the way in which this source of reconstruction revenue failed to materialise as a result of graft, corruption and massive smuggling as well as physical attacks (see BBC News, "Iraq oil hit by graft and attacks" 25 April 2006).
An Iraqi oil-ministry report estimates that in 2005 alone, $4.2 billion worth of oil-related products was stolen; in addition, there was persistent direct theft of crude oil from leaking or damaged pipelines. The reported increase in attacks on oil infrastructure makes it impossible to carry out necessary repair and upgrades to the extent that (according to the oil ministry) barely a third of projects planned for 2005 were completed.
The continuing sabotage, corruption and theft combine to remove the revenue needed for reconstruction. This too comes at a time when insurgent attacks against US forces are despite an apparent easing in March remaining constant. The toll on American troops continues to be heavy; as of 26 April, deaths among US personnel were double the total for the whole of March, and the third week of the month alone saw more than a hundred Americans wounded in combat (see "Iran: war by October?", 20 April 2006).
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Iraq, Afghanistan al-Qaida
The problems in Iraq are compounded by a further deterioration in Afghanistan, where it is becoming clearer by the day that the insurgents' spring offensive is now underway. Four Canadian soldiers were killed in one bombing incident on 22 April; the new British barracks has experienced two suicide-attacks; and US forces have been attempting to control a surge in activity by Taliban and other paramilitaries.
Moreover, the Pakistani army is no longer in control of parts of the country's border region, and usually reliable sources indicate that as many as 40,000 men are available to support the insurgency in and around these "agency" areas (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, "Fighting Talk from Osama and the Taliban", Asia Times Online, 25 April 2006).
In this connection, a significant aspect of the visit to British troops in Helmand province of the country's defence secretary John Reid was his warning of major problems ahead. This political emphasis on the predicament of the British troop deployments in the region was echoed in a particularly straightforward comment from the soldiers' local commander, Brigadier Ed Butler: "We need to expect some setbacks and we need to prepare ourselves and the public".
Iraq, Afghanistan and now Osama bin Laden. The new tape from the al-Qaida leader broadcast on al-Jazeera on 23 April declared that the so-called "Crusader/Zionist" assault on Islam justifies generalised attacks on western targets. It is not clear whether the timing was coincidental, but the statement was followed a day later by the bombings in Dahab, Sinai that killed twenty-three people and injured sixty-two.
Dahab is the third major attack in the eastern Egyptian region of Sinai since October 2004. Along with the operations in Amman and Aqaba in 2005, shows a marked strategy of concentrating on Egypt and Jordan, it reveals that elements associated with al-Qaida are targeting two key members of the network's "near enemy": regimes viewed as elitist, pro-American and unacceptable.
George W Bush and Tony Blair reacted by strongly condemning the attacks; the United States president insisted that the US was committed to its global war on terror for the duration, and there would be no let-up or change in tactics. This note of defiance came within days of the release of further documentation from the Pentagon showing how Donald Rumsfeld's "long war" is going to be fought (see "The world as a battlefield", 9 February 2006.
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here
A collection of Paul Rogers's Oxford Research Group briefings, Iraq and the War on Terror: Twelve Months of Insurgency, 2004-05 is published by IB Tauris
(October 2005)
A shift of tactics
The quadrennial defense review published on 3 February 2006 made clear that much of the US military's new emphasis in the coming period will be on special operations and pre-emption. For example, the special-operation command (Socom) has seen its budget grow by 60% in just three years and now has 53,000 personnel assigned to it, roughly half the size of the entire British army. Socom already has teams of specialists deployed to US embassies in twenty countries across Asia, the middle east, Africa and Latin America and it is expected to spread substantially (see Ann Scott Tyson, "New Plans Foresee Fighting Terrorism beyond War Zones", Washington Post, 23 April 2006).
A key development has been Rumsfeld's ability to persuade the Bush administration to agree to these units having considerable freedom of action. This has enabled a decisive shift in operations planning previously, the local ambassador was required to give approval for US military action in the country concerned, but now all that is required is for the ambassador to be informed. The change from an active to a passive diplomatic role is concealed behind a piece of linguistic legerdemain: the armed units stationed at overseas diplomatic missions, originally termed (fairly bluntly) "operational control elements", are now to be known (almost cosily) as "military liaison elements".
Rumsfeld's diplomatic success underlines the fact that the strategic move from the cold war to the long war will involve a heavy reliance on special-operations forces. But the evidence from Afghanistan and especially Iraq is that insurgent forces can be surprisingly effective against much more heavily-armed forces, including those equipped with modern attack helicopters. A case in point is the extraordinary experience that the US army has had with its mainstay helicopter gunship, the Apache AH-64, and its vulnerability to small-arms fire (see Greg Grant, "U.S. Cuts Role Of Apache for Deep Attack", Defense News, 3 April 2006).
The first evidence of this came in early April 2003, in the first, three-week phase of the Iraq war. As US forces moved rapidly towards Baghdad, a large force of thirty-four Apaches was deployed against a Republican Guard division south of Baghdad. The Republican Guard units were by this time the poor relations of Saddam Hussein's elite Special Republican Guard brigades, supplied with inferior equipment and already subject to intense air bombardment. Yet even so, the Apaches encountered a blizzard of small-arms fire to the extent that all were damaged, one was shot down and twenty-seven of the thirty-three that returned to base required repair before they could fly again.
Since 2001, reports Defense News, "the Army has lost 85 helicopters to ground fire and combat-related accidents", and has spent an additional $1.5 billion to improve helicopter survivability. Furthermore, these setbacks are resulting in extensive, and long-term, changes in US military tactics. Two of these are notable: first, US planners will deploy helicopter gunships much more often in close support of US troops on the ground rather than in "deep-strike" mode against opposing forces; second, these opposing forces are far more likely to be attacked by fixed-wing strike aircraft operating from higher altitudes, combined with hugely destructive multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS).
The MLRS is considered to be the most devastating "area-impact munition" deployed by any army in the world; it is designed specifically to kill and maim on a large scale. Each individual MLRS launcher is capable of delivering thousands of anti-personnel bomblets over an area of twenty hectares by ripple-firing twelve missiles within a minute. The withdrawal of helicopters from "deep-strike" mode also reflects the protective, casualty-averse culture that is deeply embedded in the US armed forces, but the change of tactics of which it is part carries the inevitable result of greatly increasing the risk of civilian casualties.
On the horizon
Together, this tactical reorientation and the rapid evolution and newfound freedom of action of special-operations forces act as warning-signals of the manner in which the global war on terror rebranded as the long war will be fought.
They indicate a likelihood of a number of small, "dirty" wars fought in a range of countries where US security is considered to be affected, combined with larger-scale actions using the overwhelming firepower advantage held by US forces. The experience of the past four years including the problems the United States faces in Afghanistan, Iraq and with the al-Qaida movement suggests that the probable result is increasingly embittered opposition to the US and intensified conflict rather than security and settlement.
For the moment, though, the US armed forces are doing what they know best. The Bush administration assures itself, the American people, and the world that this is the only way to proceed. At some stage in the future there may be a fundamental rethink of Donald Rumsfeld's long war. There are few signs of it at present.
