Rumsfeld's Attempts to Rewrite Himself on the Right Side of History Are Laughable

By Gary Brecher, AlterNet. Posted November 26, 2008.

Naturally Rumsfeld, a lifelong advocate of high-tech, airpower-based warfare, opposed it until 2007, when the situation was so bad Petraeus finally got his chance.

When Petraeus finally took command, most of his moves were counterinsurgency basics that would have been put in place years ago by any other occupying army in history. One of the first moves was starting neighborhood census programs so troops could start sorting out who was who, who was new, who didn't belong in the area. The worst of it is that Rumsfeld isn't content to skew the Iraq story in his own favor. His essay in the Times shows he's still pushing denial as a way of dealing with Afghanistan, by insisting we can't talk to the Taliban: "The current suggestion of ‘opening negotiations' with the Taliban may well win over some low- and midlevel supporters, but if history is any guide, offering the hand of peace to hardened fanatics is not likely to prove successful."

I remember when I was a kid, the same argument was used to prove we can never talk to "Red China": they're evil fanatics! You can't talk to them! So the United States pretended there was no China for decades, and dealt with Taiwan as if it was a little island in the middle of nowhere.

Then Nixon, a guy nobody ever accused of naïveté, changed everything by pointing out, while on his way to shake Mao's hand, that evil or not, those "evil" Red Chinese controlled a fourth of the world's population and weren't going to go away. 

Denial didn't work then, didn't work in Iraq and won't work in Afghanistan. Whether the Taliban are "evil" or not I have no idea, but the fact is that they represent most of the Pashtun in Afghanistan. Sure, the Pashtun have some strange ideas, but if we're going to call them "evil" I guess it's time to wipe them out. If we're not going to do that -- and obviously we're not -- then sooner or later, we're going to have to talk to them.

Rumsfeld's giant blind spot about counterinsurgency warfare keeps him from seeing this. Conventional warfare, the kind he understands, is binary: either you're at war, or you're at peace. Counterinsurgency warfare is a lot murkier. It always comes down to negotiating with some faction of locals, but that doesn't mean "offering the hand of peace." It's more about bribing the greedy, provoking the paranoid and making a deal with the rest. That's what we've done in the Sunni Triangle: bribed some Sunni factions, and encouraged the hostility that other local factions had developed toward the foreign fighters in al-Qaida to flare into open war between Iraqis and foreign jihadists.

Beyond that, the surge worked, if you can say it worked at all, because the Shiites used American protection to finish the job of ethnic cleansing, especially in Baghdad. Baghdad's a Shiite city now, with a few Sunni enclaves. The killing has declined because the boundaries have been set, at least for now. It's not a pretty picture, close up, and it has nothing to do with the silly dreams Bush and Rumsfeld were pushing when they persuaded us to go to war.

And even the slight improvement that the surge managed came with Rumsfeld kicking and screaming, resisting the change all the way, because the man is in complete denial about counterinsurgency warfare, about the fact that we aren't beloved liberators in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about the notion that the world doesn't divide neatly into good people that we can talk to and bad people we pretend aren't there. So whatever needs to be done in Afghanistan, you can be absolutely sure of one thing: It won't have anything to do with whatever Donald Rumsfeld recommends.  

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Gary Brecher is the author of "The War Nerd" (Soft Skull, 2008). Read more of his work at eXiledOnline.com.

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