Please note that this programme transcript is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 RADIO CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS DAVID KILCULLEN TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED INTERVIEW Presenter: Frank Gardner Producer: Simon Coates Editor: Hugh Levinson BBC White City Room 1210 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS (020) 8752 7279 Broadcast date: 01.11.07 2030-2100 Repeat date: 04.11.07 2130-2200 CD Number: PLN743/07VT1044 Duration: 27.40 GARDNER: Iraq and Afghanistan have become the defining conflicts of this decade. They’ve sucked in thousands of British and other Western troops and there is still no clear vision of how and when these conflicts are likely to end. But one man does have a unique understanding of counter-insurgency warfare. He’s Dr. David Kilcullen, an Australian, a youthful former lieutenant-colonel, who’s written much of the latest military doctrine that’s contributing to recent limited?but important?successes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Until July, he was senior adviser on counter- insurgency to U.S. General Petraeus in Baghdad. Now he’s just become a key policy adviser to U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. But he’s also in the unusual position of being an adviser to the British and Australian governments. So, in this week’s edition of Analysis, I’m asking David Kilcullen for his assessment of how he thinks the West is doing in the so-called “war on terror”?what’s working, what’s not, what lessons the West has learned and what has it still got to do? We’ll also be hearing from two academic experts on the nature of the insurgency problem. First, here’s Professor Michael Clarke who runs the Whitehall think-tank, RUSI?the Royal United Services Institute. CLARKE: If we are involved in a war on terror, we’re losing. The reason we’re losing is that although we’ve been operationally successful?al-Qaeda cells have been split up, lots of arrests have been made?the fact is they have established a brand name. They have mobilized anti-Western dissent around the world and the Western world is being drawn into battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan?and possibly in Somalia?that are not of its choosing. We are fighting their war. We are fighting the war they wanted to draw us into. GARDNER: Well, Dr. Kilkullen, that’s a fairly pessimistic view there, but he is fundamentally right, isn’t he? KILCULLEN: Well, I think Michael Clarke is very accurate in describing the al-Qaeda approach, which is designed to get us to spend a lot of money and a lot of time; and I think also very importantly to spend a lot of moral authority and political capital in reacting to their provocation. And I think the lesson from that is to look at al-Qaeda primarily as a propaganda hub. What bin Laden is trying to be is not the Commander-in-Chief, but the Inciter-in-Chief. What he’s trying to do is to provoke the West into actions that basically incite the umma, the world’s Muslim population, into a mass revolt and a mass movement. And that’s why I think it’s appropriate to see al-Qaeda as fundamentally an insurgent movement rather than a terrorist movement. GARDNER: So, on the one hand, yes, they have managed to pin down very large numbers of Western troops in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, but on the other, though, they have failed to stimulate a mass uprising. I mean, no governments have been swept aside by populations in their favour, in al-Qaeda’s favour, have they? KILCULLEN: No, that’s right, the mass uprising of the world’s Muslim population hasn’t taken place. But I think, on the other hand, we’ve certainly become involved in a number of very large scale military interventions. But I think it’s appropriate to say that any United States administration, regardless of party political orientation, is going to be looking very carefully at interventions of this kind to make sure that they actually carry with them the results that justify the resources expended. And I think we understand that we have to be fighting al-Qaeda’s strategy rather than just trying to kill individual terrorists. GARDNER: Let’s talk a little bit about your own background. How did you become interested in counter- insurgency? You had some experience in Indonesia, didn’t you, where you served as a captain of the Australian army? KILCULLEN: I started counter-insurgency at Duntroon, which is our equivalent of Sandhurst or West Point and all my instructors, without exception, were Vietnam veterans. But, of course, Australia’s also been involved in every major Western counter- insurgency since the Second World War?Malaya, Borneo, Vietnam, Somalia and, of course, Iraq and Afghanistan?and we have our own experiences in places like Timor, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and so on. You know, this is in our blood; we do it a lot. But essentially I specialized in my career on what we call “irregular conflicts”, which are conflicts where one side is a non-state actor. GARDNER: Let’s turn to Iraq and Afghanistan because these conflicts have gone on probably rather longer than was initially anticipated. I mean, we’re four-and-a-half years into Iraq, six years into Afghanistan, no sign that either conflict is going to disappear soon. What sort of a time-line would you put on Western military commitment to those countries? KILCULLEN: Most successful counter- insurgencies take about eleven to fifteen years. There has never been a counter-insurgency campaign that succeeded in a year or two years or five years. There’s a very good reason for that, which is that you typically don’t get an insurgent group surrendering. What it does is it goes quiet. But, of course, once it goes quiet it could always reactivate again, and so there’s usually a long period where what the counter- insurgent force has done has been to reduce the threat from the insurgent to the point where it no longer threatens the state and then it may remain at that low level for a very long time. Let me give you the example which I know you guys like to quote a lot, which is the Malayan Emergency. The dates that we put in the Malayan Emergency typically are 1948 to 1960, which is a twelve-year window. Now, at the five-year point of the counter-insurgency in Malaya, it was actually going terribly badly, and it then turned around from about 1952-3 onward and moved up to the point in 1960 where the Emergency could be declared at an end. But it’s worth remembering that the Malayan Communist party actually didn’t surrender until 1989. Northern Ireland, I don’t know if we’re counting it as a success at the moment, but even that took thirty to thirty-five years, depending on how you want to count it. So it’s a very, very long-term endeavour. And I think that goes to your initial question?how long will we see a Western military commitment??and I think the answer to that resides in the political patience of Western publics and political leaders, more so than in the nature of the forces that are committed. I mean, we could keep doing this for a long time and there’s one hundred and sixty thousand soldiers in Iraq from the United States; there’s 1.68 million people in the United States Armed Forces. So it’s actually not a terribly large commitment, but it’s a very long-term commitment and that’s the problem. GARDNER: Interestingly, in an interview with the New Yorker, you said that if we’re not down to fifty thousand troops in Iraq in three to five years, we’ve lost the war on terror. Do you still agree with that? KILCULLEN: Yes, I would. If we are still in Iraq in very large numbers?I’m talking about sort of one hundred and twenty, one hundred and thirty thousand?in five years’ time, then that shows that we’re just not getting ahead of the curve, that we’re in fact failing to defeat the insurgency. And I think that means that by that stage we will have lost a very substantial amount of political capital. ACTUALITY - IRAQIS PROTESTING GARDNER: Angry Iraqis protesting there at coalition troops. It’s been a common theme. In fact, that takes us pretty much to the heart of the whole counter-insurgency question. For Michael Clarke at RUSI, the negative reaction of ordinary Iraqis to American soldiers casts doubt on just how well suited to this type of warfare the US really is. CLARKE: The American military were never really equipped for counter-insurgency operations. They always said after the end of the Cold War, “We don’t do counter-insurgency; we don’t do cities; we don’t do mountains.” If you put all the things they don’t do together, you’d call them Iraq and Afghanistan. And they’re having to learn very quickly about counter-insurgency. And the fact is that four years after the beginning of this operation, the United States is only now taking up the lessons that many other militaries?the British included?have known for many, many years about dealing with counter-insurgency. GARDNER: Well, David, is Michael Clarke right there, to use your phrase, the Americans are “behind the curve” in counter-insurgency warfare, and that other countries, like Britain or Australia, do it better? KILCULLEN: All of us have had to learn and in some cases to learn on the fly, if you like, how to deal with the environment in Iraq and Afghanistan. As I go around and work with units?and I’ve been working with them in both Iraq and Afghanistan for some time, mainly American units?I’m actually quite impressed by the improvement that I’ve seen in performance. The skills and the knowledge of languages, knowledge of the local environment, ability to understand what’s going on just weren’t there three or four years ago. But I think the broader point about British experience gets to a fundamental issue about counter-insurgency and it’s this: there is a fundamental difference between doing counter-insurgency in your own country and doing counter-insurgency in somebody else’s country. Now, in the case of Northern Ireland, of course, there’s a dispute about whether Ulster is part of the United Kingdom. But the Government of the United Kingdom regards that area as part of the UK and so policy choices are made that involve extremely long-term time-frames because “It’s our country. We intend to stay here forever.” If you’re in somebody else’s country, then the insurgent has what I call a longevity advantage because they can say to the population, “Look, you may like the Americans but they’re leaving and we live here. So when the Americans go home, they might go home in ten years or fifteen years, we’re going to come out of the woodwork and if you collaborated with them, we’re going to kill you.” GARDNER: Now, David, you’ve written a doctrine, Twenty-Eight Articles, a sort of guide to company commanders, captains and majors in the field. What’s the essence of that? I mean, it’s been widely read and circulated by e-mail to junior commanders in the field in Iraq, hasn’t it? KILCULLEN: Yeah, well, it actually started life as an e-mail. I was working in Iraq in early 2006 and we were just in the process of publishing the new counter-insurgency doctrine in draft format and a lot of people said to me?company commanders and platoon commanders?“Look, I’ve read the doctrine and I understand what I’m supposed to be achieving, but I just don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.” And so I actually wrote this thing as an e-mail and circulated it around to a number of my colleagues. GARDNER: So this is military training by e- mail? KILCULLEN: Well, I mean, there’s a lot of that now, you know, and by blogs as well. If there’s an essence to The Twenty-Eight Articles, I’d say that it boils down to really three basic points: first, you analyse the environment and you diagnose what’s causing the problems; and then you specifically tailor solutions to it and so there are no templates; and then the third point, which I think is fundamental, is to say that counter-insurgency is about the population and it’s about building a long-term viable, genuine partnership with the population. And if you can effectively do that and you can put in place a political solution at the local level that works, then all sorts of other things become possible. ACT. PRESIDENT BUSH: If the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces. GARDNER: President Bush speaking there on his surprise visit to Iraq’s Anbar province in September. Once a hotbed of insurgency, Anbar’s tribes have been turning against al- Qaeda and even helping the police. But al-Qaeda soon took their revenge. ACT. BBC NEWS: A Sunni tribal leader in Iraq, praised by the Americans for fighting against al-Qaeda, has been killed by a bomb explosion ten days after he was photographed with President Bush. Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha had been cooperating with the US military in Anbar province west of Baghdad, which was formerly an insurgent stronghold. The White House has called the murder “an outrage.” GARDNER: But the murder of Sheikh Abu Risha doesn’t change the fact that Anbar province, once known as al- Qaeda Central, is now being held up as a success story for the coalition. David, is that how you see it? KILCULLEN: In al-Anbar, we saw really two phases. In the first phase what happened was that the tribes became disillusioned with al-Qaeda; and the reason that they became disillusioned was they realized that their interests were not served by what al-Qaeda was doing, that al-Qaeda was, in fact, leading them on a path to destruction. And there were a number of reasons for that. Firstly, al-Qaeda in Iraq is ninety-five per cent Iraqi, but the leadership group is very heavily foreign dominated, so they had foreigners and also urban Iraqis?who may as well be foreigners as far as a lot of the tribes are concerned?coming in and telling them what to do and trying to take over and run the power structures in their social groups. That was one issue. Another one was a series of disputes over issues like businesses, marriages, various criminal activities, contracting, all sorts of things that really directly impacted on the self-interest of the tribes. That wasn’t enough to turn them against al-Qaeda. They also had to be convinced that al-Qaeda was able to be defeated, and that was where the role of the marines and the US military in al-Anbar came in. And for a lot of last year, we had people from the tribes saying to us, “Look, we want to turn against al-Qaeda, but we just don’t believe we can survive that. You know, if we try and take them on, they’re too powerful, we’ll be killed.” And so we actually had to demonstrate that al-Qaeda could be beaten and for a period of time there in the early part of the year, of this year, we were basically in a straight up kinetic fight against al-Qaeda where a large number of people were killed, with the population sitting to one side and watching and sort of waiting for the outcome of that kinetic struggle until they finally said to themselves, “Yep, the coalition’s going to win this one, not al-Qaeda.” And at that point suddenly, you know, in a matter of weeks, a group started to swing in behind us and we saw this massive sea change where, as you know, the violence has dropped to nearly nothing in places where it was horrendous last year. And then we saw it start to spread and just worth pointing out that it’s not just in al-Anbar now; it’s in about fifty per cent of the country. GARDNER: And by kinetic, you mean the use of armed military force? KILCULLEN: Kinetic operations are operations that actually or potentially kill people and break their stuff. GARDNER: Ever since the Malayan emergency and possibly before, there’s a recognition that counter-insurgency is not just about killing or capturing insurgents; it’s about winning over the hearts and minds of the local populations. How do you think this is going and where is it going wrong? KILCULLEN: Right, well, I think there’s a lot of rubbish talked about hearts and minds, so let me just go right back to the source. And the source is General Sir Gerald Templar in Malaya in 1952 and he said, “The answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the Malayan people.” So what he was saying was not, you know, that we have to be nice to the population and we have to make them like us and that the route to success lies in making the population think that you’re a good guy. What he was saying was that there is actually a psychological dimension to… counter-insurgency and that it breaks down into hearts?that is, an emotive component?and minds?a cognitive component. And if we analyze that a little bit more, you can say that the emotive component is about whether the population believes that their interests are served by your success. So, in the case of al-Anbar that we just talked about, clearly the initial stage of the tribes losing faith in al-Qaeda was an emotive issue where they said, “Hmm, our interests are not served by al-Qaeda.” So they first lost them in the hearts dimension. But that’s not good enough. You’ve also got to prove to the population that you are going to win. So we’re often portrayed as sort of soft and nice and being gentle to people. It’s not that. It’s about convincing them that their interests are served by our success and demonstrating to them, you know, in a robust fashion that we are going to win. GARDNER: So, here we are now in the autumn of 2007, is al-Qaeda a busted flush in Iraq or is it just simply biding its time and going to pop up in another part of Iraq? KILCULLEN: It’s not a busted flush. Al-Qaeda has been on its back a number of times in the past, as you know?I mean, you’ve been there a lot. I think it’s much premature to say, you know, we’ve defeated al-Qaeda. What happens when you go into these areas is that the enemy doesn’t leave. Some leave, but also some just go quiet; and what you then have to do is you have to partner with the population and spend, in some cases, months going through very patient police work and intelligence work and building relationships with the population to scrub those cells out of the environment. And, until you do that, I don’t think you can say it’s permanent. It’s a little bit like cancer: you know, you’re suppressing it with drugs or whatever, but as soon as you take that off it’ll come back. GARDNER: But, David, does the US military have the patience and the stamina to do that? I mean, certainly the army that went into Iraq in 2003 didn’t when Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of State for Defense. Do you think the US military’s got the patience to do that sort of non-kinetic kind of military operation over the long-term? KILCULLEN: I believe the US military has absolutely got the patience and the capability to do it, and I think the army that came in in 2003 is not the army that we have there now, nor the marine corps. So I think the military is not the issue. The question is: do the politicians have the ability to stick it out? GARDNER: Now at the risk of seeing the glass half empty here, there is another risk with this which is that the US?or the coalition in general?in Iraq, and to some extent in Afghanistan, could find themselves getting sucked into local agendas, and I want to just play you here what Michael Clarke said about this. CLARKE: There are, of course, dangers in making local alliances because effectively you’re also buying into the local agendas. Indeed, it may be very difficult to make a democratic society out of one in which you have strengthened local tribal chiefs. But, again, one of the costs of counter-insurgency is that you can push out the insurgents. You can leave behind, as it were, a cleansed society. But it may not be very democratic, it may not be very friendly because in order to do it, you’ve actually got to enter into the culture of that society. GARDNER: This is very different, isn’t it, to the goals that were originally conceived in 2002 and 2003 when America invaded Iraq with Britain in tow; the idea of setting up this model democratic state for the whole… I mean, I’m not expecting you to defend US policy here, you’re an advisor to several governments, but is this now the thinking, essentially a bit of realpolitik that the system that is going to be left in place in Iraq is very far from perfect, but at least it will be a secure one? KILCULLEN: I think we did go into Iraq early with a belief that we would try to create, basically, a secular democratic state with modern democratic institutions. And I think that reality bites, and I think what we see is that in fact Iraqi society is not like that and that in fact, taking the example of the tribes, tribes have a legitimate, long standing role in Iraqi society as very important providers of network and support and social and economic livelihood and any viable Iraqi state of the future is going to have a strong tribal component. We certainly spent some time in 2003 if you like swatting the tribes out of the way, and one of our conscious decisions in starting the surge was that we weren’t going to do that any more. Instead we go in and we say, “OK who’s in charge?” and we partner with the people that actually hold local authority. And we say, “OK, here’s what we want to do. We want to make a local deal with you to defend your district to drive extremists out, to make you self-defending so that they can’t come back.” And once we get to that point and you’re not attacking your neighbours and it’s quiet, then the Iraqi Government is going to partner with you to meet your needs through an Iraqi state system. GARDNER: One of your driving themes is the necessity of local knowledge of, in terms of counter-insurgency, of knowing the terrain. I’d just like you to listen to what Martin van Creveld says about local knowledge. He is a military historian at the Hebrew University, just outside Jerusalem. VAN CREVELD: Look, Dr. Kilcullen, throughout your work you emphasize?and correctly?the need for very great knowledge of the study of local conditions, but yet at the same time you seem to take it for granted that the counter-insurgent forces will be coming in and out, there will be tours of duty lasting so and so long. How can you expect members of those forces to know the terrain and so on as well as, according to your own doctrine, they have to know it if they are to make a success of it? GARDNER: There is a bit of a change of thought, isn’t there now, that senior officers need to spend more time on the ground? They can’t just come in for six months and then rotate out because local Iraqi and Afghan officials have just started to get to know them and then they’re off. KILCULLEN: That’s absolutely true, and I see two issues in what Martin’s saying. One is the issue of rotation policy?how do you manage the fact that you have people coming in and out??and we should talk about that. But the other issue I think is about local forces because I think what Martin’s doing is he’s doing what I said earlier that a lot of people do, which is forgetting that there’s a fundamental difference between doing counter-insurgency in your own country and doing counter-insurgency in somebody else’s country. And when you are actually intervening in another country, the principal activity that you need to be doing is actually training the local counter-insurgents to be effective and that is actually the activity that drives your exit. So American forces will never be as good as Afghan forces at understanding Afghanistan, nor should we try and make them so. What we need to do is use the American forces in a sort of temporary holding pattern to allow a breathing space for the Afghan forces to build up to the point where they can handle the environment and then we should be handing over to them and letting them handle it. GARDNER: And what about rotation of forces? I mean, US troops tend to do longer tours than British and other ones, but is there an argument for saying?very unpopular with the servicemen and women?that actually their tours of duty need to be extended? KILCULLEN: Well, I think they do need to be long. I think that where we have it at the moment is probably about right for US forces because what I would say is it’s not just about how long the rotations are, it’s about making sure units go back to areas they’re familiar with and that key personnel don’t necessarily rotate as fast as combat troops. And there’s ways to get it done without necessarily making everybody stay there forever. GARDNER: When it comes to winning hearts and minds, at the risk of using this cliché again, information is surely key and this is something that you’ve made very much a theme of your doctrines. I think the West is rubbish at information operations and I think you think the same. Why are we so bad at it? KILCULLEN: Well, I think it’s actually very fundamental, and I learned this from the Taliban, actually, last autumn watching them and the way that they operate. Why we tend to lag a little is that we regard information ops as a supporting activity, whereas the enemy regards it as the main game. And I think until we start treating it as the main game and crafting everything else around that, that we’re going to be beaten every time. And the other point that I would make is that the people designing the Taliban information theme are Afghans. Too often we have a foreigner sitting there telling the Afghan guys what the information theme is going to be. Again I think we’re learning, but it’s at a tactical level. At the strategic level of the overall war on terror, I think it’s still one of our weaker aspects. GARDNER: I noticed there you used the term “the war on terror”, which is pretty unpopular here in the UK. You’ve been one of those who’s started using the expression “the long war”, which is very popular in the Pentagon. Do you think the US in particular and the West in general has the mettle, has the stomach to sustain a really long, extended, multi-year campaign against insurgency around the world? KILCULLEN: We could decide tomorrow, “OK, this is crazy,” and pull everybody back and just go and sit defensively in home countries and wait to be attacked. That’s not going to stop the war. All it’s going to do is change its character into a different dynamic. I use the term “the long war” because I think that better reflects the fact that all these things we’re seeing are very long standing dynamics that might take thirty or fifty or seventy years to play out. And so I think one of the key lessons out of the first five years on the “war on terror” is that we can’t keep doing it this way. For a start, I think we need to rename it. But even the term “war” I think is worth questioning because one of the things that’s happened to us is we said, “Well, it’s a war on terror.” And so the military said, “Well, we’re the military, we fight wars. This is a war, so we must be in charge.” And, of course, actually, about eighty to ninety per cent of the things that we do in the war on terror have not much to do with the military. They’re political or aid-related or they have to do with changing the underlying conditions that give rise to terrorism. GARDNER: I just want to play you, if I can, the final clip from Martin van Creveld about, well, his views on whether the US will stick at this. VAN CREVELD: If you look over the history of counter-insurgency in virtually every kind, what really decided the issue was the fact that the counter-insurgents got tired. So I would ask Dr. Kilkullen how to prevent your troops, your public, your politicians, your media, your whatever from getting tired from being demoralized as, for instance, happened to the Americans in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan. KILCULLEN: This is a very good point and I think he’s put his finger on one of the big issues. There are two basic ways to do this kind of campaign: one is to do the heavy lifting yourself and you create sort of an umbrella under which you try and grow the local host government. That’s what we’ve been doing to date and it’s worth noting that the United States is spending four hundred million US dollars a day in Iraq and it’s probably not sustainable. The alternative model is called foreign internal defence, which is where you essentially allow them to run it with you in a supporting role. GARDNER: Is that… er that’s the desired end state now, is it? KILCULLEN: That has been for some time, yeah. Now why don’t we do that normally? Because governments like to be in control. But I think one of the hard lessons of reality in counter- insurgency is that you have to let the locals do it and you probably have to let them do it more or less their way and on their timeline. GARDNER: David, very unfairly I’m going to ask you to look into your crystal ball now. Where would you see the next conflicts flaring up in terms of the West fighting counter- insurgency campaigns? KILCULLEN: Unequivocally Pakistan. It’s not appropriate to see the Taliban as a fundamentally Afghan movement that’s trying to overthrow the Afghan Government. It’s better to see them as a Pashton movement that’s trying to control the Pashton parts of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now in Afghanistan we have a feeling… GARDNER: [interrupting] Because they straddle the border, don’t they? KILCULLEN: Well, that’s right, yeah. And not forgetting that there’s nuclear weapons in that mix. There are non-state nuclear arms full of racial networks in that mix and there’s also al- Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and the headquarters of the global jihad sitting inside Pakistan. GARDNER: Anywhere else? KILCULLEN: I’d also point out Bangladesh. I think Bangladesh has a very disturbing trend of growing radicalism and Islamization and a fairly capable network of terrorists and insurgent groups. And the other place I’d point out is actually Europe. I think Europe has the potential for subversion, radicalization, a fair degree of social unrest. And, of course, you know, that Europe and North Africa have a symbiotic relationship in demographic terms, and so there’s a whole lot of other issues going on outside the Middle East that are worth thinking about. GARDNER: So, essentially what you’re saying is that with the right tactics, with the right strategy, the West can get the upper hand over the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it faces new challenges which may possibly be beyond their control. It sounds like the Western governments have got a lot of work to do there. David Kilcullen, thank you very much. KILCULLEN: Thanks.