Around the globe with Robert D. Kaplan

HH: Joining me to begin the conversation about the year around the globe, Robert D. Kaplan. He is the author of Imperial Grunts: The American military on the ground. He is also a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. He has been a guest on this program before. Robert Kaplan, thanks for spending some time with us this afternoon.

HH: I love this book, and I want to tell the audience it's probably the most influential book of 2005, because it's the book the president is reading right now. That's always got to give you a little bit of a pause, doesn't it, Robert Kaplan?

HH: I also noted in the author's note that it had its origin not only with Cullen Murphy of the Atlantic Monthly, but also Michael Kelly. Michael Kelly used to hold down this slot every Wednesday on this program until he deployed to Baghdad, where he was killed in the march to Baghdad. What's the origin of this, and can you explain the project for the audience.

RK: Yes. This started as a group of magazine articles to the Atlantic Monthly, supported by Cullen Murphy of the Atlantic, and Michael Kelly. And Michael Kelly's best writing, I believe, was actually done in the days before he was killed outside Baghdad. He was reporting about the troops as they saw themselves. He had some phrase that it was their history, and somebody needed to tell it. Well, everyone has to do things in their own way, and I can't replicate him, of course. But what I tried to do as this project got going was I realized that the media was writing about...you know, especially after the insurgency began, as the troops as victims, as demoralized, in some very rare cases as war criminals, as complexified morally. And that all accounted for about 2% of the troops I met. The other 98% saw themselves as warriors for good. But they had not voice. So what I decided to do was I would do at least two books traveling around the world, living in the barracks, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Colombia, the Philipines, many other places. To kind of write a postcard for posterity about this impoverished tactical existence that these American troops were living at the turn of the 21st Century. And the only other correspondents that I really related to were people from earlier generations like Ernie Pyle and Richard Tregaskis, and others who used the word, the pronoun we, rather than they, when referring to the troops.

HH: You're also drawing on a tradition, though, that has ancient roots, whether or not it's Thucydides or Tacitus, about people who have been where the battles have been fought, and who reported back...and even Caesar's dispatches from Gaul. And there's quite a lot of classical references sprinkled throughout this book.

RK: Yes, it's probably...you know, without taking on errs, but you know, of all the classical writers, the one I admire the most is Herodotus, because Herodotus doesn't write about one subject. He describes landscape. He describes personalities. He give stories. He kind of recreates a world of what people believe. And what I tried to do was a travel book. And by a travel book, I mean something very specific. I mean you don't throw a microphone in front of a sergeant's face, and ask him a direct question. You reveal him to the reader as he reveals himself to you over days and weeks. Sometimes, I wouldn't even take out a notebook until I knew somebody for a week. In other words, don't define them on your terms. Let them define themselves on their terms, and their problems and frustrations on their terms, and you be the kind of vehicle to the reader.

HH: Now I will go back and forth through the chapters in the world that you have traveled. I want to give people a summary, though. You began not long after 9/11, and you have in this volume of your work, covered places as far flung as Yemen and Colombia. You've been to Mongolia. You've been to the Philipines, of course Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Horn of Africa. Was there any method to this travel? Or was it simply handing off the baton from one special forces or Marine officer to another who would accommodate you?

RK: The method was the people I met. One of the suppositions of this book is that Americans, and the American military, don't like the word imperialism. They're uncomfortable with it. But the United States does find itself in an imperial like situation around the world, where much of what the troops do, especially training missions, governance missions, are best related to what the British, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, during their periods of high empire, did. And so, the method to the travel was that I would meet a major in Yemen, or a Coast Guard officer in Yemen, who would tell me about people he knew in Colombia. And then I'd go to Colombia, and I'd hear about this fellow in Mongolia. And in Mongolia, I'd hear about this operation in the Philipines. So the very method of my traveling was proof of a worldwide imperial like military, where people had interconnections around the world.

HH: Last night, Robert Kaplan, at dinner, I was telling a United States Congressman about the manager of the Coast Guard in Yemen as an example of the extraordinary kind of people the American military produces...offered admission to Stanford. He couldn't afford it. He went off to the Coast Guard Academy, found himself retired after 9/11, called back to duty, and now, he's one of our pro-counselors, really, in Yemen, building a navy.

RK: Yes, one of the things that I think really kind of unnerved the elite, is that while there are all these conferences and discussions in Washington and elsewhere about should we support Afghan warlords or not, should we create an Afghan national army or not, what should our foreign policy be in Yemen or Colombia or in Iraq. I discovered a world of basically working-class people, who were operationally far more sophisticated and knowledgeable about all these issues, who spoke languages, who had personalities that didn't fit into any one neat division. They were evangelical, but they spoke two exotic languages. People like that who...so while all these discussions are taking place, foreign policy is being enacted on the ground by majors and sergeants and lieutenants, who are utterly oblivious to most of these discussions. And you know what? They're doing these things very, very well.

HH: And they're very clear-eyed. In Yemen, a U.N. retired special forces officer, working for the U.N. now, described his mission as doing favors for everyone until the day came he had to get his people out, and he would collect. That's very clear-eyed.

RK: Yes, and who is this U.N. officer? He's a retired American army special forces lieutenant colonel, and this is proof that I've seen this around the world, that when the U.N. has a real important tactical mission to do, it hires Americans, Australians and Brits to do it. And then the U.N. takes the credit.

HH: Robert Kaplan, before we get into the specifics of where you went and what you found there, does America have enough capacity...I'm...I mean overwhelmed, actually, by reading this book, how many places we are, and how many enormous tasks there are to do, and the burden on the military. Is it big enough, is it deep enough to accomplish this?

RK: It's an easy question to answer, Hugh. There's no imperial overstretch with 70-80 missions per week in like 50 different countries, because in each of these places, we have ten people, we have twenty, or we have fifty or sixty. We're dealing with small numbers. The big problem is Iraq, where you have 150,000. And that overstretches the system. So the system is not overburdened by being deployed in 50 or 80 countries, or the Air Force having missions in, say, 190 countries. But the system is overburdened when you have tens of thousands of troops in even one country.

HH: And so you've described how we were in the Garrison age, but we've moved to the Expeditionary Age, but Iraq is sort of a precarious mixing of the two?

RK: Yes, and it's also...you know, people say America's imperialist. It's bad because it's in Iraq. Actually, Iraq is a perversion of intelligent imperialism, rather than an accurate expression of it, because the British and the French and the others were at their best when they had small numbers of troops training host country militaries, so that the British were not overextended financially, or in any other sense. And so American military influence works best when we have the least...when our military footprint on the ground is the smallest. I've seen one man accomplish miracles in Mongolia. I've seen dozens do great work in Algeria this past summer when I was working for Volume II. I've seen hundreds do great work in the Phillipines and Colombia, where treading water with ten thousand or so in Afghanistan, and 150,000, whatever one's views on Iraq, does constitute a mess.

HH: Thirty seconds to a break, Robert Kaplan. Is it fair to say that the American military, with whom you've been spending, is deeply discriminatory on a gender basis by necessity, and absolutely egalitarian as to race and religion?

RK: Yes, that's true. Relations between whites and blacks in the barracks, in religious ceremonies, are much better than in society at large.

HH: Robert Kaplan, I want to talk about three specific places that you mention in the book, in this order. North Waziristan, which someone described to you as the most evil place on Earth. I want to talk to you about the Phillipines, where the Abu Saaef terrorists are just about as savage as they go, until I remember that back in Colombia, among the FARC, in the border region with Venezuela, you described atrocities that people simply would only consider fables if they were in ancient text. We're up against truly evil people.

RK: Yes, we are. Keep in mind that throughout the Earth, there are all these regional separatist movements with barbaric techniques. And a good deal of them have some kind of like overlapping, strategic affinity with the goals of al Qaeda. It doesn't mean they have the same objective. It means their interests overlap. So think of al Qaeda as kind of a loose, post-modern organization that's weak at the center, strong at the edges, that doesn't demand absolute affinity of views with a lot of its allies. So the U.S. military is in this position of going to the Afghan/Pakistan border, where North Waziristan is, going to the southern Phillipines, going to the Colombian/Venezuelan border, and kind of efficiently using an economy of force, force multiplication strategy, of just a few teams of special forces training the host country military to do the lion share of the work.

HH: But the host country militaries...are they capable of absorbing the sort of training that the special forces are willing to give them, in as short of a period of time as we have?

RK: Yes, they are, because what we do is we don't train just recruits. We train their best units. And not only do we train their best units in Colombia or the Philippines, we train the trainers of the best units, so that our methods can be replicated and carried on within these countries. And it's important to keep in mind that we have U.S. military training missions throughout the world. There are so many of them that the Marines are taking the burden from special forces in many cases. As we speak, Hugh, the United States Marines are training...retraining the entire Georgian military to kind of consolidate the gains of the Rose democratic revolution in the former Soviet republic. And in every single case, we're dealing with legitimated democracies. We're not around the world propping up dictatorships. You know, that may have been true thirty or forty years ago. But the reality today is there was an explosion of democracies in the 90's, and you cannot have an age of democratization without an age of military professionalization. If we don't professionalize these militaries, they won't stay democratic for long.

HH: That, I think, goes to the core issue in Iraq. It's not just training an Iraqi army. It's training one that will not immediately go to a coup situation, but will in fact support a long evolving pluralism. Is that working?

RK: Yes. I mean, all societies, democratic or not, have to begin with some sort of professional security structure. Freedom is impossible without authority. And so what we are doing is we are training the core element of authority in Iraq, the army and the police. I just got back, as it happens, from a month in Iraq, observing this throughout the northern half of the country.

HH: I am fascinated by the chapter on the Philipines for a couple of reasons. One, my dad was stationed in Zamboanga sixty years ago...

HH: And then he went on to Japan to be part of the occupation army there. Japan has stabilized and transitioned. But the portrait you paint of Philipines, of the klepto-oligarchy, and of this...this is a truly...I had very little grasp of how insidious the Abu Saaef guerillas are. Are you an optimist about the Philipines?

RK: Not really. I'm not a pessimist, either. I think that the Philipines will be a more accurate barometer for the U.S.' ability to manage the world, than Iraq will be, because we've been involved in the Philipines going back a hundred years. We invaded the country. We fought a long, difficult counter-insurgency there a hundred years ago. We developed the country. There's strong ties with the U.S. and the Philipines islands. But there's very few other places where the Chinese are more active now, trying to displace us.

RK: Yeah, so the Philipines is the ultimate barometer to kind of...the relative power between the United States and China in the coming decade.

HH: A sidebar, Robert Kaplan, because I want people to understand this. I don't think of you as political at all. I don't know if you're a Democrat or a Republican. I think of you as an observer. Is that fair?

HH: But you're not writing a political...you're not laying out an agenda for the military here.

RK: No, no. And there are many places in the book where I do express strong points of view, but they're on tactical issues.

RK: Yeah, very rarely on strategic issues. For instance, I'm very hard on the regular army for too much bureaucracy in Afghanistan. Things like that I come down with strong opinions.

RK: It's important not to become polemical about Donald Rumsfeld. He's done...the bad things, the mistakes he's made in Iraq are well known. We don't need to belabor them. But a lot of the good things he's done are things that the military appreciates, but because we have a media establishment that hasn't served in the military, it's something they don't appreciate and aren't interested in. For instance, NATO and European command were for long decades always ruled by American army generals. They became regular army mafias, so to speak. Rumsfeld appointed a Marine to head NATO as the supreme allied commander in Europe, General Jim Jones. And what he has done is refitted NATO in a leaner, meaner form, for an expeditionary age, so that NATO will have a real purpose. Rusmfeld has tried to kind of end in a soft manner the big navy mafia in the Pacific command, by trying to appoint an Air Force general to shake things up, to give the Chinese something to think about. He didn't succeed for other reasons, but the writing is on the wall there. His emphasis when he got in on special forces, and a lot of small deployments all over the world, rather than a few big ones, are all things that had to be done. His tragedy is that he understood the world of the future, which is a world of more special forces, a regular army that needs to reform drastically if it's going to survive, but he got himself involved in a war where he required the very forces that he knew he would have to make obsolete twenty and thirty years hence. So that made him conflicted about the number of regular army troops he needed in Iraq.

RK: No, I do not. I've been going back to Iraq since 1984. The only way I can describe Saddam's regime is think of Eastern Europe before Stalin died in 1953. It was like the worst, darkest regimes in Eastern Europe in the late 1940's. Had we not gone into Iraq, the sanctions would have been lifted, all the scientists from the ex-Soviet Union, the nuclear and other scientists, would have flooded back there. The U.N. sanctions would have been lifted. And the problems we would have now would probably be equally as bad, though of a different nature.

HH: I have saved for this relatively short section of our hour, Robert Kaplan, the six minute section, a discussion about Colombia, because this chapter unnerved me. I've always been aware that we send troops and money down there, and I read the Tom Clancy novel. But until you describe what's going on, on the Venezuelan border, and how Chavez is actually trading drug money and guns to Arab terrorists, and how the FARC is just a maniacal organization. It really did not drive home the strategic importance of this front. Can you expand on what you saw there in Colombia, what Americans generally don't know about what's going on down there?

RK: Yes. Colombia to me...I've been all over Iraq. I was in the Battle of Fallujah with the Marines. I've never been to a place that felt as dangerous as Colombia. You can't go from one Colombian city to another without flying. And Colombia does more kidnapping than any country in the world, per capita. Colombian narco-terrorists are as brutal and cruel as the worst al Qaeda people. We have a great opportunity in Colombia. If you ask me, Hugh, who is the most impressive leader in the third world, I would say President Álvaro Uribe Vélez of Colombia. He has risked his own life. He is a constitutional democrat. He has made big in-roads against these narco-terrorists. His approval rating after six years in office is still 70%, in a fully democratic society with a feisty media. When a commando operation goes wrong, he takes full responsibility on television. And what we are doing is we are backing up this man, because it is the only chance we have. And President Chavez of Venezuela is trying to undermine Colombia. I've walked along that border. It's a very porous border divided by just a narrow stream in the middle of the jungle. The FARC controls large areas of the country, in almost like a sovereign manner. When you think of the ark of instability in the world, don't just think of the greater Middle East. It's everywhere, because Arab terrorist groups are active. They are there in Venezuela, in Maracaibo, in Margarita, in islands off the Venezuelan coast. So there is like a strategic alliance with drug criminals and the Arab terrorists, because the Arab terrorists have...what they have is they have expertise in car bombs, things like that, where the narco-terrorists have money. Billions of dollars of it. And they also have sovereign territory, so to speak.

HH: Does the intelligence gathering the military is about every day backed up by the NSA and other intelligence...does that keep us ahead of them effectively? Or are we always struggling to catch up with a basically irregular army of guerillas, with much greater mobility and firepower than anything we've dealt with before?

RK: In terms of Colombia, we have linguistic advantages. It's not like the Middle East. Almost all special forces officers, whether they're of Latin descent or not, speak fluent Spanish. So we're really ahead of the game there. The problem is not getting intelligence. It's getting...you know, like sighting criminals or leaders of organizations, whether it's Zarqawi in Iraq or it's the leading FARC officers in Colombia. I saw this in Iraq, where there were a lot of sightings in the battalion in which I was embedded, of Zarqawi. You can get sightings of people. But the person who sights the person has to be able to communicate it in real time, and then there needs to be an operational element ready to like go out immediately.

RK: A real military transformation is bureaucratic transformation. Wherever it is, Colombia and Iraq, it's about pushing power out to the edges of command, giving young lieutenants and captains and staff sergeants more and more power and autonomy.

HH: A quick glimpse. I want to jump over the globe to Mongolia, where you write the Mongolians, even though occupied for 80 years by the Soviets, are more afraid of the Chinese, and deathly afraid of SARS. Now probably Avian Flu. Why is this?

RK: First of all, there are very few Russians living in the Siberian border regions near Mongolia. But China is a demographic immensity that is not only overwhelmed, it threatens to overwhelm Mongolia. But it's overwhelming Soviet East Asia. China is this surging economy, surging population zone. Mongolia is only 2 million people spread over a vast area. A million of them live in the greater capitol city area of Ulan-Bator. Mongolia is part of the former Manchu Dynasty. It's the only part of the mainland Manchu Dynasty that the Chinese have yet to reincorporate.

HH: Mr. Kaplan, I said this as we were going to break. I want to talk to you about China and the American military. A couple of times, maybe three times, unprompted by me, you brought China into the conversation...

HH: ...about the Philipines, other places. They are also a full frontal challenge to the American military. They're building a blue water navy. What is going on with the Chinese military? What should the American person listening right now know about that?

RK: Here's the American challenge. For the last fifty years, the American Navy has been able to treat the whole Pacific Ocean as an American light. That is not going to be the case for the next fifty years. The Chinese Navy is pushing out asymmetrically. There's a tremendous emphasis not on across the board development, but on submarines, and on missiles that can hit moving targets in the middle of the ocean. The Chinese are obsessed with the ability to attack an American aircraft carrier. That doesn't mean they will. That doesn't mean they'll have any motive to even threaten it. But the very fact that they could do it will affect our carrier movements, will constrain our own carrier movements, and thus, affect the balance of power in the Pacific. So the big challenge is how to accommodate China's legitimate re-emergence as a great power, without a serious cold war or a hot war occurring, that could really disturb the peace of the world.

RK: Yes, I am, because I think that our military leadership in Honolulu, which is the headquarters of Pacific command, is far less ideological than people in Washington, D.C. They're not liberals, they're not neo-conservatives. They basically understand that the worst thing that could happen is if we provoke the Chinese too much. But they also understand that unless we set limits for the Chinese, we will have real problems with them.

HH: Now I want to conclude our time together by talking about the American military. I'm a civilian, but I married into a military family. My wife was born on Quantico. I was married on Pendleton. They've lived all around the world with the Marines. And you spent...one of your chapters in North Carolina with both special forces and Marines. And there's a lot of very interesting stuff in here, especially about the rhetoric we hear that the American military is tired and worn out. Your commentary?

RK: My commentary is that...and I just came back from Iraq, and I spent six months a year in the barracks, is that I've only met two kinds of Army Special Forces and front line Marines: Those who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those who are pulling every bureaucratic string to get deployed there. Morale has never been better. It's much better than in the 1990's, where the military was not really allowed to do anything. Front line combat troops are like artisan writers. They want to be active in their chosen profession. As I said, morale has never been better, and the one complaint I hear is we can get this thing done in Iraq. It may take a few years longer than people think, but the weakest link is the home front.

HH: You know, a few years ago, Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post wrote Making the Corps...

HH: ...that really interested me in the civilian/military divide that he worried about. Do you see that growing or narrowing?

RK: I see it growing, because this is the first time in history where you have an intellectual media governmental elite, where people don't have anyone...where have very few people who've served in the military within their own social circle. One of the things you see in Iraq, you see all these soldiers, Marines, private contractors, and they're all from the South, the greater South, the Mid-West, the Great Plains. And they all e-mail their families every single night about what's going on. And so people in other parts of the country are far more cosmopolitan and sophisticated about what's going on in Iraq now, than people on the two coasts of California and New York.

HH: Now what about the American military's rock-solid tradition for...since the country was founded, even before it, of unwaveringly listening to and following civilian orders. Are you ever worried, Robert Kaplan...you've spent a lot of time in both politics and military, about the temptation that overcame Rome, in the era of empire as well...

RK: Absolutely not. I am not worried at all about that. The one thing...in fact, and just to really bring this down, Hugh, to concrete terms. You know, I've heard conversations in the barrack...well, what if Hillary Clinton were elected? And people say well, if she's the commander-in-chief, she's the commander-in-chief. We'll respect her as much as President Bush.

HH: If, in fact, 9/11 had succeeded, and had decapitated American leadership, what would have happened, Robert Kaplan?

HH: Would the military have assumed control, and then given it back? That's the bottom line.

RK: Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, the military now, another tactical frustration they have in Iraq, is they say where is the State Department. We want desperately to hand over responsibility to USAID, the State Department. Now, the State Department may be an unhealthy agency. It may be in desperate need of reform. The military knows it can do a better job than these civilian government departments. And yet nevertheless, they are very uncomfortable with their expanding role.

HH: Crucial question, Robert Kaplan. After all these years and deployments, and thousands of hours with American military, and summing it up, do you expect, do they expect that al Qaeda will successfully attack the United States again on United States soil?

RK: They have...you know, militaries have to think in worst case scenarios, or else they wouldn't be doing their job. And their assumption is that it will happen. And if they didn't assume that, they wouldn't be doing their jobs.

HH: And do you hear about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of these various evil forces that we've been talking about?

RK: All the time, because we live in a time of history, where weapons of mass destruction are in the hands of very emotional...or getting into the hands of very emotional people without the bureaucratic control mechanisms that say the late Soviet Union had. So wherefore the Soviet Union may have been evil and communist. It was also very conservative and responsible, bureaucratically, in terms of handling such weapons.

HH: So is it a tale designed to scare people? Or is it a reality of a nuke in the hands of people who would try to get it here?

RK: It's not a tale. It's not a fable. It's a reality that the U.S. military lives with.

HH: Well, it's a magnificent achievement. My hat is off to you. I mean, you've really reduced most writers to feeling like bystanders, but congratulations and enjoy the rest that...the military told you what? Take a few months off and then get back on the ground?

HH: Thank you. Robert Kaplan, author of Imperial Grunts: The American military on the ground. I cannot, simply cannot encourage you strongly enough to read this, because it's factual. It's not written by the tubas of the media, in a seminar room on the Charles. It is the real story of the real challenges, and the real men who are fighting and facing them down around the globe, in the hands of a craftsman, Robert Kaplan.

Don't know. I highly recomend it.

I knew I should have selected that last month on audible.com.

4 posted on 12/28/2005 10:26:57 PM PST by Choose Ye This Day (Win the war. Confirm the judges. Cut the taxes. Control the spending. Secure the border.)

If you listen closely to the President when he mentions Special Operations, you will notice that he uses the correct terms in the correct context. He has really taken SOF to heart.

Also, he tends to call the Army COS and the Commander of USSOC by their first names while he addresses other flag officers by their last names in public.

He knows the GWOT is a SO war.

He knows the GWOT is a SO war.

Indeed

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