Occupation With a Human Face

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33957-occupation-with-a-human-face

The face McFate put on the Human Terrain System and by extension the counterinsurgency campaign — idealistic, culturally informed, a war for graduate students and Wired readers as much as anyone — was at least as important as any strategic contribution HTS could or did make. The cascade of puff pieces written about her, patronizing as they were, had a strategic purpose.

This deployment of imagery calculated to appeal to Americans in general and American liberals in particular is in keeping with the tradition of American counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency is about managing two populations: those of restive, underdeveloped regions and countries under occupation; and those of the liberal democratic states undertaking occupation campaigns.

When occupations begin to go wrong, as they invariably do, policymakers need new ideas and new images to keep the people at home from asking too many hard questions. One way is to tout the small-scale nature of most counterinsurgency activity — modest groups of American troops and aid workers becoming involved in village-level affairs, helping the locals, getting their hands dirty, outsmarting guerrillas.

This image of the benevolent occupier (who helps grow democracies even as he grows individually) has captured the imagination of a certain sort of American liberal since John Kennedy became a counterinsurgency enthusiast during his administration.

The public narrative of counterinsurgency also assuages the fears of people in advanced capitalist countries by emphasizing things like building infrastructure, promoting democracy, and liberating women. In the process this narrative helps hide the reality of counterinsurgency war: death squads, the manipulation of sectarian and ethnic tensions, the fostering of regimes dependent upon their sponsor’s powers.

At present, though, counterinsurgency — at least in its “hearts and minds,” nation-building variant — is at a low ebb in popularity among the defense establishment. This is in part due to the sheer messiness of counterinsurgency — essentially colonial warfare in a postcolonial context — which overflowed in Iraq and could not be explained away by counterinsurgent myths.