Ann Marlowe

Originally published in The Weekly Standard, 8/1/09

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/016/805exjkw.asp

The Accidental Guerrilla
Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
by David Kilcullen
Oxford, 384 pp., $27.95

In the dim red glow of the crowded C130 transport aircraft, my soldiers’ faces were guarded and withdrawn. We were minutes away from landing, and all expected a serious firefight before the day was out. Some retched from turbulence or checked their rifles.

And so on, for a few hundred words. Is David Kilcullen about to assault Falluja? No–Connecticut-sized East Timor, which was down to about 200,000 wretched inhabitants at the time the Australian army faced the fearsome challenge of “invading” it. Kilcullen, “one of the few Indonesian linguists in the force,” took the “gamble” of walking over to the Indonesian airfield commander and asking for his handover of control. Looking up at the “continuous stream of aircraft stretching all the way to Australia,” the commander sagely agreed.

There are too many silly, pretentious, self-regarding moments like this in The Accidental Guerrilla, and they nearly overwhelm Kilcullen’s often sensible observations, and undermine our confidence in his mainstream if not particularly original views of best-practice, population-centric counterinsurgency.
(more…)

originally published in The Weekly Standard, June 29, 2009

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/664uwbvd.asp

The Enemy at the Gate
Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe
by Andrew Wheatcroft
Basic, 384 pp., $27.50
The heart may sink a bit reading the Introduction to The Enemy at the Gate: “This book is first of all about Europe’s fear of the Turks and then, by the end, about fear itself.”

This book “is not a straightforward history” (italics Andrew Wheatcroft’s) but it soon becomes evident that the trendy posturing is skin-deep. Wheatcroft has, thankfully, not lived up to his promise to write about “fear itself.” His fourth book is primarily a military history of the clashes between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires in the 17th century, the fruit of more than 20 years researching the field. If anything, it is old-fashioned in its emphasis on day-to-day battlefield action, with little about the economic life of the two empires or behind-the-scenes political maneuvering.

Some of the most suggestive material here is on military organization, equipment, and tactics. Wheatcroft tracks the burgeoning use of grenades (named for their resemblance to pomegranates and giving their name to a new military branch, the grenadiers) and the bayonet, a new weapon particularly useful in defending against Ottoman cavalry. The Europeans who besieged Buda in the 1680s brought “wicker gabions to be filled with earth in front of the Ottoman lines”–ancestors of today’s Hescos.

It was by no means clear when the Turks besieged Vienna in 1683 that they fielded the less advanced army. Turkish flintlock muskets were more accurate than European matchlocks. The Turkish Janissary was “astonishingly versatile” as well, master of many weapons. But Janissaries had “no uniformity of equipment nor did they march in step like Western soldiers.”

(more…)

originally published in Forbes.com, 12/29/2008

If we can treat ghetto culture in the U.S., we can do it elsewhere, too.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/27/afghanistan-culture-poverty-oped-cx_am_1229marlowe.html?partner=email

Afghanistan is a ghetto.

If you can see beyond the exotic clothes, the mountains and the overwhelmingly rural aspect of the country, it’s obvious. No, Afghanistan doesn’t look like an inner-city slum. But over the course of 11 visits of a month or so each, I’ve come to believe that Afghans in many respects act like people trapped in “the culture of poverty.” Yes, they are a warm, hospitable, vastly social people, but they are crippled by a dysfunctional culture.

By and large, Afghans are relentlessly present-oriented, unable to delay gratification, macho, authoritarian, fatalistic, passive, disorganized and feckless when it comes to responsibilities. They spend time almost exclusively with relatives, have few affiliations with civil society and mistrust others outside their family groups. There is little to no privacy in an Afghan family, and little individuation.

The majority of Afghans are illiterate, but even most of those who are educated are oriented to oral rather than written culture. Learning in schools is by rote memorization; class sizes are huge, dropout rates high. Religion is practically the only activity that unites Afghans who aren’t blood relatives. Independent thinking and critical reasoning are not much in evidence, and very few Afghans seem to have internalized moral codes, even based on religion. Fewer still are able to stand up to peer pressure and do the right thing when called for.

While Afghans aren’t nearly as violent as Americans on an individual basis, as a group, they have had trouble figuring out ways of working out their differences through discussion rather than warfare. Very few of their rulers in the last hundred years have peacefully relinquished power to a successor. Tribes operate more or less like gangs, albeit white-bearded gangs.

And so we Westerners (and Indians and Japanese)–and more particularly, we Americans–are engaged in the business of what is euphemistically called “reconstruction,” though there was nearly nothing in the way of human or physical capital in Afghanistan when we arrived. (I will leave aside for the moment the question of why a country that had world-class architecture, poetry and art from the ninth to the 15th centuries was reduced to a basket case by the 20th.)

What the U.S. and its allies are really trying to do in Afghanistan is social engineering on a grand scale, scarcely seen in the whole history of the world, and the most wonderful good luck for the Afghans. We are bringing to the ghettos of the Islamic world the same conviction that we brought to our own slums: that the cycle of poverty is breakable. (more…)