E-Notes

A Journey into the Future

The 2003 Pitcairn Trust Lecture on World Affairs

Address by Robert Kaplan

Trudy Kuehner, rapporteur

July 31, 2003

Robert Kaplan, one of the nation's leading foreign affairs journalists, is an FPRI associate and a contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly. His books include Balkan Ghosts (1994), Ends of the Earth (1996), Empire Wilderness (1998), Eastward to Tartary (2000), Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2001), and Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (2002). On April 9, 2003, he delivered the second annual Pitcairn Lecture on World Affairs, sponsored by Pitcairn Trust (www.pitcairn.com), a private trust company and investment management firm serving the wealth management needs of affluent individuals and families.

Mr. Kaplan began his remarks by noting that in March 2003, while hundreds of thousands of American troops were mobilizing in the Persian Gulf region for the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command was involved on the ground in 65 countries. The U.S. Air Force currently has a presence in 170 countries. Even before 9/11, U.S. armed services professionals were engaged in operations in some 150 countries a year. It is already a cliche to say that by any historical standard the United States is more an empire, especially a military one, than many care to acknowledge.

While foreign policy commentators discuss the pros and cons of concepts like nation-building, mid-level officers have been making all kinds of decisions around the world, such as how best to build a Yemeni coast guard, modernize the Rumanian army, or help the Mongolians protect their border against Chinese infiltration. These young people, cultural repositories of America's experience and deputized in effect as agents of the American empire, are making decisions on the ground without instructions.

Mr. Kaplan used three case studies- one in Latin America, one in the Middle East, and one in Africa- to illustrate how these service people think and the specific ground-level problems they face.

Colombia

Taking first the case of Colombia, Mr. Kaplan reported that he had just returned from being embedded with four different U.S. Army Green Beret regiments there, where an entire other war is going on in which the U.S. is deeply involved. Colombia's drug problems may seem less important now than the problems in Iraq and North Korea, but those latter countries represent the last of the Cold War dinosaur regimes that are passing as we speak. Colombia represents the kind of challenges we are going to face in the future.

Colombia is "interagency" writ large, meaning that there is a meshing of the Departments of State, Defense, Energy, and Commerce and the EPA, as is now happening in Iraq as the military operation gives way to a rebuilding operation. In Colombia one sees American soldiers in full kit with grenades and rifles, but they are not working for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, they are working for Secretary of State Powell. Meanwhile, one sees American civilians with no weapons at all working for the Secretary of Defense. The American ambassador in Colombia is more a general, and the commander of Southern Command more a diplomat. We are entering an era where the civil, military, diplomatic, and military services are becoming inextricable.

For people on the ground, Mr. Kaplan continued, "interagency" can mean bureaucratic boondoggles and various agencies with different agendas stepping on each other's toes. The goal is to develop it into a fluid civilian-military command structure.

In Colombia, the drug war has been folded into the war on terror ("narcotraffickers" are now "narcoterrorists"). Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt, and also the third most populous country in Latin America, after Brazil and Mexico. Several guerrilla bands, left and rightwing narcoterrorists, control about a third of the country, a vast amount of real estate. They make about $600-700 million a year in cocaine-related protection profits. So they have vast resources and money to buy all kinds of military hardware. They have the territory to set up bases in what amounts to a sovereign sanctuary.

Some of the most violent parts of Colombia are on the Venezuelan border, where President Hugo Chavez has given these criminal groups rear bases while inviting Arab criminal and terrorist gangs into Maracaibo and the islands off the Venezuelan coast. There have already been documented linkages between the various guerrilla groups in Colombia and the FARC, ELN, and IRA, and signs of a possible relationship of convenience between Al Qaeda and Colombian terrorists.

Like a number of such places in the world (including Yemen, which will be discussed below), Colombia is less a nation than a group of city-states in the highlands that cannot control the criminal lowlands, where historically the hand of central government has not extended, leading to anarchy or chaos. We are moving in because imperialism has proven in the past the most benign antidote to chaos.

The Colombian terrorists are much more highly developed than many others in Latin America. They are so inventive in Colombia that they set up roadblocks where one must show ID so they can check your name against a computer database, which can take days, to see if you are worth kidnapping.

Mr. Kaplan observed that the received wisdom about the United States' involvement in Latin America throughout the Cold War- the coup in Chile, and Guatemala in 1954- is that it is something of which we should be ashamed. But the larger truth is that our Cold War method of operation in Latin America is the only viable approach for the United States to follow in the coming decades in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Throughout the Cold War decades, the U.S. Southern Command had very little money. All the military funds were budgeted for the European Command, because of the Soviet Union and Germany, and the Pacific Command, because of China and North Korea. Yet SOUTHCOM had to defend South America, parts of Central America, and the Caribbean against Soviet and Cuban infiltration. It came up with an imperial strategy as old as the Romans and Greeks, called economy of force. They inventively used special operations units and intelligence agencies such the CIA to quietly, off-camera, mold the political reality in countries in a way that didn't risk bogging the U.S. down.

The U.S. had 550,000 troops in Vietnam but didn't accomplish much there. By contrast, at no point between 1979 and 1992 did we have more than 55 special forces trainers on the ground in El Salvador, but with just those 55 and a few hundred support personnel, the U.S. was able to help the rightwing groups suppress the leftwing groups and then the regular army to absorb the rightwing groups and turn them into a professional army that respected human rights. El Salvador today may not be a success story, but in an imperfect world it is about as normalized as one could reasonably hope. Because you cannot fix a whole society or its whole military, you have your elite units train the trainers of their elite units. You work to convert a few elite units in the host country's military and train them to go after a few pivotal targets, thus achieving maximum effect with minimum manpower.

From a moral perspective, in the ten years after the Chilean coup, for example, infant mortality was lowered from 79 per 1,000 births to 11 per 1,000 births, the poverty rate from 35 percent to 11 percent. Chile is now the model Latin American democracy, while Venezuela and Colombia have very little to show for their four decades of democracy in terms of quality of life.

Mr. Kaplan noted that Colombia's terrorists have no central structure, another feature that makes it a testing ground for the future. The guerrilla groups have a diffuse hierarchy, with no overall commanders. Rather, they have been separated out into franchises. You can cut off one element, but there is always another, just as with Al Qaeda after its central command structure was severely hit by the United States. So you have a country with a vast interagency challenge, where everything is diffuse.

The leftist Colombian guerrilla groups, Mr. Kaplan said, are Karl Marx on top and Adam Smith all the way down. Ideology is gone in Colombia, yet there is a higher rate of violence and torture than almost anywhere else. Everything is about money. This blending of criminalization and war is another of the challenges we will be facing in the Philippines and numerous other places.

Yemen

Mr. Kaplan noted that Yemen is a lot like Colombia. The principal challenge for its capital, Sanaa, at 7,500 feet, is extending the central government's power out to the lowlands: in this case, desert, whereas in Colombia they are jungles. The Yemeni government controls half its country; the Colombia government, about 60 percent of its country.

The Americans on the ground in Yemen, as in Colombia, are concerned with maintaining the status quo. The American empire, like every other empire in history, is a status quo power, meaning that it seeks to preserve the central authority in each place as it is and spread its power.

Much as we don't want to change the Colombian government but just want it to be able to control all (or at least more) of Colombia, we don't want to change the Yemeni government, just to help it control more of Yemen. Because if the status quo changes, if too many countries have new (even if they are more liberal) forms of government, the world will be a different place. America's power is supreme precisely because the world is the way it is now. If the world becomes a different place, America's power may dissipate, even as American values take over in many places. So the challenge in Yemen is how to get the government to rule over those of the country's regions where the government doesn't have control, mainly in the north, along the Saudi border.

It is a stretch, Mr. Kaplan said, to think the Yemeni government can actually control all these places. But with a minimum number of Americans on the ground, with a reasonable budget expense that gets the most for the least, one can train a few special units in the Yemeni government that can project power at will, wherever and whenever they want, in a far more efficient manner, into these tribal badlands to bring them under control. Indirectly but effectively

Mr. Kaplan noted that Yemen probably has a higher degree of anti-Americanism than most other places in the Middle East. The antiwar demonstrations in Sanaa earlier this year were 30,000 strong and quite violent. The U.S. embassy's architecture tells the story: the sandbags and concertina wire are higher than elsewhere, and the armed guards more numerous. It is, however, a democracy after a fashion.

Yemen's president, Ali Abdallah Salih, who has been in power since 1979 (as the last president of North Yemen; he became president of Yemen upon its reunification in 1990), runs the country, and has institutionalized his rule through the security and other services. But there is a parliament, which holds elections. The Islah, a somewhat fundamentalist party, is the largest political party. President Salih controls this parliament, less by intimidation than by tribal relationships. Both he and the leader of the Islah party come from the Hashid family, so it is really tribal relationships that keep a lid on things. Left to itself, this parliament would be very radical. The problem here is that the government has too little control, not too much, Mr. Kaplan said. Precisely because of that, it is the most violent, dangerous place for American citizens. That is directly related to its level of democratization.

Given these ironies and challenges, Mr. Kaplan said, the Iraq operation is not a model for the future. It involved mobilizing too many troops and assuming too much risk. The fewer times we do this kind of thing, the better. Because the U.S. can dominate easily provided it operates quietly. The moment a crisis comes to center stage in the world in this time of mass global media, it stops being judged on its merits and starts being seen as a defining symbol. Everyone can define themselves as members of some group through that crisis: anti-American, European, Muslim, antiwar intellectual, whatever one wants. Once the crisis becomes symbolic, rational argument has no chance. So the U.S. is better off with many small crises than one big crisis.

How, he asked, in a lot of these places do we operate more nimbly and do things more quietly? Again, he said, look at Latin America in the fifties, and the CIA's involvement in the 1967 assassination of Che Guevera in Bolivia (which did not set off any big demonstrations in the U.S., preoccupied it was with the Vietnam War).

Applying this to Yemen, which is a setting for the emergence of Al Qaeda cells, where one hour outside of Sanaa you are in a poor country of crowded pickup trucks filled with young men with AK-47s, whose loyalty is to a tribal sheik. You are close to the Saudi Arabian border. Saudi Arabia is some four times larger than Yemen, but Yemen's population is almost as large as Saudi Arabia's. Both countries' populations are concentrated in the southwest quadrant of the Arabian Peninsula, on the Yemen/Saudi border.

Far from being most concerned about Iraq or Yasser Arafat, Saudis are most concerned with Yemen and the instability it produces. Yemen in this regard is like Colombia: a hard-working, entrepreneurial society with the highest population growth rate in the region. Half of all Yemenis are 15 years old or younger. It is one of the most highly armed populations in the world, according to World Bank statistics, with about four AK-47s or grenades for every Yemeni: 80 million arms for a population of 19 million. It is lawless, poor, overpopulated, and very dangerous. Also, it is vast. You have the desert badlands in the north, but also a sophisticated, cosmopolitan culture in the northeast, the Hadhramaut, with Indian, Indonesian, and Thai influences, cut off from everyplace else. Its age-old spice trading links to southeast Asia, make perfect links not only for legitimate business and financial networks but also for terrorist networks. And you have this whole other area which requires infiltration and policing. Then in the coastal cities of the south, Mocha, Aden, and others, you have a proletariat fundamentalist phenomenon. In Al Mukalla, on the coast, one part of the boardwalk is for men and the other for women and children. There are Ethiopian street urchins and Somali refugees. Everyone dresses in black. There is garbage everywhere. It is crowded as anything, and the Yemeni security forces have little success finding anyone there. This other part of Yemen shows the urban side of fundamentalism. (One might also note, however, that Islam seems to better reduce common crime among the urban poor in Yemen than Catholicism does in Colombia.)

Then you have southern Yemen as a whole, which from 1967-90 was the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, or South Yemen. Because it was Marxist, it is now more pro-American, or at least less anti-American. Many Yemenis who went through the Soviet experience are much more grateful to the West than in more traditional northern Yemen. Yet because they were forcefully denied religion for those decades, they are more susceptible to fundamentalism now. So it is pro-Westernism in the south, as a short-term phenomenon, but fundamentalism is a more a long-term phenomenon.

American officers on the ground in Yemen have to deal with and recognize some unsavory people with terrorist backgrounds in order to prevent worse people from coming into power. They know that the president of Yemen needs these people to give him legitimacy in order to do business with us in other ways. This is a reality that is difficult to understand unless you are there.

Eritrea

Mr. Kaplan finished by briefly noting the case of Eritrea, a country of only 3.5 million people on the Horn of Africa, across the Red Sea from Yemen. It is the most civil society in Africa without democracy. But only a small elite are subject to coercion: it does not feel like a coercive dictatorship as far as the common person is concerned. Eritrea has no personality cult and no ethnic tensions among its nine ethnic groups, even though half the population is Orthodox Christian and half is Muslim; several languages are spoken. The government resists holding elections, feeling that elections would only cause ethnic splits.

Eritrea may be the only third-world country that has a high level of American-style secular patriotism, because of its thirty-year war with Ethiopia. It uses its financial aid efficiently, and the bureaucracy works well, with no corruption. At the same time, Eritrea has serious human rights problems. Several U.S. embassy employees, Eritrean nationals, are being held in prisons (even as Eritrea offers the U.S. air and sea bases whenever it needs them).

Eritrea is an exception that proves the rule of how vast and variegated the world is, and how difficult it is to apply many of our general principles in specific places. So while we need general principles to give coherence to our values and operations, we also need to be flexible in implementation. There are many Eritreas in the world, and countries that show the opposite example, too. Each place requires its own strategy.

Mr. Kaplan concluded by noting that the U.S. does best when it applies the general, historic principles of a liberal free society, but we must not be too narrow and legalistic in interpreting those principles. We should not force elections, for example- that is where we tend to get into trouble. We are a global power with global responsibilities. Flexibility is key, but we can use the Cold War-era Latin American paradigm today, infused with a stronger human rights component for our times.

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