Plan Colombia and Beyond

• “We have to convince those who passively support the insurgency that we are not their enemy. Unfortunately, our current strategy overemphasizing military force drives undecided millions into the insurgents’ arms. Not only are we fighting the war wrong, we are fighting the wrong war.”
  
  
• “Overwhelming firepower is often counterproductive.”
  
  
• “Comprehensive reconstruction and information efforts win hearts and minds.”
  
  
• “Those who prioritize national missile defense over either special-operations capabilities or non-military tools of foreign policy understand neither the nature of our greatest threat nor how to defeat it.”
  
  
• “We must promote America's charity, while exposing the enemy's hypocrisy. Civil affairs, ''development" in non-military terms, is aggressive economic and political development as well as cultivation of civil society institutions and human rights. Only when populations in the developing world obtain genuine economic opportunity, social dignity, and political empowerment will they no longer incubate the global insurgency.”

That’s good stuff. But these seem like such basic pieces of advice: Economic development is important. Winning populations’ trust is important. Treating civilians well and respecting their human rights is important. Sweeps, raids, large-scale bombing and other military “shock and awe” tactics drive the local population into the insurgency’s arms. “Non-military tools of foreign policy,” like economic aid, are neglected at one’s peril. You mean we don’t know that?

These seem like such elementary suggestions that an op-ed making them would seem unnecessary. Yet the U.S. government has failed to follow them in Iraq, and the U.S.-aided Colombian government has failed to follow them in its own conflict. The extreme distrust for the U.S. and new Iraqi forces among residents of places like Anbar province is mirrored by the extreme distrust for the Colombian state in places like Caquetá department.

The most interesting thing about this op-ed is the language it uses. Though it advocates elements of the sort of less-military approach that is usually associated with peacenik liberals, it omits catch-phrases that would make a Republican or Pentagon audience shut down and stop listening. Terms like “nation-building,” “inequality,” “governability,” or “human security” do not appear (though “human rights” does sneak in). Instead, there’s lots of muscular talk of “severing insurgents’ connections to populations,” “isolat[ing] and smother[ing]” the “enemy,” “effective police operations,” and, of course, “counterinsurgency.”

I’m not recommending inserting tough-sounding language into everything we say and write. In particular, there is a huge gap between counterinsurgency as a doctrine and counterinsurgency as the United States and its proxies have disastrously practiced it. But some familiarity with this defense-and-security argot can ease communication with many who don’t automatically see things our way.

Like the U.S. strategy in Iraq, Plan Colombia is proving to be hugely ineffective and in need of drastic revision and de-militarization. As that becomes increasingly evident to all, people and groups on our side of the debate will have much more opportunity to propose changes. When we do, we will sometimes – not all the time, but sometimes – have to use language like that seen in Tuesday’s Globe.