Kaplan's Latest

[The Reaper]

Philadelphia Inquirer

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opini...doing____.html

Posted on Sun, Sep. 9, 2007

'. . . there isn't enough media coverage about what our troops are actually doing ...'Robert D. Kaplan is senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He also is the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. His most recent book is "Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground." Kaplan, who is speaking at the FPRI on Tuesday (http://www.fpri.org/events), spoke to The Inquirer about Iraq, our mission there, and what people don't know about each.
The Inquirer: To scan the media, one might think people were starting to believe less and less in the "war on terror." When you hear that, what goes through your mind?

Robert D. Kaplan: What goes through my mind is how little our public knows about what the American military does abroad. In Iraq, in general, there isn't enough media coverage about what our troops are actually doing in tactical operations centers, in increasing bonding operations with the Iraqi people and security forces. There's altogether too much media emphasis on the tales told by those either fighting or back home and no longer fighting. The public is not conditioned to appreciate the full complexity of our actual operations in Iraq - instead, they are conditioned to feel sorry for the soldiers who are there.

As for the war on terror, it really is a global war, in the sense that we have global deployments in many countries in any given week. In Africa, we stretch from Senegal to Djibouti, and yet there is no coverage of it. None of these operations is secret. Same with our missions in places like Colombia or the Philippines - all of them fall under the rubric of the war on terror. The American public is thus being misinformed and operates in a bubble of ignorance. Off the coast of Somalia, for instance, we've been successful in helping people in Mogadishu, but you see little coverage of it. In Afghanistan, we've gone a long way toward rebuilding the cell phone system there - not covered. What we get is the car bombing or the suicide bombing on Yahoo - otherwise, nothing about Afghanistan.

It's not a right-left bias, just an "incident bias." If there's an incident, it's covered; if not, not. Processes are hard to cover, and a lot of what we're doing abroad involves processes.

Inquirer: Are we finding terrorists? Are we fighting terror directly?

Kaplan: No - but then, the aim should be to fight them indirectly, to ramp up native troops to fight them directly. That's a model that goes back centuries: to bring the host country in militarily to fight on its own, so you can operate as an adviser. We've been pretty good at that around the world - with the exceptions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Give them training, give them credit for good accomplishments, supply humanitarian relief, bring up the reputation of American troops, but try never to do the actual fighting. In those regards, we've had a lot of success. Remember: There may be a debate about democracy itself, but the fact remains that we've been living in an age of democratization since the 1980s. That means an age of military professionalization: If you don't professionalize the militaries of all these new democracies, it'll bring the democracy down. We helped professionalize the militaries of Poland and Romania. We've got a lot of crisis-prevention programs around the world. And these by nature never make news. See, that's almost the object: not to make news.

I just took a TV crew to four countries where we're involved and the American public doesn't know about it. The hardest thing to film is what's not there. If you're developing ties with the Filipino military, and you can walk into small towns and Muslim inhabitants greet you as friend, not as enemy, how do you film this? You've created a positive context for human relations. But there are no big signs, no exploded car, no visual there. How do you film that?

Inquirer: You have written that we need to become more sensitive to the cultural terrain in other countries, and get better at operating within that terrain.

Kaplan: Our bureaucracies are getting better at it. They're teaching foreign and exotic languages in military training now. At Annapolis, for example, two years of exotic-language training is required for every midshipman. The Pentagon also is getting better at this, but it's still way behind. The exception is SOUTHCOM [the United States Southern Command, which operates in Central and South America], which has most operators on the ground militarily speaking Spanish, but we don't have nearly that level of expertise around the world. As for what the military calls "culturally sensitive," few academics would be very impressed. We're still pretty weak there. Outside of the technical services, such sensitivity is very, very important. Obviously, people on destroyers and subs don't, as a rule, need this stuff. There's a whole side of the military that's so technical this isn't needed. But in the cases of the Army and the Marines, it's very important. So often I've met a soldier trained as an artillery officer - but then he's sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. He has no use for his technical expertise and now needs cultural and language expertise he was never trained to have. In the Army and Marines, you just can't assume people won't need this knowledge. You get career tracks that run at a right angle to what you've been trained for. That's why you need broad-based cultural language training, at least for our land forces.

Inquirer: The relative lack of depth in Arabic in this country is a long-standing puzzle.

Kaplan: Yes. It's surprising that it took 9/11 to spur Arabic studies here - a direct attack.

Inquirer: What languages should we train in now, for the future? What about Urdu? Indonesian? Farsi? What will be the hot language that our forces might need in the next decade?

Kaplan: I would say French because it grants you access to a good third of sub-Saharan Africa, where we're going to be active in peaceful competition with the Chinese. Chinese itself, too. The chances of any kind of land war with China are remote - but Chinese could be very useful for the Navy, and the Navy is promoting it, because our interactions with China, either peaceful or not, are likely mainly to be naval.

Inquirer: Are you looking forward to the report on the "surge"?

Kaplan: What I think will happen is that [Gen. David] Petraeus will be careful not to make political statements. He'll come up with a laundry list of things going better and not better. He'll lay out terrain, talk benefits and dangers of various courses of action, and let the politicians fit the pegs in the holes. He won't be foolish enough to say, "I believe we need to stay or need to go," although he might speak of a certain number of withdrawals in the spring. He won't respond to praise and blame; he'll keep to the technical side.

Inquirer: Does it surprise you that it took so long to find someone like Petraeus, who seems to be making progress several others could not?

Kaplan: What's heartrending is we had to wait this long to get such a sophisticated general. He was already well-known early in the Iraq conflict. If you look at how [Gen. John J.] Pershing was promoted over many other senior officers in World War I, and how Eisenhower was promoted in World War II - how Lincoln reached down, past many senior officers, and hired U.S. Grant - there's a legacy in war of looking for the best and promoting them. That didn't happen in this war.