The Fletcher School

Just as the world approached the one-year anniversary of President George W. Bush’s proclamation that the fighting in Iraq had come to an end, bestselling author and provocateur Robert D. Kaplan asserted to the Fletcher community at a recent lecture that there was in fact no end in sight.

Addressing a near-capacity audience, Kaplan expressed his view of “Global Security in the Year 2010,” a strong defense of military action and a dissection of the current “worldwide insurgency.” He drew primarily from his recent experiences with U.S. military troops in the Middle East, including spending all of last fall in southeastern Afghanistan and a recent six weeks in Fallujah.

Professor Richard Shultz introduced Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, as a "serious researcher, one who does his homework, is provocative, and an engaging speaker." Providing suggestions for a counter-insurgency, Kaplan raised some eyebrows in describing the current threat from Al Qaeda as similar to that of “an innovative global corporation.”

Describing the “dispersed and empty battlefield,” the situation in Afghanistan, contended Kaplan, is a truly unconventional conflict. Only when the U.S. military begins to operate more and more like Al Qaeda—dispersing power and responsibility away from the central command—can it expect any chance of success. Kaplan pointed to 10,000 American troops holed up in Kabul, wading through layers of bureaucracy before getting permission to launch attacks. Instead, the forces should employ a decentralized model in which smaller military units make decisions in the field. Rural villages, for example, as places with latent and no doubt budding tribal and insurgent activity, are precisely where the military should be.

Yet Kaplan’s esteem for the military was also unmistakable: Highlighting an initiative in the Philippines during the summer of 2002, Kaplan described how U.S. special operatives forces set up bases in the “worst areas,” those the most susceptible to Al Qaeda and other terrorist influences. In order to drive up “actionable intelligence,” the forces built schools, dug wells, paved streets, vaccinated children and conducted other relationship-building activities. In their efforts to ingratiate themselves into society through humanitarian activity, the U.S. military had in essence turned the media in their favor, gained local support and shamed the national government into corroborating with them in the future. That, Kaplan said, is what the U.S. should do now in Iraq.

Fletcher Professor John Hammock, intrigued by the ramifications such activities would have on the NGO sector, led a number of questions on the tenuous relationship between the military and humanitarian NGOs. The military, responded Kaplan, would love to have more NGOs, but would first have to create a safe and secure environment for the nonprofit sector. The military is essentially “involved in [activities] that were relief-NGO work. Civilian NGOs won’t go where security is too bad.” He continued that the military had thus been forced to “fill gaps where NGOs won’t go.”

One student asked Kaplan for policy prescriptions for the counterinsurgency, to which he quoted New York Times writer Peter Maass: “Before you can start winning hearts and minds, you have to be seen as the superior tribe, the one who monopolizes use of force.” You can’t have freedom or democracy, he continued, “without authority first.”

Robert D. Kaplan’s talk was the last in the 2003-4 academic year’s Charles Francis Adams lecture series.