Comments on: ‘The clover isn’t good enough’: How much victory do we want?

By: The Faceless Bureaucrat

The Faceless Bureaucrat — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:48:16 +0000

I’ll buy it!

By: Thomas Rid

Thomas Rid — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:56:20 +0000

Thank you for the reference. Your thought about the different ethos is interesting. Yet I was more after theoretical and conceptual similarities than differences in “role evolution,” as the article has it. Can a state’s attempt to reaffirm (or establish) a monopoly of force end in victory? Here and now is not the space to go into detail — I’ll respond with a book.

By: The Faceless Bureaucrat

The Faceless Bureaucrat — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:03:23 +0000

I must disagree, Tom. I grant you that police officers are asked and do die in the name of management. But where I do disagree is on the conceptual equivalency between police and soldiers. The two domains each operate under a different ethos. Problems arise when we mix them: wars on crime are famously wrong-headed, and rarely do ‘police actions’ succeed when conducted by the military. To me, this is what makes COIN (and peacekeeping) so difficult to do correctly: it is neither fish nor fowl. The recent issue of Armed Forces and Society has an article on the militarisation of policing and vice versa (http://afs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/2/327).

By: Thomas Rid

Thomas Rid — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:46:28 +0000

A fascinating discussion. But I’m not sure if your point on “management”, Faceless B, is correct. Let me try an example from a different field also concerned with security: Police officers take more risk than normal citizens, they might even be killed on the job (although killing enemies is certainly not part of their job description). Yet what they do is in a way “management,” risk-control, keeping violence and crime in check without believing for a second that they can eradicate it for good — i.e. declare victory, sufficient or not.

By: The Faceless Bureaucrat

The Faceless Bureaucrat — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 10:43:25 +0000

Nick,

Are the concepts ‘sufficient victory’ and ‘acceptable risk’ equivalent? An interesting point. Certainly, Tony Blair seems to have listened well to his adviser Lord Giddens, and through him to Beck: the former’s testimony last week was couched in terms of risk. But isn’t there something qualitatively different in the very notion of victory? We don’t declare victory over risk, we manage it, live with it. What compels us to use the word victory, no matter how modified, watered down, qualified? Risk is a function of probabilities; victory is not.

I assert that it has something to do with cost. And Stirrup yesterday in his testimony hit upon it when it he claimed that soldiers died in vain in Basra at the end of the British operations there. This hits hard; it is part of the ‘Ouch’ Tim mentions in his post. You can die for victory: there is some heroic sense of justification attached to the idea. But you can’t die–and you can’t ask someone to die–in the name of management.

This isn’t mere semantics: there is something essential about both the concept of victory and the need to declare it.

By: Nick Ritchie

Nick Ritchie — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:04:31 +0000

The notion of ‘sufficient victory’ connects with Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society thesis that claims we have become preoccupied with mitigating risks of future threats, as opposed to their current manifestation – risks produced by the complexity and connectivity of a globalised security environment. A risk-based security paradigm focussed on actions in the present to mitigate potential future threats almost by definition cannot achieve ‘absolute victory’. A degree of risk and uncertainty will always remain. Reducing a particular subjective risk to a tolerable level (however defined) given contextual constraints (time, money, geography, military resources etc.) will necessarily be framed as ‘sufficient victory’.

Of course, the determination to achieve ‘absolute victory’ over Saddam’s WMD programmes through 100% verifiable, irreversible disarmament and elimination of WMD weapons, components and precursor materials (95% could not be accepted as ‘sufficient victory’) is part of the story for the Iraq debacle.

By: Formerly Grant

Formerly Grant — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:52:10 +0000

I would define as much as can be hoped at this point in Afghanistan as:

1. A fairly central government
2. One capable of extending its control throughout most of Afghanistan
3. One that is friendly with the United States even if not a firm ally
4. A nation that can have an end to warfare and a serious effort on reconstruction.

In Iraq I am a bit more hopeful, and my idea of a realistic victory reflect this:

1. A central government that includes the various groups and powers of the nation.
2. A military that considers itself the guardian of Iraq and not the government of it.
3. An effort from parties to reach out beyond their tribal/religious bases.
4. A foreign policy that is friendly with the United States and Iran (because I consider the only reasonable alternative much worse).

If we can get even most of this I would be content to say that we have accomplished about as much as we could be expected to do. Perhaps in 2001 or 2003 we could have done more in that narrow space of time, but we didn’t.