Classic Imperialism

By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
September 23, 2005; Page A16

This past summer, I observed a U.S. Army Special Forces exercise in Africa that represented the quintessence of imperialism as it has been practiced throughout history and yet which no modern liberal could oppose. Almost 200 Green Berets fanned out across the Sahara to train with soldiers from nine North and West African countries. It was part of a broad effort to professionalize the troops of fledgling democracies, assist them in hunting down Islamic terrorists in unruly borderlands, and deal with future humanitarian catastrophes like Darfur.

I embedded for a month with a Special Forces A-team in southern Algeria, the first U.S. military opening in that erstwhile radical Arab state since the Allied invasion of North Africa in 1942. I watched as one captain, one warrant officer and nine sergeants worked and lived with an Algerian Special Forces company on an equal basis, eating each other's food, shooting each other's weapons, and trying out each other's field techniques. The Algerians won a counterinsurgency struggle in the 1990s against terrorists more vicious than those in Iraq, a war that Middle East area experts doubted could be won; they were obviously worth training with. And the A-team provided a deft hinge for the further improvement of U.S.-Algerian relations, a process spurred by the collapse of the non-aligned movement and the common experience of fighting Islamic insurgents.

To Algeria's south, in such countries as Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad, the Special Forces teams weren't training with host nation troops so much as mentoring them, owing to their rudimentary state. For a relatively small outlay in men and expenditures, the U.S. military has begun developing a badly needed, pan-African intervention force.

This is happening not just in Africa but throughout the world. U.S. Marines have engaged a two-year modernization of the Georgian armed forces to secure democratization following the Rose Revolution. In the southern Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf Islamic group has been marginalized by an Army Special Forces program that emphasized humanitarian relief in villages where the group had been most active, coupled with training of the Filipino army. In Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe's military and police units are being trained by Special Forces in the fight against narco-terrorism. In Nepal, from where I've just returned, a U. S. Air Force medical team was training emergency responders in the event of an earthquake.

Such small-scale, bare-bones missions are far more indicative of how the U.S. military actually operates across the world than is the fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. Without the experience of such missions, many of which are humanitarian, troops in New Orleans would not be able to perform as expertly as they have. National Guardsmen with whom I embedded in Afghanistan are now in the Big Easy.

All of this -- not military occupations, with their attendant proconsuls -- is what constitutes classic imperialism: by, through, and with the "indigs," as the Special Forces phrase goes. Local alliances and the training of indigenous troops, since time immemorial, are what has allowed imperial powers to project their might at minimum risk and expense. It was true of Rome even in adjacent North Africa, to say nothing of its Near Eastern borderlands; and it was particularly true of imperial France and Great Britain, two-thirds of whose expeditions were composed of troops recruited in the colonies. Iraq, especially when the Coalition Provisional Authority was in control instead of the Iraqis, is a perversion, not an accurate expression, of traditional imperialism.

Who could possibly be against such classic imperialism, provided, of course, that the term itself is not used? Not the Democrats, certainly. After all, it was Sen. John Kerry who called for a dramatic increase in Special Forces in the last election. Anyone truly opposed to most U.S. military missions abroad will have to find a fringe candidate to support next time around. For in the overwhelming majority of cases, U.S. troops are acting upon requests from struggling democratic governments to take in hand their armed forces, so that their soldiers will defend democracy, not subvert it. This was particularly true in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, where American troops conducted the bulk of the training missions rather than NATO per se.

Moreover, given that humanitarian disasters increasingly occur in anarchic zones, the militarization of relief aid is not a trend to disparage. It is a fact to admit. It goes beyond the National Guard in New Orleans or U.S. sailors and marines in tsunami-wracked Indonesia: The situation is similar in many African countries, where civilian relief agencies often operate only in the vicinity of the capital cities for their own safety, leaving the rest of the countryside for militaries to handle.

This is to say nothing of conventional military deployments; like, for instance, sailing carrier battle groups through the Strait of Malacca to keep the sea lanes open that allow globalization. The oft-heard plea against the imperialist role of the American military is less an expression of a serious, case-by-case analysis of its deployments world-wide, than it is an emotional response to the difficulties in Iraq.

It does not help public awareness that the media gives almost no coverage to the activities of the American military beyond a few obvious places. No other correspondents of major media outlets, for example, chose to embed anywhere in Africa during this summer's operation, even though European Command made most of the A-teams available to reporters. Given such editorial judgments, how can the policy elite -- whose members have little personal contact with the middle and lower ranks of the armed forces that staff these missions -- be sufficiently aware of what is actually going on?

Imperial overstretch may be a reality in Iraq. Not so everywhere else. The mundane, tactical reality of our overseas military is small numbers of force-multipliers scattered across the globe -- from a single defense attaché in many a Third World country to the sub-thousand soldier units in places like Colombia, which constitute the high manpower-end of the scale. The 11-man Green Beret mission that I witnessed in Algeria is most typical. Indeed, what I have learned over several years of embedding almost nonstop with the U.S. military around the globe is that the smaller and more low-key the deployment, the more the taxpayer gets out of it.

Nation-building, democratization, regime stabilization -- whatever one wants to call it -- must always involve a military training component. And business is booming. If Libya's transition away from radicalism is to be consolidated, at some point it will require an Army Special Forces or Marine mission. (European Command, with responsibility for most of Africa, is already talking about it.) With Indonesia now a democracy and the Chinese navy expanding its reach nearby, at some point there will be a dramatic upsurge in U.S. military training exercises there, too. The Marines are already planning to develop more area experts within their ranks to keep up with demand.

Classic imperialism is not merely an option, but a tried-and-true necessity for a better, more stable world. The danger is not that classic imperialism will undermine our financial solvency or our democratic values, but that it itself will be undermined by the drain in resources caused by the necessity of continued high troop levels in Iraq.

Mr. Kaplan, a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground" (Random House, 2005)