Imperial Grunts - Robert D. Kaplan.doc

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1、 IMPERIAL GRUNTS THE AMERICAN MILITARY ON THE GROUND ROBERT D. KAPLAN RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK CONTENTS Title Page Dedication Epigraph Map PROLOGUE INJUN COUNTRY CHAPTER ONE CENTCOM YEMEN, WINTER 2002 WITH NOTES ON COLOMBIA “Yemen was vast. And it was only one small country. . . . How to manage such an

2、 imperium?” CHAPTER TWO SOUTHCOM COLOMBIA, WINTER 2003 WITH NOTES ON EL SALVADOR “The future of military conflict was better gauged in Colombia than in Iraq. . . . In Colombia I was introduced to the tactics that the U.S. would employ to manage an unruly world.” CHAPTER THREE PACOM MONGOLIA, SPRING

3、2003 WITH NOTES ON MACEDONIA, BOSNIA, AND TAJIKISTAN “Mongolia was a trip wire for judging future Chinese intentions. . . . Col. Wilhelm was determined to make the descendants of Genghis Khan the peacekeeping Gurkhas of the American Empire.” CHAPTER FOUR PACOM THE PHILIPPINES, SUMMER 2003 WITH NOTES

4、 ON THE PHILIPPINES, 18981913 “Terrorists used these poor, shantyish, unpoliceable islands as hideouts. . . . Combating Islamic terrorism here carried a secondary benefit: it positioned the U.S. for the containment of China.” CHAPTER FIVE CENTCOM AND SOCOM AFGHANISTAN, AUTUMN 2003 WITH NOTES ON PAKI

5、STANS NORTHWEST FRONTIER “Because al-Qaeda was a worldwide insurgency, America had to fight a classic worldwide counterinsurgency . . . here, amid the field mice and the mud-walled flatness of the Helmand desert, there was only constant trial-and-error experimentation in light of the mission at hand

6、.” CHAPTER SIX FROM THE ARMY TO THE MARINES FORT BRAGG AND CAMP LEJEUNE, NORTH CAROLINA WINTER 20032004 “I had entered a world stripped to its bare essentials, the inhabitants of which had taken a veritable monastic vow of poverty.” CHAPTER SEVEN CENTCOM HORN OF AFRICA, WINTER 2004 WITH NOTES ON EAS

7、T AFRICA “ Who needs meetings in Washington. . . . Guys in the field will figure out what to do. I took ten guys through eastern Ethiopia. Everywhere people wanted an American presence. A new paradigm was emerging for the military, one that borrowed more from the French and Indian War and the Lewis

8、and Clark expedition than from the major conflicts of the twentieth century.” CHAPTER EIGHT CENTCOM IRAQ, SPRING 2004 WITH NOTES ON NICARAGUA AND VIETNAM “I looked around in broad daylight to see the roofscape of Al-Fallujah covered with thousands upon thousands of old mufflers and tailpipes, guarde

9、d by U.S. Marines, standing atop the city with fixed bayonets. . . . Yet the American Empire depended upon a tissue of intangibles that was threatened, rather than invigorated, by the naked exercise of power.” EPILOGUE THE INTERIOR CONTINENT Authors Note and Acknowledgments Endnotes Notes Glossary O

10、ther Books by Robert D. Kaplan About the Author Copyright Page To the memory of Marine 1st Lt. Joshua Palmer of Banning, California, born November 28, 1978, killed in action April 8, 2004 And to all the other U.S. Marines killed or wounded during the fighting in Fallujah, Iraq, in April 2004 Major V

11、ictor Joppolo, U.S.A., was a good man. . . . We have need of him. He is our future in the world. Neither the eloquence of Churchill nor the humaneness of Roosevelt, no Charter, no four freedoms or fourteen points, no dreamers diagram so symmetrical and so faultless on paper, no plan, no hope, no tre

12、atynone of these things can guarantee anything. Only men can guarantee, only the behavior of men under pressure, only our Joppolos. John Hersey, A Bell for Adano, 1944 Imperialism moved forward, not as a result of commercial or political pressure from London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, or even W

13、ashington, but mainly because men on the periphery, many of whom were soldiers, pressed to enlarge the boundaries of empire, often without orders, even against orders. Douglas Porch, professor at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, 1996 In a campaign against Indians, the front is all aroun

14、d, and the rear is nowhere. Erasmus D. Keyes, Fifty Years Observation of Men and Events, 1884 PROLOGUE INJUN COUNTRY He was a lieutenant colonel in the First Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF as it is written, and One MEF as it is spoken) stationed at Camp Pendleton, California. I met him before he

15、left for the Persian Gulf in the autumn of 2002. He had just been injected with anthrax vaccine, and had been taking malaria pills for many months of his life, during missions to Africa to train local armies. He told me that in the markets of the CongoBrazzaville condoms were used as sacks for “penc

16、ils, fruits, everything except what theyre supposed to be used for”; that tribal patronage, not merit, often decided promotion in the Kenyan army; that North Korean diplomats in Africa received little financial support from their government, and in order to be self-sufficient dealt in drugs and pros

17、titution. His skin was the color of clay under his high-and-tight crew cut, with taut cheeks and a get-it-done expression: an ancient sculpture in digital camouflage, except for the point of light in his eyes. The Romans, by their rites of purification, accepted and justified the world as it was, wi

18、th all its cruelty. The Americans, heir to the Christian tradition, seek what is not yet manifest: the higher ideal. Thus, he was without cynicism. Rather, his honesty made self-delusion impossible. “The century is only two years old,” he told me, “and look at whats happened. That al-Qaeda incident

19、on September 11 was somewhat significant. But we may have nuclear attacks and disease outbreaks that will take many more lives, and which will get us deeply involved on the ground in countries still obscure to us, the way September 11 got us involved in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is those involvem

20、ents-to-come that will shape the course of the new century.” Indeed, by the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moments notice. The Pentagon divided the planet into

21、 five area commandssimilar to the way that the Indian Country of the American West had been divided in the mid-nineteenth century by the U.S. Army. Instead of the military departments of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, California, Oregon, and the West, now there was Northern Command, or NORTHCOM; Southern

22、Command, or SOUTHCOM; European Command, or EUCOM; Central Command, or CENTCOM; and Pacific Command, or PACOM.1*1 For example, at the corner of 5 degrees latitude and 68 degrees longitude, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, CENTCOM gave way to PACOM, just as EUCOM gave way to CENTCOM at the Turkish-I

23、ranian border. This map bore uncanny resemblance to one drawn in 1931 for the German military by Professor Karl Haushofer, a leading father of Geopolitik. The United States, having vanquished Germanys budding world empire in World War II, now had operational requirements for maintaining its own. But

24、 according to the soldiers and marines I met on the ground in the far-flung corners of the earth, the comparison with the nineteenth century was more apt. “Welcome to Injun Country” was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq. To be sure, the

25、problem for the American military was less fundamentalism than anarchy. The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier. But the fascination with Indian Country was never meant as a slight against Native North Americans. Rather, the reverse. The fact that radio call signs often employed In

26、dian names was but one indication of the troops reverence for them. This map left no point of the earths surface unaccounted for. Were I standing at the North Pole, where all the lines of longitude meet, I might have had one foot in NORTHCOM and the other in PACOM; or in EUCOM if I shifted a leg. Af

27、ter I first saw this map in the Pentagon, I stared at it for days on and off, transfixed. How could the U.S. not constitute a global military empire? I thought. The only way to explore such a mapto know it intimatelywas on foot, or in a Humvee, with the troops themselves, for even as elites in New Y

28、ork and Washington debated imperialism in grand, historical terms, individual marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailorsall the cultural repositories of Americas unique experience with freedomwere interpreting policy on their own, on the ground, in dozens upon dozens of countries every week, oblivious t

29、o such faraway discussions. This was true of both officers and enlisted men, for while generals were involved at the tactical level as never before, the actions of the lowliest corporals and privates could be of great strategic impact under the spotlight of the global media.2 It was their stories I

30、wanted to tell: from the ground up, at the point of contact. Truly, the increasingly decentralized nature of commandnecessary in a complex world where, for instance, each region of Afghanistan required a different approach to the local militiawas giving enlisted men unprecedented decision-making pow

31、ers. Such responsibility required a firm, moral belief system, of which secular patriotism could form but a part. Thus I was interested in religion, and once on base went to as many religious services as I could. I was less concerned with war and conquest than with imperial maintenance on the ground

32、, and seeking a rule book for its application. The project would take years. I had the earth to roam. It could not be the work of one book but of several. Here is the first. But before I recount my odyssey through the barracks and outposts of the American Empire, I must address the issue of imperial

33、ism itself, a word with which most are uncomfortable, and about which there has been much recent debate. Imperialism is but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world, and in the process to become subject to all the worlds anxi

34、eties.3 That is why empires arise at the fringes of consciousness, half in denial. By the time an imperial reality becomes truly manifest, it is a sign that the apex of empire is at hand, with a gradual retreat more likely than fresh conquests. It is the revealed fact of empire itself that spurs tho

35、se outside it to join forces in opposition. Rome never consciously thought that it was building an empire until it already had one, and had already reached the limits of its expansion in the Near East, under Trajan in the early second century.4 British imperialism in India reached its highest level

36、of self-consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century, just as the British Empire was becoming impractical.5 Empires are works in progress, with necessity rather than glory the instigator of each outward push. The Venetian conquest of Dalmatia in 1000 began as an expedition against pirates, jus

37、t as Venices later conquest of the Morea, the Cyclades, and the Dodecanese in Greece was a defensive measure against a Turkish advance from the west. The British acquired Bermuda in 1684 to guard a stretch of the Atlantic. They took Trincomalee in Ceylon in 1795 to help guard India, and the Yemeni p

38、ort of Aden in 1839 to have a coaling station for their ships en route to India through the Suez Canal. The American Empire progressed likewise. “As both a dream and a fact the American Empire was born before the United States,” writes Bernard De Voto, the lyrical historian of westward expansion.6 F

39、ollowing their initial settlement, and before their incorporation as states in the Union, the western territories were nothing less than imperial possessions of Washington, D.C. The embryonic nation that hugged the eastern seaboard of North America had found it intolerable that the guns of European

40、powers should be at its rear: the French in the Mississippi Valley, the Spanish in the Southwest, the British in Canada and the Northwest. But it was not inevitable that the United States should have an empire in the western part of the continent. That destiny was brought by small groups of frontier

41、smen, separated from each other by great distances, making alliances with some Indian tribes and buying the neutrality of others. It was they who “provided just enough weight to turn and keep the balance American,” writes De Voto. The result, he goes on, was an imperialist drama in “delicate equipoi

42、ses, constantly oscillating.”7 He might have been describing the American military deployments of the early twenty-first century as I experienced them, for while the entire planet was a battle space for the American military, I would learn that the fewer troops that policed it the better. Small ligh

43、t and lethal units of soldiers and marines, skilled in guerrilla warfare and attuned to the local environment in the way of the nineteenth-century Apaches, could accomplish more than dinosauric, industrial age infantry divisions.8 Despite the building of the Panama Canalone of those rare, conscious

44、feats of empire building, accomplished by President Theodore Rooseveltit was also not inevitable that America should have become a preeminent global power. What would the United States have become without Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo? It was those dictators, and the men around them, who forced the U

45、.S. out of its self-imposed isolation in order to meet the security threat posed by Nazism and Japanese militarism. The unintended consequences of successfully meeting those challenges included the encampment of the Soviet Red Army in the heart of Europe and a civil war in China that brought a commu

46、nist regime to power: new threats which led to further American imperial expansion. Four decades later, the victory over communism, like the victories over the Nazis and Japanese, led to more unintended consequences. Breaking the will of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s meant the arming

47、of radical Islamic guerrillas, who subsequently turned against the great power that had helped sustain them: the United States. Henceforth, Islamic terrorism became the sharp edge of a seeping anarchy that followed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eurasia, and of the decomposition

48、 of states created by European empires on other continents. Since antiquity the collapse of empires has been a messy business, and the most benign antidote to the chaos unleashed has been the birth of new imperial domains. Consequently, the turn of the twenty-first century found the United States with bases and base rights in fifty-nine countries and overse