In the imperial weeds: in his travels with special forces on the frontier of America's empire, Robert Kaplan captures the gritty realities, but not the paradoxes

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2005 by Christian Caryl

Imperial Grunts: The American Military On the Ground By Robert D. Kaplan Random House, $27.95

There are a few things you might need to know about Yemen. If you're kidnapped, don't get too upset; you're probably just a bargaining chip in some tribal bid for a new water well or a road. Kalashnikovs are everywhere, and so are the long curving daggers known as jambiyas, every local man's obligatory fashion accessory. If you want to bring along presents for local notables, big knives will do fine. Cell phones are popular, as is the Arabic-language satellite TV channel Al-Jazeera, even if, as Robert Kaplan advises us, Yemenis tend to view it as "provocatively Westernized." When socializing, you may find yourself having to chew large amounts of the mildly narcotic weed known as ghat, which has, Kaplan notes, "an exquisitely subtle effect at once energizing and relaxing, like having five cups of espresso without feeling overwound."

Oh, yes, and don't forget that Yemen just happens to be a key strategic location in the post-9/11 GWOT (Global War on Terrorism). Osama bin Laden's family originally comes from the Hadhramaut, the desolate hinterland bordering Saudi Arabia. Not long before Kaplan's arrival in 2003, the CIA rubbed out an alleged Qaeda operative by blasting his car with a missile fired from a Predator drone. And it's not over yet. As Kaplan describes it, the country is a classic breeding ground of early 21st-century terrorism, a place where modernization and tribalism collide to devastating erect. As such, it poses exactly the same sort of challenge that faces the United States and its allies on myriad other fronts across the world.

This remarkable, intriguing, and frequently frustrating book is essentially a GWOT travelogue, a dizzying grand tour of some of the places--largely neglected by the mainsntream media--that figure in this struggle. But just in case we get blinded by the exoticism of his locales, Kaplan is ready with a useful antidote. Look back to history, he says, and we'll realize that the whole thing is just a matter of deja vu all over again. For the U.S. military, one particularly useful template is America's own Indian Wars of the 19th century. (Yemen, says one American there, is "Injun Country.") But Hadrian or the young Winston Churchill, Kaplan argues, would have found plenty that was familiar to them as well. For what we're observing today is the classic imperial paradox at work. The story of the 20th century was the struggle for supremacy among several great powers, expressed in a series of huge, set-piece conflicts. Today, by contrast, American hegemony is challenged by an amorphous international grouping of fanatical insurgents, more a "brand" than an organization, that doesn't even rely on the perks of state sponsorship. That makes them almost impossible to spot, and because they feed on the profound tensions inherent in the very process of globalization, they are exceptionally hard to uproot. As Kaplan perceptively notes, "[T]errorism is both a cause and a symptom of the political weakness of states like Yemen. So, in a sense, the U.S. was fighting the unwieldy process of modernization itself."

And what all of this has inevitably spurred--whatever our original intentions--is a largely improvised, haphazard process of American imperial expansion, as U.S. power rushes in to fill the ensuing vacuums. The primary agents of this process are not the policy-making elites in Washington, Kaplan writes, but American soldiers on the ground, often relatively low-ranking non-commissioned officers (the "grunts" of the title) making day-to-day, deeply pragmatic decisions in response to a bewildering array of local problems. From time immemorial, Kaplan insists, this is how empires have grown, and his mission is to provide a "snapshot" of this process at a pivotal moment. For Kaplan, empire-building is not about using big armies to conquer people; it is a mess of squishy, microcosmic doings along the fuzzy border between war and diplomacy, prosecuted most effectively when it's all happening outside of the media spotlight (his own excepted, of course). In situations like these, less is usually better--a principle known at the Pentagon as "Economy of Force." In Colombia, Kaplan watches approvingly as a tiny group of U.S. Special Forces advisers bolsters the shaky Colombian army against a powerful narco-insurgency, and recalls 1980s E1 Salvador, where, he writes, "fifty-five Special Forces trainers accomplished arguably more than 550,000 troops in Vietnam." In the southern Philippines, another small group of S.F. operatives help the army of the Manila government to isolate Muslim insurgents allied with al Qaeda. That can mean training Filipino soldiers how to fight in the jungle at night, but it can also mean digging wells or fixing local peoples' teeth. In Mongolia, he trails along as the American military attache conducts a marvelous one-man diplomatic campaign. By spreading goodwill along the host country's sensitive frontiers and wooing key players in the military hierarchy, Lt. Col. Thomas Wilhelm is banking that Mongolia will make the right choice on that distant day when the Pentagon suddenly finds itself needing a plausibly deniable listening post or a low-profile logistics base in the region.