US Response To Islamist Insurgencies: Seriously Deficient

The NY Times reported yesterday that the US Army buried a Rand Corporation report that offered a "wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies [which] was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key."
As Rand concluded, "the report finds that large-scale U.S. military intervention and occupation in the Muslim world is at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible. The United States should shift its priorities and funding to improve civil governance, build local security forces, and exploit information — capabilities that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan."
This is quite an indictment following several years of questionable "progress" by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report, titled "War by Other Means: Building Complete And Balanced Capabilities For Counterinsurgency," states what should be obvious: Military force is but one instrument of COIN [counterinsurgency] available for use in such contests, and it ought to be subordinate to a political strategy of offering the people a government deserving of their support. Improvements in local governance, legal systems, public services, and economic conditions may be at least as important as military operations, though the former often depend on the success of the latter.
That the report was buried tells us much about transparency, or lack of it, in the US government. One would think that the Rand report would be welcomed by no less than Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has spoken at length of the need to reinvigorate the so-called soft power piece of a multi-pronged effort to bring stability to insurgency-convulsed regions: One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win: economic development, institution-building and the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic communications, and more – these, along with security, are essential ingredients for long-term success.
From Rand: "four of the strongest statistical predictors of successful insurgency exist in today’s Muslim world: populations excluded from politics and estranged from the state; authoritarian, unresponsive, inept, and corrupt government; insurgents committed to destroying such government; significant popular sympathy for insurgents."
How is that substanitally different from what Secretary Gates has concluded?
The letter from the Chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, Rep. Ike Skeltion (D-MS), to Army Secretary Pete Geren stresses an important point, that the US Army, and military generally, ought to be above internal, domestic politics in an effort to accomplish the tasks set before it: "The United States Army has a long and honorable tradition of carrying out the nation's business in a professional, nonpolitical, and extremely competent manner. This makes it all the more important that when the Army finds itself involved in a situation that has not gone according to expectations, it undertake a critical assessment of what went wrong, even if that assessment reflects poorly on the Army, the Department of Defense, the Executive Branch, or Congress. We cannot improve future results without studying past failures any more than we can wish that the war in Iraq had proceeded as outlined in some of the rosier scenarios laid out before the war started."
This past Sunday at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, Defense Secretary Gates said, "we have learned that war in the 21st century does not have stark divisions between civilian and military components. It is a continuous scale that slides from combat operations to economic development, governance and reconstruction – frequently all at the same time."
This ought to be obvious to all parties. That the Rand report was buried because it stated the obvious is disgraceful and clearly contrary to any reasonable notion of transparency, and destructive to the effort to create an effective counterinsurgency strategy.
Isn't responsive government, a lack of corruption, competency and transparency the proper prescription for succeeding at our "war on terror"? A buried report, buried because it illuminates a failing strategy, is precisely contrary to what ought to be US policy at home, and no less abroad.