As Ken has noted below, he and I are in Afghanistan at the moment courtesy of the Prism Cell of HQ Regional Command-South (essentially a think tank for the commander of RC-S). We’ve been here for a couple of weeks travelling around a bit and generally trying to make sense of the strategic communications aspect of this campaign, a main interest for both of us. I’ll hold fire on my conclusions on stratcomms: I’m just finishing up the paper which I will publish and brag about and share here when it’s done soon. In the meantime, I thought I might share a few other impressions I have formed along the way here, in no particular order.

1. ‘Contact high’–I totally agree with David Ignatius writing in the Washinton Post on this ”[The] contrast between commanders’ high hopes for Afghanistan and stubborn realities on the ground is the strongest impression during a visit here. Traveling with the military, there’s always something of a contact high — with senior officers assuring visitors that the mission can be achieved.’ I find I cannot help walking away from meetings with some people here who are so clever and committed that I think ‘Man, this could really work.’ But after a few hours my suspension of disbelief dissipates and unhappy verities begin to prick my bubble, see next point.

2. When building anything get the big heavy bits settled firmly at the base and then work your way up with smaller stuff. For 9 years now we’ve gone at it the other way around. There’s a lot of good work being done here but it feels like trying to shore up a wall of big blocks with a foundation of pebbles. The big blocks:

• The Afghan government is not able to (or seemingly very interested in) govern the country in a manner which is congenial to the resolution of the conflict. They are, basically, it seems to me, making hay while the sun shines–and some of them are making an absolute fortune out of the status quo. Why change?
• The Taliban thrives on ISAF’s own supply chain, see Warlord, Inc.    
• The government security forces in the south of the country by their own admission would not last 24 hours without the support of the coalition–this is not likely to change outside the 2014-18 time frame. Political expectations, on the other hand, are that ‘positive trends’ will be demonstrated in November 2010.
• Attitudes in the home populations of European coalition partners are increasingly hostile to the continuance of the campaign not least as the belief grows that the net contribution of the campaign to preventing terrorism on their own streets is negative. Meanwhile, for Americans, $300 million dollars a month is what USAID is pumping into the country at present. One can only imagine that a few Americans will be asking ‘for what?’ as their own public finances collapse. From where I sit I cannot see a good answer to that.

Finally, I still do not understand what the political strategy is. Moreover, what are the positive trends which can be demonstrated in November 2010? I suspect that the best case to be made is that we now, at long last, have the pieces in place to succeed, in time. But surely that merely begs the question ‘what have you been doing for 9 years then?’ David Petraeus is an electrifying speaker, a great communicator, if anyone can do it he can. That said, it’s going to have to be one hell of a speech.  

3. The Canadians, now being Canadian-British I am biased, but…well, respect. Looking at Kandahar, its political and strategic importance, its plain centrality to this campaign, it’s amazing that  they held it as well as they did with pointy sticks. Ok, maybe not pointy sticks but ‘chronically and woefully under-resourced’ are words that spring to mind which again begs the question, why? If it’s so obvious now that this is the ‘centre of gravity’ then why weren’t we acting as though it were all along?

4. Sitting here in Kandahar airfield looking out at the horizon (a twenty-foot high dirt berm topped by razor wire which is never far away) and breathing in the aroma of the ‘Poo Pond’ (a locall attraction, no shit) I am musing about what archaeologists of the future will gather from the physical evidence  of Afghanistan’s history. Surely they will gather that it is a place which many conquerors have passed through in their time, leaving their marks on the landscape, fortresses, towers, caravansarais, giant Buddhas, mosques and steles, and airports and roads. Alexander the Great, the Mongols, the British even, and a shortlived thing called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but the most mysterious of all the HESCO Empire of the early 21st century which came and left leaving behind inscrutable formations of wire and canvas dirtboxes surrounding gigantic internal moats of human excrement and mounds of broken computer hard drives. Why did they come? Where did they go? Only the sands can tell… Seriously, I know that one message we wish to send the Afghans is that we are not conquerors, we’re not here to stay. But I fear that our current body language also does not reassure. Here’s the way I imagine the conversation:

Afghans: ‘Are you here to stay for the long haul?

ISAF: ‘Of course, that is why everything on this base is designed to be thrown away or fits in the belly of a C17. Get it?’

Afghans: ‘Ummm… no.’  

5. The PortaLoo. If you want to gauge the mood of an army I think a great way to do it is to read the graffiti on the walls of the crapper. Given the, ahem, digestive troubles, which tend to afflict travellers to this part of the world where the microbes are more exotic and robust, I have read a lot. I swear there’s a PhD topic there. I think it would make a uniquely interesting and relevant subject for someone in literature, for instance.

Another issue that’s drawn my attention here is the question of consistent, coherent narratives. If you don’t want to get caught saying one thing to one crowd and another to another, you’d better be consistent in your messaging. Right? This is the orthodoxy, and I’m not at all sure it’s right. Consider a couple of the big messaging tensions to be negotiated:

 1. To the domestic UK audience: this war is about stopping terror on the streets of the UK, but we’re leaving anyway.

 2. To the Afghan audience: we’re here to stay v. to the US/UK audience: our commitment is strictly limited, and we’re about to start leaving.

For another, there’s the difference between saying something and being heard. People bring to bear widely disparate attitudes, beliefs and desires, all of which affect not just whether they pay attention to a message, but also the way in which it is perceived. For example, some people are convinced that Elvis is dead, and refuse to accept the wealth of compelling evidence to the contrary. If I provide some evidence that is deeply challenging to your viewpoint, you have a choice – change your mind, or ignore my evidence. Guess which way many people choose?

At some level, our values may be similar: people are the same wherever you go. There is good and bad in everyone. So while talk of democracy, freedom and human rights might not resonate with those who associate the terms, if anything, with decadent immoral foreigners, talk of justice and honour need not be so far removed from those sentiments.

But at another level, the norms and attitudes of groups can vary widely – between social groups and within them. The story in one valley might be quite different to that next door, and even within the same valley, people will hold different views.

As I am sure many of our readers know, Small Wars Journal are in the middle of a fund-raising drive to finance an overhaul of their site as well as simply their continued service.

Small Wars Journal is one of, if not the, most central blog on counterinsurgency, defence policy and national security issues. Thanks principally to the tireless efforts of Dave Dilegge (Editor-in-Chief) and Bill Nagle (Publisher), SWJ provides frequent original articles, daily round-ups of all major news sources, and a discussion board, bringing together a wide cross-section of professionals, scholars and thinkers from academia, policy, and the armed services.

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Following a friend’s Facebook link I came across this New Yorker blog post by George Packer on the IDF Gaza ‘Aid’ Convoy Debacle ‘Israel Takes the Bait‘. I can’t fault the opening line which is spot on: ‘The Israeli raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.’ Packer goes on to claim that ‘Sunday night’s incident showed again that the most powerful force in international relations today is neither standing armies nor diplomatic councils, but public opinion as shaped by media.’ There are few people more inclined to think that this is true than me having written a fair bit on this issue (see 100 Years of COIN: What new have we learned?); as it happens, however, I think this is a bit of a stretch–the most powerful force in the world? It does seem to be important with respect to Israel, to an extent, but how about Darfur, or Tibet, or the Kurds (one might ask the Turks who are in high dudgeon over the weekend’s events)?

Anyway, I digress, whether or not it is the most important force I certainly do think it is very important. But why? And how? For me, one of the most arresting passages in Rupert Smith’s book The Utility of Force is where he writes,

We are conducting operations now as though we are on a stage, in an amphitheatre or Roman arena. There are two or more sets of players—both with a producer, the commander, each of whom has his own idea of the script. On the ground, in the actual theatre, they are all on the stage and mixed up with people trying to get to their seats, the stage hands, the ticket collectors and the ice-cream vendors. At the same time they are being viewed by a partial and factional audience, comfortably seated, its attention focused on that part of the auditorium is noisiest, watching the events by peering down the drinking straws of their soft-drink packs – for that is the extent of the vision of a camera (Smith, 2006: 284–5).

He then goes on to compare the role of the theatre commander to that of a theatre or film producer. As compelling as I found this metaphor I also found it a little awkward to understand and wished that Smith had illustrated it with more specific examples. We need wait no longer. Israel’s naval commandos have served up what might be a textbook example. Back to Smith for a sec:

The media and its role must also be an integral part of planning–if only because it will pitch up in any event, and tell a story, so it is best to consider the story and the role of the media from the start. On the basis of this understanding I see the media as being to a large extent the source of the context in which the acts in the theatre are played out: they do not make the facts, but it is they who express and display them. In the theatre of war those on the stage and watching in the stands judge actions in the theatre within this context, and it is up to the planners to ensure the audience via the media always remembers there are at least tow producers and companies on the stage–not one mixed up large one. That is why establishing the context of the event and getting the story right from the start is so important. To act effectively one is trying to gain a position where the majority of the audience and the people on the stage are following your script in the context, and not that of the opponent. (391) 

When the IDF’s naval commandos rappelled on to the decks of those ships did they think that they were conducting something more than a tricky tactical exercise in boarding? Did their commander understand that first and foremost what they were doing was descending on to the stage of a movie set starring them with worldwide release? It doesn’t seem so to me. But the other side was for sure. They were conducting theatre; the Israelis were not and they’re paying the price for making that mistake

Now, dear Readers, while I do not agree with everything Ms. Marlowe says in her post, I do very much like her line of reasoning.   She wonders:

What if counterinsurgency has never, ever, anywhere actually worked? What if our military has been chasing a chimera for almost four years — or more?

Marlowe states that while “COIN makes sense intellectually”

there doesn’t seem to be any increase in security when our troops do the right stuff (getting out among the people, lots of presence, lots of talking). We’ve got it down to a science now: the shuras, the projects, the provincial development plans, the embedded partners…It’s a lovely theory, but it may be a waste of time, and of all those young men and women who get blown up by IEDs while getting out among the people.

If we follow this thinking, it raises several other thorny questions, such as:

1. How do we know if it works?  By what measures?  In whose opinion?
2. Do we restrict the question only to COIN as we define it doctrinally, or across the board, to COIN as a concept?
3. Do we restrict the question to current operations, geographically and temporally, or across all places and times?

Our own David Ucko makes an astute comment on the post, wondering if we are not falling into the logical fallacy of ab abusu ad usum non valet consequentia (not in so many words, maybe, but the point is there none the less).  David asks if it is valid to judge the efficacy of something by examining instances where it is not applied correctly.  Perhaps COIN works, but crappy COIN doesn’t. 

Good questions, all.

It seems that the conventional wisdoms of the current age–hearts and minds, COIN–are now being challenged.  No matter what the answers are, this can only be seen as a good thing. 

When we (observers, practitioners, enthusiasts) fail to question, but instead simply drink the Kool-Aid and go along blithely and blindly, we run the risk of falling, lemming-like, over the edge of a conceptual cliff. 

The trouble is, after so long in places like Afghanistan, and with the appeal of doctrine such as the current COIN thinking, it takes a great of guts to develop a new approach.  Such arguments, made ab inconvenienti, are tricky, but are sometimes exactly what is required. 

What if COIN doesn’t work?  Is anyone prepared to answer the question, when the end/exit is already in sight?  Even if we all agree and answer, “No, it doesn’t”, where will that lead?  I have suspected for a long time that COIN itself is merely the knee-jerk answer to a previous question, “Do kinetic/conventional/body-count campaigns work?”  The answer was no, so the 180 degree opposite alternative was chosen as the replacement.

Marlowe suggests heading in that direction:

More and more, I suspect that it’s the brutality that works, not the COIN. It’s moving hundreds of thousands of people across a country, or shooting all the men in a village as a reprisal for terrorism, or taking hostages, or doing extra-judicial kidnappings. Of course, the brutality would work without the COIN, too.

The trouble is, according to Marlowe, the paradoxical nature of Western ethics when it comes to waging these types of campaigns:

Brutality works. But that’s not who we are.

So, the real $64,000 question is not, “What if?” but rather, “Then what?”

Heavy Metal, it is well known, has long been used as a psychological weapon. The Taliban, it is also well known, have outlawed music when they held power in the late 1990s. Logically, that makes the Mullahs even more vulnerable to dry guitar riffs and fast drums. Now U.S. special forces are escalating, probably inspired by Luftwaffe tactics.

During the Marjah offensive a few weeks ago, U.S. Special Forces apparently used The Offspring, Metallica and Thin Lizzy to “piss off the Taliban,” according to one officer. In recent days the 82nd Airborne has taken the tactic to its next step: a YouTube-enhanced spoof of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone.” The clip has been making the rounds and is approaching 4m views on YouTube. Presumably with many flabbergasted Taliban and al-Qaeda viewers among the stunned audience.

But it is a little know fact that the German Luftwaffe has pioneered the brutal tactic in 2007. Their tune — Olaf Henning’s “Cowboy und Indianer” – is far more devastating than, say, Rammstein’s “Heirate Mich.” The Germano-pop boasts unmistakably suggestive undertones, “Komm’ hol’ das Lasso raus,” or “come get the lasso out.” Without doubt a crippling blow to the Mullahs’ morale. Most lethal are the phallic missiles, I’d say.

Watch your back, Talib.

The only surviving attacker of the Pakistani terror team which killed 166 people in Mumbai in a 60-hour televized city-wide rampage was sentenced to death in an Indian court today. As it happens I was thinking about this several days ago when Thomas posted his excellent piece on the attempted carbombing in New York, Resilience? He enjoins us:

The problem with all this is that the terrorists, whoever they turn out to be, have an overarching interest in provoking attention and creating fear. True, domestic terrorism constitutes a serious threat. No, not a strategic or existential one. So therefore a failed, amateurish plot should not be treated like a strategic threat. It should not get more attention than it deserves. If it does, the subtext will be clearly understood by extremists everywhere: America is frightened.

Not a few other very clever people have remarked similarly. Keep cool. Do not overreact. Keep a sense of perspective. I quite agree. As Thomas lays out elsewhere, see Cracks in the Jihad, Al Qaeda is remarkably self-alienating. Our over-reaction pumps air into their sinking life raft. Moreover, as also was observed in comments the trendline with these sorts of attacks is from ineptitude to even greater depth of ineptitude. The self-starting Jihadi tends to be a noob, it would seem. And yet with a sense of perspective we see that there are several trendlines which are less positive.

• First, for quite a few decades now (I would date the start of it to post-war urbanization, accelerated by television, and then again by the web) insurgents are increasingly detached from the population. In the country it’s hard to be anonymous. If you’re hiding in a farmer’s haybarn the farmer knows you’re there. In the city its easy.  
• Second, the elements of attack are basically widely available. The Mumbai attackers had AK-74s and ammunition, energy bars, backpacks, and mobile phones–and the supply of the latter they could easily obtain from the bodies of their victims so really all that was required was a telephone number in order to tap into their command and control network.
• Third, if you take a few data points starting, say, almost forty years ago with the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the Siege of Mecca in 1979, the Colombian Palace of Justice Siege in 1985, the Budyennovsk raid in 1995, the Nord-Ost Seige in 2002, and Beslan Massacre in 2004, you see a gradual increase in the scale, brutality and sophistication of raids. 

A few guys really committed guys with the level of infantry training you could get in a good reserve unit, equipped with stuff you can purchase from Tesco for a few hundred pounds, and weapons available to anyone with cash and criminal connections can cause a colossal amount of damage. Of course an interesting question is whether the two trend lines–self-start Jihadist ineptitude, increasing non-state death commando sophistication–are actually connected. Do they form part of a coherent strategy or are they independent phenomena? For that matter is the latter truly non-state? At any rate it seems to me that the question of resilience is highly germane. Let’s not ramp up fear without reason. But then again don’t fool yourself. Times Square is a point on a trend line. Mumbai is a point on a trend line. What’s next?

*Photo is from the Telegraph.

The facts about the attempted car bomb attack at Times Square are only emerging. We will certainly know more about the perpetrators very soon. Let’s assume, for the moment, that the Pakistani Tehreek e Taliban are not just claiming to be behind what they say is a revenge attack, but that they actually are. How should the US government react?

Steve Coll over at the New Yorker just posted a thought-provoking short piece on his blog. He argues that the Obama Administration now has an opportunity “to atone” for some of the mistakes in its public communication following the Christmas Day attack. Obama should, Coll suggests, “start talking back to terrorists everywhere in a more resilient, sustainable language than he has yet discovered.” Example:

They intend to frighten us; we are not frightened. They intend to kill and maim; we will bring them to justice. They intend to attract attention for their extremist views; the indiscriminate nature of their violence only discredits and isolates them. They intend to disrupt us and throw us into fits of media-saturated hysteria; we will remain vigilant, but we will also keep their unsuccessful attempted murder in perspective.

Well, that’s tricky. Doing so could be a risky move that could have just the opposite effect. Coll himself says that the Christmas bombing was “more serious.” So where should the line be drawn? Bizzarre al-Qaeda tapes already provoke reactions by senior US politicians. What seems to be an amateurish attack may do more: create significant political pressure for the administration. Political opponents might soon repeat their point that the administration is defenseless and soft on terror, even if there is probably not a lot of substance to such criticisms.

The problem with all this is that the terrorists, whoever they turn out to be, have an overarching interest in provoking attention and creating fear. True, domestic terrorism constitutes a serious threat. No, not a strategic or existential one. So therefore a failed, amateurish plot should not be treated like a strategic threat. It should not get more attention than it deserves. If it does, the subtext will be clearly understood by extremists everywhere: America is frightened.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has outlined his vision for ending the war in Afghanistan.  It is not a surprising vision, but it is clearly enough articulated as to be worthy of some analysis.

To Miliband, writing as he is on the cusp of both a national election and some kind of dignified exit from Afghanistan after eight costly years of Western–but particularly, British–military involvement, the Afghan conundrum can be summed up rather simply:

Violence of the most murderous, indiscriminate, and terrible kind started this Afghan war; politics will bring it to an end.

Fair enough. Violence, bad; politics, good.  Go fetch Squealer: it is certainly worthy of being written on the Wall of the Barn.

But hang on a tick.  Miliband’s classic liberal interpretation of events may be too simplistic to be effective.  It is enthymemic.  We might interrogate his strategy by looking a little deeper at the concept of politics.

Miliband’s formulation that violence is the problem and politics is the solution has a familiar ring to it.  For Western societies, it has become a sort of founding myth.  One spokesperson for this liberal view is Hannah Arendt, who claimed that violence could destroy, but could never create.  Politics, to her, was the absence of violence.  This is what Milliband seems to be implying here.

But to believe that is to forget much of the reality of Western political history.  As Charles Tilly reminds us:

In choosing political regimes, to some extent we also choose among varieties of violence…Contentious politics [and, seriously, what other kind of politics can we imagine for Afghanistan in the near to medium term?] consists of discontinuous, public, collective claim making in which one of the parties is a government. A government is a substantial, durable, bounded organization, that exercises control over the major concentrated means of coercion within some territory. (Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, p. 9)

Of course, the degree and even the type of violence can vary.  Not many—but some—would prefer brutal Talib violence over, say, the restrained violence of a Western nation-state.  But we must acknowledge that politics does involve—indeed is based on—violence and its successful application.

Put another way, as Harold Lasswell reminded us in his 1935 book, politics is always and everywhere about determining “who gets what, when, and how.”  Making—and then enforcing—those determinations rests upon the skillful application of force: deliberate, discreet maybe, but ultimately and necessarily, devastating. 

Liberals would have us believe that there is some teleological arc to politics, though: even if these questions do underpin politics, we have mature and sophisticated means of determining the answers.  Who gets? Why, the majority, of course, plus whatever minorities are defined and enshrined by convention or law.  Who decides?  Why, the majority of course.

Liberalism suggests that Afghanistan ain’t quite there yet…but could be, with just a little help from us.  Of course, the Afghans should decide for themselves, but as Miliband points out, they must do so through

a new and more inclusive internal political arrangement in which enough Afghan citizens have a stake, and the central government has enough power and legitimacy to protect the country from threats within and without.

Progress, one of the sacred elements of Liberalism, is possible.  And what do the Afghans need to get there? Again, Miliband has the answer:

Britain’s experience in the nineteenth century, and the Soviet Union’s in the twentieth, showed that the best way, perhaps the only way, to stabilize Afghanistan in the long term is to empower the Afghans themselves in charge so that they can secure and govern their own villages and valleys. To achieve this, the Afghans need full political and military support, and generous economic subsidy, from outside. But the Afghan people neither need nor welcome our combat troops on their soil any longer than is necessary to guarantee security and set them on a course to regulating their own affairs. [emphasis added]

Enter the military. Well, not just any military, our military actually. Miliband cites General McChrystal approvingly:

the role of the military is to “try to shape conditions which allow people to come to a truly equitable solution to how the Afghan people are governed.”

And people dare say there isn’t complete unity of effort between the civil and military branches of this fight.  How much violence? Just enough to get the Afghans to make the right decisions.  And for how long? Not any longer than is necessary.

Tidy.

Beyond the inconvenience of violence that observers like Lasswell and Tilly allow, there are others, non-Liberals, like Carl Schmitt who go much further.  As Tracy Strange points out in the Foreword to Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, Schmitt believed that

Fighting and the possibility of death are necessary for there to be the political.

To Schmitt we do not have Tilly’s ‘politics of collective violence’ but rather a sort of ‘violence of collective politics’. He would think that, wouldn’t he, joining up as a Nazi and all.  But his logic was rooted in the very nature of liberalism itself and may be instructive as a critique of Miliband’s thinking, not if it were applied under normal circumstances, but rather, as he is suggesting it is applied, to the contigent extremes that mark the current Afghan political terrain. 

Strange explains that Schmitt felt liberal politics was a

 system which rests on compromise; hence, all of its solutions are in the end temporary, occasional and never decisive.

The idea that ‘one more Jirga’ or ‘a better election’ can get us there is, to Schmitt, inherently flawed because liberal politics “can never resolve the claims of equality inherent in democracy.”  There will always be—there always needs to be—friends and enemies in politics.

Schmitt has a point.  How can the Taliban and women’s rights groups come to a lasting political compromise?  How can we reconcile their (to put it mildly) competing claims?  It is just not going to happen.  Not without a shedload of violence behind one side or the other.  And that would not be reconciliation, but rather domination, or even annihilation.

This is where Arendt and the liberals, and Schmitt and the illiberals, part ways.  To Arendt, there can be no violence in politics.  To Schmitt, there can be no politics without violence.   On this they are both very clear.

What is not clear, now, is Milliband’s vision.   He endorses the Soviet recipe for (temporary) success for the Kabul regime: 

forgetting communism, abandoning socialism, embracing Islam, and working with the tribes.

What is Milliband’s advice, four decades later?   How can Afghans simultaneously forget violence and embrace politics, when, according to him, Afghan

unity is founded on a deep desire among the people to live life as they see fit?

Politics will bring the West’s war in Afghanistan to an end, to be sure. But violence will accompany it all the way.

I absolutely loathe the Olympics, just hate everything about them; so I kind of wasn’t planning to be anywhere near London when they take off anyway. But added to that ever since the Mumbai attacks it just seems to me a time and place worth avoiding. The world’s biggest international sporting event in one of the most open cities on the planet makes for a gigantic target. Given eight years warning how difficult would it be to repeat the performance?  Professor Peter Sommer from a little known university across the street from King’s College London appears to share a similar apprehension, see ‘2012 Olympics could face “blended” physical, cyber attack‘. What I particularly about Sommer is that his is a voice of reason in the generally rather febrile cyber-war-espionage-terror-whatever discourse pointing out that on its own cyber (like any other weapon or system) is an annoyance. In combination, however, it could be very important:

There is what’s called a ‘blended attack’, so there is a physical attack, but it’s made easier because someone is disrupting cyber systems at the same time, so that is the sort of scenario that people have got to worry about… 

Exactly. That is the principle of combined arms after all–an idea as old as the day one caveman said to another ‘OK, here’s the plan: I’ll stab with pointy stick while you throw the big rock.’ Terrorism today, to play on the words of Antonio Giustozzi, is an unholy amalgam of Koran, Kalashnikov and Smartphone. Unfortunately, it’s probably also true that even without a cyber-monkey wrench being thrown into the mix a coordinated attack of teams attacking in sequence across the city would rapidly stretch the security forces to the max.