Foreign Affairs Response

My response (subscription only) to Bing West's excellent Review Essay article in Foreign Affairs. Interestingly, West has recently talked about money in COIN here.

Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature"

"We're in the least brutal period in human history" is how the World Service sums up Steven Pinker's thesis. Pinker uses historical data sets to measure violence. Deaths worldwide are at 1/2 person per 100 000, declares Pinker. He compares this to "the worst years of" World War II, which he calculates as 300 deaths per 100 000.



Using data sets is always controversial (see for example the debate over Democratic Peace Theory using the Correlates of War database [Tarak Barkawi has critiqued this data set]) but this is an extremely valuable work. The debate over New and Old wars is saturated but placing violence within an empirically analysed, quantitative historical trajectory is a significant development. From this, the methodological debate and the reasons for what we see are set to break out into the social sciences.


"A problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won" is how Pinker elegantly defines how we are increasingly seeing violence. 


Is the increasingly visual nature of war, beamed into hour homes in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, causing us to develop anti-war norms? We get conflict fatigue.  Pinker also examines and endorses the trade theory - greater economic interdependence reduces the probability of going to war with each other. John Darwin touches on this in After Tamerlane. 



Yet Pinker in the quote compares the present day with World War II. Many who fought in that conflict are still alive. It was a national ideological with racial architecture that drove this war in Europe and Africa. In the Sino-Japanese theatre, each foe dehumanized the other. Ideologies can be as potent a weapon as a nuclear arsenal and the question I have is, does social networking make antagonistic ideologies more or less likely?



A full World Service piece on the Pinker work is here. 

Punditry from the Arab world on the tenth anniversary of 9.11

The world looks West this week on the tenth anniversary of 9.11 so it's interesting to look East.


Rahsa Sadek at Al-Ahram provides a good commentary on the Iranian position on Syria, noting that al-Husseini writing in the London-based Asharq al-Awsat (owned by the house of Saud) believes that, "Iran's fears are firstly, that the vital route through which Iran provides Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Palestinians -- particularly the Hamas movement -- with military and logistical supplies and funding will be blocked."


Only a week previous (Aug 30), Dick Cheney released his memoirs, perhaps to coincide with the tenth anniversary of 9.11 and generate patriotic sales (a review here). Called in a 2005 Washington Post editorial, the "Vice President for Torture", his memoirs cast him once again into scrutiny into the Arab and Muslim worlds. The radical polemicist el-Khazen at the London-based Dar al-Hayat (owned by prominent members of the house of Saud) launches a diatribe: "this century will know no war criminal more contemptible than Dick Cheney. The terror of 11 September 2001 killed around 3,000 Americans, and the former US vice president was responsible for the deaths of 6,000 American soldiers, for oil and Israel, and the deaths of a million Arabs and Muslims."


And still the shadow of colonialism provides a very powerful resistance narrative for the NATO interventions and Western policy in the region. Also in al-Hayat, Zein writes that, "the talk of Western democratic values being brought to the Middle East "is no more than cover for the return of the colonisers to this region."


Jazeera English carries a front page dedicated to remembering 9.11 but the Arabic portal homepage is concerned with the rift between Egypt and Israel following the embassy incident. It's possible that for the West, this War on Terror failed to touch us as much as the original incident, as it was in the very heartland of torch of democratic freedom. Nothing since in the "long war" has evoked such feeling from us. The wars of attrition in Iraq and Afghanistan have been characterised by low body counts (60 000 American troops died in Vietnam, approximately 1600 have died in Afghanistan over a decade of occupation). 9.11 still defines us. But for the Arab world, much has passed which makes the original incident of much less interest. Wars fought on their soils and continuing unrest must lead many to question the way in which they feel about the terrorist tragedy, since it spawned, as al-Khazen overestimates, "the deaths of a million Arabs and Muslims."


Al-Quds is concerned also with Egypt and Syria but carries an op-ed by the editor (in arabic here) on 9.11 in retrospect and the world now facing America. Atwan brings out the well-worn arguments that much hatred has been ignited and enflamed against the West particularly in muslim-majority countries, that America failed in Afghanistan, created an Iraq which now has much closer ties to Iran, and drained its own financial resources to the point of national bankruptcy. Atwan sees NATO's involvement in Libya as neo-colonialism and finally ends with the point that he believes the US will veto any attempt by the Palestinians to press for statehood at the UN. The decade since 9.11 has surely seen America's standing both financially and morally in the world decrease dramatically. Whilst in her possession are nearly all the economists and international relations experts in the world. What future too then, the social sciences?

With the role of culture an ascendent trope in military planning, it's interesting to look back on one of the lesser moments after 9.11, covered well in a Washington Post article, about the Taliban's offer to hand bin Laden over to a neutral country. The Post observes that: "Some Afghan experts argue that throughout the negotiations, the United States never recognized the Taliban need for aabroh, the Pashtu word for "face-saving formula." Officials never found a way to ease the Taliban's fear of embarrassment if it turned over a fellow Muslim to an "infidel" Western power. "We were not serious about the whole thing, not only this administration but the previous one," said Richard Hrair Dekmejian, an expert in Islamic fundamentalism and author at the University of Southern California. "We did not engage these people creatively. There were missed opportunities." Yet our recent culture surge doesn't seem to be paying off yet, if the punditry is anything to go by. 
 

The Wisdom of Crowds. Review of "Defence Reform: An independent report into the structure and managment of the Ministry of Defence"

"Reconcile ambition with reality."

In August 2010, Lord Levene was employed by Liam Fox, as Defence Secretary, to commission a report as chair of the Defence Reform Steering Group.The deadline was July 2011. The report was published on June 27, 2011. Operating in tandem with the "quinquennial" SDSR, ("the Defence Secretary’s view was that the SDSR alone would not be enough to resolve the problems facing Defence. His assessment was that the existing departmental management structure was demonstrably not working well, and had contributed to the Department’s financial crisis") the report seeks to streamline the corpulent entity that is the MOD, bloated by middle managers and massive overexpenditure. Put simply, when it's the taxpayers' money you're spending and not you're own, the emphasis on efficiency isn't a priority.

This report examines the operating structure as a whole, a project which arguably hasn't been undertaken since The Central Organisation for Defence White Paper of 1984, and the New Management Strategy. Which is quite staggering in its ineptitude and myopia since the end of the Cold War and the reorientation of strategic necessities in the early 1990s.

There's little new here in the Levene report (which is probably why it took less than the time he was given to complete it, and I can almost envisage the accompanying PowerPoint presentation), but it does serve to lessen public anger, as details consistently emerge of massive waste and incompetence within the MOD. Streamlining the MOD whilst coagulating the three branches under a Joint Services command is logical. Continued successful integration of civilian and military personnel within the ministry is a further goal. The NHS has a similar problem with those engaged at the chalk face (to take a teacher's term) and the administrators.

The composition of the review board is interesting and merits examination simply for their lack of knowledge of the MOD or any other ministries of defence, for their lack of knowledge of UK military strategies or current and future threats and how this might impact organizational structure. None of the personnel have, as far as i can see, experience in the military-industrial complex. The privatisation of warfighting is a pressing issue that we need to understand and how this effects the MOD structure. 

The personnel are:

Lord Levene: Career in business and banking with roles in defence procurement under Michael Heseltine.

Baroness Noakes: A chartered accountant by training who has worked in financial streamlining of the NHS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That didn't work well then.
Dr David Allen: His doctorate is in chemistry and had a successful career at BP
Raymond McKeeve: Corporate finance partner at Berwin Leighton Paisner, involved in restructuring and acquisitions.
Björn Conway: Head of Aerospace, Defence, Security and Resilience at...Ernst and Young.
George Iacobescu: Known as the "bankers' landlord" he is the chariman of the Canary Wharf Group.
Gerry Grimstone: A privatisation "guru" to UK governments
General Sir Nick Houghton: Vice-chief of the Defence Staff
Ursula Brennan: Replaced by Jon Day after being made 2nd PUS (Permanent Under Secretary) in February 2011

My observations of the report are these, but below them are the recent media reports of Dempsey's confirmation hearing in the US, which I feel are much more important.

• The shadow of the tottering global economy hangs over the report.
• The report recommends manking, "the Head Office smaller and more strategic, to make high level balance of investment decisions, set strategic direction and a strong corporate framework, and hold to account." This is in keeping with a desire to streamline, but also to realign the MOD, set it to a coherent direction. We want everyone at the MOD to be singing from the same hymn sheet, and for everyone to know the words to the hymn.The creation of a Defence Board is suggested, based around the Defence Secretary. The Board would comprise: Defence Secretary (Chair);
  • An additional Minister;
  • Permanent Secretary;
  • Chief of the Defence Staff;
  • Director General Finance - reflecting his role as the principal financial adviser;
  • Chief of Defence Materiel - reflecting his responsibility for a major part of the
  Department’s business, and the immediate priority of ensuring that the equipment
  and support programme is affordable and deliverable; and,
  • Three Non-Executive Directors (NED), one of whom would act as the lead NED (as
  defined in Cabinet Office guidance), one of whom would chair the departmental
  Audit Committee under the Board and a third who would chair the Appointments
  Committee.
• Centralised or delegated? The DoD is having this very discussion about how forces should function in kinetic operations. The Levene report fudges the issue: "We do not advocate such a choice. The model we propose involves a strong Head Office to provide strategic direction, make the major balance of investment decisions, set a clear control framework and hold its delivery units to account, and delivery units which have the levers they need to run their business in line with that strategic direction and their budgets. Within that overarching corporate framework, some decisions are best made centrally and others should be devolved, some services are best provided corporately, others are best performed in the delivery units. Each needs to be worked through on its own merits, and this is what we have done."

• When someone else is paying you can really go for it. The Daily Telegraph reported in July that senior managers over the past four years had spent over £986 000 000 of taxypayers' money on MOD credit cards and a time when the management "is grappling with a multi-billion pound black hole in its finances". Another investigation showed that the top ten managers at the MOD earned £1.7 million between them in 2010. The Levene report, in acknowledging public concerns, stressed that it was concerned with building a cost-effective model for a functioning MOD.
• The report sees that "tackling problems in Defence acquisition must be a high priority, we regard Bernard Gray’s appointment as the Chief of Defence Materiel (CDM) as key to reforming this area. We have focussed on the responsibilities, authorities and accountabilities of the Head Office, military users and Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) - including the CDM himself - in the Department’s model for delivering military capability and managing its finances, but we have not sought to duplicate the work Bernard Gray has set in hand on the future functions, structure and size of DE&S, and its relationship with industry. We understand that he will report to Ministers later in the year." Gray produced a report for the MOD on defence acquisition in 2009.
• Revolution in Military Affairs predominates, being the acquisition of technology for technology's sake. In this regard, we are pressured by the United States, who are engaged in the ultimate RMA, and fear that if we don't keep up, interoperability issues will burgeon. We're hanging on to the coat tails of a management doctrine that will take us into financial armagedon. The MOD is in an unenviable position (similar to the NHS) that emerging technologies make their industry more expensive to run, rather than less expensive. The NHS has this problem with diagnostics and treatment, the MOD has this problem with weaponry. This problem has been known for a generation. Notably, Norman Augustine, when chairman of Lockheed Martin postulated one of his many Augustine's Laws regarding the DoD's ability to purchase fighter planes. The trajectory of cost of a fighter and the trajectory of DoD budgets meant that by 2054, the entire U.S. defense budget will purchase one aircraft.  It will be shared by the Air Force and the Navy 3 1/2 days each week, except in leap years, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.
•  
• MOD as management, "brings transparency, standardisation and professionalisation to enabling processes, both to enable efficiency and to move towards filling posts with the right individuals, with the right skills, for the right length of time."
• Levene was conscious of the history that preceded his own attempts to solve the problem, adding that no cure, as such, has been foundm that in the UK, the questions he asked also lay "behind the formation of a Committee of Imperial Defence in 1904 to organise Britain’s defence and military preparations. They have vexed Government ever since, through the Churchill reforms after the Second World War, the Mountbatten and Ismay / Jacob proposals that led to the creation of the unified MOD in 1964, the Heseltine reforms of the mid 1980s and the New Management Strategy that followed, and
  the various reforms of the 1990s and 2000s."
• The report employs the principle of Occam's Razor, though Levene may not know it as such. He has tended towards simplicity over complexity, to aid transparency. Parsimony of approach is very well from the outside looking but when is so far up the Americans' asses that one is in front of them, and when the Americans waded into Iraq and Afghanistan, then parsimony becomes difficult.  
• The Fog of War hangs over this report. Levene is as much in the dark as how the forces should be realigned to meet strategic threats in the 21st century as anyone else. When Levene identifies the major priorities of Defence as being to "Direct - understand the strategic context, make Defence policy and strategy, define and resource the necessary military capability and strategically direct operations
  and Defence Diplomacy, to Generate and Develop – generate force elements to meet current operations and potential military tasks and develop the future force; a key enabler of which is to: Acquire – procure and support the equipment, systems and commodities needed in the short and long term" he highlights the major problem facing the MOD - nobody really knows the strategy needed. Will we need to fight small wars or large ones? Long wars or short wars? Will we fight asymmetrically or as centres of mass against similar opponents. How will our nuclear deterrence work against the non-state actors and the mezzanine actors that operate autonomously in multiple states?
• Working in conjunction with the already created National Security Council. 

"Those who had less experience [of the MOD] were often able to bring new ideas to the task from which we benefitted considerably"

Across the Atlantic they're having the same soul searching. Much was made in the US press of the concern levelled at Martin Dempsey at his confirmation hearing as the chairman of the JCS in late July amid mounting concerns about how adequately prepared the US is to combat cyberattacks. Regarding overspending, Dempsey was quizzed by Senator McCain.

"A group chartered by the secretary of the Army to look into how the Army procures major weapons systems found that every year since 1996, the Army has spent more than $1 billion annually on programs that were ultimately canceled. Since 2004, $3.3 billion to $3.8 billion per year of Army developmental testing and evaluation funding has been lost to canceled programs, including the now-canceled future combat system program.

As we know, the cost of the F-35 has lurched completely out of control. The few short months after the awarding of the contract to Boeing for the new tanker is now another additional $1 billion in cost. And the list goes on and on.

What -- what's the level of your concern and what do you think we ought to be doing about it?

DEMPSEY:
Well, Senator, as we discussed when I was here a few months ago, I -- I would never sit here and try to justify. It would be impossible to sit here and justify the current process, given that it has not delivered the capabilities we've required within the resources available to do so.

And so, I think that we're at a point where we absolutely have to seek acquisition reform."

Later, Senator Portman adds, "But I hear just as often blame attributed to the way the department develops requirements. I'm involved, again, on this contracting issue on a broader scale in looking at, you know, the Joint Strike Fighter, for instance, where now we're looking at a projected cost overrun of $150 billion, roughly. Unbelievable."

Here's the full confirmation hearing.

Here's Dempsey, earlier at TRADOC speaking about "leader development". By the end, I'm none the wiser about the DoD intends to develop leaders in the 21st century.

Gen. Martin Dempsey addresses "Leader Development for a 21st Century Army" from TRADOC on Vimeo.

Review - "Operational Culture for the Warfighter", 2008

To drink tea with the enemy or kill them? Nobody is sure anymore.

Salmoni, B.A. and Holmes-Eber, P. (2008) Operational Culture for the Warfighter: Principles and Applications (Quantico, Virginia: Marine Corps University Press)

The difficulty of prosecuting post-conflict operations in Afghanistan and more prominently at that time, Iraq, led the United States Military to publish Field Manual 3-24 in 2006. The manual contained anthropological wisdom generated from the Cultural Awareness and the Military project (formed at the Watson Institute in 2004), and TRADOC, Ft Leavenworth, Kansas. This manual was written to fill a 'gap' in counterinsurgency theory [the manual superceded FMI 3.07-22 (2004) and MCWP 3-33.5 (1980)], and to update previous thinking.

Taliban in the winter. According to "Operational Culture for the Warfighter", insurgents in Afghanistan exhibit a "local cultural disinclination" to fight in the winter months. Or it could just be that the landscape is ill-suited to guerilla warfare, much as al-Zawahiri lamented the monotonous, arid landscape of the Egyptian countryside. 

'You cannot fight former Saddamists and Islamists' goes the manual, 'the same way you would have fought the Viet Cong, Moros or Tupamoros'. 2006 was, with hindsight, a pivotol year in the US-led occupation of Iraq since the al-Qaeda affiliated Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (though I debate how strong that link ever was, even given the infamous 'correspondence' between he and al-Zawahiri) was deeping antipathy between Sunni and Shia amidst spiralling violence.

Looking back, we definine also during this period the so-called Sunni Awakening, in which the tribal leaders, plausibly with US funding, coagulated to resist the influx of foreign fighters that were conducting jihad against both civilian and military forces in the country without any apparent strategic goal apart from the aim of maximimising casualties, possibly to increase media attention. Even after Zarqawi's death in June of that year, violence in Iraq had reached unprecedented levels. The spectre of Vietnam was raised, of a quagmire and a never-ending stabilisation project. The convergence of a body of anthropological views on prosecuting Phase IV operations and the volatile, precarious situation in Iraq led to the the Petraeus troop-surge in the country in 2007.

The cultural turn had become an ascendent "thought model" within influential circles of the US DOD; believed to be the answer to the inability of US led forces to win the peace in the aftermath of major combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a consequence, and in parallel with the Iraqi troop surge, the DOD outlayed $41 million for the development of the Cultural Operations Research - Human Terrain System (HTS) led by Montgomery McFate, Andrea Jackson (deleted wiki page here role in Lincoln Group here) and Steve Fondacaro, which sought to give anthropologists a combat role, actively implementing, from the front line, cultural expertise, embedded in military units. The use of academics in kinetic operations divided the community. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists formed in reaction and protest at academics prosecuting wars, believing it be ethically indefensible and effectively "weaponizing" anthropology.

In late 2007, the American Anthropological Association issued a statement on HTS, concerned about its ethical implications. The executive board statement concluded that it would 'place anthropologists in positions in which their work will be in violation of the AAA code of ethics'.. In early 2008 one of the anthropologists embedded in US operations in Afghanistan, Michael Bhathia, was killed by an IED, prompting greater media scrutiny of the HTS. Later that same year, another academic embed, Paula Lloyd was doused in flammable liquid and set alight in Afghanistan. She died two months later. The number of serving anthropologists in these Human Terrain Teams never reached numbers of much more than ten - either in Iraq or Afghanistan, In 2010, McFate and Fondacaro both left the programme. 

The fate of HTS and its relegation to the more theoretical and now less fashionable schools of  thought within the US military has created a vast uncertainty over the role of culture in understanding and prosecuting wars. Only recently, John Nagl in a department of War Studies podcast, suggested that there had become too much emphasis on drinking tea with the enemy - that kinetic means were still the most potent in coercing the enemy and winning over local populations by demonstrations of military strength. 

Thus the 2008 manual, Operational Culture for the Warfighter, published by the Marine Corp University, is important in that it reinforces the notion that culture is assumed to play a large role in combat, but what that role is can be very hard to ascertain. Highlighting the fashionable notion that fourth generation warfare, and particularly COIN will be the way in which the Marines deploy in the future, the manual suggests that, 'our wars will be "wars amongst' the people" - not wars against the people and not wars oblivious to the people.'

The "key terrain" argues General Mattis in the foreword, is the will of the host nation's population and that gaining the trust of skeptical populations will suffocate the ideology of the enemy. In battling for the hearts and minds of the local population then, it is assumed that the better you know these people, the more easily you can win them over. The manual reads like a local phrasebook, but instead of learning languages, you can read the signs of the human terrain, instead. Diverse case studies are given which reinforce cultural viewpoints. In seeking to move beyond HTS, the authors stress that culture is mutable and fluid. And yet they still view culture as 'a logical system which can be understood using theories and principles developed during more than 150 years of research and study by social scientists'. It is supposed here that the length of time of study automatically means a greater level of understanding, and this is dangerous. 

Published in the year that two anthropologists were mortally wounded in Afghanistan, the work seeks to move away from basic, simplified expressions of culture and inherent stereotypes but I feel that it never achieves this convincingly. Noting the Culture and Personality studies of WWII, that suggested some cultural reasons for national psychologies (p.18-19), the manual rejects a one-size-fits-all approach to the human terrain. Culture is messy or "fuzzy set" to quote the manual, and the marine should not fall into the trap of homogenizing the human terrain within his Area of Operations.

Emphasizing this risk, the manual defines Human Terrain as 'those cultural aspects of the battlespace that, due to their static nature, can be visually represented on a geographic map. Human terrain is static with respect to change over time; rigid with respect to fluid human relationships and limited to representing human behaviour in only two dimensions' (p.34). Citing a map of Algeria as a caveat, with its areas of Berber and Arabs delineated, the manual warns against such a simplification, suggesting that this is only a macroscopic interpretation and that intermarriage amongst other developments may have enforced tribal links and cross-cultural ties in the region. 

As the manual goes on to present myriad ways in which culture informs decisions within a marine's AO, it falls into two traps. Firstly, the manual overplays the way in which culture informs a population's response to a US marine's presence. Consider this section from the manual:

"U.S. personnel in Afghanistan frequently notice a drop in insurgent activity during the winter. Over time, they have come to understand that this is related less to diminished insurgent enthusiasm for anti-Afghan violence, and much more to the local cultural disinclination to fight during the winter months in high altitude. Conversely, the upsurge in violence over the summer and autumn is seasonally driven, and not necessarily a function of greater insurgent zeal."

A "Local cultural disinclination" is given as the reason for dropping activity in the winter. In fact, operational elements of insurgency are much more easily prosecuted in the spring and summer, not because the lazy native finds the winter far too cold to go out and prime IEDs, but instead because the eight foot high crops that grow in the spring and summer enable concealment. One must not give cultural considerations too much sway when life and death are on the line. As Porter has shown elegantly, cultural considerations tend to be swept beneath the carpet and material considerations predominate when the former can negatively influence the latter. This year, insurgent activity in the winter (2010/11) reached unpredented levels as rebels sought to destabilise the region and influence phased troop withdrawals - creating casualties and negatively impacting on domestic populations of NATO countries. This wasn't a cultural decision - it was strategic, material. 

Secondly, the manual at times still demarcates a very 'us' and 'them' approach to culture, which is to the detriment of the entire work. As much as it seeks to break away from the "culture and identity" mantra of the WWII anthropologists, it never really does so. Consider in the chapter on belief systems, the following passage (p.173):

In the U.S. for example, the Puritan notion that we can control our lives and experiences through hard work is repeatedly emphasized through such common sayings as:

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”
“God helps those who help themselves.”

These sayings contrast significantly with popular expressions in the Middle East, which emphasize submission to God’s will and acceptance of a divine plan that one cannot control:

Insha’allah
“If God wills it.” (Arabic, Turkish, Persian)
Im yir-tzei HaShem
“If God wills it.” (Hebrew)
Agar reza-ye Khuda bashet
“If it finds the favor of God.” (Persian)
Keh deh khoday reza wi
“God-willing.” (Pashto)
Allah A‘lam
“God knows [the outcome—not I].” (Arabic)
Allah ma‘a al-sabirin
“God is with the patient.” (Arabic)

Significant for Marines, particularly those working in Information Operations, is the way that popular folktales, sayings, and imagined histories are used in propaganda to rouse popular sentiment.

Reading between the lines, the American is the do-it-yourself, can-do motivated warrior in charge of his/her own destiny. The Arab submits (a literal interpretation of 'Islam') to the will of God allowing fate to influence their activities and shape their trajectory. The Iranian too submits (Persian) as does the Jew (Hebrew). Only the Puritan is strong and single-minded. Such a reading elides many expressions in both languages and allows culture to inform activity to a much greater extent that is the reality. The Crusaders shouted Deus Vult (God Wills It) when charging into battle during the First Crusade - such a cry invoked their God as the true God and helped to define their own troops (Christian, righteous) against the enemy (Muslim, infidel). Americans are as likely to say "God only knows" as much as any Arab, but beyond that, religion invocations carry with them much greater weight than the simplicity of the expression itself.

Ann Marlowe was right in 2006 when she wrote that 'there are some things the Army needs  in Afghanistan, but more academics are not at the top of the list'. She is still right now. Ultimately, phase IV operations aren't about culture - they are about the ability of the soldier to move away from his perception of the space as an area to be conquered, to a view of the terrain as a place to be reconstructed. The same people, that the soldier has recently homogenized and degraded in his own mind, termed them the enemy, in order to rationalise a use of violence, must then be reconfigured in his psyche as a "host population" meriting the soldier's assistance and understanding. This is the big problem with COIN - how to deconstruct a rationale of violence to one of assistance, whilst still enmeshed within a language of war that dehumanizes and homogenizes the local population.   

Consider Iraq. For the soldiers, the country consisted of two colour-coded zones. The green zone was the safe area ensconced behind high walls in the centre of Baghdad. The other area was called the red zone. All of the local population, regardless of gender or age were termed hajis, a derogatory name, given because muslims must at one point in their lives go on the pilgrimmage to Mecca. One zone for the population - red, for danger - and one name for them. That's a great mindset for prosecuting a war; it's a terrible mindset for stabilising a peace. 

The kinetic operations in Afghanistan undertaken by NATO are being cloaked in a humanitarian discourse that disguises the military aspect of developing 'security on the ground'. The media war is seeking provide covering fire whilst the kinetic war is prosecuted. McChrystal may have attempted to develop relations between the foreign agents and the Afghans (he had good relations with Karzai, which was unusual for a high ranking U.S. official, civilian or military) but his successor Petraeus has escalated operations that seek to limit the exposure of NATO troops to danger. Airstrikes in Afghanistan and drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas have increased. Yesterday, after yet another airstrike that killed civilians, Karzai warned NATO against the continued use of these tactics.

Paula Holmes-Eber teaches the operational culture to marines at Quantico. She weds anthropology specifically to military effectiveness. This 2008 manual influenced the 2010 book she co-edited with Donald Gardner, Applications in Operational Culture: Perspectives from the Field. She can be contacted regarding her work at pholmeseber@gmail.com

Barak Salmoni moved from the Marine Corp Center for Advanced Operational Cultural Learning to RAND in 2008.

More:

See especially this informed FabiusMaximus piece that works as a bibliography.

 

Pilon, J. G. ed. (2009) Cultural Intelligence for Winning the Peace (Washington, D.C: The Institute of World Politics Press)

Porter, P. (2009) Military Orientalism (London: Hurst)

Shaffer ed. (2006) The Limits of Culture: Islam and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Stanton, J. (2009) General Petraeus' Favorite Mushroom: Inside the US Army's Human Terrain System

Review

Moghadam and Fishman eds. (2010) Self-Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions within al-Qa’ida and its Periphery, Harmony Project, Combating Terrorism Center, West Point

The Enemy Within

‘Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win’

-- Sun Tzu

Nearly eight years into the global war on terrorism, we have yet to engage successfully in the battle of ideas against radical Islamism. There is a growing recognition among counterterrorism specialists that the current struggle with al-Qa’ida must involve an ideological component to deprive it of supporters and recruits. An inside perspective on how extremists view themselves and their struggles, as well as a nuanced understanding of the ideological fissures that divide them, are steps in this effort.

-- Hafez, Self-Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions with al-Qa’ida and its Periphery, p.41

Audrey Cronin’s 2008 Adelphi Paper highlighted al-Qaeda’s ‘most potent source of strength as its powerful image and carefully crafted narrative.’ It has seemed that the West was complicit, after 9.11 in feeding the brand. Only has recent scholarly endeavour focused on analysing jihadi discourse – obtaining, translating and analysing the wealth of data that exists, and thus attempting to draw inferences from what is found there. Cronin’s paper turned the long war notion on its head when she stated that, ‘focusing on how terrorism ends is the best way to avoid being manipulated by it.’

This latest CTC volume from the Harmony Project builds on Vahid Brown’s important 2007 work, Cracks in the Foundation: Leadership Schisms in al-Qa’ida, 1989-2006’, that served to reorient scholarly focus; rather than edifying, homogenising and perceiving al-Qaeda as monolithic, ubiquitous in the Muslim world, Brown (a scholar of Bihai systems of thought) sought to deconstruct the entity through painstaking discourse analysis and understand internal conflict of the group driven by, ‘brand versus bureaucracy,’ as Brown notes:

‘In what boils down to a struggle between branding and bureaucracy, al-Qa’ida has consistently put its ability to inspire a broader movement over the development of its organizational capacities to pursue strategic military goals. While its guerrilla strategists have fought for the resources to build an effective military organization, its two supreme leaders - bin Ladin and Zawahiri - have preferred press releases over battlefield preparedness.’

(Brown, 2007)

Consisting of ten chapters that correspond to three broad areas of divisions—

theological, internal, and external areas of conflict , the latest report offers a conceptual framework, further dividing the drivers of disagreement into seven types: ideology, strategy, tactics, goals, enemy, organizational structure, and power.

Brown’s original thesis still flies and foregrounds many of the related theses in the chapters:

‘If bin Ladin and Zawahiri have power over these far‐flung affiliates, it is based on reputation and brand, not direct operational authority. Considering that affiliate leaders control more operational elements than bin Ladin and Zawahiri, it is reasonable to think they may actually be the critical leadership nodes in al-Qa’ida.’  

Despite the multitude of sources and new material that increases exponentially in the blogsphere, the databases such as Harmony, Open Source, OSINT, FBIS, BBC Worldwide Monitoring (to name a fraction), there is a need here to maintain a deep-rooted scholastic rigour. On occasion, it is betrayed here. The well-documented writings of Dr Fadl that were serialised and demonstrate an apparent reversal of his jihadi beliefs are highlighted in this volume. But Lahoud, in her brilliant The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction, explores this apparent ‘reversal’ by tracing a line through the entirety of Dr Fadl’s extant writings, as well as the circumstances surrounding that writing’s publication to add context to the reversal. Further, Hafez says of that ‘in 2005, U.S. forces in Iraq captured a letter by Zawahiri addressed to Zarqawi. The letter is dated 9 July 2005 and its contents were released by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence three months later’ (p.38). Whilst he is right to cast doubt on its authenticity in the footnote, further research would have led him to the London Times article from 2006 that suggests Israeli intelligence passed the letter to Washington and were angered when its contents were made public. This is possibly an attempt to add another layer of ‘history’ to the letter to further its ‘authenticity’ but it is worth noting here. Lahoud for example, believes the letter to be consistent with the style of Zawahiri (Lahoud Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (2010) p.208).

For a bipartite ideology that ignores the state and its rulers, creating a single dynamic between God and the individual, Jihadism has encountered a singular problem – how to play at politics when the doctrine of your beliefs does not allow for such a field. Al-Rahman wrote in a latter to al-Zarqawi that ‘policy must be dominant over militarism. This is one of the pillars of war that is agreed upon by all nations, whether they are Muslims or unbelievers. That is to say, that military action is a servant to policy.’ Jihadi ideologues are well appraised of Western scholarly thought on strategy and this appears to be what the paper calls a Clausewitzian train of thought but which more explicitly seems to identify with the Powell Doctrine.

Important distinctions are reinforced. Brooke’s separation of near (apostate regimes) and far enemy (Western Imperial backers) helps further to group the rhetoric that emanates from the jihadi ideologues and can assist in explanations of strategy, fitna (civil strife in the sense of internal schism) and ideology. Brown’s recent work on the Global/Local dichotomy and the sway that Nationalist sentiments still hold has been borne out recently, especially in papers on Somalia.

Stenersen’s chapter on the Taliban shows the early separation that bin Laden enacted by his global jihad. As a trainee asked bin Ladin in the summer of 2000, ‘how is it that you raise the call to fight America, knowing that the Taliban wouldn’t hear of such a thing, for reasons of the safety and security of Afghanistan (may God protect the Taliban)?’ Alia Brahimi, in her rigorous working The Taliban’s Evolving Ideology identifies a letter written from Mullah Omar to President Clinton, in 1996, ‘making a bifurcation between the domestic and the international arenas.  He sought to re-assure the Americans that the Taliban had neither the intent nor the capability to attack the US: “whatever we are—even  if we are as you say fundamentalists—we are far from you and we do not intend to harm you and cannot harm you either”’ (Brahimi, p.5).

Finally, Abu Waleed al-Misri, editor of the Taliban’s Arabic‐language journal, wrote: Afghanistan, the strongest fortress of Islam in history, was also lost because of a series of losses that reached a disastrous level because of the deeds of Bin Laden in Afghanistan. This disaster is worse than the calamity of the Arabs and Muslims in their wars with the Jews in 1948, which the Arabs call the “catastrophe” and the 1967 war, for which they invented the term “Setback.”

Attacks on Muslims are seen a main source of alienation and internal disagreement in Jihadi actions. Hafez writing that, ‘First, these attacks, even if permissible from a jurisprudential viewpoint, alienate broader Muslim support, which is essential for the long war against the United States and local tyrants. Second, these attacks unnecessarily open too many fronts when the priority should be given to expelling invading forces from Muslim lands. Third, indiscriminate attacks against Muslims tarnish the image of Islam and, thus, defeat the broader objective of drawing people to the Islamic faith.’ Under Zitouni’s leadership (1994 to 1996), the GIA descended into such indiscriminate savagery as to alienate the entire international jihadi movement, and ‘what happened in Algeria in the mid-1990s’ has become a euphemism in jihadi discourse for complete abandonment of any vestige of religious or ideological coherence in the nihilistic pursuit of violence.

Though there is a certain repetition in the chapters, especially from the application of certain sources (Zawahiri’s internet Question and Answer from early 2008 is widely used), this volume represents the cutting edge in dissection of jihadi discourse gleaned, with the majority of references (the 240 page document contains over 700 footnotes) coming from jihadists forums, sites and blogs. Stenersen writes presciently on foreign/local fighters in the arena of Afghanistan, and is complimented by chapters on Ikhwan/Jihadis, AQ/Hamas and AQ/ Shias: ‘Al-Qa’ida is indelibly tarred by its association with attacks on Shi’a and is therefore identified strongly in the minds of many Muslims as a radical sectarian movement that cannot claim to be the defender of Islam.’

Still there are problems with the ubiquity of the al-Qaeda label, Moghadam and Fishman observing that, al‐Qa’ida remains operationally capable, as demonstrated by the Christmas Day 2009 bombing attempt of Northwest Flight 253; by the suicide bombing of a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan; and by the murderous rampage of U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood, Texas, to name a few examples.’ Where the influence of al-Qaeda in these acts is still largely open to debate: Hasan wrote emails to al-Awlaki but was acting under his own conscience, driven by Jihadi ideas, but far from a ‘member of al-Qaeda.’

The editors of the volume urge caution in their final policy recommendations, observing that, ‘one of the main findings of this volume is that the global jihad movement’s dynamism and multi-dimensional nature-both hierarchical and flat, distinct and amorphous-makes it concurrently more susceptible, but also more impervious, to divisions.’ The jihad movement, it is noted, operates in a highly contested Islamist marketplace.’ And, ‘long after al-Qa`ida will have been destroyed, a variety of jihadi groups will continue to fight in various places around the globe, in some cases with little interest in the United States, just as they did before 9/11.’

See Further:

Deol, Jeevan and Kazmi, Zaheer, eds. (2011) Contextualising jihadi thought (Hurst & Co., London, UK) Forthcoming

Lahoud, N. (2010) The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (New York: Columbia University Press)

Review

Lahoud, Nelly (2010) The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (New York: Columbia University Press)

Academia Hits Back

‘Omar Rahman said: The prosecutor says that those who raise the slogan that power is for God while they themselves want to monopolise power have been described by Muslims and Islamic history as “Khawarij”’

-- Ayman al Zawahiri in Mansfield, L. ed. (2006) In His Own Word: A Translation of the Writings of Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri (TLG)

In the aftermath of 9.11, academics divided into two camps – those who saw this seminal event as a chasm separating the new millennium from the world of the past and others who were at pains to stress that the lessons of history could allow us to successfully adapt for the future.

The view of Islamic violence became similarly binary – a Kilcullen world view that saw the inexorable growth of jihad according to complexity theory (see also the longwarjournal for propagation of this thought) against the more cautious evaluation of the threat, most prominently from leftist academia. As the tenth anniversary of 9.11 looms, it appears that those who have favoured the applications of history and those who have urged a more measured reading of the jihadi threat are in the ascendancy: as such, Lahoud’s contribution is a timely and prescient addition to this ascendant view.

Building upon a seminar for Harvard’s Islam in the West programme that Lahoud gave in 2008 entitled, Will al-Qaida Self Destruct?, this book offers a comparison of the early Islamic Kharijite sect with the doctrine of today’s Jihadis: ‘Doctrinal differences among the jihadis serve as a major obstacle to their unity and this respect parallel with the Kharijites’. Lahoud, firmly in the Hegghammer camp at Harvard, demonstrates the departure of the jihadis from Islamists, an important distinction that will do much in the future to enhance the study of the phenomenon.

Discussion of the Kharijites with regard to current Islamic fanaticism is not new. Tamara Sonn utilised the Kharijis for her discussion on irregular warfare and terrorism in Islam [see Johnson, James T. ed. (1990) Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification of Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press) esp. Chapter 6; also see for example, Kenney (2006) Muslim Rebels: Kharijites and the Politics of Extremism in Egypt (Oxford University Press)] but Lahoud’s strength is in making the comparison (whilst stressing ‘the jihadis are not the historical descendents of the Kharijites’) that much more relevant with her explicit argument that:

‘What the Kharijites show by way of comparison is that religious groups defined by scriptural rigidity are more often defeated by their own quibbles and internal disputes over doctrine than by the sword of their enemies.’

The notable difference of course, as Lahoud alludes to, is that jihadism is a global phenomenon perpetuated by the Internet. Indeed, Lahoud’s contribution is all the more welcome for her utilisation of Islamist sites, blogs and forums as sources – affording an insight into how the scholarly evaluations of jihadi doctrine may look in the future. The Kharijites, by contrast, were geographically constrained.

Ultimately for Lahoud:

‘While violence has heightened the profile of jihadism on the world stage, the individualistic basis upon which jihadism is premised has not allowed a co-ordinated use of violence to meet strategic long-term objectives; it has prevented any form of unity, or an effective political structure to emerge out of jihadism.’ (p.14)

Lahoud isn’t alone in documenting the contradictions apparent in the jihadi phenomenon. Alia Brahimi (‘Crushed in the Shadows: How Al-Qaeda is Losing the War of Ideas’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 2010, 33(2), pp.93-100); Christina Hellmich (‘Creating the Ideology of al-Qaeda: From Hypocrites to Salafi Jihadism’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 2008, 31, pp. 111-124) Patrick Porter (‘Long Wars and Long Telegrams: Containing al-Qaeda’, International Affairs, 89, pp.285-305); Jarett Brachman and William McCants (‘Stealing Al-Qa‘ida’s Playbook’, Combating Terrorism Center) have all produced recent tracts stressing containment whilst allowing the apparent rifts in the global jihad to play out (see also ‘Self-Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions Within al-Qaida and its Periphery’, Combating Terrorism Center, West Point) also Harmony and Disharmony. Not just ideological, the schism between domestic Islamists allying with the influx of foreign fighters that espouse ideas of global jihad have led to infighting from Afghanistan to Somalia (for the latter, see ‘Somalia’s Divided Islamists’, International Crisis Group, Africa Briefing No. 74)

What the jihadis need is a Powell Doctine – some strategy that subsumes violence to the serving of political ends. But by its very nature, as a bipartite ideology that exists only between the individual and God, bypassing any political structures or deference to ruling parties, the jihad phenomenon is destined to amorphous fitna – an ideology characterised by internal dispute occasioned by sporadic acts of seemingly random violence.

Through examination of the writings of key ideologues and examining the historical precedent within the Islamic tradition, Lahoud has produced a work that can exist as the foundation stone for further examination based on her findings: though with the occasional repetition of point or quotation, this book frames the current world of jihad within a brilliantly dissected trajectory.

Lahoud isn’t frightened to contradict established wisdom and it is her analysis that proves the more inviting – from the apparent recent dissent of Dr. Fadl and al-Maqdisi [for the perceived wisdom see Bergen and Cruickshank (2008) The Unravelling, The New Republic, June 11 and Wright, Lawrence (2008) The Rebellion Within, The New Yorker, June 2] to the Taliban and al-Qaeda [see also, Strick A. and Kuehn, F. (2011) An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al-Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan 1970-2010 (Hurst and Co.)]. Anne Stenersen at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment is also preparing a volume on the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. For an alternative view of the motivation behind the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan see Cornell, Svante E. (2006) ‘Taliban Afghanistan’ in Shaffer ed. The Limits of Culture: Islam and Foreign Policy (MIT Press) p.275.

Further scholarly work should examine the impact of the 1967 symmetric war between the Arab countries and Israel that seems to have had such an impact upon the early jihadi ideologues and led to the development of the idea of asymmetric warfare in combat with apostate regimes and their western backers: al Zawahiri has written of 1967 as a moment of seemingly large impact on the psyche of the Islamic world. Another area of research is the interface between Islamists and Jihadists – this promises to be the next area of focus – as Islamic militant vehicles continue terrorist activities across South East and Central Asia. Lahoud never really explains how the phenomenon she describes might ever 'self-destruct' but Islamist blogs and forums promise plenty of interest as the ten year anniversary of 9.11 approaches. As Lahoud notes, ‘Jihadism is in the eye of the beholder, it means different things to different jihadis.’