War From the Ground Up (16 page)

While this approach can legitimately be seen as successful from one perspective, the long-term fusion of military and political activity had destabilising consequences. British policy on the North-West Frontier provided an ideological counter-point for the radicalisation of people into Islamic extremists. David Loyn documents how the Wahabbi-inspired Deobandi strand of Islamic thought produced militants who sought to integrate themselves with the Pathan tribes. By 1849, for example, militants controlled the Swat Valley. The Ambeyla campaign in 1863 to eject them cost the British over 800 dead; prototype ‘bomb factories' were found by the troops that cleared their base. Twelve-thousand-five-hundred men were needed five years later to dislodge militants who had made common cause with tribesmen in Sittana. Fanatical militants, called ‘ghazis', used to fight alongside the Pathan tribes under the green banner of Islam as distinct units, travelling to conduct jihad.
³¹

David Loyn states that the first recorded attempt at a suicide attack on British troops in Afghanistan was in Kandahar on 17 January 1880: a man calling himself a
Talib-ul-ulm
ran up to a British Engineer Sergeant
and tried to kill him but was stopped.
³²
In 1895 Mullah Powindah, a fundamentalist mystic, led his network of militants into the Swat Valley and joined forces with the Wahabists there under Mullah Sadhullah. Their call for jihad against the British was backed by the Afghan king, Abdur Rahman. Loyn notes how Abdur Rahman quoted the same passages from the Koran as Osama Bin Laden later used.
³³
This Islamic narrative was inter-twined with the Pathan General Uprising of 1897. After their defeat in the Tirah campaign, the militants moved to an even more remote area and even started to publish a newspaper called
Mujaheed
.
³⁴

Loyn's remarkable account of this century of political violence, which can only be summarised in its most basic form here, illustrates the unstable and unpredictable consequences of the use of force outside the interpretive structure of war in the Clausewitzian sense. Loyn's argument is perhaps encapsulated by his assertion that the same villages in Waziristan that were the first to rise up against Great Britain and back the ghazis, later backed the Mujahideen, and now back Al Qaeda.

A counter-point to the rather austere radicalising trends at play during the century Loyn describes is provided by John Masters, a Gurkha officer who describes his experience living and fighting on the North-West Frontier, particularly from 1936–7, in the first of his autobiographical books,
Bugles and a Tiger
(1956). He recounts, for instance, that after each campaigning season ‘scores of Pathans' who had been fighting against the British Indian army would earnestly apply to their British political agent for the Frontier Medal (the medal more typically awarded to soldiers of the British Indian army rather than to the ‘enemy'!) with the appropriate clasp; after all, in their view they had valiantly fought in the same actions.
³⁵
Masters' retrospective account of the texture of the British Empire's interaction with the peoples of the North-West Frontier at its twilight is a reminder that there were more subtle narratives at play in that period too: the notion of the politically kaleidoscopic battle-space is a long-standing feature of conflict that the contemporary context merely exaggerates.

To this point
War From the Ground Up
has sought to draw attention to what characterises the concept of war in contemporary conflict, in particular to identify the continuities, evolutions, or breaks with war as more traditionally defined in its inter-state paradigm; the concept as posited by Clausewitz being the primary point of comparison. Clausewitz
wrote about war shortly after its transformation by Napoleon; war today is again being transformed by the information revolution, which forces liberal powers to reconsider strategic thought in relation to their use of armed force. The remainder of the book examines how the West can operate in the politically fragmented, and interpretively unstable, environments which tend to characterise contemporary conflicts.

When in contemporary conflict the application of force moves towards being a direct extension of policy, but is shoehorned into the interpretive structure of war in its more traditional, Clausewitzian sense, armed force frequently fails to connect to political utility. The following three pairs of chapters examine possible responses to this problem by liberal powers. Three themes are developed: the construction of the political context of conflict through strategic dialogue (
Chapters 4
and
5
); the construction of operational approaches (
Chapters 6
and
7
); and the construction of strategic narratives, which connect operational approaches to their political context (
Chapters 8
and
9
).

Strategic dialogue is the reciprocal interaction between policy, in the sense of the political decisions and intentions of the state, and how policy is articulated as actual operations: the interaction between what is desired and what is possible. I make a distinction between the organisation of strategic dialogue, in terms of the procedural configuration of how strategy is made within the state, and the substantive output that dialogue produces: the strategy itself. This chapter considers strategic dialogue in terms of what political choice means in contemporary conflict. The next chapter considers how well liberal powers, particularly in terms of their civil-military structures, are configured to conduct effective strategic dialogue.

When tactical actions are highly politicised, strategy needs to ensure that policy is politically coherent down to the tactical level; this is consistent
with the role of strategy in armed conflict as a bridge between political and operational activity. Yet when liberal powers do not understand a problem on its own terms, applying instead a distorting paradigm of war, proper strategic dialogue is frustrated. This is primarily because conventional war is often understood as a decisive, finite, event; the flow of direction is one way, from policy through various levels to tactical execution; the military execute, but do not question policy. Moreover, strategic dialogue is blocked the other way too: when a default association is made between the action of armed forces taking place within the military domain of ‘war', the traditional view is that civilian politicians, once their policy direction has been given, should ‘stay out' of military activity. That view is misguided; policy makers should be as close as possible, realistically, in a vicarious sense, to the political pulse of the conflict on the ground.

Strategy links deliberate action to political outcomes. In the Clausewitzian paradigm, while the lines of policy continue into war and drive military action, actions within war seek intermediate military, not directly political, objectives. In this context the strategic ‘level' can legitimately be understood to be at the juncture of military and political activity, the boundary perhaps between war and international politics; this would normally be defined procedurally in terms of the interaction of politicians and generals. Below that level is the domain of operational military planning that ultimately serves a political end, but is itself military. In this context, for the policy-maker to consult ‘ground truth' means to consult generals, not the soldiers below them, about the feasibility of achieving a given policy.

In the Second World War, for example, the experience of the common solider was clearly ground truth of a sort, but not the kind that mattered to policy. The interaction between military action and policy—strategic dialogue—occurred much higher in the chain of command. This made sense as the juncture of military and political actions was usually at the level of whole corps and army groups. For instance, General Patton's push into Czechoslovakia with his Third Army Group in the dying days of the war in 1945 was primarily driven by political factors in terms of the race against Soviet occupation rather than the German military threat.

There is an important distinction to be made between two possible significations of what the ‘strategic level' means in the context of armed conflict. First, it means a location of strategic authority, in the sense that a person, usually of very senior military or diplomatic rank, makes decisions that formulate and adjust the strategic basis of operational plans in light of policy, and potentially makes recommendations to policy-makers to adjust policy in light of operational reality. Second, the strategic level can be understood as a domain in which an action has a political quality.

In traditionally defined conventional war there tends to be an overlap between the location of strategic authority and the location at which people make decisions that have a political quality, as in the example of General Patton above. In contemporary conflicts, however, the tendency is for there not to be a neat overlap, but an expansion of the strategic domain. This domain includes, but also goes far beyond, those who have strategic authority, like one circle expanding beyond another. Relatively junior commanders find themselves making decisions which although nowhere near as significant in scale as ‘strategic' decisions made by those who have strategic authority, nonetheless have a directly political quality, however insignificant those actions in themselves may be, and so are also, in an alternative sense, ‘strategic'.

This creates something of a mismatch, and can change the role of the commander with strategic authority, especially in emphasising his or her co-ordaining function across several tactical sub-units/agencies, military and civilian, relative to the function more traditionally associated with the strategic commander, of delivering decisive blows to the enemy.

In contemporary conflict, tactical action frequently does have directly political significance. This is not just when a tactical event is picked up by the global media, but also on a routine basis. The political outcome of a conflict is the accumulated outcome of innumerable individual actions as opposed to decisive blows against the enemy. This type of cumulative campaign has been described in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan by Dr Conrad Crane as a ‘mosaic' conflict.
¹
This term encapsulates the idea that the war is best represented by the accumulated effect of a multitude of sub-narratives, none of which is decisive in itself. In this context, strategy looks to brigades, battlegroups and companies, and their respective civilian equivalents and host nation partners, to deliver political results. Each may be pursuing very different activities,
ranging from high-intensity combat to humanitarian work, even within a small physical space.
Figures 7
and
8
exemplify mosaic conflict in the context of the coalition effort in Iraq in 2004.
²

In such circumstances strategic considerations have to inform tactical action, in order to link tactical actions to political purpose. There may still be a ‘strategic level' in the sense that it denotes a particular grade of civilian/military authority, but this should not be confused with the location of strategic effect, that is, the strategic domain. Strategic effect in many contemporary conflicts, including Afghanistan, is fragmentary: ‘in counter-insurgency, the levels of war are all flattened'.
³

The problem of how to have strategic effect in a fragmented conflict environment was considered in 1967 by Admiral J. C. Wylie, who distinguished between ‘sequential' and ‘cumulative' strategies.
⁴
Sequential strategies were linear. To achieve the goal of policy, step A led to B, led to C. He uses General MacArthur's island-hopping campaign in the Pacific during the Second World War as an example. Decisiveness, traditionally the feature by which an action has been defined as ‘strategic' (rather than ‘tactical'), is stamped on history with every step taken along a single path to the ultimate objective.

Cumulative strategies could be just as decisive, but far less perceptibly so. The US navy's wider contribution to the war in the Pacific is used as an example. The cumulative effect of each Japanese naval and merchant ship sunk, for instance, gradually choked the Japanese economy, a critical component of the US Pacific war effort. For Admiral Wylie these strategies were not mutually exclusive, as their unity in the overall Pacific campaign makes clear. In some ways Wylie's ‘cumulative' strategy is about how to conceptualise an attritional strategy: the final result may be decisive, but the distance from the destination may not be signposted as clearly as an outcome arrived at through a series of decisive battles.

In Afghanistan, Wylie's argument is equally applicable. Decisive, sequential, strategic actions may legitimately be pursued, such as some form of negotiated settlement with the Taliban. Certain military actions may also have decisive strategic effect in themselves: the 2011 Osama Bin Laden raid being an example. However, in parallel with sequential approaches, the coalition is pursuing a cumulative campaign gradually to reconfigure the political landscape, namely by attempting to connect people to the Afghan government.