War From the Ground Up (18 page)

When one is fixated with the interpretation of any organised violence through the prism of inter-state war, whoever shoots at you becomes ‘the enemy'. This encourages a mentality in which the enemy is treated as a unified political entity, and an assumption of a reasonable degree of coherence in their agenda, which confuses strategic planning. The last chapter argued this point in the context of Afghanistan. Yet neither does the ‘terrorist' enemy of the Long War act with a single rationale. Application of a Clausewitzian paradigm distorts the situation. As Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb, when the Commander of the Field Army, wrote on the front page of his
Counter-Insurgency Commander's Guidance
(2009): ‘an insurgent fights for change, for the freedoms he believes in and a better life. You fight for change, for the freedoms you believe in and for a better life. What's the difference?'
¹⁰

In the summer of 2010 the 1
^st
Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles (1 RGR) was based in central Helmand. While our purposes remained distinct, at one point the local insurgents started to build a road in imitation of a road we were building for the people. Conversely, the fact that the apparently efficient, if brutal, justice system offered by the Taliban is quite popular is a major incentive for the coalition to improve the Afghan justice system. These are but two of a number of examples of how, while we vilify one another, we can imitate one another in competition. This operates in the tactical domain too. While we seek to ‘out-guerrilla the guerrilla', they copy some of our tactical methods. Patrick Porter, who looks at the theme of cultural mirror-imaging in
Military Orientalism
, cites a rather amusing quotation from the 2002 al-Qaeda
‘newsletter': ‘the time has come for the Islamic movements facing a general crusader offensive to internalise the rules of fourth-generation warfare'. Porter notes the irony of the fact that this concept was coined by Bill Lind, an American cultural conservative, in the US Marine Corps
Gazette
of 1989.
¹¹

The idea that many wars have resulted from political misunderstanding is well established. Neil Sheehan stresses this in
Bright Shining Lie
(1989), his account of the Vietnam War.
¹²
America saw Ho Chi Minh's forces as part of a wider communist threat rather than as a nationalist movement which used communism as a vehicle: ‘anti-communism contributed to it [the Vietnam War] in the sense that because of their mindset, they [US leaders] wanted to see the world in black and white, they didn't want to see any shades of gray, and so you got a simple-minded anti-communism … their instincts led them to look for simple-minded solutions and they then followed those simple-minded solutions to our grief'.
¹³

The essential deduction is that, if force is to have political utility, one needs to understand the nature of the problem on its own terms, not through dogmatically applied ideological or doctrinal lenses. In contemporary conflict, if actions at the tactical level have direct political effect, they need to be planned with that in mind. Sheehan portrays Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, the protagonist through which he often views the Vietnam War, stating: ‘this is a political war, and it calls for discrimination in killing'.
¹⁴
The measures of such campaigns are the political opinions of target audiences. For Vann, the Hamlet Evaluation System, which graded each village in terms of its political sympathies, would become ‘the body count of pacification'.
¹⁵

If one fails to understand one's environment in its own political terms, one does not know what political effect one will have. Military action gains an element of lottery; one may arrest or kill insurgents because they are part of the ‘enemy', but not know who they are in political terms. The political effect may be beneficial or hugely damaging: one simply does not know in advance. In wars of ideas, and battles for perception, merely to attack ‘the enemy' in such a context is to push political buttons in the dark. As General Sir Frank Kitson wrote in
Low Intensity Operations
(1971), there is a need for both ‘political intelligence' and ‘operational intelligence' in these types of conflicts. This lesson,
like many others in General Kitson's incisive book, has had to be relearned by the coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
¹⁶

In response to this problem, one approach to counter-insurgency, used by 1 RGR in Afghanistan, sought to understand and shape the operating environment to have political effect, and to prosecute what might be termed ‘legitimacy-centric counter-insurgency', in line with General McChrystal's direction at the time: to define how actors within the political environment subscribed to the narrative of the government of Afghanistan, and attempt to draw them towards it. Once one has some form of political understanding, one can tailor the strategic narrative to each audience. The chart at
Figure 9
shows the different political affiliations of a fictional society based on an Afghan district. This particular model is not complicated, and one can clearly come up with more sophisticated political models. Simplicity, however, has a utility of its own so long as it distils rather than distorts a political environment. The real utility is the creation of a common political operating picture that can be mutually understood by coalition soldiers, civilian counterparts and Afghan partners.

The model breaks down a society into target audiences in much the same way as a politician in a domestic political environment would do. The colouring of these audiences is in relation to their proximity to the Afghan government narrative, ranging from white, meaning they generally subscribe, to grey denoting ambivalence, to black, for those who reject it. In the bottom right-hand corner are those who support the Afghan government narrative but not the insurgent narrative. In the top left-hand corner are those who support the insurgent narrative but not the Afghan government's. In the bottom left we have those who are alienated from both sides; the majority of people in the Afghan conflict will be found here, be they ‘accidental guerrillas' or disenfranchised farmers. In the top right we have those who back both narratives to gain personal advantage, such as big narco-militias and warlords. These people usually have connections to the insurgency and the government.

The essential deduction this model presents is that to have political effect, one needs to make political choices at the tactical level to tailor the overall narrative to have purchase in one's operating environment; or potentially, to show that the overall narrative really does not work in one's own area and requires adjustment higher up.

Can the moderate insurgents be broken off from the hardcore? If so, how do we configure our operations to make sure we are putting pressure on the hardcore without alienating the moderates? How does one deal with the audiences in the top right? An overly aggressive posture risks inflating the size of the insurgency; not dealing with them risks losing credibility among the bottom left groups. Does one use resources
to bolster the position of those in the bottom right, who already support the narrative, or reach out to less committed constituencies, potentially alienating one's home base? These are examples of any number of questions one could ask. They have to be asked when one decides how to attack an insurgent base area, where to build a road, where the local police force should recruit, and to whom one should award contracts. Without such information, or where there is not a common political picture across time and space, a circumstance all too common, actions will be politically incoherent.

The approach also dispenses with the notion of an isolated enemy picture; that is, a picture which only presents the insurgency, often in the form of tree diagrams, in terms of its operational set-up. While such charts are obviously vital, political context is essential: who are these insurgents in social and political terms? Without that information, one can attack a network, and even destroy it, but the political effects of doing so, both in terms of positive and negative outcomes, will be uncertain.

One needs to locate the insurgency in its political context before one can even start to think about how to deal with it. Are they fighting because of genuine ideological attachment to the Taliban? Perhaps they are fighting because they are marginalised in local politics, and want greater power locally; perhaps they are criminals, perhaps they are ‘accidental guerrillas' who see themselves as defending their land against foreign forces, but do not have a problem with Afghan government forces.

An insurgent commander in Afghanistan may also be the relative of a prominent local political figure. His death or arrest may alienate that political figure from the Afghan government. The military benefits of attacking the insurgent network may well be outweighed by the political consequences of the action. Alternatively, if that political figure is corrupt, one may use the threat of arrest against his insurgent relative as leverage to stop his corrupt practices. Yet if one does not configure one's information so as to situate insurgents within their ‘civilian' environment, these links will not be visible, precluding the possibility of anticipating risks and opportunities in the first place.

The identification of political leaders who are marginalised, be they insurgents or not, is also vital. This is an important counter-balance to the preoccupation with ‘key leaders' that tends to dominate ISAF political
engagement at all levels. If ISAF is only seen to engage with leaders who are already in power, the appeal to a narrow political base is exaggerated, and may well alienate marginalised communities.

In summary, as counter-insurgency involves armed politics, it requires making real political choices, even at the tactical level. If one company secures an area by empowering one tribe, and the adjacent company empowers another in their area, an illusion of stability may be created that falls apart as soon as the coalition have left should it turn out that the two groups are hostile to one another. One cannot refuse to engage in political activity: the empowerment or marginalising of individuals and groups will occur through coalition actions, whether deliberate or not.

The difficulty that having to make real political choices on the ground presents can be illustrated with reference to the British experience in Afghanistan. On the one hand, the British military and its civilian counterparts are fighting for ‘a better life for the Afghan people'. However, the British effort is also premised on a narrative that emphasises British national security. This depends on the denial of the Afghan state for terrorist use. The desire for a stable Afghanistan to safeguard regional security, especially given the insurgency in Pakistan, is also perhaps considered in rational terms to be more important than a just and democratic Afghanistan. The problem with this is as follows: if the tactical actions that strategy orchestrates cannot satisfy all of it political aims, a political choice must be made between courses of action; if that choice is not made, tactical actions are pulled in different directions and will not be coherent.

The anti-narcotics policy goal in Helmand, for example, might be said to frustrate other policy goals, and pulls the effort there in different directions. The idea that destroying poppy removes the insurgency's main income may be true; yet it also removes the income of the rest of the population, as it is the basis of the economy. In this respect a blanket ban on poppy may appeal to domestic political sensitivities, but it does not help to win anyone's support in Helmand. If poppy were destroyed selectively as a form of political pressure (a means rather than an end) it would be a very effective tool. Yet that is not possible if one subscribes to a blanket ban. On the other side of the argument is the belief that drugs fuel corruption, and the West should not tolerate drug dealers given its own domestic stance on the issue.

While there are legitimate arguments on both sides, the approach is currently in limbo as the need to avoid pushing peasants towards the insurgency by burning their crops is usually the more pragmatic choice. The question here is not the policy itself, but how the absence of proper strategic dialogue has led to stagnation.

On 1 December 2007 C Company 1 RGR, in which I served, fought its most successful battle of the tour in the village of Siah Choy, in a combined operation with Canadian infantry and armour on the banks of the Arghandab River, west of Kandahar city. We caught the insurgents by surprise and routed them. One memorable feature of the battle was the fact that one of the contacts found my platoon running around village streets that were full of drying marijuana, which was both surreal and an indication of the huge scale necessary for any undertaking to eradicate the crop. Properly resourced and prosecuted, it is possible (poppy was successfully eradicated from some districts of Helmand, such as Nawa). However, there is no comparable crop with which to replace people's livelihoods. This remains the case today. For anyone on the ground, the need to establish some coherence in the approach, while recognising that there are legitimate views on either side of the argument, is plain to see.