War From the Ground Up (34 page)

However, while Clausewitz acknowledged the existential dimension of war, both for the individual and the state participant, he assumed that his actors were within the state, and still bound by its rationale. Thus the general who made instinctive decisions was still in the service of state policy. By the same token, the people's role was critical: the ‘condition and temper' of the civilian population mattered to strategy in terms of its ability to support a friendly army with supplies and information, or to deny this to an enemy army.
⁴⁶
However, people's allegiances were fixed: they were friendly or enemy and, critically, were victorious or defeated with their state.
⁴⁷
The state provided a vital common interpretive ground for the people, the army and the government to understand war in the same way and be defeated or victorious together.

For Clausewitz emotional dynamics underpin his concept of war. The polarity which defined the relationship of state opponents in war was grounded in emotional antagonism. This was not usually between individual soldiers, but between their states: ‘modern wars are seldom fought
without hatred between nations; this serves more or less as a substitute between individuals'.
⁴⁸
Indeed the etymology of the word ‘enemy' is from the Latin
in
+
amicus
(friend) giving
inimicus
(not friend). The distinction between oneself and the enemy is an emotional one; this sets up the antagonism which then determines when to demand recognition of legitimacy of one's strategic narrative through violence.
⁴⁹

Yet the total identification of strategic audiences with their state, which makes the enemy ‘the' enemy (a single, unified, entity), is usually an idealised pole; this was so in Clausewitz's day too.
⁵⁰
In contemporary conflict, the idea that there are audiences within the state who actively try to fight against the policies in war of their ‘own' state is commonplace. British citizens have been known to fight as insurgents in Afghanistan and other parts of the world. The importance of identification with the state historically has been a matter of degree rather than a clear distinction.

When a strategic audience stops identifying with the state's strategic narrative, the inter-state paradigm of war starts to break down. This is one of the themes in
All Quiet on the Western Front
.
⁵¹
Paul Baümer is a patriotic German soldier who acts on the basis of his country's rationale for war. His own emotional understanding, however, comes to subvert that rationale. This process evolves predominantly as war's emotional reality imposes itself on its rationale: ‘a hospital alone shows what war is'.
⁵²

As his experience of combat expands, Baümer and his comrades start to doubt their state's rationale for war. One of his comrades, Tjaden, responds to the suggestion that war starts ‘by one country offending another': ‘a country, I don't follow. A mountain in Germany can't offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat'. This problem is brought out by another soldier in this discussion: ‘it's queer when one thinks about it; we are here to protect our fatherland. The French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now, who's in the right?'
⁵³
The deconstruction of the emotional antagonism between states prefigures Baümer's loss of hatred for his ‘enemy' on an individual level. This is illustrated in a key passage in which he has just killed a French soldier:

But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

Once Baümer distances himself from any personal enmity for the enemy, he begins to doubt the rational interpretation. Full realisation comes when his emotional response to killing a French soldier overcomes the purchase of the rational interpretation. His rationale is no longer aligned to the reasons for which he is being told to fight. The book's final paragraph portrays Baümer's death as the ultimate irony in its juxtaposition of the war's rational and emotion interpretations:

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

Identification with the state in the paradigm of inter-state war is an important binding force which associates a rational narrative with a legitimating emotional response. Yet the paradigm of inter-state war does not easily comprehend situations in which people act according to emotional responses which derive from an identity not associated with that of a state party to conflict. Contemporary conflict is characterised by the proliferation of audiences beyond the enemy, as polarity gives way to politically kaleidoscopic conflict environments. These audiences always potentially existed, but were not audiences until the information revolution connected them to the conflict as audiences, hence their proliferation. A second, intrinsically associated trend is the proliferation of audiences beyond state parties as non-state audiences, or non-state actors (usually two statuses of the same entity, in that an action as an actor will probably be a function of interpretation as an audience).

For a state party's strategic narrative to gain purchase on these audiences it cannot assume pre-existing identification with the state, but neither can it persuade them by force. They are less likely to be persuaded by the rational component of a state party to the conflict's strategic narrative.

Because membership of a state is often a powerful emotional bond, people who identify with their state are more likely to subscribe to their state's strategic narrative, even if they may have their own reservations. Conversely, strategic audiences without affiliation to a state party involved in the conflict are more likely to assess the legitimacy of a strategic narrative based on their own emotional response, as they would usually have less reason to follow the rationale of a state which they do
not identify with, especially if that state is acting in its self-interest. If these non-state audiences also lie beyond the enemy, neither can they be forced to subscribe to a strategic narrative. Hence the emotional response of non-state audiences becomes of paramount importance in order that those audiences see one's strategic narrative as legitimate.

The progressive inversion of the rational-emotional functionality is in many ways the leitmotif of the challenge to the paradigm of inter-state war. In contemporary conflict, the emotional aspect of strategic narrative comes increasingly to the fore as a persuasive device.

Where the emotional interpretation becomes functional for an audience, the ‘identity' of the audience becomes a key factor because identity is usually the basis for emotional response. The massive expansion in the requirement for liberal powers and their militaries to understand the ‘human terrain', a sort of conflict anthropology, bears witness to the revival of the importance of people's identities in contemporary conflict.

In Afghanistan, emotional responses by a range of actors of significantly diverse socio-political identities produce alternative rationales to that offered by the competing strategic narratives of the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban. The Wednesday Market Bombing is a practical example of this. On 31 March 2010 a bomb was planted by insurgents in the crowded weekly Wednesday bazaar of a rural part of Helmand Province. It was aimed at the Afghan police, who in the event were not there that day. Around thirteen civilians were killed and many more wounded. Reported on BBC news, the event was transmitted to global audiences, some of whom would have mattered more than others to the conflict's outcome (the ‘strategic audiences'). All these audiences would probably have varied in their interpretations of the event's meaning. I arrived on the scene after the event, where the Coldstream Guards had been treating the injured in a nearby International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) patrol base. This is an edited extract from a note I made at the time:

Shura [meeting] for returning dead bodies from IED this morning… Approx 40 injured/dead, all locals. Struck by dignity of scene: evening last light approaching, locals go out from shura to pray. What will be will be: ‘
inshallah
…' Rhythms and liturgies seem to channel their grief… The dead are buried the same day. Life goes on. One of our soldiers was speaking to a mullah: ‘you (us and the Taliban) fight, we die'.

The BBC news story was fair but located the event in a wider government of Afghanistan/ISAF versus Taliban story.
⁵⁴
That is indeed the story into which ISAF and the Taliban leadership tend to weave events. That is not necessarily illegitimate; the insurgents' intent in this case had been to kill the Afghan police; whether or not they had anticipated such a large blast and the civilian collateral damage is not known. There was another theory that traders from the Ishaqzai tribe wanted to destroy this popular bazaar in Barakzai heartland to shift economic activity in their direction. While I do not think this causal explanation is likely, the fact that locals were speaking in these terms, however conspiratorial, shows that they did not rely only on the polarised narrative to understand the conflict.

The ISAF-Taliban narrative of the war in relative terms is not, indeed, one that many farmers in Helmand care that much about. Unlike civilians in the paradigm of inter-state war, they are not strongly bound to state narratives (of either their official or shadow state). This emotional circumstance is fundamental to understanding the political positions of many Afghans. They do not have ‘divided loyalties' as the paradigm of inter-state war would see it; they are loyal to their own interests. They are actors in their own right. Their emotional circumstance underpins the conflict's kaleidoscopic political configuration: this is the bridge to Clausewitz's ideas, for while Afghanistan is not an inter-state war, the emotional texture of the conflict is the legitimising base of any presentation of its rational, abstracted, form.

When the Afghan conflict is understood in terms of war, war provides a fragmented, rather than a stable, interpretive structure because the war means so many different things to so many different people. This subverts the relationship between the rational and the emotional in the inter-state paradigm of war. In the inter-state paradigm the rational mode of understanding is a centripetal force which unifies events into a single narrative: the ‘big picture'. It is on the basis of this rational ‘big picture' that strategists can make sense of events and make plans. Conversely, the emotional mode of understanding is a centrifugal force in which what the war means to an individual has endless variation. It is recognised as legitimate but not a basis on which to plan. When the emotional mode becomes functional it acts against the rational by suggesting a new rationale. This is dangerous for the rational interpretation: it begins to fragment as it is pulled by the centrifugal force of emotional
interpretation. As globalisation reworks identity both in terms of unifying and dividing people, the rationale for any war will find it hard to gain purchase on every potential strategic audience.

This presents strategic narrative with a problem. An appeal exclusively to
logos
risks the marginalisation of certain strategic audiences (which policy may well accept as a risk), as arguments based exclusively on national interests may not have a sufficiently broad emotional appeal to audiences beyond one's state. Conversely, appeal to
pathos
is inherently unstable, as it encourages strategic narrative to latch onto utilitarian and supposedly universal concepts such as ‘freedom' to bind together strategic audiences (this is discussed in the next chapter). Problems occur when it becomes clear that national interest starts to compete with these more idealistic propositions when choices about campaign resourcing and achievability of aims need to be made. Yet a connection between
logos
and
pathos
is nonetheless required in any strategic narrative to achieve legitimacy. The next chapter examines how to stabilise their relationship, particularly with reference to the last of Aristotle's rhetorical resources:
ethos
.

If war loses its integrity as a common interpretive structure for strategic narrative to rely upon, actions in conflict may well be subject to significantly differing interpretations. This establishes a tension at the core of the strategic narrative that can pull it apart: for strategic narrative to be legitimate in the eyes of a strategic audience, its rational argument needs to find resonance with the identity of that audience in human, emotional terms; emotional interpretation legitimises the rational narrative.

Yet as the differences in socio-political identity between strategic audiences proliferate in an ever more interconnected world, no single narrative can usually satisfy everyone. That is, to define victory absolutely would mean universally to convince strategic audiences of victory, or success, in one's own terms, which is generally impossible. This chapter examines how to stabilise the relationship between the rational and emotive components of strategic narrative—
logos
and
pathos
—in order to generate a sense of legitimacy and to gain purchase on strategic audiences.

Three themes are suggested: the centrality of the moral component, or
ethos
; the power of historical association; and the necessity for liberal powers to avoid literalism in their arguments with fundamentalists, and instead present a strategic vision confident in its own values.