War From the Ground Up (35 page)

The First World War came to be justified by several participants through explanations that went beyond national interest. President Woodrow Wilson in his speech announcing the US Declaration of War on Germany on 2 April 1917 appealed to universal motives:

It is a war against all nations… It is a challenge to all mankind… Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion… Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up among the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.

While such justifications make apparently powerful appeals to domestic and worldwide audiences, the idea of fighting for universal values is clearly a paradox since there would be no enemy if those values were genuinely universal. Given the scale of destruction in the First World War, an ironic dimension can be detected in the post-war label of a ‘war to end all wars'. The need to bind people together through narratives that appeal to ‘universal' values, which are more heavily located in the emotional than the rational rhetorical domain, is at odds with the inherent fragility of such universal claims. This is a difficult tension that often finds expression in contemporary conflict.

In a highly interconnected world, rational strategic narratives based on national interest, which might equate to Aristotle's
logos
, are less able in a conflict scenario to gain broad traction, as strategic audiences beyond the enemy, and beyond the state, proliferate in their diversity. This is common sense. Why would Afghan civilians, for example, support coalition efforts (or even be passive) in Afghanistan if the coalition was purely there for its own interests, and not for the well-being of Afghans? Strategists delve increasingly into the emotional domain,
pathos
, to gain purchase on target audiences beyond the enemy and the state. Thus ‘freedom', for example, becomes a strategic aim. President Bush in November 2003 spoke about the ‘forward strategy of freedom' at a speech in London.
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In terms of rhetoric, fighting for freedom suggests an experience which can be universally shared by the target audiences and thus bind them together.

The experience of applying a forward strategy of freedom suggests that emotionally-based narratives are highly problematic. Many audiences did not interpret freedom in the same way as President Bush. The key tension in strategic narrative in the context of contemporary globalisation is between universal themes, which tend to be situated in the emotional domain, and themes based on particular political agendas, which tend to be defined in rational terms. Strategy has to keep them in an uneasy relationship to maintain coherence.

The difficulty of so doing can be illustrated with reference to coalition aims in Afghanistan. Over the course of the conflict the following sets of objectives, which have all appeared at various points, have often competed and clashed with one another rather than be mutually reinforcing: democracy, development, drug eradication, women's rights, the removal of the Taliban, the denial of Afghanistan to al-Qaeda and its associated syndicates, the credibility of NATO, regional stability, the denial of a safe haven to the Pakistani Taliban, the commitment to the Afghan people.

To deal with the problem of universality of appeal versus national interests, other countries have opted for a simple, and sometimes brutal, alternative: to define their strategic audiences far more narrowly. This is the equivalent of a political approach in domestic politics that focuses on the satisfaction of a narrow part of the electorate without concern for the alienation of other audiences. Russia, for example, has in a sense succeeded in securing Chechnya in two wars. The Sri Lankan government forces also seem to have succeeded in their war against the Tamil Tigers. However, the definition of success in both of these instances is partial. The extent of human rights violations committed in these cases qualifies the recognition of victory in the eyes of much of the international community. To operate in this way is to make a Faustian pact, as the resentment which such methods inevitably will arouse may come to compromise the stability of any strategic effect achieved in the short-term. The use by liberal powers of extraordinary rendition is another example of such practice. The moral high ground, once evacuated, is very hard to regain.
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How can this problem be resolved, or at least mitigated? Strategy needs to pay attention to the third rhetorical resource:
ethos. Ethos
stabilises and insulates strategic effect, which otherwise can be over-exposed to the conflicting relationship between rational and emotional narrative,
which, in terms of Aristotle's understanding of rhetoric, can broadly be equated with
logos
and
pathos
.

Strategic narrative is permanently aspirational. Strategy is necessarily arrogant in the sense that it seeks to impose a permanence of meaning against the challenge of future interpretation.

The Pyrrhic victory is an extreme example. In fact the outcomes of most wars have evolved, as their consequences mesh with the future and people interpret the outcome—the meaning—of the war differently. The two world wars of the twentieth century were seen as victories for Britain by the majority of British people at the time; they also, however, broke the British Empire, a result that will itself be read differently by various constituencies. Vietnam could legitimately have been interpreted as a partial American success, or at least a draw, when President Richard Nixon declared that the 1973 Paris peace agreement brought ‘peace with honour in Vietnam and South East Asia'. That view was re-interpreted after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was, to my mind legitimately, not considered a failure by the USSR at the time (and Western analysis has been heavily distorted by a victor's view of the Cold War's end); the USSR had handed power over to a relatively stable Afghan state headed by President Najibullah. Although his army suffered reverses, it stabilised the situation and decisively defeated the Mujahideen at the battle of Jalalabad in 1989. (The most dangerous moment for an insurgency is often when it has to convert to a conventional force finally to topple the state forces; since conventional high-intensity battle is far more complex and resource-intensive than guerrilla warfare, insurgencies often fail at this point. The Mujahideen here are not the only example of this; note the same phenomenon with the Tamil Tigers. This factor will, I think, come to play a role in the current Afghan conflict too.)

The more genuine reason for the collapse of the Najibullah regime is fairly obvious: the collapse of the USSR itself in 1991, which had been funding the Afghan government. However, for the USSR, a perception of having at least forced a stalemate in 1989 was seen as a failure once the Mujahideen entered Kabul. As Clausewitz himself recognised: ‘in war the result is never final'.
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The requirement to maintain the narrative—perpetually to win the argument—is enduring, not finite.

One deduction is that where the meaning of war is not compartmentalised by a common interpretive structure, strategic effect is often based on how future interpreters perceive the moral component of a strategic narrative. The British policy of appeasement in the 1930s is remembered with shame less because it was strategically unsuccessful than because it was cowardly; in one analysis Hitler's perception of moral weakness was a key factor in the strategy's failure from the British perspective, so the two factors were linked at the time too, not just in retrospect. In
Unfinest Hour
(2002) Brendan Simms documents how British policy during the Bosnian War of the 1990s was plagued by a morally questionable foreign policy.
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There may be rational reasons why Dutch troops failed to act to prevent a massacre at the Srebrenica enclave in 1995, but they have little purchase on most audiences. Troops at another safe area in Gorazde in 1994–5 were under largely the same authority and successfully prevented a massacre by taking on Serbian soldiers.

The Second World War, although globally more damaging in human terms than the First, is remembered as more purposeful because questions of right and wrong were far more distinct. The original supporters of the Iraq War today often focus on Saddam Hussein's removal as a positive fact, despite the subsequent narrative of the conflict. Even many of those who did not support the war would agree that Saddam Hussein's removal, in itself, was a good thing. Conversely, many of the rational reasons, such as weapon of mass destruction (WMD), or the emotional reasons, such as the general, confident, mood of ‘what next' in the US administration after the 2001 Afghanistan success, have long since evaporated. At the time of writing it is unclear how things in Iraq will progress. However, depending on the outcome, those earlier rational reasons may be rehabilitated, or not, while Saddam Hussein's removal is permanent. The point is that rational and emotional reasons oscillate; moral reasons are more stable.

There are some important caveats to this argument. First, one cannot construct foreign policy exclusively on the basis of moral imperative. The danger would be that it is very hard to limit moral arguments, and limitation of conflict is critical to wider international stability. State sovereignty, for example, needs to be taken into consideration. In short, there also have to be other forms of strategic rationale. Yet to gain traction on a politically diverse range of target audiences, strategic narrative in contemporary conflict may struggle if it appeals purely to national
interest, which might be associated with more
logos
-type rational arguments; the narrative may also struggle if over-exposed to fragile universal claims more associated with the emotional domain of
pathos
. Appeal to
ethos
is a powerful binding force. However, used on its own it is also a destabilising force, as it has no obvious limit. The alternative approach is to try not to have wide appeal in the first place and to ignore wider strategic audiences, for which the Russian approach in Chechnya provides an example, but this evidently brings problems of its own.

Counter-insurgency theory stresses living among people to develop human relationships, and thereby persuading people to see the counter-insurgent in a different light. There are several instances in Afghanistan where a local inhabitant may not agree with the presence of British forces in his area, but has told a soldier he has got to know personally of an improvised explosive device (IED) ahead. The effect of living among people in the context of counter-insurgency has an extraordinary effect, which is hard to quantify in rational terms.

As a Gurkha battlegroup in Central Helmand during the summer of 2010, we found that the single greatest shift in popular perceptions of us came when we started to live among people. This meant getting out of our forward operating bases and actually permanently living in the villages in much smaller fortified compounds. The people then got to know us as other human beings. Greeting people on patrol by name makes a massive difference. Sergeant Govinda Gurung, who commanded a checkpoint, was actually clapped out by villagers, who lined the streets, when his multiple left the village at the end of their tour. The fact that this side of the narrative in Afghanistan is consistently pushed back by the more sensational emotional appeal of violent activity, even if the latter may be less prevalent in a given area, accounts for much of the quality of perceptions of contemporary conflicts.

Conversely, I often thought when I was a platoon commander that turning up to a remote village for the first time, despite our best efforts to adopt a soft posture, and despite explaining that we were here to hand out medical supplies, was, from the villagers' perspective, rather odd. They may well have been grateful for the medical care but they were suspicious about its context. Doctors in the UK don't typically turn up with an armed entourage! It is far easier to communicate intention if one feels at ease and trusts one's interlocutor.

Living among the people in small outposts was also one of the key success stories of the surge in Baghdad. General Lamb in his commander's guidance for counter-insurgency writes that ‘your morality defines your legitimacy', and advances an association between ‘minimum force' and ‘moral force'.
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In short, humanity often cuts across prejudice. In an information age in which public diplomacy is as important as traditional diplomatic activity, engagement with whole peoples on a human level becomes ever more necessary as a form of persuasion.

As war fuses with politics, humanitarian considerations can become the lowest common denominating cognitive unit among very diverse audiences. As time progresses, the perceived moral component of strategic narrative becomes increasingly important in the stability of strategic effect: a perceived victory does not suddenly appear as a defeat. In the longer term, strategy convinces less through Aristotle's
logos
, the rational component of narrative, and
pathos
, emotional appeals, but more through
ethos
, the moral component of narrative. Moreover a strategic narrative which neglects ethos completely is in danger of finding itself illegitimate in the longer term.

The construction of an interpretive framework is critical to give meaning to actions in order to achieve a policy outcome. During the global financial crisis of 2008 the world looked to the US government's actions in order to decipher the ‘pathology' of the crisis against which to act.
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This was a combination of how the US government acted in terms of its support (or absence of support) to financial institutions and in terms of how that behaviour was situated in a broader historical framework. In Andrew Ross Sorkin's account of the crisis,
Too Big to Fail
(2009), he relates an answer which Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave in response to a question asking whether this would be a second Great Depression, or another ‘lost decade', as Japan had experienced: ‘No. Because we've learnt so much about them that we won't have either'.
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