The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (14 page)

Like the church in the Middle Ages, the universal authority asserted by the human rights regime remains controversial. In 1948, Saudi Arabia and South Africa abstained from endorsing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a foundational human rights document, for fear that it would challenge their own ability to determine the norms of justice within their borders. Islamic nations contest the universality of human rights, claiming that they do not account for values implicit in sharia. The 1982 Iranian representative to the United Nations, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, argued that “the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which represented a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition, could not be implemented by Muslims.”
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This position was formalized in the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam and adopted by the fifty-six member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 1990. Later, the League of Arab States passed the Arab Charter on Human Rights (2004, entered into force 2008).

Muslim nations are not the only ones questioning the “universality” of human rights. Concerns about human rights overreach led to the Declaration of Indigenous Rights, adopted in Panama in 1984, to safeguard the customs of non-Western peoples. Similarly, the Vienna Declaration on Human Rights in 1993 acknowledges “the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds” in the face of human rights universalism. The Bangkok Declaration of Human Rights of 1993 asserts that human rights, as generally conceived, do not accord with “Asian values” that oppose some Christian and democratic values. Each of these challenges to the universalism of human rights implicitly proposes a competing world vision of justice and legitimacy that sets the groundwork for a neomedieval environment of multiple authorities and allegiances.

An example of the clash between the universal authority of the human rights regime and Westphalian sovereignty of states is the controversy surrounding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee awarded the prize to imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”
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China, which views him as a criminal, immediately denounced the award as an affront to China’s sovereignty, because it challenges the legitimate authority of the state to establish and enforce laws within its territorial boundaries, which is core to the Westphalian order. As Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said, “The Norwegian Nobel
Committee, by giving the Peace Prize to a convicted person in China, shows no respect for the judicial system of China” and warned meddling foreigners that “if some people try to change China’s political system in this way and try to stop the Chinese people from moving forward, they are obviously making a mistake.”
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Additionally, China formally protested Norway, canceled several planned official meetings, and publicly declared that China-Norway relations had been damaged.

In defense of the award, Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Committee, boldly asserted a supranationalist position consistent with the human rights regime. He claimed that states are now subservient to the world government embodied in the United Nations and that they must acquiesce to the norms of human rights:

The controversy between China and the Nobel Committee is emblematic of the larger shift from an international society of states to a pluralistic global order of multiple authorities, challenging the foundations of the Westphalian order and characteristic of the competing authorities and allegiances that make up neomedievalism.

State sovereignty is retreating on seemingly every front and the Westphalian order with it. Neomedievalism is indeed upon us according to Bull’s test. Aside from a handful of strong states in Western Europe, North America, and parts of Asia, an increasing majority of countries are fragile or “disintegrating.” Globalization and the technological unification of the world are making national borders, and those who control them, less relevant. The regional integration of states and the international organizations they produce are progressively challenging the sovereignty of states, as have myriad transnational actors, creating overlapping authorities and allegiances within territories. Unlike in Bull’s day, the state is no longer the primary player on the world stage; it is merely one
among a chorus of actors. This emerging world order heralds a return to the status quo ante of the Middle Ages, or neomedievalism.

Given the relationship between the sovereignty and war, the implications of neomedieval warfare are significant. In the Westphalian order, states have shaped the conduct of war over the past centuries to reduce death and destruction. But who will do this in a neomedieval order? If history is a guide, then the answer is dismal.

Kill them all, God will know his own.

—Attributed to Abbot Arnaud Amalric

Sometime in the eleventh century, a Christian sect called the Cathars emerged in Languedoc in southern France. The sect’s roots remain a mystery, although it probably originated in Armenia and traveled westward via Byzantine trade routes. Not much is known about Cathar beliefs other than that they were a heretical blend of church doctrine with elements of an ancient Persian religion called Manichaeism and first-century Christian Gnosticism. For example, they believed in reincarnation, a Satan as strong as God, equality of the sexes, vegetarianism, and pacifism. They also did not believe that priests were required to intercede with God and therefore did not recognize the authority of the church. This got the pope’s attention.

In 1209, Pope Innocent III launched a crusade against the Cathars that would look like a war of terror to modern observers. A crusader army consisting of mercenary free companies, knights with their retinues, and pilgrims departed from Lyon in July and marched south into Languedoc. Two weeks later, they encountered their first major Cathar stronghold at Béziers, a well-fortified and amply supplied city.

While the pope’s army was busy preparing for the siege, a small sortie of armed men from the city snuck into the crusaders’ camp seeking mayhem. They got it. A brawl broke out between them and the mercenaries, and, finding themselves quickly outmatched, they beat a hasty retreat to the city walls. Unfortunately for them, the defenders were also preparing for a long siege, and the walls were not fully manned. The mercenaries flooded the gate and swarmed into the streets, with the rest of the crusader army not far behind. The city was doomed.

The crusaders tore through the streets, killing Cathars and Catholics alike. Panic-stricken residents fled to the churches seeking sanctuary but were afforded none, as the crusaders smashed down the doors and slaughtered all
inside. Abbot Arnaud Amalric, the papal legate who commanded the crusaders, allegedly ordered, “Kill them all, God will know his own.”

Following the holy massacre came the spoils. A dispute arose between the knights and the mercenaries over the division of booty. The enraged knights chased the disorganized and likely drunk mercenaries from occupied houses and seized their plunder. Not to be outdone, the mercenaries burned Béziers to the ground, destroying it and the booty. Estimates of the dead range from seven thousand to twenty thousand, almost all of them civilians. The news of the massacre quickly spread, and many cities and castles surrendered in terror. The crusaders’ victory was swift and total.

But the killing did not stop there, as military success does not always induce political victory. Over the next forty-five years, thousands of Cathars were hunted down and massacred, annihilating the sect. A group of zealous monks led by Dominic Guzmán (later Saint Dominic) carried out the systematic proscription and imprisonment of heretics, including the use of torture and execution. Their purpose was to wipe out the last vestiges of resistance; Cathar sacred texts and churches were torched, and believers who refused to recant were publically hanged or burned at the stake. This was the simultaneous birth of the Inquisition and the Dominican order.

The Cathar crusade might seem horrific to modern readers, but how different is it from the genocides of Rwanda and Darfur? Or the massacres in the Balkan, Congolese, or western Africa wars? Or the Sunni and Shia wars of Iraq or Syria? Or the armed conflicts in Sri Lanka, Colombia, or Chechnya? The answer is not much. Given the relationship between war and the state, it is important to consider how the shifting nature of the international system changes warfare and vice versa.

War is timeless; warfare is not. The former describes an activity, one that is bloody, violent, and political and remains the same in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth, the nineteenth, and, indeed, the fifth century BC. The latter describes how war is conducted and changes as a result of improved technology, geopolitical conditions, ideology, culture, regime type, and other factors. For example, Caesar’s legions and Mao’s guerrillas fought differently—warfare. Yet they used organized violence to achieve a political objective—war. There is nothing new about neomedieval war, but neomedieval warfare differs sharply from Westphalian warfare.

In the Westphalian world, war is the exclusive capability and right of states, since they claim the monopoly of force and nonstate actors are outlawed from
using violence. Accordingly, Westphalian warfare is generally an interstate affair, fought between states through their national armies like gladiators to violently settle disputes between states. War’s objective is the defeat of a rival state or the capture of territory, the measure of sovereign power in a Westphalian system.

Over the centuries, states developed diplomatic protocols regulating interstate affairs such as war and peace. For example, states mark the beginning of armed conflict with an official declaration of war, the victor is often determined by decisive battlefield victories such as Waterloo and Midway, and a formal peace treaty between states denotes war’s end. Westphalian warfare is best articulated by Carl von Clausewitz and his book
On War
, written in the 1820s yet still a primary text at war colleges today. The role of the military in international relations is central, because battlefield victory is the ultimate arbiter of political disagreements between nations, and captured in Clausewitz’s famous dictum: “There is only one decisive victory: the last.”
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National militaries also forged customs regarding conflict, later codified into the “laws of war,” such as the Lieber Code, the Geneva Conventions, and the Rome Statutes that seek to regulate violence. Examples of this code distinguish between lawful and unlawful combatants, dictate rules of engagement in combat, mandate the humane treatment of prisoners, outlaw hostage taking and some weapons (e.g., triangular bayonets and flamethrowers), and pronounce white flags to signal intent of surrender. World Wars I and II best exemplify the Westphalian way of war, often termed “regular” or “conventional” warfare.

Now this trend is reversing, and “irregular” warfare is more regular than the “regular” warfare. Militaries no longer battle other militaries, and nonstate actors now do the fighting and dying; an estimated 90 percent of casualties today are civilian.
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War is shifting from interstate to intrastate and is accordingly fought in fragile or failed states that have by definition lost their monopoly of force. In contrast to Westphalian warfare, most fighting today is civil war, ethnic conflict, insurgency, rampant violent crime, warlordism, and general lawlessness.

A review of recent conflict trends confirms this shift away from Westphalian warfare. According to the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland, the number of internal conflicts has tripled, while the number of interstate wars has dwindled to nearly zero over the past sixty years (see
figure 9.1
). The top twenty-five “at risk” countries all have at least one active ethnic insurgency or terrorist group within their borders. The report concludes that “the number of conflict recurrences has surged to unprecedented levels. Since the mid-1990s, recurrences outnumber new onsets by significant margins.”
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Most of today’s armed conflicts, like the crusade against the Cathars, are fought between myriad state and nonstate actors for ideological objectives or plunder rather than territory. For example, al-Qaida fights to impose a strict interpretation of Islam, and MS-13 fights for control of the illegal drug trade; they do not fight to become a member of the society of states.

Figure 9.1
Conflict Trends 1945–2005.

The customs of states do not apply to neomedieval actors, and this affects how they fight. Neomedieval wars have no clear beginning, middle, or end; there is no formal declaration of war, battlefield victory to determine the winner, or peace treaty to symbolize conflict’s end. Instead, they tend to persist in nebulous perpetuity and can span generations in a lower-intensity yet unending armed conflict that epitomizes durable disorder.

Similarly, neomedieval warfare frequently and flagrantly violates the laws of war. This is to be expected, since such laws were developed by national militaries to fight one another, and neomedieval actors are not signatories to the Geneva Protocols. Consequently, neomedieval warfare blurs the line between civilians and combatants, as in the sacking of Béziers, and today the vast majority of casualties in war are civilian, further evidence of the rise of neomedievalism. In 2003, the European Union estimated that “since 1990, almost 4 million people have died in wars, 90% of them civilians.” Oxford economist Paul Collier agrees in a World Bank research report, stating that in modern civil wars, “nearly 90% of the casualties resulting from armed conflict were civilian.”
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Many other individuals and institutions have made similar observations.

Victory is also different in neomedieval warfare. For Clausewitz and the Westphalian way of war, overwhelming force wins the battle that wins the war and ultimately the political objective or national interest. But when Westphalian militaries engage neomedieval foes, they often win every military engagement yet lose the war, because military success does not equal political victory in a neomedieval environment. In other words, the utility of force in neomedieval warfare is low. Examples of this phenomenon are plentiful: France in Algeria (1954–1962); the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (1979–1989); Israel in Lebanon (2006); the United States in Vietnam (1959–1975), Iraq (2003–2011), and
Afghanistan (2001–2014). In each of these cases, the state tried to bomb its way to victory over a militarily inferior enemy yet ultimately failed to achieve its strategic objectives because military force could only achieve tactical results. Westphalian strategies do not work in neomedieval warfare.

Examples of neomedieval warfare have steadily increased since the end of the Cold War, while Westphalian war between states is almost nonexistent. The Rwandan genocide was fought by two ethnic groups, Hutu against Tutsi, and was less about controlling land than about eradicating a rival ethnic group. Eight hundred thousand people were killed in approximately one hundred days.
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The conflict followed ethnic populations without regard for country boundaries, spreading from Rwanda to neighboring Burundi, Uganda, and eastern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Not present were national armies, Clausewitzian logic, or any regard for the laws of war—in a word, “regular” or Westphalian warfare.

There are numerous other examples of neomedieval warfare since the end of the Cold War: the war in the Balkans, the Sunni and Shia conflict in postinvasion Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan, genocide in Darfur, conflicts in the Congo, wars in West Africa, and the civil war in Syria. Drug wars in Latin America pit international and highly organized gangs against one another and society, reaping vast destruction and arguably rendering countries like Mexico a narco-state. Other groups, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia, and al-Qaida, want to abandon the Westphalian system altogether and establish a caliphate based on their vision of eighth-century Islam.

Additionally, the weak can defeat the strong in neomedieval warfare. In the Westphalian world, weak nations should represent an opportunity or at least not a threat to strong states, most clearly illustrated in the era of colonialism, when strong European states conquered much of the world. Now the opposite is true. Strong states cringe at becoming entangled with weak states. In October 1993, Somali clans armed only with small arms and “technicals”—often pickup trucks with heavy machine guns or antiaircraft guns mounted on the truck beds—defeated the most elite US military forces, consisting of the Army Delta Force, Ranger teams, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, Navy SEAL Team Six, and Air Force Pararescue–Air Force Combat Controllers. The Battle of Mogadishu, also known to Somalis as the Day of the Rangers, was captured in the book and then the movie
Black Hawk Down
. Following this defeat, the United States left Somalia. The Battle of Mogadishu shows that the Westphalian way of war is not absolute and the hegemony of strong states no longer total.

The defeat also led to broader shifts in US foreign policy. The superpower became reluctant to intervene in weak states, as revealed by its inaction regarding the Rwandan genocide. In
A Problem from Hell
, Samantha Power explains that the “lesson of Somalia” was that the Pentagon now feared that “a small engagement
by foreign troops would end up as a large and costly one by Americans.”
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The experience also gave birth to the so-called Mogadishu Line, a foreign policy term denoting the point at which peacekeeping becomes war; it is sometimes used pejoratively to describe strong states’ aversion to entering situations in weak states that might drag them into an armed conflict, as with US President Bill Clinton’s refusal to mobilize US ground troops to curb the conflict surrounding the Bosnian Serb Army in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 and also his decision to use only airpower in Kosovo during Operation Allied Force in 1999. When ground troops are deployed, they spend the majority of their time conducting force protection of themselves rather than on military expedition, which is questionable military strategy.