War From the Ground Up (10 page)

For the purposes of propaganda, the Taliban is keen for the insurgency to be regarded as a unified movement under the banner of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which is ostensibly controlled by Mullah Mohammed Omar and the Rahbari Shura (Supreme Council). In reality, the Afghan insurgency is a
mix of Islamist factions, power-hungry warlords, criminals and tribal groupings, all pursuing their own economic, political, criminal and social agendas and interests, from local feuds to establishing a pan-Islamic caliphate. Three major groups operate under the banner of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: Mullah Omar's Taliban, the Haqqani Network and the Hizb-e-Islami faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. While the latter two sometimes co-operate with the Taliban leadership, they are considered autonomous factions.
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While it should be credited with a far better standard of analysis than what had gone before, this February 2011 parliamentary report received very little media attention in the UK. However, the wider debate does seem to be evolving towards a more sophisticated appreciation of the insurgency. An article by Anthony King in April 2011, for example, is cognisant of the actual political dynamics at play in Afghanistan, which are fragmented rather than binary:

The British see Helmand and the conflict in which they are involved in dualistic terms; the legitimate centralised state of Afghanistan represented in Helmand by the governor against the Taliban insurgency—the white state against the shadow state. The British are seeking to ensure that the balance of power is in favour of GIRoA. Yet, this binary perspective, although in line with conventional counter-insurgency thinking, seems to be simplistic in relation to Helmand. Indeed, it may fundamentally misrepresent the political conflict in Helmand… The battle for Helmand may perhaps surprisingly not primarily be between GIRoA and the Taliban, represented as the legitimate and shadow governments, but between Britain's projected and idealised model of GIRoA and actual, existing power structures and power-brokers in Helmand: Sher Mohammed Akhundzada and his patrimonial networks.
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The latest official version of the UK 2006 Helmand deployment at the time of writing is the July 2011 House of Commons Defence Committee Fourth Report on
Operations in Afghanistan
.
²⁰
Lack of intelligence about the situation in Helmand before the deployment is a theme that runs throughout the report. The report cites a military view that the assessment of the Taliban's intent in 2006 was correct, but not the assessment of their capability.
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This view, however, does not take into account the key nuance in terms of defining the insurgency's ‘intent' that the 2011 Foreign Affairs Committee report recognised. The insurgency is a fragmented franchise organisation. Hence the Taliban senior leadership may well have a coherent intent. But can ‘the Taliban' in the sense of the wider insurgency have ‘an intent' if they are a constellation of different groups?
No. Moreover, the argument that their capacity was underestimated is not correct. The scale of the insurgency increased with the British deployment, not before it; the subsequent resource mismatch followed from this. That in 2011 much of the report's oral evidence still held on to the highly problematic notion that ‘the Taliban' could be characterised as a coherent enemy force in 2006 is perhaps indicative of how far ingrained is the basic conception that conflict is polarised, and how powerfully such a lens can distort, and erase the nuance, from the historical record.

In summary, there was not a significant ‘Taliban' insurgency in the south in 2005. Partly this was because Kabul exercised so little visible presence there from 2002 to 2005 that there was little to rebel against. The violence that did take place was mainly a reaction against the behaviour of Akhundzada and his associates. In one sense this could legitimately be said to represent insurgent violence against the government, Akhundzada being the Provincial Governor; but to characterise this as a ‘Taliban' insurgency is drastically to oversimplify the local political driving factors.

There was undoubtedly growing violence, but most of the violence that did occur was the product of factional interests sometimes dressed up as polarised conflict to exploit ISAF resources. The British deployment catalysed the insurgency because it shoehorned a kaleidoscopic political environment into an overly polarised model, which gave disparate groups a violent focus in a common enemy. Combined with political moves, such as the timing of Akhundzada's dismissal, this led to a reconfiguration whereby political interests that had supported the Afghan government turned against it. When local political actors moved away from the Afghan government franchise, this left only a rump of an Afghan government in Helmand whose rule was to be extended. The factions that had supported the Afghan government, but switched to the Taliban franchise, put pressure on the towns of northern Helmand, forcing a response. British soldiers on the ground were left holding the baby.
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This book is not primarily about Afghanistan. However, the Helmand case study illustrates how strategy must understand a problem on its own terms, not through dogmatically applied conceptual structures. In Afghanistan the coalition has moved away from a binary model of the conflict, and has since 2009 performed better; it now recognises the
legitimacy of the franchise argument, but took a long time to do so—almost a decade of violence since 2001.

How did this happen? We need to trace the history of how war and strategy have been understood to understand the problem of how war is conceived in the present. The remainder of this chapter examines three cornerstones of war as traditionally understood in the Clausewitzian tradition: the principle of polarity; the physical and perceived components of war's outcome; and strategic audiences (those upon whom the strategist through war seeks to have an outcome) and their relationship to the state.

The enemy is traditionally what a ‘military' outcome in war is defined against. War, according to Carl von Clausewitz, the most influential theorist of war in the Western tradition, was by necessity a polarised contest: ‘war is the impact of opposing forces', which could be likened to a ‘giant duel' made up of countless smaller duels.
²³
This two-way polarity is depicted by Clausewitz in the first paragraph of
On War
by two men wrestling, which symbolised how war's function is ‘an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will'.
²⁴
The polarity between opponents is what makes war a contest which provides a decision, a resolution of the argument.
²⁵

Clausewitz categorised wars in accordance with how far they sought to achieve a decision.
Ganze Krieg
, which can be translated as absolute war, was not just the unrestrained use of violence; it was war that aimed at absolute political settlement through total destruction, or total submission, of the enemy.
²⁶
Absolute war was ‘saturated by the urge for a decision' in the sense that the absolute means of such a war were consistent with its absolute political aims. As wars moved away from the conceptual pole of
ganze Krieg
there was a corresponding reduction between the application of violence and the intended political outcome, until one reached the point where violence was merely threatened as part of normal political activity: ‘the less a decision is actively sought by the belligerents, the more the war becomes a matter of mutual observation'.
²⁷

Clausewitz's analytical originality was to associate the forms of war between polarised opponents, attack and defence, with war's capacity to provide political meaning through a decision. For Clausewitz, war starts
with defence, in that unresisted attack is not war.
²⁸
So polarity is present from the outset as resistance is a prerequisite of war. War necessarily brings both forms into being, because attack and defence cannot exist without the other.
²⁹

Force can then be understood as a type of language. As in a verbal argument, the negative form (defence) is about prevention of the enemy's argument; the positive form (attack) is about the assertion of one's own argument. For example, in a purely defensive battle (a siege with no counter-attack, for instance) the defending commander seeks to delay the decision as far as possible: ‘a defensive battle that remains undecided at sunset can be considered to be won'. In offensive battle ‘the aim of the commander is to expedite the decision'.
³⁰
The positive and negative forms are present at all levels of war, in battle, both sides alternate between attack and defence, right down to the lowest level where a soldier alternates between use of a sword and shield, or their modern equivalents.

Hence polarity provided a military scale to give meaning to actions in combat. The meaning of actions in combat for Clausewitz was a synthesis of both forms, as in a verbal argument in terms of landing blows and parrying the opponent's to produce a result: attack pushed the counter of war's outcome on this scale towards victory, and defence pushed against attack: ‘polarity does not lie in the attack or the defence, but in the object both seek to achieve: the decision'.
³¹
The decision could be absolute: ‘in battle each side aims at victory; that is a case of true polarity, since the victory of one side excludes the victory of the other'.
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However, Clausewitz recognised that the outcome was usually relative: ‘it is not possible in every war for the victor to overthrow his enemy completely'. However, according to the principle of polarity, war provided a single, mutually-recognised scale which determined the relative superiority that set military conditions for a political outcome: ‘victory normally results from the superiority of one side; from a greater aggregate of physical and psychological strength … every reduction in strength on one side can be regarded as an increase in the other'.
³³

In summary, Clausewitz interpreted the antagonistic polarity between opponents in terms of a dialectic expressed in the form of attack and defence which provided meaning to their clash in combat. That meaning was defined in terms of a see-saw-like military scale: whether an outcome (victory or defeat) was absolute or more limited, was, critically,
defined against one's enemy. This concept gives a cognitive stability to what military actions mean in war.

Without polarity, force loses decisive political meaning. Sometimes it is necessary to accentuate an existing polarity to give force political utility. In the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s, for example, the UN forces failed to achieve any decisive outcome because their political masters took a morally relative point of view. The desire to avoid another such scenario was influential in Prime Minister Tony Blair's decisive stance on Kosovo in 1999.

However, the right and wrong of the Kosovan issue were not at all clear. There were in fact crimes being committed by both sides, by the Serbian para-military forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). This was reported by a fact-finding mission led by the Organisation for Co-operation and Security in Europe prior to the NATO intervention. The criminal associations of the KLA, and its follow-on groups (it was officially disbanded in 1999), have since been widely documented. However, the NATO coalition presented the conflict in terms of a case of right versus wrong and achieved a decisive outcome against Serbia, at least in the short-term. In the longer term the legacy of the conflict is less clear-cut in political terms, not least in the on-going issue of the recognition of Kosovo.

In 1999 the NATO coalition was able to shape the battlefield in Kosovo in terms of its presentation of a clear case of right versus wrong; even though things were more morally complex on the ground: by taking a clear stance decisive action was possible. Yet this needs to be distinguished from the situation in Afghanistan. In Kosovo a polarity between two sides already existed; the shaping of the battlefield in political terms was to bring the international community, especially NATO countries, behind one side, allowing war's mechanism in the Clausewitzian sense to function. Yet in circumstances in which there is very little polarity to begin with, war's mechanism in the traditional Clausewitzian conception is compromised from the outset.

What pre-2001 polarity exists in the Afghan conflict is strongly associated with the tension between the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance and the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. The difficulty here is that accentuating such polarity to define the enemy better can engender its own unwanted sectarian tensions. This is partly why the Afghan government try not to present themselves as the reincarnated Northern Alliance, and
the Taliban distance themselves from the label of being a Pashtun nationalistic movement: it is the conflict itself that encourages tensions that both sides, wanting to avoid the break-up of Afghanistan on ethnic lines, resist.

The Kosovo example also illustrates that polarity is relative. Parties to a conflict may only be drawn together temporarily. Part of strategy's role is thus the orchestration and manipulation of polarity in relation to another party to present an enemy against whom a ‘military' result can be defined. This is usually most obvious in the escalatory moves that anticipate armed conflict.

Polarity can give cognitive stability to what military action in war means, but how then does a military outcome translate into a political outcome? Power can be understood as a relationship. This idea resonates with how Clausewitz understood war as the clash of wills, in which one sought to impose one's will on the enemy. For Clausewitz, the ‘decision' provided by the mechanism of war through the polarised dialectic of attack and defence had a physical and a perceived component.