War From the Ground Up (17 page)

Figure 7: The ‘mosaic' nature of US operations in Iraq in 2004. Each box refers in relation to its sub-divisions to the ratio of mission types that the formation was conducting. (MNC-I is Multi National Corps Iraq, MNF is Multi National Force, MND is Multi National Division, with a corresponding geographic orientation direction, or ‘B' for Baghdad).

Figure 8: This illustration amplifies the situation in Multi National Force West, which was at the time held by 1 MEF (Marine Expeditionary Force). The mosaic nature of conflict is replicated within each of its RCTs and BCTs (Regimental/Brigade Combat Teams) and the MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit).

To use a phrase from the world of political theory: ‘all politics is local'. For armed force to be of political utility in mosaic conflicts, tactical actions often need to be considered primarily in terms of their local political effect, even if in their own right, such political effect is very small. This is different from situations in which armed forces only need to think about their actions in military terms. For instance, a decision to attack one group, or support another, whether desired or not (one may not know the affiliation of the insurgents one fights, or be able to avoid the fact that most projects empower some groups over others), will attract some realignment in the local political situation; that needs to fit in with one's broader strategy, or one's actions will politically be incoherent, like a politician who takes contradictory positions vis-à-vis the constituencies that he seeks to keep in balance. The critical implication is that political choices constantly need to be made at the tactical level.

As President Abraham Lincoln famously stated, ‘you cannot please all the people all of the time'; this being the case, one cannot avoid making political choices. The key is how far they are planned and coherent, because one recognises the political quality of the action, or unplanned and incoherent, because one does not.

The dynamics of the conflict in Afghanistan, like many other contemporary conflicts, are in many ways analogous to that of domestic politics in liberal democracies: strategy has to operate within a complex political environment that nobody can ever fully understand. Within this environment actors tend to act in a kaleidoscopic manner on the basis of self-interest.

The British army Jungle Warfare Advisor Course teaches that the ‘jungle is neutral', after the famous book by F. Spencer Chapman.
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This environment may be complex and intimidating, but has no favourites. To reject this complexity because one is unaccustomed to operating within it is a mistake. As in jungle warfare, one has an advantage once one accepts complexity and stops trying to fight against it by forcing it into the more straightforward polarised concept of war. The endless foliage of the jungle, like the infinite complexity of human societies, stops being an exhausting barrier to progress once one relaxes in that environment and comes to see its advantages, since its demanding texture
is the same for everyone: most political environments are complex; that is normal.

The following vignette is from an exchange reported by Bob Woodward in his book
Obama's Wars
(2010) between General Stanley McChrystal and President Obama in 2009:

McChrystal presented a map of Kandahar and its suburbs that attempted to lay out the tribal dynamics. It was a crazy quilt of overlapping colors that resembled a piece of modern art… A spaghetti soup of dotted lines, dashed-dotted lines and double-dotted lines reflected what were believed to be the relationships and tribal loyalties. Some are Barakzais, others such as Karzai are Popalzais, and on and on. Some of the narcotics kingpins were listed…The President reflected on the Kandahar map and the power broker chart. ‘This reminds me of Chicago politics', Obama said. ‘You're asking me to understand the interrelationships and interconnections between ward bosses and district chiefs and the tribes of Chicago like the tribes of Kandahar. And I've got to tell you, I've lived in Chicago for a long time, and I don't understand that'.
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For Woodward, a highly experienced political journalist, to describe such complexity as ‘crazy' in a military context is noteworthy. President Obama's reaction to this diagram reveals that he would be familiar with this way of conceptualising a problem in the context of domestic politics; and presumably, in a domestic political context, so would a political analyst of such skill as Woodward. A US political consultant, in the context of an election, would think about strategy precisely in terms of how to achieve political effect, in terms of overall public opinion, through the cumulative effects of fragmented local actions. The complexity of this diagram may appear unnerving as a military problem; yet the political environment it represents is very similar to the competition between a multitude of actors and interest groups in normal, messy, domestic politics.

General McChrystal's subsequent response to President Obama in Woodward's book is ‘if it were Chicago we'd need far more troops!' While funny, there is some irony in the fact that the President has intuitively and immediately seen the problem in its own terms. That line of thought is, however, seen as a funny quirk, since this is not Chicago, it is ‘war'. The President does not appear to see it as a legitimate line of thought with which to interrogate a policy problem.

Professional politicians have to be comfortable operating in uncertainty; nobody can ever fully understand any political environment,
because human societies are so complex. Yet political theory exists that has successfully figured out how, broadly, to have effect in such an environment. US political marketing is perhaps the best example of this. Through detailed analysis of interest groups, one selects target audiences. Political messages, both in terms of actions and words, are carefully nuanced to achieve a change of perception among target audiences, and draw them towards one's narrative. While liberal democracies are entirely familiar with the application of such theory in the context of domestic politics, when it comes to war, or armed conflict, even when the dynamics are broadly analogous, to reject such complexity in favour of a simplified polarised narrative is the norm.

Admittedly, one will never have a complete political picture; that is impossible. One can always find out more about a society. In many ways the longer one spends in conflict environments such as Afghanistan, the more one realises how much one does not know. Yet to reduce what complexity one does acknowledge to a simple insurgent versus government model, just because one has an incomplete picture, is misguided. Reduction of complexity to black and white encourages the very type of anti-intellectualism that prevents strategy from understanding a problem on its own terms: we need to embrace complexity and deal with it, not reject it.

The conceptual crux of the problem is that Western liberal democracies often assume that military action consists of one concept when in fact it consists of two: military action means the use of armed force itself; it also refers to a military interpretive structure in which the application of armed force sets conditions for a political solution. In the Clausewitzian paradigm these concepts are symbiotic, as was set out in
Chapter 1
. When armed force is employed as a direct extension of policy in contemporary conflict, military action largely, and frequently unconsciously, leaves behind the accompanying interpretive structure of war as a military domain. Problems occur when the conceptualisation of the enemy in such circumstances has not evolved, and still presumes a military interpretive context that may not exist.

The relationship of a strategist to the ‘enemy' in normal domestic political activity is significantly different from the enemy in the paradigm of inter-state war. For in the paradigm of inter-state war the enemy is also the strategic audience against whom one's actions seek to have an effect. In domestic politics an individual, or a target audience, may support
the opposition, but that person or audience are not themselves the enemy. A politician in an election ideally would win over all of the electorate to his point of view. This may involve defeating the enemy, the opposition party, but one does not seek to defeat the electorate itself. In the same way a group of ‘accidental guerrillas' may support the Taliban, but one should not be seeking their defeat; rather one should be seeking to pull them out from the sway of the Taliban.

There is a big difference between thinking about counter-insurgency in terms of the defeat of insurgents (i.e. actual people), and the defeat of an insurgency, which is ultimately an idea, or a group of ideas.

The International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) campaign plan, redrawn in 2009, was based on the notion that the Afghan population was the ‘strategic centre of gravity'; that is, their perceptions were judged to be the most important variable to campaign success, and the campaign was therefore planned with the primary objective of gaining their support for the Afghan government. In presentations that I have attended, this was usually the first step of the argument. The next step was usually that Kandahar city was the Taliban's centre of gravity. The third step was then that the control of the population in Kandahar city was therefore to be the ISAF campaign main effort. This was presented as a linear argument whose deductions lead into one another. While this may well have been the best course of action, to present it as a linear argument is problematic.

Focusing the campaign's main effort on the perceptions of the population in Kandahar city sought to achieve a decisive blow against the insurgency. Such a move indeed resembles the purpose of defining a centre of gravity in conventional warfare, to identify where to concentrate for the decisive blow to knock out the enemy. How does this concept translate in terms of Afghan counter-insurgency? In political terms, to have identified Kandahar city as the decisive point was a bold move; however, for a political consultant in a US Presidential election, it would be like the Democratic Party investing massive resources in trying to win Texas, or the Republicans California, seeking a knock-out of the other party rather than a victory on points. To continue such an analogy, massive investment of resources to take on the opponent's home base means taking risk on the support of one's own home base, and in more marginal areas. As this analogy suggests, if the defeat of the enemy is a
means to an end (as in an election), rather than an end in itself, one does not necessarily need to capture the enemy's home base; that is only one course of action.

This is encapsulated by General Sir Graeme Lamb, who worked with General Stanley McChrystal in 2009 when the latter was commander of ISAF. In his evidence to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, General Lamb states that he briefed General McChrystal in 2009: ‘we [ISAF/the coalition] had, for seven or eight years, asked the question, “Where is the enemy?” The question we should have asked was, “Where should we be?”'
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Plans are not made in retrospect, and I emphatically do not seek to second-guess decisions made in 2009, which might well have been the best course of action. The point is, however, that if we take as a starting point the deduction that the population's political affiliations are the campaign centre of gravity, what we have is a problem with which a political consultant would be familiar in the context of an election. The defeat of the Taliban, like the defeat of one party by another in an election, is a means to an end if one has defined one's end as the will of the people. Thus while the decision to take on the Taliban in Kandahar as the centrepiece of the campaign may have been the best option, the linear three-step argument that is usually presented to justify it does seem to present a tension between the conception of a centre of gravity in conventional war and in Afghan counter-insurgency; the key variable being the difference of what the ‘enemy' represents in either case.

This confusion of concepts gives rise to a paradox in the coalition approach to conflict in Afghanistan and the ‘Long War' more generally. On the one hand, the liberal powers involved recognise that they are in a political war for perception and ideas on a global scale. However, when liberal powers are tempted to think about war in essentially inter-state terms, this assumption is insufficiently challenged: that military activity sets conditions for a political solution, but is itself apolitical. This can encourage liberal powers to think of military outcomes in absolute terms of ‘winning' and ‘losing', absolute standards of success or failure that are rarely evidenced in domestic politics. Every time the question ‘are we winning in Afghanistan?' is asked, is the latent fixation with all armed conflict being understood implicitly in terms of inter-state war revealed.

David Kilcullen has characterised counter-insurgency as an ‘armed variant of domestic politics'.
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Antonio Giustozzi has used the term ‘armed politics' to describe ‘the distortion caused by the presence of non-state armed groups on the competitiveness of an otherwise open political system'.
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Both of these definitions capture the essence of the problem: in such conflicts armed forces are required to have effect in an environment in which actors use an eclectic range of means, violent and non-violent, to compete vis-à-vis one another for political advantage (in the broad sense of power rather than just political advantage within state structures).