Out of the Mountains (10 page)

For its part, the city's government doesn't have the capacity to handle the massive influx—thousands of weapons and new gang combatants per year, along with billions of dollars in cocaine—as well as to sustain a city whose population and area are rapidly growing but which lacks key infrastructure, resources, and support systems. In particular, city leaders have limited influence over the Honduran criminal justice system, which is run by the central government (based in Tegucigalpa, on the other side of the country) to suit its own interests rather than those of the city. For example, the
mano dura
policy of
2003
–
4
, driven by elite-level politics at the central government level, involved an aggressive crackdown on gangs. This dramatically backfired, increasing violent activity and driving gangs underground. It turned the gangs into dark networks that were much harder to see and deal with, and created prison fraternities that became training and radicalization engines for the gangs, so they were primed for action just in time to exploit the influx of drugs when it began to spike in
2005
.

In urban metabolism terms, violence in San Pedro Sula can be seen as a toxic by-product of this massive influx of drugs, weapons, money, and deportees, on top of existing licit economic flows driven by the city's role as a key littoral and business hub, which were already straining the limited carrying capacity of the city's governance and infrastructure. San Pedro Sula's metabolism has been overwhelmed: the city is simply unable to absorb and metabolize these inflows. The resulting toxicity is seen in symptoms such as urban dislocation, violence, crime, and social breakdown. It's important to note that these toxic effects aren't evenly spread: they're concentrated in at least a dozen microhabitats that Stacia's team studied on the ground, with some city sectors relatively peaceful and quiet, others the scene of intensely violent competition for control among the various nonstate groups, and yet others effectively autonomous and outside all government control.

San Pedro Sula, then, is a good illustration of how urban metabolism models, and an approach that views the city as a complex flow system (or, more accurately, a system-of-systems nested within larger regional, national, and transnational flows) can be applied as a way of understanding conflict dynamics.

III

All this goes to highlight what Steve was pointing out that night in the bar of the Bryant Park Hotel: the environment is shifting, and we need to think of cities as living, breathing organisms if we want to understand the direction in which that shift is taking us. The megatrends of population growth, urbanization, littoralization, and connectedness suggest that conflict is increasingly likely to occur in coastal cities, in underdeveloped regions of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and in highly networked, connected settings. We're still likely to experience wars between nation-states, and conflict in remote areas such as mountains, jungles, and deserts will still undoubtedly occur. But the trends are clear: more people than ever before in history will be competing for scarcer and scarcer resources in poorly governed areas that lack adequate infrastructure, and these areas will be more and more closely connected to the global system, so that local conflict will have far wider effects.

The implications are profound. In the first place, it turns out that what I've outlined here is far more than a theory of future conflict—indeed, it's a “theory of everything” in the sense that these drivers will affect every aspect of life on the planet in the next few decades, not just conflict. The city-as-a-system approach we've explored here can be applied to many complex problems that may appear unrelated—rural soil salinity, urban crime, water or fuel shortages, offshore piracy, social injustice, or racial exclusion, for example—to understand how they interact in a given city or network.

Taking this approach may help us identify emergent patterns within a city system, make sense of its system logic, reveal the flows within it, and thus begin to design tailored interventions that can both keep a city safe
and
allow it to flow and breathe. As the urban metabolism model suggests, and as discussed in greater detail in Chapter
5
, we can break such approaches down into
supply-side interventions
(which help ameliorate some of the causes of rapid, unplanned urbanization and thus relieve some of the pressure on a city and its infrastructure),
demand-side interventions
(which help improve the city's resiliency and thus its ability to cope with the pressures on its systems), and
framing system interventions
(which seek to alter the context within which the city develops, by changing its interaction with larger national and transnational systems).

To fully understand these kinds of potential interventions, however, we first need to take a much more detailed look at the range of threats that affects this environment, and the ways in which particular threat groups operate—both at the local level (where, like the gangs of San Pedro Sula, they compete for control over population or territory) and in terms of their connectivity with the wider world. The next three chapters seek to add this detail. Chapter
2
looks at three examples of conflict over a spectrum from transnational terrorism through insurgency, civil war, and criminal activity, and it seeks to understand the complex ways in which these conflicts interact with overstressed urban environments. Chapter
3
explores the way that nonstate armed groups compete for control over populations and terrain at the hyperlocal level, and Chapter
4
examines (through the lens of the Arab Spring uprisings) the way that enhanced connectivity allows local actors to draw on worldwide networks. Taken together, these chapters provide the deeper context that will allow us, in Chapter
5
, to draw some tentative conclusions and begin to think about ways in which we might deal with the crowded, coastal, urban environment of future conflict.

2

Future Cities, Future Threats

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. Yet
this
city would still be globally connected. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants would have access to the world's most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city.

—Richard Norton, 2003

I. Sixty Hours in Mumbai

As dusk fell
on November 21, 2008, the MV
al-Husseini
, an unremarkable coastal freighter a little larger than a fishing trawler, left its berth in the harbor of Karachi.
1
The
Husseini
steamed into the gathering darkness, blending in among a mass of small craft, fishing trawlers, container vessels, and passenger ships. The ship sailed out into the Arabian Sea, bound for the Indian city of Mumbai, five hundred nautical miles to the southeast. On board, a raiding party of the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) prepared for the most audacious maritime terrorist attack in India's history.

The events that were about to unfold are worth examining in detail, since—along with the other examples we'll look at in this chapter—they help to illustrate the range of threats that will exist in the urban, networked, littoral environment of the future.

The assault team had received thirteen months of training from LeT instructors, as well as from retired (and, allegedly, active-duty) members of Pakistani Special Forces and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), at a camp near Muzaffarabad in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. One trainee later testified that the camp was run by LeT but was near a military base, was guarded by Pakistani troops, and received ammunition and weapons from the army.
2
The raiders' preparation included ideological indoctrination, weapons and tactics instruction, assault training, and amphibious raiding exercises using inflatable boats on the Mangla Dam reservoir in Kashmir. Seven trainees were chosen from an initial batch of thirty-two, recruited from urban areas in Pakistan by LeT and its political wing, Jamaat ud-Dawa. After selection was complete, three experienced LeT operatives came in to take charge of the group.
3
The team commander, using the nom de guerre Abu Dera Ismail Khan, divided the ten-man team into five pairs, assigning each to a target in the waterfront area of South Mumbai.
4

Throughout
2008
—according to evidence given during his terrorism trial—the American-born, ISI-trained Pakistani intelligence agent David Coleman Headley (Daood Sayed Gilani) had made a series of trips to scout the target locations, passing detailed geographical information to his ISI handler, Major Iqbal.
5
At the same time, LeT had established a network of up to forty local sympathizers in and around Mumbai.
6
Along with other spies, Headley (who was convicted on terrorism charges in January
2013
, for this and other operations) had generated a detailed picture of the environment, helping planners in Pakistan understand the layout of streets and buildings and the flow of people, traffic, and commodities in the crowded urban peninsula of South Mumbai, a complex and densely populated area in which coastal slums, warrens of narrow alleyways, and residential housing were intermixed with office buildings, public spaces, and high-rise luxury hotels.
7

On board the
Husseini
the raiders were busy examining the reconnaissance data, poring over Google Earth images to study their targets, confirming routes of attack, and ensuring they knew how to navigate the complex urban terrain in which they would be operating. Each man was issued a Russian AK-
47
or Chinese Type
56
assault rifle, a Pakistani-made copy of a Colt automatic pistol, two clips of
9
mm pistol ammunition, six hundred rounds of rifle ammunition, and eight to ten Chinese-made Type
86
hand grenades.
8
Some raiders were given packs of military-grade RDX explosive, Garmin GPS satellite navigation devices, and cellphones. Three carried extra SIM cards of Indian and U.S. origin for the attack, and at least one had a Thuraya satellite phone. The terrorists loaded their combat equipment into backpacks along with water, emergency rations, a change of clothes, false ID cards, Indian cash, credit cards, and detailed maps of their targets.
9
They also packed cocaine, LSD, and steroids, probably to keep themselves awake during the raid: Indian police later found high concentrations of these substances in the blood of several dead attackers.
10

Their journey to Mumbai took roughly thirty-six hours. On the night of November
23
, the terrorists hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, the MV
Kuber
, far out in the open sea. They transferred four crewmembers to the
Husseini
as they seized the vessel, and then ordered the captain, Amar Narayan Solanki, to sail to a position a few miles offshore of Mumbai. Sometime after this—exactly when is unclear, since there are no surviving witnesses—the four crewmembers on board the
Husseini
were murdered. As
Kuber
sailed toward Mumbai the raiders checked in with their handlers in Pakistan using satellite phones, carried out final rehearsals and briefings, and assembled their explosives, fuses, and timers into a series of improvised bombs with which they would later create havoc on the streets of Mumbai. The precise sequence of events on board
Kuber
is also unclear, as all but one of those involved was also dead within a few days. But at least one source has suggested that Solanki, who had a history of involvement in coastal smuggling and illicit trafficking, and wouldn't have known that his crew were already dead, didn't resist the terrorists because he mistakenly believed they were smugglers of the kind who normally operate in these waters.
11

At dusk on November
26
,
Kuber
was about four nautical miles off Mumbai. On instructions received via satellite phone from their handlers in Pakistan, the raiders seized the captain, tied his arms and legs, cut his throat, and threw his body belowdecks.
12
They cross-decked from the fishing trawler into three military-grade Gemini rigid-hull inflatable boats—a difficult operation at night, out of sight of land, with a three-foot coastal swell running—then abandoned the
Kuber
and set off toward Mumbai in the inflatables.
13

Nightfall in Mumbai

The assault teams landed in two separate locations, near the fishing colony of Badhwar Park and Machhimar Nagar, in the Colaba waterfront area of South Mumbai. Unlike the upscale residential neighborhoods, hotels, and high-rise office complexes that dominate the rest of this area, the landing sites the terrorists chose were dense, complex informal settlements—coastal slums made up of thousands of tiny shacks, fishing huts, and moored boats.
14
Local people noticed both landings. In one case the terrorists, who were well groomed and wore neat Western-style clothes, successfully explained themselves as “students”; in the other they intimidated local fishermen (who, like Solanki, probably thought they were smugglers or members of local organized crime groups) by pointing to their weapons. Though the locals saw the team land, none of those who spotted the terrorists reported them to the police—probably because of the lack of police presence (or government services generally) in this part of Mumbai.
15
Just as the raiders had slipped out of Pakistan by nesting within the coastal traffic of Karachi, they had now entered India under cover of the normal background clutter of licit and illicit flows in and around the slums and port of Mumbai.