War From the Ground Up (2 page)

War From The Ground Up
is not an academic account of the conflict in Afghanistan, nor is it a personal narrative. Yet in the three tours I have served in Afghanistan as a British infantry officer, it has struck me that this ‘war' is really not what war is typically understood to be. This informs my analytical perspective, from the ground up, of the concept of war. This is a distinctive viewpoint: while most accounts of war look down at the battlefield from an academic perspective, or across it as a personal narrative, I draw instead on personal experience to look up from the battlefield and consider the concepts that put me there, and how those concepts played out on the ground.

The dynamics of the Afghan conflict as I have experienced them are encapsulated by the political posture displayed by an Afghan district governor I knew. He did not see most of the local insurgents as a problem. Was he actually on their side? No. He was from the provincial urban landowning class. Many of the local insurgents were the sons of their rural tenants. They did not represent a threat to his personal interests. He did, however, have a problem with other insurgents, namely the out-of-area Afghan fighters and foreign jihadists. Moreover, the governor was far more concerned about a group of the local police who were controlled by one of his political rivals. Against this background were powerful tribal and criminal dynamics which also cut across a polarised ‘Afghan government versus Taliban' conception of the conflict. Such dynamics were not an anomaly. Most people in the Afghan conflict are
really actors in their own right, and act according to their own interests, as opposed to that of a given side.

War is usually understood as a polarised contest. The concept of polarity is inherent in the idea that war is fought between sides. There are normally two sides in this concept of war. Even if the war involves several parties, they are typically separated and aligned as two sets of allies. This polarity is necessary for war as traditionally understood to perform its basic function as a political instrument: to provide a military outcome that sets conditions for a political solution. The distinction between one's own side and the enemy allows war to provide a see-saw-like, mutually exclusive outcome: defeat for one side is victory for the other. Even if the outcome of war is not absolute, the overall success or failure of a side in war is relative to an enemy.

The outcomes of many contemporary conflicts, however, are not exclusively defined against an enemy. In Afghanistan the defeat of the Taliban fades every year as a strategic priority relative to the stabilisation of the Afghan state, even if that means the endurance of a latent insurgency. Definition of the outcome of the Afghan conflict for the international coalition extends into the perceptions of audiences well beyond the insurgency. The Afghan people are deemed to be a central audience. Beyond Afghanistan the perception of the conflict's outcome within the Muslim world, and particularly in Pakistan, for instance, is a key factor. Moreover, the outcome in Afghanistan has global implications in terms of the credibility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), not least in terms of Chinese audiences.

This challenges the see-saw model of victory and defeat that is central to war as traditionally conceived. One can apply military pressure against the enemy in the Taliban, and more broadly to the insurgency. However, the defeat of insurgents in the military sense may assist in, but does not translate into, victory for the coalition because the interpretation of the conflict in terms of military metrics may well be a frame of reference to which most audiences do not subscribe. For example, the drone strikes in Pakistan are effective against the enemy in a military sense, but to argue that they contribute to a sense of coalition success among audiences other than the enemy is to ignore the widespread protests against them.

In war as traditionally conceived, military action is understood, and planned, in terms of its effect against the enemy. This is a fairly stable
basis from which to determine a conflict's outcome, which is in the last analysis based on death and destruction, or its threat. However, when a conflict's outcome comes to be defined against audiences other than the enemy, strategy must adjust to the audience rather than assume that the application of force will be universally understood in terms of its effect against the enemy.

Thus in the traditional concept of war an audience other than the enemy (which is therefore beyond the range of armed force) is still considered to understand the conflict's outcome according to the military verdict of the battlefield between the sides actually fighting. When they do not, the military outcome does not provide a stable basis upon which to define a conflict's outcome. In such circumstances, should these audiences beyond the enemy matter to the strategist in terms of the conflict's outcome, strategy needs to consider military actions in terms of their likely political interpretations by these various audiences. This in turn leads to military action within war becoming highly politicised: the boundary between military and political activity is blurred. The use of force moves towards being simply an extension of policy the more it aims directly at political aims. This is distinct from the established idea, set out by Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), that the use of force in war is an extension of policy by other means. In the Clausewitzian sense, activity within the military domain ultimately seeks a political result, but via a specifically military outcome that sets conditions for it.

The blurring of military and political activity, common in contemporary conflict, can be elucidated by analogy to domestic politics in liberal democracies. In domestic politics, there is an animating tension between, say, two parties (like political parties and their various constituencies in liberal democracies, in the Afghan conflict the Afghan government and the insurgency can both be characterised as franchise movements which have an ideological core, beyond which people have subscribed to the franchise primarily to further their own interests). In the context of UK domestic politics, the other party may be an ‘enemy' of sorts, but a party's success is only partly defined by popularity ratings relative to the other party.

Neither is the outcome a party has within a term in office defined in terms of ‘victory' or ‘defeat' (apart from in a general election, in which the result is, precisely, defined directly against the other ‘enemy' party). Rather, the outcome that a party in government is recognised to have
had is gauged: first, in relation to the audiences who are the objects of government policy; second, in terms of the effect it has, perhaps successful, perhaps not, along given policy lines. Both of these are subjective, and liable to evolve over time.

To produce and maintain its ambitions on given policy lines, the party needs to keep in balance an evolving constellation of political constituencies, deciding whose support to maintain, whose to win over, and whose to take risk on. This requires sustaining the loyalty of the ‘home base' of more ideological supporters while simultaneously appealing to other audiences, many of whom will interpret political rhetoric foremost in relation to their own self-interest as opposed to strongly identifying with a political agenda. Success or failure will depend on how far a party can get this diverse set of audiences to subscribe to its political narrative.

Domestic politics take place in a fragmented, kaleidoscopic environment, in which sections of the electorate are thinking about their own interests, effectively competing vis-à-vis one another. While war is not usually understood through such a lens, the conflict in Afghanistan is precisely characterised by such a politically kaleidoscopic battlespace. The similarity between domestic politics and contemporary conflict is emphasised by the practice of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan: an approach that seeks to match actions and words so as to influence target audiences to subscribe to a given narrative. Moreover, just as in a general election, where parties need to configure their national narratives to find resonance in local issues, so too in many contemporary conflicts do big ideas need to be attuned to local circumstances.

The analogy with domestic politics in liberal democracies indicates how politically nuanced approaches, even down to the tactical level, are required to have effect in highly politicised, kaleidoscopic conflict environments. This approach contrasts with the default association of the application of armed forces in violent combat with a polarised conception of conflict as ‘war'. The indiscriminate association of an aggressive and violent enemy with the traditional concept of war can frustrate more politically nuanced approaches. Hence a politician planning to have political effect may consult a geographical map to plan his or her campaign based on the distribution of voters. Yet the implication is that a political estimate has preceded decisions about where physically to allocate resources.

The military, however, tends by instinct to gravitate towards locations of violence to find and take on the enemy. In counter-insurgency, to intervene in a fight without first having anticipated the political risks and opportunities of such an action is in most cases (outside self-defence situations) to misunderstand the nature of such highly politicised conflict. The outcome of an action is usually better gauged by the chat at the bazaar the next day, and its equivalent higher up the political food chain, than body counts. The control of political space is as important, if not more important, than controlling physical space.

Strategic confusion can result when conflicts characterised by competition between many actors in a fragmented political environment are shoehorned into a traditional concept of war, with its two polarised sides. This fragmented competition may involve organised violence on a large scale, but is fundamentally different from war in the traditional sense: in many contemporary conflicts armed force seeks to have a direct political effect on audiences rather than setting conditions for a political solution through military effect against the enemy. In Afghanistan, activity (both violent and non-violent) by coalition forces and insurgents is frequently considered primarily in terms of the effect it will have on the local political situation, rather than thinking about the problem strictly in terms of the defeat of an enemy.

Whereas political considerations in war as traditionally conceived usually take place at the highest levels of military and civilian command, political considerations now drive operations even at the lowest level of command: the military dimension of war is pierced by political considerations at the tactical level. The fact that the military now tends to speak about ‘battlespaces' rather than ‘battlefields' acknowledges the expansion of the traditional, apolitical, military domain beyond the physical clash of armed forces to include its political, social and economic context even at the local level.

This trend is exaggerated when, as in Afghanistan, liberal powers and their armed forces conduct many actions through non-violent means, often termed ‘non-kinetic' in military jargon. These have significantly expanded in the first decade of this century, not least due to the possibilities of the Internet and the proliferation of mobile phones, but also any number of other information media.

The ‘information revolution' is as much a feature of the poorest countries in the world as the richest. This was brought home to me in
an operation in rural Kandahar Province, South Afghanistan, in December 2007, when I caught up with a team of Afghan soldiers who were hunched over a mobile phone they had confiscated from a peasant in a remote mud compound, only to find them avidly debating the latest features of this new model, which was more advanced than the one I owned in the UK. This was not surreal, it was normal. The information revolution that is currently going on irreversibly accelerates and expands the information dimension of modern conflict right down to the tactical level.

In terms of the role of the information domain in contemporary conflict more broadly, as David Kilcullen has argued, successful insurgents, and now successful counter-insurgents, seek to persuade an audience in such a way that the political message delivered is an end in itself; this effectively reverses the role of information in conventional warfare, which tends to be about the explanation of actions.
¹
The composition of forces at the tactical level, where civilian diplomats and development advisers, among others, often pursue the same local political goals as their military counterparts, reflects this fusion of the violent and the non-violent.
Figure 1
is taken from a UK manual on stabilisation operations, which tend to be defined as operations of a lower intensity than conventional war that aim to have a given political effect in failing states. The diagram illustrates how people's perceptions are the object of the commander's activity; it also shows that he has many means, violent and non-violent, at his disposal to achieve this.

In summary, contemporary conflict tends to exaggerate this distinction: first, the use of armed force for directly political outcomes, outside the traditional concept of war; second, the use of force within a traditional concept of war, in which the military seeks a distinctly military outcome which then sets conditions for a political solution.

To re-emphasise the point, this distinction is not always clear on the ground. Commanders (in the context of Afghanistan, both coalition and insurgent commanders) will differ in their approaches. Should a commander ignore the political dimension of the conflict, and focus exclusively on killing those whom he perceives to be his enemies, then he is not using force for a directly political outcome; in reality few commanders will do this, but some have come close. By contrast, others, including the vast majority of coalition commanders in Afghanistan today, will be very closely attuned to political effect, be they at the tactical level, or
higher up, and consider all their actions, violent and non-violent, in these terms. What results is therefore a complex patchwork, which is why this distinction can be hard to perceive in actuality.