War From the Ground Up (3 page)

To develop this distinction requires an assessment of political and military activity not only in terms of the difference between political
and military resources, but also in terms of what these activities seek to achieve: their aims.
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In contemporary conflict resources remain a relatively stable axis of difference between military and political activity. Despite the use by armed forces of non-violent resources, whether organised violence has been applied or threatened, remains a central distinction between military and non-military activity (though this is increasingly complicated by activities such as cyber-threats). The difference between political and military aims, however, does not provide a clear distinction: how can military activity be distinct from political activity if, in seeking directly political rather than military outcomes, organised violence is a direct extension of policy?

When liberal democracies use force as a direct extension of political activity, the boundaries between war and peace become confused. There is no logical spatial, or chronological, limit to the ‘War on Terror'. The ‘War on Terror' as a phenomenon has been relabelled in various ways. One contemporary term is the ‘Long War'. This is apt: the term implicitly makes an association between its objective, which, though ill-defined, can be understood partly in terms of a continuous effort to shape worldwide political perceptions according to the West's security interests, and its consequent lack of a clear end point, as perceptions continuously evolve.

What liberal powers do by blurring the conceptual boundaries between war and peace is often to militarise in a polarised manner pre-established patterns of political activity, which might otherwise not be part of the wider conflict. Robert Haddick wrote in 2008 that ‘the Long War, characterised by tribal and ethnic conflicts, is a reality'.
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That is indeed the case, but tribal and ethnic conflicts have been a reality for thousands of years; they pre-dated the Long War.

To frame political tensions, which have long existed, as part of a larger ‘war' is a deliberate policy choice. That is, those tribal and ethnic conflicts were generally not a security problem for liberal powers until they were incorporated into a broader conception of a global conflict. The linkage of local and regional conflicts into a global conflict is not necessarily wrong in itself; there is a requirement to explain how conflicts, disputes and insurrections in different parts of the world affect one another. However, the consequence has been, and will continue to be, that liberal powers are pressured to take sides and invest military credibility
in conflicts that may have no clear military solution within the terms of war as traditionally understood.

This interplay is clear on the ground in Afghanistan, where preexisting patterns of political activity, be they tribal, narco, religious, sectarian, or many other possible factors, become issues which come to have a bearing on the political affiliations of Afghan audiences to either of the sides that compete for that affiliation in the Afghan conflict (usually understood as the government of Afghanistan and international coalition on the one hand, and the insurgency or the Taliban on the other). Yet in absorbing these pre-existing political tensions, the sides in the Afghan conflict themselves become less distinct, and become franchise movements, as a complex web of cross-cutting motivations compromise the neat polarised conception of conflict.

A book published by the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs (CENSA), a US think tank, in February 2011 was entitled
Hybrid Warfare and Transnational Threats: Perspectives for an Era of Persistent Conflict
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Hybrid war is prominent in contemporary military thought, and I agree with many of its themes. Yet the conception of war as continuous conflict realised by the Long War subverts this traditional conception: that war is the ultimate form of decisiveness, which evidently requires an end point. The continuous conflict idea implicitly challenges the utility of war as a decisive political instrument.

This problem underlies the current debate as to the value of counter-insurgency as an approach to contemporary conflict. The Long War has been characterised as a ‘global counter-insurgency'. This form of global counter-insurgency has been criticised on the basis that it is not as effective as conventional war, which Western militaries are better suited to fighting. The argument has sometimes been characterised as between ‘crusaders', who advocate extending counter-insurgency-type thinking to defence policy beyond Afghanistan, and ‘conservatives', who want the US to fight, and decisively win, conventional wars.
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The question might be framed as a choice: do liberal powers choose only to fight wars in their traditional form, typically by conventional means, and win them, or do they use military force outside the traditional conception of war, as a direct extension of political activity?

In operational terms, the latter option may be the more effective operational approach in politically fragmented, kaleidoscopic, conflict environments. Yet counter-insurgency can be expensive in blood and treasure.

In strategic terms, preference for war in its traditional form might appear to be a more sensible option, as it presents a clear boundary between war and peace, which compartmentalises, and thus contains, violence in the world. Moreover, it usually allows Western military forces, when used, to win decisively in conventional military terms, rather than commit to conflicts which may lack a clear end point. However, there are evident problems with such a strategic approach. A policy decision only to fight wars with clear military solutions would mean to decline involvement in several situations in which enemies, especially non-state actors, refuse to engage in conventional battle against Western military forces. If there were legitimate Western security interests at stake, to refuse to fight anything but conventional battles might in reality mean not fighting at all, and thus to accept risk on those security concerns.

The use of armed force within a traditional conception of war on the one hand, and outside war, as ‘armed politics' in a direct extension of policy, on the other, is an important distinction in the abstract. They are in theory fundamentally different modes of prosecuting conflict. However, because they are often hard to perceive on the ground, the failure to make such a distinction is understandable. The failure to distinguish, however, carries with it a risk of liberal powers potentially getting the worst of both parts: engagement in permanent conflicts in whose operational prosecution they are unskilled.

The reality may not be a choice between such stark alternatives. First, isolation of the alternatives implies that there is currently a choice. However, future conflicts may not provide the luxury of such choice; an enemy can force one to fight on his terms. That is a central tenet of hybrid war theory, and makes sense.
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Counter-insurgency is likely to remain the more effective operational approach to deal with an enemy who wants to fight in an irregular manner. As this book argues, however, counter-insurgency is not a fixed but a highly flexible set of ideas, and does not necessarily need to be associated with expensive and drawn-out nation building. Counter-insurgency has often been a particularly resource efficient approach; yet the popularised historical record is partial because successful, resource efficient counter-insurgency campaigns have by their nature tended to be low profile precisely because they dealt with the issue discretely and with political sensitivity: how many people today have heard of the Dhofar campaign?

Second, the notion that future conflict in a world being so dramatically re-shaped by the information revolution can revert to traditional conventional war must be qualified. Short of absolute war, in which the primary goal is the annihilation of the enemy, the outcome of any more limited conflict will involve the perceptions of multiple strategic audiences who are unaligned to either side; how those audiences interpret the use of force politically will probably be essential to any military planning. This is likely to exclude the possibility that any future conventional war of a limited nature will take place in an apolitical military bubble whose outcome is defined exclusively against the enemy.

Third, contemporary conflict's conceptual boundaries are hard to define. The Sri Lankan civil war, for example, demonstrated a spectrum of means from low-intensity combat to high-intensity conventional battle on land and sea; only one side was a state actor (which evidently could not claim to represent the whole state), with the fighting being interspersed with periods of peace. The Chinese military aid to the Sri Lankan government in the final stage of the war, which tied into Chinese naval ambitions in the Indian Ocean, further complicates the categorisation of this conflict. Moreover, the conflict is not over in many ways. There remains a possibility of war crimes prosecutions in the future, should the political ground shift, and the governability of the Tamil population may well prove difficult in the longer term. Difficulty in categorising conflict, and making a distinction between war and peace, is frequent, not anomalous, in contemporary conflict.

These three caveats to the nature of this choice suggest that the distinction offered by such a choice does not impose a requirement to make a binary decision between two forms of conflict. Indeed to perform effectively in contemporary conflict, liberal powers do not need to make an absolute distinction between ‘crusader' and ‘conservative' positions.

To my mind, to have effect in a fragmented political environment, in which force is used as a direct extension of policy, counter-insurgency is usually a more effective operational approach than methods associated with conventional war. Counter-insurgency makes sense in theatres such as Afghanistan as an operational approach to achieve current policy goals. For a start, conventional war requires a clear enemy, which international coalitions do not have in Afghanistan or in the Long War. There is the option to use conventional force against insurgents, which
has been used by Russia in Chechnya and by the Sri Lankan government against the Tamil Tigers. In both cases such methods were successful in a narrow sense. However, by engaging in such methods, which are typically associated with large-scale human rights violations, liberal powers compromise their own values.

The apparent choice between these two modes in which armed force can be applied is more usefully understood as a practical analytical tool, which operates in a dialectical manner. In terms of contemporary conflict, the analytical distinction between the use of force in war and in ‘armed politics' outside war should in particular be made when liberal powers are tempted to elevate counter-insurgency from an operational approach within defined theatres to a global strategic approach. This is mistaken. The two are profoundly different propositions, even though they are already blurred to an extent in the Long War.

Counter-insurgency as the doctrinal basis of a national strategy is radically distinct from being the doctrinal basis of an operational approach. To conceptualise a national strategy as a type of global counter-insurgency is effectively to remove limitations on the conceptual expansion of the conflict, as an expanding multitude of different political issues are militarised in terms of their association with this concept. One consequence of the removal of limitation concerns the challenge to liberal democracies posed by Islamic fundamentalism. The liberal tradition, in the broad sense of the values that animate liberal democracies, is threatened by its use of a very broad and unstable concept of ‘war' to deal with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, an initially anomalous practice that seems now to have evolved into normality.

Moreover, there is today a particular urgency to investigate how to be effective in more limited, and typically more politicised, conflicts; for should strategists deem the use of force within more limited forms of armed conflict, and more moderate operational approaches such as counter-insurgency, to be ineffective, there may arise a temptation to apply military force in an unrestrained, absolute sense, because it ‘works' more reliably in achieving a policy goal. That is, for the methods that decisively ended the Sri Lankan civil war to be understood as ‘effective' is not only a profoundly dangerous attitude in terms of wider international stability, but represents the other side of the coin of failing effectively to prosecute armed conflicts using more limited and moderate operational approaches.

Finally, as the issue of how to define war rarely extends beyond specialist discussion, the public have not been much involved; yet the public's will and taxes must ultimately sustain strategic choices. The question of whether to commit to a ‘generational war', to accept an ‘era of persistent conflict', without a clear end-state, or, conversely, not to engage in countries in which there are genuine security concerns, should surely be an issue of public discussion, as the West seems to be sleepwalking into such a period of global generational conflict.