War From the Ground Up (36 page)

In the summer of 2010 in one of the villages that our battlegroup patrolled, an old mud-walled stables is still known as the ‘British fort'. British forces occupied Gereshk and its outskirts during both the First and Second Afghan Wars, and the outpost probably dates from one of
these interventions. In both cases the British backed the Barakzai tribe of central Helmand, who were traditional enemies of the Alizais in the north of the province, and in both cases provoked a fierce Alizai reaction.
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The second time the Alizais actually made common cause with the Barakzai and chased the British out of Gereshk; this led to the destruction of a British brigade at the battle of Maiwand in 1880. In 2006 British forces were drawn into the key towns of northern Helmand: Sangin, Nowzad and Musa Qala. The Alizais reacted in the same way, especially as the British deployment had been preceded by the removal of Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the Alizai provincial governor. Mike Martin has argued that, in 2006, following his dismissal due to British pressure:

Sher Mohammad, the excluded powerbrokers and the cross-border elements simply played to the Helmandi feeling that the British were historical enemies and that the deployment was ‘revenge for Maiwand'. In a scenario that could have happened 170 years earlier, the British had managed to align previously antagonistic groups again, and the uneducated population did not know any better than the narrative that ‘They [the British] have come to oppress your wives, they are infidels', with religion being used to sharpen grievances felt.
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History matters. Strategic narrative, which effectively provides the interpretive structure that seeks to give particular meaning to tactical actions, must take this into account. The British did not do so in 2006 and suffered, when many Helmandis, especially in the north of the province, came to see what Britain genuinely intended to be a reconstruction mission as a rehearsal of older grievances. If history is ‘a dialogue between the past and the present', the ability to tap into, and channel, historical currents, is important in the construction of effective strategy. The power of how people perceive history can be a powerful ‘force multiplier', or can alternatively be a huge drain on resources where strategy tries to swim upstream against historical perception.
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This theme is more familiar in the context of domestic politics. Competition over the interpretation of American history (in rhetoric which, for example, stresses the intentions of the founding fathers, and the polarisation of responses to movements such as the Tea Party, whose very name claims a particular interpretation of US history) is at the heart of current US political competition.
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Political messaging in a domestic context is aware of popular perceptions of history and is attuned accordingly.

In Afghanistan the Taliban make frequent appeal to historical analogy: ‘Are you a son of Shah Shuja or Dost Mohammed?' is one of their recruiting slogans. Shah Shuja was the ruler of Afghanistan installed by the British following the First Afghan War who ruled 1839–42; he is remembered in Afghanistan as a weak and effeminate ruler. Dost Mohammed was the great ruler of Afghanistan who overthrew Shah Shuja and ruled 1826–39 and 1843–63. The intention of this slogan today seeks to connect the comparison of Shah Shuja and Dost Mohammed to that between President Karzai and Mullah Omar. Virtually every aspiring Afghan political group since Dost Mohammed has tried to associate itself with him. Mullah Omar himself in April 1996 wore the cloak of Mohammed in Kandahar and professed himself leader of all Muslims, the
Amir-al-Mu'minin
. The last man to have performed this act was Dost Mohammed in 1834, who used it as a rallying call for war against the Sikhs.

Historic claims are often highly subjective. The banter between the Afghan police and the Taliban over unsecure radio offers an amusing insight into the subjective nature of historic claims. Both groups claim that they are the true Afghans, and that they are the ones continuing the struggle against foreigners for which the 1980s Mujahideen fought. The Taliban call the Afghan police ‘American slaves', to which the Afghan police usually reply that the Taliban are the ‘Pakistani slaves'; the same historical figures and anecdotes, as well as a choice selection of insults, are thrown in by both sides to communicate the opposite meaning.

History is a powerful spring of emotion; the strategist who can construct his narrative to tap into that well gains access to its power. The malleability of history is in part due to the instability of ‘national' histories. For example, the oft-recited argument that Britain actually achieved its strategic objectives in the First and Second Afghan War despite some tactical defeats may well be a legitimate interpretation of the historical record. However, it has no purchase for Afghans, whose belief in the defeat of the British is an idea ingrained in their national history.

Yet neither is there any such thing as a universal ‘Afghan' view of history. This was made evident to me in March 2008 when my company was sent to Maiwand, a small town on the road between Helmand and Kandahar. We were the first coalition troops to have spent any length of time in the area since the start of the war in 2001. We had been briefed that Maiwand was the site of a famous British defeat mentioned
above, and that villagers might comment on this. Moreover, the Taliban had actually been spreading rumours in Helmand that the ‘real' reason the British were there was to avenge the battle of Maiwand. During the first patrol in the town my platoon sergeant, Bel Gurung, was earnestly asked by some of the villagers if he was Russian, followed by ‘I didn't realise you people were still here'. This was all the more odd since he is Nepali! (To be fair, a lot of the Soviet troops in the 1980s were from the Asiatic parts of the USSR, and perhaps it was I who had the wrong pre-conceptions).

In another case, at a place called Hyderabad in the Upper Gereshk Valley, I remember one of the villagers asking why the American army had come, even though all the troops were in British uniform. For them, at that time, we were all much the same. The point is that it is perhaps too simplistic to extrapolate clear ideas about how people in rural southern Afghanistan make political judgements based on a particular oral historical tradition. I cannot claim to understand how exactly we fitted into the historical traditions at play in southern Afghanistan; it would have been a complex web of historical anecdote, conspiracy, current news, actual human interaction and mutual miscomprehension.

Because history is not stable, strategy can work with it and weave its narrative into its tapestry. Strategy can use the flow of history as an emotional current upon which to float its rational narrative. Leo Tolstoy wrote in the second epilogue to
War and Peace
(1869):

In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
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A common metaphor for Tolstoy's theory is that of the shepherd looking at his flock from a hill. All the sheep are acting of their own free will and the flock moves around in different directions. The sheep at the head of the flock is seen to be the leader at that point in time, although his position is really a function of the particular alignment of the flock at that time; the leader is a label for events.

Although Tolstoy's view is an extreme position, the idea that we can associate strategic effect by aligning ourselves with the currents of history is an important consideration. For example, what was effectively
regime change in Libya, going with the current of the Arab Spring, generated much less opposition than in Iraq. In an alternative example, in an analysis of President Truman's foreign policy, Nick Cullather argues that the idea of ‘development' was forged in the context of the conflict against the Soviet Union to further US strategic interests. Yet by situating development in a particular historical framework, US strategy was able to avoid the anti-colonial opprobrium for an idea which closely resembled colonial practice:

When President Harry S. Truman announced a ‘bold new program … for the improvement of underdeveloped areas'
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in January 1949, the global response was startling. Truman ‘hit the jackpot of the world's political emotions',
Fortune
[Magazine] noted.
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National delegations lined up to receive assistance that a few years earlier would have been seen as a colonial intrusion. Development inserted a new problematic into international relations, and a new concept of time, asserting that all nations followed a common historical path and that those in the lead had a moral duty to those who followed… Leaders of newly independent states, such as Zahir Shah of Afghanistan and Jawaharlal Nehru of India, accepted these terms, merging their own governmental mandates into the stream of nations moving toward modernity. Development was not only the best, but the only course: ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time',
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Nehru observed.
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Cullather's article exemplifies how the United States was able to exercise far more strategic influence by situating its strategic narrative within a powerful historical discourse, to which US strategy contributed by channelling that discourse towards its own interest. Cullather also argues that development as an abstract idea did not work very well on the ground in Helmand. The Helmand Valley Development Project, which tried to settle immigrants from all over Afghanistan on land reclaimed from the desert through irrigation, caused as many problems as it addressed. The events in the Middle East today show the importance (and difficulty) of being on the ‘right' side of history. Yet, like the actual conduct of development, the difficulty for strategy is to balance what gains purchase on a wide audience with what that entails on the ground.

The issue of strategy and the flow of historical narrative plays out in Helmand today. The main Soviet forces withdrew from Helmand in 1988, leaving garrisons of the Soviet Afghan Army in the main cities. Subsequently, the remaining political actors, including the then local government, the army and the Mujahideen factions, fought each other in a vicious struggle for power which had been building throughout the
1980s (under the surface of the two-dimensional Soviets-versus-Mujahideen narrative). The eventual outcome was colonisation of much of Helmand by the most successful Mujahideen group, which was effectively a tribal-based faction run by the Akhundzada family.

When one looks under the bonnet of the conflict today, local power-brokers (most of whom lived through the 1980s conflict) often talk of the fighting in terms of an extension of the same conflict—making reference to which Mujahideen party/communist faction an actor belongs/belonged to, and generally trying to figure out who will be sitting in what chairs when the music stops (or at least changes records). Moreover in Helmand the rural farmers' perception of the Afghan National Army is historically informed. As locals sometimes remind us, the Taliban used to conscript men from their villages to fight Ahmed Shah Massoud's predominantly Tajik group in the north of Afghanistan in the 1990s. The Afghan National Army today is largely composed of northerners. On the other hand, Taliban conscription was very unpopular, and the Afghan National Army in other areas is seen positively because it is more impartial in the factional disputes of the south.

The competition between strategic narrative and historical experience is as much a problem for the Taliban leadership as it is for the coalition. The Mujahideen split up after the Soviets left in the 1980s and fought among themselves. The Taliban leadership know that and, more to the point, the Taliban leadership must know that everyone else knows that too. The Taliban has a weak political identity because it means different things to different people. Many Taliban fighting groups themselves do not even follow orders from their leadership in any formal sense, and often ignore direction.

How does the Taliban leadership deal with this? Given their lack of a solid corporate identity, how do they communicate a strategic narrative that is remarkably effective? They attach labels to stories. They seek to transform anything into an information effect. Any coalition actions are ‘spun' by the Taliban to communicate a certain message. Several actions are invented, and the Taliban invariably blame the coalition publicly for civilians killed by their IEDs (even though the statistics show that, at least since 2009, the insurgency has caused far, far more civilian casualties than the coalition).

In a strategic sense, their campaign plan is not to lose: ‘you have the watches, we have the time' is the standard expression of this. History is
what is remembered. The Taliban leadership hopes to claim victory by placing a label on a narrative before it has even happened, which is a good strategy if you have nothing to lose. By staking out a claim to future victory the Taliban leadership takes credit for the actions of those who are within its franchise, who may in reality be fighting for personal gain rather than any wider cause.

Is this strategic narrative effective? On the one hand, yes: by placing an overwhelming emphasis on perception and communication, the Taliban are able to persuade people faster than the coalition can. On the other hand, to base one's entire strategy on perception rather than on the reality that lies beneath it is highly unstable. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, it is clear that strategies which depend massively on perception without a base in physical reality are very dangerous!

The Taliban leadership looks powerful, but in claiming small successes illegitimately they are giving themselves far more authority than they really have. At some point people might see that the emperor is naked. That point may come about in negotiations with the Taliban, as it becomes clear that either they will not negotiate, or that they will not agree on anything, because the groups they claim to command may well ignore them and they would lose all credibility. While they are merely negotiating, however, they appear to represent all of the Taliban, which improves their stature. To use a financial analogy, the Taliban leadership may well be creating a bubble in their own stock price.