War From the Ground Up (37 page)

In a broader sense, both the coalition-Afghan government and the Taliban are anti-historical in their treatment of historical experience. Both wish to ignore the 1980s war in Afghanistan, despite it being the most powerful lens through which many Afghans understand the present. The process of transition to Afghan forces was relatively successful for the Soviets, but the Afghan army really only controlled the roads and cities after the Soviet withdrawal. This is an important memory for much of Afghanistan's rural population, especially in the south. Conversely, for the Taliban, the Mujahideen split up and fought among one another after the Soviet withdrawal, and many of them had no problem joining the government because their fight had been against foreigners, not Afghans.
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People are not a clean slate on which a strategic narrative can be imposed. The situation in sixteenth-century England during the Reformation provides an unusual, but useful, analogy.
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In the 1520s and
early 1530s Thomas More argued that individual readers were not passive
tabulae rasae
, ‘clean slates', who receive the self-contained literal meaning of the Biblical text without mediation of any kind. On the contrary, More contested the notion of a ‘literalist' interpretation of the Bible, since, he argued, readers inevitably come to the text with presuppositions as to probable meanings from beyond the text.
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Without such presuppositions, interpretive communities fragment and fall to internecine dispute.

This is by analogy the position that the international coalition, and indeed the Taliban leadership, find themselves in today; by treating people as a-historical personages, competition over the meaning of most events in the conflict involves tearing apart their factual stability, as ‘facts' are put on a pedestal, over the broader context of what each side is trying to do. When there are an endless number of potentially significant events, as there are in mosaic conflicts, the effect is a loss of overall meaning; ISAF investigations of ‘what happened' compete with insurgent counter-claims amid all sorts of alternative views presented by other actors, from Afghan villagers to internet bloggers: this produces not a comprehensible Roman mosaic but a postmodern jumble with no discernible story.

The result of the dynamic is that audiences latch on to stories that have some kind of linear thread, which can range from casualty figures to number of girls in schools, which ultimately generate eccentric, partial, and incoherent comprehensions of conflict. Indeed, one of General Petraeus' successes as commander of ISAF was to set out a clear story of how transition would occur, a structure through which audiences could make some sense of an eclectic range of facts available to them that might relate to the conflict.

Fighting fundamentalists on literalist battlefields is a terrain as tedious as it is dangerous for liberal powers. Liberal powers should be confident about the values that underpin their title. Those values should be expressed in terms of strategic vision that beats fundamentalists because they have nothing to offer in the longer term, apart from a sort of puritanical, purgatorial, stasis (take the Taliban rule in the 1990s for example). Liberal powers have failed to present a convincing vision of their role in the world in the first decade of this century. Engaging fundamentalists on a literalist plane is the corollary of this loss of strategic self-confidence: if people had confidence in what liberal powers stood for
they would have some faith in what we are trying to do in Afghanistan, and interpret our actions more sympathetically.

The importance of vision in strategic narrative, in the sense of an aspirational proposition, was brought home to me by a remarkable encounter I had in Nepal in 2008. I was in the west of the country in a town called Tamghas, which suffered in the Maoist civil war. The town was racked by the troubles which result from the polarisation of political affiliations that civil wars encourage. I met a local teacher who was also one of the wealthier peasants, and one of the few moderates left. He was fairly despondent about the situation. The moment of complete surprise for me came when he started talking about ‘1215 Magna Carta', which, since we were speaking Nepali, I initially thought was some kind of technical Nepali term. It turned out that he listened to the BBC World Service and, incredibly, was familiar with this episode of English legal history.

He said I was lucky to live in the UK, even though to him the UK was more of an imagined community than a real place. This informed the entire way in which he conceived the work of the British government in Nepal, namely the good work that the Gurkha Welfare Scheme did in the town. This kind of narrative is essential; the Maoists could all too easily dress up what the Gurkha Welfare Scheme does in anti-imperialistic terms. Vision and confidence in one's values is today at the core of strategy. Vision provides stability to the interpretive structure proposed by strategic narrative, because it offers a way for people to understand confused situations on the basis of their belief in that vision; this is superior to dependency on an exclusively literal understanding of ‘what happened', which can be unclear and often invented in the competition in conflict to persuade people of a particular agenda. Vision of strategic narrative is therefore of little value if not accompanied by confidence in that vision.

The construction of strategic narratives in fragmented political environments often generates a paradox for the strategist. On the one hand, the orchestration of actions directly to target people's perceptions is an immensely powerful strategic tool; on the other hand, it is a dangerous drug which can encourage huge instability by forgetting that there
should be a physical reality underpinning perceived reality. How does the strategist deal with this? Ultimately strategy faces a rhetorical question: how do we combine actions with the perception of those actions in order to persuade an audience over a period of time?

When strategy operates in a stable interpretive structure, such as when the inter-state paradigm of war is used symmetrically by both sides, the meaning of actions only makes sense as part of a larger whole. When that interpretive constraint is removed, as is often the case in contemporary conflict, the meaning of every action can be contested. The way in which actions are contested on a global scale in the Long War and in Afghanistan between the coalition-Afghan government and the Taliban is typical of a literalist, unstable, interpretive environment, unconstrained by agreed presuppositions. Virtually every action is challenged by and within either side.

At the local level, if there is a civilian killed, the Taliban will always blame it on the coalition; the reality is usually that they have accidently trodden on an IED. If there is any fire-fight, the Taliban will claim that there was damage to civilian property or casualties. If the coalition arrests anybody, a crowd of locals will turn up at the gate of the patrol base insisting that the man is innocent; it can be hard to distinguish genuine argument from those that are forced by the Taliban to complain to the coalition. Indeed on one occasion in 2010 a village elder harangued us for hours about how two people whom we had detained were innocent. At the end of the meeting when he was out of earshot he said privately and discreetly that the men were guilty but that there were Taliban spies in the meeting who had told him what to say.

This type of situation is commonplace. Every coalition action is woven into conspiracy theories of what is ‘really' going on. I remember how many villagers I met in 2007–8 genuinely thought that my platoon had arrived to spy on their women. The idea that the coalition ‘really' supports the Taliban to prolong the struggle to control resources is but one of innumerable conspiracies which, disappointingly, are rife.
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The outcome is that every action has to be contested and explained, as there is no stability to its meaning. For strategic audiences, this resembles a vicious, never-ending argument about who did what, which is never resolved, and ultimately provides no stable basis for a strategic narrative to persuade them.

The
Daily Telegraph's
information campaign during the 2009 British parliamentary expenses scandal illustrates how the speed of information
in a fragmented story makes actual fact less important than the overall impression. On one day, the paper would run with the accusations against an MP on the front page and present a short explanatory statement from the MP which he or she would have had little time to work up. The next day, by which time the MP would have had time to investigate and present a proper response, the caravan had moved on and another MP was under scrutiny, and responses from the previous day were old news. Thus the reality of whether the accused MPs were guilty, and all of the mitigating circumstances, were far less important than the initial perception.
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This offers an analogy with events in Afghanistan. The endless argument over the facts of individual events is less significant than the overall impression. The overall impression in turn is far more related to people's pre-existing prejudices than attention to individual facts.

This kind of situation, where sides argue tooth and nail over the meaning of every point or action, is typical of unstable interpretive environments, and those environments are in turn produced when people are insecure about who they are, and what they are about. Returning to the analogy of sixteenth-century England, we find that a parallel situation would be the debate over the interpretation of the English translation of the Bible in the 1520s and 1530s. The translators of the Bible into the vernacular claimed that it would allow every person to read it individually without the distorting intervention of Catholic doctrine. The immediate result was that every word was contested, as people disagreed over precise literal meanings, since there is clearly no such thing as an incontrovertible ‘literal' meaning.

Texts mean different things to different readers, according to the presuppositions they bring to the text in the first place. The Protestants of the 1520s and 1530s courageously translated the Bible into the vernacular; once the project was completed, however, Protestants vehemently disagreed both with Catholics and with other Protestants over all kinds of meanings; every word became a battlefield. Hence key ideas were contested on the basis of technical philological points (that is, not on the basis of the overall direction of the text's meaning), until Protestant traditions formed that stabilised scriptural meanings with the establishment of alternative presuppositions.

As has been argued in
Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents
(2007), in such unstable interpretive circumstances
the authority of the philologist, the expert on the translation and meaning of words, replaced the authority of the Church; now the text was ‘not property of the reader and interpreters but its translators', thus creating ‘new frontiers for confusion'.
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The role of the philologist provides a neat parallel with the role of the media today. There are essentially two rhetorical responses to such a problem. The first is to state that some people will always understand the ‘real' meaning, and that these are the people one is trying to persuade. Thus one Protestant reaction in the 1530s was to claim that the elect (those predestined by God to go to heaven) had the real meaning of the Bible ‘written on the heart', and would always interpret a text correctly.
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This is similar to propositions which claim to act on the basis of universal values, such as the persistent rehearsal by President George W. Bush of the argument that the United States was engaged in a war with those who ‘hated freedom'. The argument is essentially that it is the ‘other' which irrationally does not understand something that is universal. This rhetorical approach imposes blame not on the text, or in the context (here the strategic narrative), but on the reader, or the strategic audience. Thus the sixteenth-century culture of blaming the ‘bad reader' who missed the point of a text whose meaning should be literal finds resonance today in the frequent assertions that audiences domestic and foreign ‘don't understand' what the coalition is doing in Afghanistan. This suggests that the problem is one of communication for which the audience is responsible, rather than the issue itself.

The other, more positive, rhetorical response to an unstable interpretive environment is to persuade people of the overall intention, as opposed to becoming trapped in an endless ‘who did what' argument about each action. In terms of our Biblical analogy, this is a tradition strongly associated with Augustine (354–430 ACE). His key argument was that people should read the Bible with a general sense of the text's overall meaning and direction, which was elucidated by non-textual elements of the wider Christian tradition. The theme of charity, for example, provided an essential interpretive guide to understand obscure passages. That Augustine stressed confidence in vision and the overall message, while living at a moment of profound self-doubt for the Roman Empire, with barbarians at its gate and the fall of its western half approaching, makes his views particularly resonant today. Augustine's is a very different, and more stable, interpretive tradition than the simplistic
idea that words, or actions, can speak for themselves if the right person interprets them. Essentially it privileges intention over specific content.

An alternative and perhaps more familiar example would be the debate about how British judges interpret the law. One of the key issues is how far they should understand the intention of Parliament in the literal words of the statute, or look beyond the text to other sources. The late Lord Denning, who was judge in a 1950 case, stated controversially that ‘we do not sit here to pull the language of Parliament and of Ministers to pieces and make nonsense of it… We sit here to find out the intention of Parliament and of Ministers and carry it out, and we do this better by filling in the gaps and making sense of the enactment than by opening it up to destructive analysis'.
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