War From the Ground Up (38 page)

Nor were Augustine or Lord Denning's views so different from the way the British army today emphasises the need for ‘mission command' in battle: that commanders should be clear about what their commander wants to achieve and select the best route to get there; this is a much more stable way of communicating meaning than describing in detail exactly what to do, which would unnecessarily have people debate whether to go left or right around a hill if it hasn't been exactly specified.

The acknowledgement of the centrality of vision in strategy is certainly not new. It seems at present, however, that the literalist approach is in the ascendancy. For actions in contemporary conflict to have political utility—to be in support of an idea—strategy needs to understand that the role of strategic narrative is to convince people; in imitation of the good orator, that requires effectively binding
logos, ethos
and
pathos
together. President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or President John F. Kennedy's inauguration speech are both classic examples of highly successful presentations of strategic narrative. They blend rational argument with passion, history and vision; they are essentially persuasive in terms of all three of Aristotle's rhetorical resources. From a strategic perspective, they set conditions for future actions to be understood in a particular context which encourages people to see those actions in terms of what they were driving at, rather than in terms of the action itself.

An episode related by General Sir Graeme Lamb captures the effective matching of words, actions and vision. He speaks about the issue of General Stanley McChrystal's effort to reduce civilian casualties on taking command in 2009:

[The insurgents] operate in the communication space incredibly better than we do. It is the area in which we are horribly deficient. It was important therefore that we change the dynamic through the ways people drove [road traffic accidents, and a perception of coalition arrogance by defensive driving, had been a big problem]—so it was how we were perceived by the population—and how we tried to reduce the casualties in the use of force and other ways.

Hobbes world is a grim old place. Both sides are getting broken up, killed and damaged in the process of this, and people apply the Surrey [an English county] map to it, which just doesn't work. Trying to reduce those casualties is recognised by the people. There was an incident in the North, in Kunduz … when a tanker was blown up and a number of locals who had been told by the Taliban to get the fuel were killed. McChrystal went straight there, and a lot of people said, ‘What are you doing? We haven't had the inquiry yet, and Germany are upset about this'. The bush net [informal communication] of Afghanistan is every bit as good as the bush nets you will find in other parts of the third and second world. It is often far better than where we have a clever communication space. It went around the country that he was someone who was genuinely trying to reduce civilian casualties, and the vast majority of Afghans got that. So McChrystal was seen as somebody who was in charge of ISAF and the coalition forces, who was genuinely aware of Afghans. That is not how they had perceived it before.
²⁵

The dry, banal, bureaucratic language and legalese of official justifications for a conflict, or the endless announcement of ‘investigations' into who did what in relation to allegations of wrongdoing, characterise the West's strategic narratives today (President Obama's speeches, or General McChrystal's actions, are perhaps exceptions which prove the rule). This is not just a case of finding it hard to persuade people because we are boring; by engaging fundamentalists on the battlefield of literal interpretation, we fight on ground that favours them, because their messages are simplistic and work better in that environment. Moreover, the Taliban are able to exploit the fact that the coalition is honest; the Taliban continuously gain political advantage by lying and making up stories. To shift the interpretive environment by emphasising ultimate intentions plays to the West's strengths, because fundamentalism has nothing to offer in the long-term.

I first met insurgents when I taught at a school in a hill village in eastern Nepal in 2002. The Maoist insurgency was taking off in this part of the country. The ‘Maobadi' arrived for the first time one night; I woke up to find a band of around platoon size sleeping in the house of the family I was staying with. There was mutual surprise in the morning! They were not expecting a Westerner to turn up at breakfast and nor was I expecting them. I got to know them as they came and went from the village over the next few months. What struck me was the need to understand insurgents on their own terms. Most were very young, between 13 and 18; many were girls; they were virtually all illiterate; they were mainly poor, low-caste Nepalis; few wore uniform; they were not from the local area; their weapons were a mix of old rifles, which they cleaned assiduously, and quite sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) manufactured from pressure cookers.

These were indeed real guerrillas who had left their families and were ideologically motivated: they were sworn to fight to the death, at least in their boasts to me. Their commander, not much older than me, even gave me a particularly enthusiastic and largely incorrect presentation on Marxism, including an eccentric and obsessive emphasis on the Paris Commune (which I must say was a rather bizarre, but entertaining, experience in this rural Himalayan village!). He felt that he was part of a wider and energetic historical movement. That his genuine idealism should have been channelled in this way was somewhat tragic.

The brief outline of circumstances described above indicates that any counter-insurgent would have to deal here with a very particular political problem. To have understood Nepal's civil war in generic military terms as ‘insurgent' versus ‘government', in isolation of its actual political and social context, would have been overly simplistic. Yet fixation with these generic doctrinal categories has proved to be problematic in the coalition campaign in Afghanistan, particularly in the earlier phase of the campaign, as well as more broadly in the ‘Long War', which the ‘War on Terror' seems to have become. This is what happens when an operational approach is upscaled to the level of strategy, or policy: when operational ideas, which demand a political context, are not adequately provided with one, they move up to fill the vacuum. This in turn produces a danger that the campaign is not understood on its own terms, but rather aims at generic military metrics that are largely self-referencing, and distort comprehension of the conflict. In Afghanistan, this has led people to see counter-insurgency as a strategy in itself, which it is not, and to criticise it on that basis; the irony being that counter-insurgency is a perfectly sensible operational approach.

The examination of war from an exclusively military perspective, isolated from its social and political context, leads to false conclusions and poor strategy. Carl von Clausewitz's
On War
was partly a response to his experience of the Napoleonic Wars, which he saw as the product of the French Revolution: ‘very few of the manifestations in war can be ascribed to new inventions or new departures in ideas. They result mainly from the transformation of society and new social conditions'.
¹

War today is in the process of undergoing another evolution in response to social and political conditions, namely the speed and interconnectivity associated with contemporary globalisation and the information revolution. However, strategy, particularly in the West, still tends to be constructed with two basic assumptions which derive from interstate war, even for conflicts which are not inter-state: first, that competitors in war are essentially polarised; second, that the core strategic audiences of the conflict are to be found within the sides themselves.

The information revolution connects new audiences to contemporary conflicts, accelerating the proliferation of potential strategic audiences beyond the enemy (people against whom a conflict's outcome is defined other than the enemy), and beyond the state (people who do not identify with one of the state parties to a conflict); these categories often
overlap. Those beyond the enemy are out of range of force, the traditional, coercive means by which hostile audiences come to subscribe (by forced consent) to the legitimacy of one's strategic narrative; they are more likely to interpret actions in directly political terms, outside the interpretive structure offered by war. Those beyond the state, ‘non-state audiences' (who include citizens who refuse to identify with their ‘own' state, or at least have strong multiple identities), are more likely than citizens of a state party to be persuaded through their emotional and moral responses, given that the state rationales of national interest may have less or no purchase on them.

Although audiences beyond the parties to a conflict have always been recognised, victory and defeat in the inter-state paradigm relate to effects upon these core audiences, who identify with their state to the extent that they are defeated or are victorious with it, typically as a result of the defeat of their army on the battlefield. This latent inter-state mentality often extends to circumstances in which the enemy is not a state, in the sense that the enemy is essentially considered unitary. The presentation of the 9/11 attacks in terms of an ‘act of war' against the United States by President Bush in his 20 September 2001 address to Congress suggests such a default association of organised violence with the concept of war. He asserted that ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists'; this reaches to the heart of a conception of war's function as the resolution of an issue between polarised sides.
²

This conception needs re-evaluation in the light of recent experience. In Afghanistan there is a central tension between the government and the insurgency. However, these sides are better characterised as franchises that do not clearly align many of the conflict's actors. These actors tend to manoeuvre to gain political advantage vis-à-vis one another. This is significantly different from the polarised, two-way conflict of interstate war; although that conceptual premise is immediately suggested when people speak of the Afghan conflict in terms of ‘war'.

To speak about the actions of ‘the insurgency' in Afghanistan is accurate only insofar as it is recognised that the insurgency is a franchise movement that comprehends many factions and interests, including some who are close to, or also part of, the government ‘franchise'. Moreover, the umbrella term is convenient because it is often not clear which part of the insurgency is responsible for an action. However, this should not be confused with the notion that ‘the Taliban' are a unitary
enemy whose leadership exerts direct control over the whole insurgency down to the tactical level.

What are the consequences in contemporary conflict of utilising as a default the inter-state paradigm of war, even for conflicts which are not inter-state? If that paradigm were merely a label to describe war, typically industrial war, between states, ‘conventional warfare' would be merely an inaccurate qualification for it, since it has been the exception in terms of the conflicts fought by Western states since 1945. Yet the durability of conventional war as the basic analytical structure of war goes far beyond semantic inaccuracy; it frustrates the need to re-define conflicts which are not ‘conventional', such as Afghanistan, so that they can be prosecuted successfully.

There is a contemporary requirement to be more precise about what we mean by military activity in terms of distinguishing between the use of force and the use of war. I have argued that the term ‘means', in Clausewitz's dictum that war is an extension of policy by other means, has a twofold signification, both meanings being intertwined. The first meaning refers to the actual use of force, the second to war as an interpretive structure which makes war ‘itself' a particular political instrument. War offers an interpretive template which can be used by strategy to persuade audiences to understand actions in a conflict in a given ‘military' way (just as the words of a barrister are understood through the interpretive context of court advocacy; outside of court, the same words might be interpreted in significantly different ways). Strategic thought, notably in popularised public debates preceding conflicts, tends to focus intensively on the former (the actual use of force) and to neglect the latter (war itself as a political instrument).

The question ‘should we intervene militarily in country X?' is common, and rarely semantically challenged. Such phrasing would imply that the use of military means for military ends is indistinguishable. Yet the difference between military means and military ends corresponds to the distinction between the two significations available in Clausewitz's dictum: the military apply armed force, but military ends are traditionally defined through the concept of war. While the two may well be inseparable in certain circumstances, especially in conventional war, military means can be, and are in many contemporary conflicts, used independently of military ends the more they directly seek a political goal.

The converse is a grey area: would a state on state attack without traditionally defined military means, using cyber alone for example (which has happened already: Russia's three week cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007, which was described in the press as ‘cyberwar', being the most notorious), be said to make use of the interpretive framework of war?
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When war fails clearly to separate the military and the political, organised violence in human affairs is not contained. Take the Long War for example. Such a redefinition of the ‘War on Terror' exemplifies that, if a war's mechanism cannot provide a military outcome, it does not end. The Long War may not be absolute war in the sense of huge armies clashing, but it clearly approaches an abstract conception of absolute war because the use of force is unrestrained by policy: how can policy regulate force if force is a direct extension of policy?