Friday, December 22, 2006

An Integral Approach to the War on Terror?

Siona at Zaadz forwarded a New Yorker article on David Kilcullen, an Australian who is an expert on counterinsurgency, to me and a couple of other integral bloggers. I find that his approach, while not referencing any integral jargon, has the feel of integral nonetheless.

Here is an example:
“What does all the theory mean, at the company level?” he asked. “How do the principles translate into action—at night, with the G.P.S. down, the media criticizing you, the locals complaining in a language you don’t understand, and an unseen enemy killing your people by ones and twos? How does counterinsurgency actually happen? There are no universal answers, and insurgents are among the most adaptive opponents you will ever face. Countering them will demand every ounce of your intellect.” The first tip is “Know Your Turf”: “Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district.” “Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency”—the title riffs on a T. E. Lawrence insurgency manual from the First World War—was disseminated via e-mail to junior officers in the field, and was avidly read.

Last year, in an influential article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Kilcullen redefined the war on terror as a “global counterinsurgency.” The change in terminology has large implications. A terrorist is “a kook in a room,” Kilcullen told me, and beyond persuasion; an insurgent has a mass base whose support can be won or lost through politics. The notion of a “war on terror” has led the U.S. government to focus overwhelmingly on military responses. In a counterinsurgency, according to the classical doctrine, which was first laid out by the British general Sir Gerald Templar during the Malayan Emergency, armed force is only a quarter of the effort; political, economic, and informational operations are also required. A war on terror suggests an undifferentiated enemy. Kilcullen speaks of the need to “disaggregate” insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad. Kilcullen writes, “Just as the Containment strategy was central to the Cold War, likewise a Disaggregation strategy would provide a unifying strategic conception for the war—something that has been lacking to date.” As an example of disaggregation, Kilcullen cited the Indonesian province of Aceh, where, after the 2004 tsunami, a radical Islamist organization tried to set up an office and convert a local separatist movement to its ideological agenda. Resentment toward the outsiders, combined with the swift humanitarian action of American and Australian warships, helped to prevent the Acehnese rebellion from becoming part of the global jihad. As for America, this success had more to do with luck than with strategy. Crumpton, Kilcullen’s boss, told me that American foreign policy traditionally operates on two levels, the global and the national; today, however, the battlefields are also regional and local, where the U.S. government has less knowledge and where it is not institutionally organized to act.
Kilcullen's basic argument is that this whole war on terror, or the long war (partly his phrase), is not about Islam -- Islam is secondary to the problem.
“There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’ ” Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, he said, “People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.” He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates.
Beginning to see this problem as a human problem dressed in Islamic clothes is the first step toward being able to form an opposition that has any chance of succeeding.

He advocates working with this conflict at the local level, the people level, rather than all the inflated hyperbole of the Bush Administration about nation building and a global war. None of that is going to have any impact. The enemy is smart than that.

Bin Laden knows how Americans think -- our CIA made him the man he is today -- so just before the 2004 elections he released a video that linked his supposed agenda to the Democratic agenda in an effort to help Bush get reelected. Bin Laden knows he needs Bush to maintain recruitment and resentment among the rank and file who support his efforts.
Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden’s public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. “I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?” he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that “this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy.” Ron Suskind, in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” claims that analysts at the C.I.A. watched a similar video, released in 2004, and concluded that “bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reëlection.” Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance. Indeed, in the years after September 11th Al Qaeda’s core leadership had become a propaganda hub. “If bin Laden didn’t have access to global media, satellite communications, and the Internet, he’d just be a cranky guy in a cave,” Kilcullen said.
When we make this into one big war against one big enemy, we make Bin Laden more powerful and play into his agenda. Rather than seeing this as one big war, we need to redefine it as 60 or so smaller wars (whatever the real number might be), and engage the enemy at that level.

If we are to follow the approach Kilcullen lays out, we must intimately know the people whose hearts and minds we hope to persuade. We must know their hopes and dreams, their frustrations and resentments. But we must also know everything about their lives, their villages or cities, and their social networks. Further, we must also understand the regional dynamics, and use all the resources we have available from face to face dialogue to global information sharing -- essentially, we must utilize each of the quadrants.

He correctly points out that this war won't be won with military might as much as it will with information and human level interactions. When he was on loan to the Pentagon, under Paul Wolfowitz's supervision, he was asked to create policy in that direction, but Rumsfeld preferred to spend the money on flashy weapons.
In 2004, Kilcullen’s writings and lectures brought him to the attention of an official working for Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Wolfowitz asked him to help write the section on “irregular warfare” in the Pentagon’s “Quadrennial Defense Review,” a statement of department policy and priorities, which was published earlier this year. Under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld, who resigned in November, the Pentagon had embraced a narrow “shock-and-awe” approach to war-fighting, emphasizing technology, long-range firepower, and spectacular displays of force. The new document declared that activities such as “long-duration unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and military support for stabilization and reconstruction efforts” needed to become a more important component of the war on terror. Kilcullen was partly responsible for the inclusion of the phrase “the long war,” which has become the preferred term among many military officers to describe the current conflict. In the end, the Rumsfeld Pentagon was unwilling to make the cuts in expensive weapons systems that would have allowed it to create new combat units and other resources necessary for a proper counterinsurgency strategy.
This shows how poorly Rumsfeld understood the war he was leading -- and suggests that maybe under new leadership, there is hope that the US will begin to see the real issues involved. I'm not holding my breath.

However, Kilcullen demonstrates that there are military minds capable of seeing the whole of this conflict rather than merely focusing on the military approach. Hopefully, the Pentagon will begin to take more seriously approaches such as those laid out by Kilcullen.

There is much more to this article than I can cover, so please give it a read.


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