Knowing the Enemy

    George Packer has a good article in this week's New Yorker (alas not on-line), "Knowing the Enemy."  He considers the "anthropology of insurgency" in Iraq, focusing on an Australian military intellectual, David Kilcullen, currently working for the US Pentagon.  Kilcullen, after close study of several insurgencies, points out that these sorts of conflicts are not driven by ideology or religion (thus the notion "Islamofascism" obscures more than it elucidates) but, rather, by social bonds:

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. (60)

      This perspective leads to a very different strategic vision: disaggregation.  What needs to be done to fight insurgencies is a careful analysis of the social and cultural contexts within which they operate.  Only after the very local roots of any particular insurgency are understood can a comprehensive approach be taken to defeat them.  Of course, this means using political and economic and social and informational means to counter insurgencies, not simply the overly militarized approach that has failed so badly for the US in Iraq.

     Lots of good ideas here but I have two responses: 1) this is not new, but is still largely ignored in terms of actual US policy; and 2) there are some obvious resonances here to both Sun Tzu and Confucius.

     As to the assertion that these ideas are not new, I would direct attention, again, to the notion of "fourth generation warfare," which I have mentioned before, especially as distilled in Thomas Hammes's book.  We know, and have known for some time, that war is now different than, say, WWII.   Political goals, and the orchestration of military and informational campaigns centered on political goals, define the nature and tactics and strategy of war.  And it is precisely the US's lack of foresight and nuanced thinking along these lines that has generated failure in Iraq:

However careful Kilcullen is not to criticize Administration policy, his argument amounts to a thoroughgoing critique.  As a foreigner who is not a career official in the US government, he has more distance and freedom to discuss the war on jihadism frankly, and in ways that his American counterparts rarely can. "It's now fundamentally an information fight," he said.  "The enemy gets that, and we don't yet get that, and I think that's why we're losing." (64)

     Of course, many of the "we" do get that: Hammes certainly does.  Those who do not get it are the top leadership of the Bush administration, who willfully deny the reality of the war they have created.  Irresponsible leadership at the very top is what prevents the known knowns (as Rumsfeld once said) of informational, counterinsurgency, fourth generation warfare from being effectively pursued.  And that irresponsibility is now compounded by fumbling indecision as Bush waits to "announce" his new "way forward" until January.

      And that brings me to Sun Tzu and Confucius, who know a thing or two about effective leadership or its lack.  The Packer article has passages that bring both ancient thinkers to mind.  Here is a quote that cites Bruce Hoffman, from Georgetown, on what we should be doing:

"Instead of turning the prisons into insurgent universities, you could have a systematic process that would be based on scientific surveys designed to elicit certain information on how people joined, who their leaders were, how leadership was exercised, how group cohesion was maintained."   In other words, America would get to know its enemy. (68)

     Of course, "know your enemy" is a key tenet of Sun Tzu.  It is extraordinary that after over three and a half years in Iraq we still fail in this way.  Part of that failure is due to the torture policy, which directly works against knowing the enemy.   Remember, Sun Tzu also tells us that we should treat captives well, so that they can be turned to our own purposes.  But, as the Packer story suggests, there will likely be no real change in Iraq policy until Bush is gone.

    And that brings us to the last point, the Confucian angle.  Packer interviews an anthropologist, Montgomery McFate, who is currently working with the Pentagon:

Montgomery McFate noted that the current avatars or right-wing Cold Warriors, the neoconservatives, have dismissed all Iraqi insurgents as "dead enders" and "bad people."  Terms like "totalitarianism" and "Islamofascism," she said, which stir the American historical memory, mislead policymakers into greatly increasing the number of our enemies and coming up with wrong-headed strategies against them.  "That's not what the insurgents call themselves, she said. "If you can't call something by its name - if you can't say, 'This is what this phenomenon is, it has structure, meaning, agency' - how can you ever fight it?" (68)

     McFate may not realize it, but she is quoting Confucius, and his belief that only when we name a thing for what it is, can we take action in the world.

      Sun Tzu, Confucius, Hammes, the vast literature on informational war and counterinsurgency - all of these texts are readily available, the ideas they put forth are immediately at hand.  It is a tragedy - no, it is a deeply immoral act of irresponsibility - that Bush and company cannot put them together to find a way of stopping the inhumane butchery of Iraq.

Comments

[MinorRipper]

Great post, thanks. Don't know if you've seen this David Letterman clip with Our Fearless Leader in it, but its pretty funny--
www.minor-ripper.blogspot.com

[Rajesh]

If what you say is true, why is "freedom fighters" beheading US contractors by shouting god is great?