Warlords, Inc.

by Noah Raford

  How can one account for the longevity of these military commanders and the relative stability, security, and development within the realms under their control? To the extent that it refers to direct means of delivery, it may be true that “warlords did not re-distribute [the entire] part of the resources accumulated to the population in the territory they control.”23 The networks of solidarity were—and continued for a long time to be—more open to the traditional bearers of authority, be they clan or village elders (“white beards”), khans, mullahs, or pirs. Yet the comparative advantage of the warlord whose authority—founded as it is on military force—extends beyond one particular group of solidarity, can be found precisely in aspects that are an intrinsic part of its modernity: its connectivity to the globalized markets and its de-territorialized nature. It is this global connectivity that enables warlords to “act locally but think globally.”24 The clearest expression of this connectivity is provided by the numerous linkages that the top military commanders had with “institutions beyond the traditional localized continuum: [transnational] Islamic parties, foreign countries, [NGOs,] and international organizations.”25 The importance of warlords in contemporary Afghanistan clearly originated in their military strength, but their strength was maintained and reinforced by their capacity to attract resources to be redistributed through patronage, via traditional groups of solidarity.

  Access to this variety of sources of resources, by virtue of his prominence in the economy of war, allowed the warlord to surpass and, in many cases, to replace the traditional local leadership in his capacity to attract and distribute resources. In a sense, the warlord came to occupy a position in the tradition of the local notable “who not only is able to secure [his] group’s autonomy in relation with the state, but one who can attract and canalize the maximum aid from the state or other sources toward [his] own group, simultaneous with the capacity to maintain a certain degree of autonomy in [his] domestic affairs.”26 But as his power is based neither on a given territory nor on direct administration, the warlord needs the cooperation of various solidarity groups, be they secular (tribal or clan-dominated) or religious. Warlordism, as developed in Afghanistan, is definitely a form of patrimonialism, sharing with the Weberian ideal the fundamentally personal nature of power. Yet it departs from the ideal in that the power of the military leader, beyond his charisma and his foundation in the control over the means of organized violence, depends on a dynamic process of bargaining with various local solidarity networks whose channels are vitally important for the distribution of resources. This is essentially a different configuration of social control than the one imagined by a patrimonial leader controlling the military means in isolation from other social forces.

  Warlord, State, and Society

  The samples of warlordism used for illustration thus far are circumscribed to a political context defined by the formal existence of a state (Afghanistan or Colombia) with limited capacity in all arenas of governance, including the military, political, economic, and social spheres. Is this evidence enough to conclude that warlords indiscriminately “seek to overthrow [the state] in order to secure their own form of military autocratic rule,” as the conventional view on warlordism seems to assume?27 A cursory look at the paradigmatic case of warlordism in China seems to signal a negative answer. There seems to be a general consensus that supports and extends the assertion that Guangdong’s “residential warlord” from 1929 to 1936, General Chen Jitang, and other military leaders at the time did not have ambitions to expand their rule beyond the provinces under their control and definitely had no ambitions to overtake the state, despite providing significant public services such as health care and education and despite building large-scale infrastructure projects such as bridges and roads. While these warlords had no intention of expanding their power to the entire state, they did seize power in the provinces no longer under state control and organized a de facto autonomous governance, serving their own private interests with little or no contact with the central government.28

  If that was the situation in the historical Chinese case, is that still the case today? In the post–Cold War era, scholars refer to the challenges to central authority in collapsed/failed states in terms of “several battles [that] take place within the state, not [just] against it.”29 Dr. Kirill Nourzhanov is one of the rare voices to introduce a radical departure from the traditional view on warlordism as necessarily opposed to the state. In particular, he mentions the rise of a particular category of warlords “who not so much confront or tolerate the state, but work in partnership with it.”30 Cases as diverse as Sierra Leone, Colombia, and Afghanistan point in the same direction, since local warlords, while involved in a military confrontation against the central authorities’ attempt to bring their fiefdoms under control, do benefit from the presence of the state in its weakened condition.

  Thus, for instance, Colombia contains a complex relationship between the state and the paramilitary, who are tied together through a multitude of contradictory relationships, being simultaneously linked “as all[ies], as competitor[s] in an oligopolistic market for the provision of security, as parasite[s], and as military adversary[ies].”31 In Africa, a common denominator seems to be the importance that warlords capture the state—or at least be able to use its globally recognized sovereignty in order to increase their ability to secure external patronage.32 In Afghanistan, in line with traditional political forces, the warlords have, in fact, “a need for a distant and benevolent state, whose existence they do not challenge.”33 An expression of this connection between the warlord and an unobtrusive state is the ease with which the government of President Karzai was able to incorporate into its structures powerful regional controllers of organized violence, such as generals Fahim and Dostum, as well as Ismail Khan.

  The common denominator of all these cases seems to be the concept of an “oligopoly of violence.” The concept of an oligopoly of violence was devised as an analytical tool to apply to postcolonial Africa, but it appears to be applicable to various crisis regions in which the European model of a state monopoly over violence has limited empirical value. Inspired by economists’ understanding of an oligopoly as an imperfect form of competition in which there are only a few providers of a product or a service for which there are multiple buyers, oligopolies of violence are described as a particular arrangement between security providers, comprising “a fluctuating number of partly competing, partly co-operating actors of violence of different quality.”34 Of course, within these parameters, there is no single type of oligopoly, the markets of violence being no less homogeneous than the economic markets, with the specific characteristic being given exactly by “the mixture of competition and complementarities of rules, claims and authorities.”35

  Warlordism thus described emerges as a form of governance defined by the concept of an oligopoly of violence, in which the state remains an important actor on the market of violence but is not alone any more. Warlords can be seen as autonomous actors whose power and autonomy derive from their possession of an efficient military force, but who cannot exist in isolation from both society and the state (be it his own state or other, usually neighboring states). The warlord is a significant actor in a situation characterized by an asymmetry between a previously “strong society” and a “weak state.”36 He is autonomous in the sense that, although active in the territory (or territories) nominally under the control of a state, there is no higher authority (including the state) capable of regulating or dictating his actions. Thus the warlord coexists with both the state and various communal networks of the society but is not within the military reach of any of them.

  However, while born from the strength of his military force, the warlord’s autonomy is maintained and perpetuated not by ignoring the society or the state, but by installing himself in a nodal position between the society he controls, the targeted state, and other actors, such as other states, international organizations, international NGOs, and transnational corpora
tions, among others. There are numerous instances in which those actors have cooperated in one way or another with warlords: the United States support for the burgeoning warlords-to-be in the Afghan-Soviet war, for instance, and their cooperation in the campaign against Taliban is well publicized. In other examples, Liberia under the control of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) became France’s “third largest African supplier of logs,”37 and both Pakistan and, in particular, Iran were allegedly heavily involved in supporting one or another of the Afghan warlords, as were NGOs such as the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan and Oxfam. Moreover, certain religious groups continue to cooperate with warlords in varying parts of the world, as do corporations, such as Shell Oil in Nigeria, Executive Outcomes and its offsprings on the African continent, and the like.

  Far from being cut off from relations with either state or society, the autonomy of the warlord, founded as it is on his military strength, depends on his successful bid for a central place in a network with most of these actors. In this way, he maintains a parasitic relation with both state and society, while breaking from a unique dependency on either of them. As long as the warlord is capable of manipulating the flow of resources within the weak institutional edifice of the state, he has no incentive in the further development of state structures. In a sense, the warlord does not govern directly, as most of the time, he is not directly involved in the provision of public goods, but rather, he oversees the provision of these functions by other actors. If Afghanistan is to serve as an example, the functions of governance in areas as diverse as education, training, agriculture, and irrigation systems, were transferred or outsourced to various NGOs by both central government (like the Taliban) and the local warlords.38 The warlords, though, were active in attracting resources to allow public goods to be provided, as well as in setting up the conditions under which NGOs or other external actors were able to operate. Accordingly, the nature of governance for the communities under a warlord’s control depends on his actions and on his manipulation of the network of actors capable of providing social services.

  Regardless of the position one takes in identifying the structural causes underlying the appearance of warlordism and its consequential development of “markets for violence” (economic or noneconomic in nature), it is hard to deny that the “continuation of violence is based on economic motives or unconscious economic behavior.”39 Underscoring the importance of the economic dimension should not impede the recognition that warlords, deliberately or simply as an unintended consequence of their newly acquired status, can and sometimes do play a significant role in supplementing those social functions underperformed by an atrophied central state.

  Analysis: Warlord Entrepreneurship as Governance

  From the above analysis, we can summarize a few characteristics of warlords as entrepreneurs and the polities they control. First, the warlord appears in those parts of the world in which formal state institutions crumble under the combined pressures of traditional loci of political authority and the melting down of Cold War support for the central authorities. Without a doubt, the warlord’s primary source of power is located in his private possession of military might, which he is forced to exhibit periodically and to eagerly defend against any attempt of dispossession coming either from a central authority, fellow warlords, or external intervention. To compensate for the weak political authority deriving from his autonomous use of violence, the warlord becomes a central player on the market of violence, using his position in the global economy of war to attract various resources, while at the same time avoiding locking himself into dependency on a single source. While the central asset that raises the interest of the warlord remains procurement of weapons, these resources cover a wider range, from channeling aid to attracting foreign NGOs in the provision of basic services such as food, health, or education. His political position depends not only on his military prowess but also on his ability in securing those resources, as well as on the extent to which he is embedded in various solidarity networks capable of redistributing those resources in his name.

  Second, far from being a homogenous phenomenon, warlordism is highly heterogeneous. Although it may be possible that some of its existing forms will develop into stable alternative forms of governance in an oligopoly of violence, this is likely to occur in only a few instances. It is impossible to avoid the fact that the provision of social services is rarely characteristic of the warlord order. However rare it is, though, it is legitimate to investigate the circumstances under which warlords can move beyond the purely predatory behavior of ordinary bandits and advance toward partial forms of governance in the absence of efficient state mechanisms of redistribution.

  Third, it may be argued that the contemporary warlord, given the circumstances in which he acts (globalized economies, both legal and illegal, and state and non-state competitive actors), is not dependent on domestic extraction. He does not control the population, as much as he keeps it captive. The participation of foreign humanitarian intervention (NGOs, IGOs, and the like) might be thus explored as a form of ransom. Some existent public services (such as health and education) are not performed by warlords; instead, these functions are performed by external actors from which the warlord extracts resources. In this way, we may have a semblance of an answer to why some services are performed. Important as it may be, the warlord is interested not so much in his domestic legitimation function deriving from this performance as in negotiating with the actors interested in performing those functions.

  Finally, the necessity of dealing with failed states, dysfunctional institutions, and a lack of good governance at the periphery of international law has pushed the process of state building to the core of current scholarly interests, and even more so to the attention of political decision makers. Organized violence outside the control of the state characterizes contemporary life in a significant number of societies, and it seems to be a fact that many now take as inherent to many of the conflicts plaguing the world. The burgeoning literature on state failure, however, is founded on a negative logic, one triggered by the analyses of what is missing in polities at the periphery of the Westphalian system—in particular, the absence of the centralized monopoly over violence. Building on this negative logic, the solutions widely offered revolve around the recentralization of the control over organized violence in a manner reminiscent of early state-formation theories. In contrast, by acknowledging the provision of social services such as infrastructural networks, health care, and education in at least some of the areas outside the central government’s control over violence, we find that a positive, inductive logic—one centered on identifying what is already in place in those political units—may be better equipped to explain the circumstances that lead to the weakening of the state and that allow warlords to thrive locally as entrepreneurs on the market of violence and to prosper at a national, regional, and international level.40

  7 5GW

  Into the Heart of Darkness

  Mark Safranski

  Fifth-generation warfare (5GW) has been a controversial concept among military theorists, analysts, and bloggers ever since it was proposed as a successor to fourth-generation warfare (4GW), a strategic theory originally put forward by defense intellectual William Lind and subsequently expanded by others. The 4GW school posited a succession of generations of historical warfare paradigms rising and falling—1GW (close-order musket drill), 2GW (massed firepower and mass armies in entrenched defenses), 3GW (fast combined arms maneuver warfare), and finally 4GW (irregular, antistate conflict focused on the moral level of war). The problems posed by transnational terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or al-Qaeda, the robust, decentralized insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and chaotic failed states like Somalia gave traction to the arguments of 4GW thinkers and caused some analysts to look for a kind of future warfare that might defeat 4GW fighters or replace them as a more urgent threat.

  These speculations, loosely grouped under the rubric 5
GW, while often creative, share little in common with one another and have faced a critical reception in the defense community. Many orthodox military strategists rejected the entire 4GW theoretical construct as deeply flawed and ahistorical. In the 4GW school itself, William Lind dismissed claims for 5GW as premature and has said that the signs thought to be pointing to 5GW are merely new aspects of 4GW—as 4GW has yet to fully unfold. Some “XGW” theorists, like those in this book, discarded chronological linearity in articulating a model of 5GW based upon secrecy and deception, while grand strategist Thomas Barnett and futurist John Robb have used 5GW to describe elements of their own well-developed strategic theories. On the subject of 5GW, there is not a chorus of voices but a cacophony.