Scribe Publications
OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS
David Kilcullen is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on counterinsurgency and military strategy. He served 24 years as a soldier, diplomat, and policy adviser for the Australian and United States governments, and he held the position of senior counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq and to the NATO Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. He is currently the chief executive officer of Caerus Associates, a Washington-based strategy and design firm. His books include The Accidental Guerilla, which was a Washington Post bestseller, and Counterinsurgency.
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Published by Scribe 2013
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Copyright © David Kilcullen 2013
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Kilcullen, David, author.
Out of the Mountains: the coming age of the urban guerrilla / David Kilcullen.
9781922070678 (paperback)
9781922072658 (e-book)
1. Insurgency. 2. Guerrilla warfare. 3. Asymmetric warfare. 4. Counterinsurgency. 5. Terrorism. 6. Subversive activities.
355.0218
scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Ambush in Afghanistan
1. Out of the Mountains
2. Future Cities, Future Threats
3. The Theory of Competitive Control
4. Conflict in Connected Cities
5. Crowded, Complex, and Coastal
Appendix: On War in the Urban, Networked Littoral
Notes
Acknowledgments
I called this book Out of the Mountains, but I might just as easily have called it Back to the Future, since the issues I examine here—centered on conflict in the urbanized, networked littorals of an increasingly crowded planet—were already well understood by the end of the last century.
Marine Corps general Charles Krulak said in 1996 that “the future may well not be ‘Son of Desert Storm,’ but rather ‘Stepchild of Somalia and Chechnya.’” Ralph Peters, Robert H. Scales, Alan Vick, Roger Spiller, Russell Glenn, Paul Van Riper, John Arquilla, Michael Evans, and Justin Kelly had all written extensively by the late 1990s on urban operations in coastal cities. By 2000, Dave Dilegge—later a torchbearer for the insurgency of ideas through the Small Wars Journal—had founded a community of interest around his Urban Operations Journal. At the same time, Duane Schattle, Dave Stephenson, and Frank Hoffmann were thinking through the challenges of urban operations against hybrid threats. Military forces in several countries were expanding their amphibious and urban capabilities, while police services, aid agencies, and some NGOs were considering governance and human security in marginalized urban areas. I myself had written a series of papers on urban tactics and amphibious operations, informed by the experience of late-1990s peace enforcement in coastal environments.
But much of this thinking on urban littorals, an already very well established set of ideas by 2001, was sidelined by urgent military necessity after the horrendous Al Q aeda terrorist attacks of 9/11. We found ourselves (not by choice) involved in a landlocked, rural insurgency—far from cities or coastlines—hunting guerrillas in mountain valleys, trying to work with and protect the remote tribal communities in which they nested and on which they preyed. As Iraq descended into chaos after 2003, we were drawn into intense urban counterinsurgency—but, again, we were far from the coast. For a decade since then, the vibrant civilian and academic discussion about future challenges in coastal megacities has gone on without much input from those who have been fighting the war. Bing West, with his closely observed studies of urban combat in Iraq, and Lou DiMarco, with his survey of urban operations since Stalingrad, are two outstanding exceptions to this rule—but even their work has had less impact on the debate than it deserves.
That civilian debate, however, has been enormously productive. Diane Davis, Stephen Graham, Jo Beall, Mitchell Sipus, Saskia Sassen, and Mike Davis, among many others, have added immensely to our understanding of development and conflict in connected cities. Policing and crime thinkers such as John P. Sullivan and Diego Gambetta, and urban sociologists such as Sudhir Venkatesh have studied the challenges of criminal insurgency in large cities and explored the ways in which underworld networks communicate. Institutions such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Asian and African Development Banks, along with firms such as IBM and McKinsey, have studied the problems of future urbanization. Universities including the London School of Economics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, among many others, have established cities programs, while think tanks such as the Brookings Institution (with its Global Cities Initiative) have examined the problems of urban growth, littoralization, and connectivity. Architects such as Oystein Gronning and Eyal Weizman have applied spatial design thinking to urban conflict.
Now that the war in Afghanistan is beginning to wind down, it’s time for the military to reengage with the challenge of irregular conflict in the urban littoral. When the dust eventually settles and our generation, the generation that fought the war, shakes itself off and turns from the moment-by-moment challenge of the war to once again consider the future environment, we’ll find that the same old challenges of the urbanized littoral remain, but that much of what we thought we understood has changed. Not only have enormous advances been made over the last decade in cloud computing, complex systems theory, big data analysis, remote observation, and crowd-sourced analytics—allowing new insights into old problems—but vast amounts of real-time data are now available to inform our thinking. Most important, the environment itself has changed. The level of connectivity and networked interaction (among populations all over the planet, and between and within coastal cities) has exploded in the last decade, and it’s time to bring this new understanding to bear on the problems of urbanization and conflict. What we may find—and what this book tentatively suggests—is that things aren’t where we left them when we headed off into the mountains after 9/11.
In writing this book, I’ve benefited from the thinking and research of all these individuals and institutions, and also from the unstinting and generous help of friends, colleagues, and family across the whole world. Professor Tammy Schultz read and carefully critiqued every chapter. Dr. Erin Simpson kept me focused on the big issues and helped sharpen the argument over many discussions in the field and over the map. Greg Mills, Oyeshiku Carr, John Pollock, Claire Metelits, Satish Chand, and Amit Patel contributed foundational ideas, as did Leah Meisterlin, Steve Eames, Nigel Snoad, Oystein Gronning, Antonio Giustozzi, Claudio Franco, Andrew Exum, Gordon Messenger, and John Sullivan. Stacia George, Alex Hughes, Jason Knobloch, Matt McNabb, Richard Tyson, and Will Upshur at Caerus designed and led community-participative mapping programs in some extremely challenging urban environments—and developed crowd-sourced analytics and remote observation tools that made it possible to see the
patterns discussed in this book. Likewise, Anna Prouse, Nate Rosenblatt, Jacob Burke, and Omar Ellaboudy pioneered field research techniques to map the virtual/human network overlaps that turn out to be critical in this environment. Nate Rosenblatt, in particular, provided many insights and key sources that proved critical to understanding the Arab Awakening, while Anna Prouse fearlessly walked the streets of several hostile cities (not just in Africa) as we figured things out. Christian Chung and Scott Long did the initial desktop analysis on Jamaica and Sri Lanka that helped me to do effective fieldwork later. Michael Stock, Randy Garrett, Ben Riley, John Seel, Pat Kelleher, Nadia Schadlow, Marin Strmecki, and Dan Ermer provided guidance, insight, funding, and moral support—not necessarily in that order of importance—that made this research possible. Ben Fitzgerald and his team at Noetic were essential partners in the effort, and the Smith Richardson Foundation gave generous financial and intellectual support to field research and tech platform development. To the extent that this work has any merit, it derives in large measure from the wisdom of this great community of research and program partners; the errors, omissions, and misstatements, of course, are mine alone.
At Oxford University Press, David McBride and Sarah Rosenthal were cogent, insightful, and supportive through multiple delays, rewrites, and email absences as we pulled the manuscript together, while Kim Craven and Christian Purdy were helpfully (but not endlessly) patient. At Hurst & Co. in London, Michael Dwyer provided extremely helpful inputs at critical times, and Jon de Peyer kept me focused on the timeline, as did Henry Rosenbloom at Scribe Publications in Melbourne. My parents, John and Anne Kilcullen, my sister Janet, and my whole American family—including Ken Schoendorf and Jennifer Parker, Jimmy Davidson and Melanie Pease, Jim Davidson and Sarajane Wallace, and Patrick and Roberta Davidson—gave me vastly more than moral support: their edits, ideas, and perspectives (not to mention a succession of kitchen tables, sofas, and desks on which to perch my laptop while I wrote the manuscript) were incredibly helpful. Finally, as an intellectual partner, a critical sounding board, a perceptive editor, and an emotional rock, I can only humbly thank my beautiful wife, Janine, and promise to be calmer (and hopefully less absentminded) now that the bloody thing is finally done.
Washington, D.C.
April 2013
Introduction
Ambush in Afghanistan
I
3:45 p.m., September 10, 2009
Dara-i-Nur District, Nangarhar, Afghanistan
The bridge gleamed in the afternoon light. In two hours the temperature would plunge as the sun sank behind the mountains, casting the valley into shadow. But for now the air was warm, with the chill edge of eight thousand feet of altitude. The sun heated the stunted pines, filling the valley with scent. It warmed the men who lay in the pine needles, among gray rocks, two hundred yards up the hillside, overlooking the road.
The road was an oily two-lane blacktop, newly made, that followed the valley floor. Below the bridge, the valley opened up into fields and orchards, with gray stone and mud-brick villages set back from the road among the trees. The open ground below the bridge gave scope for evasive maneuver, so this was the last spot where you could hope to ambush a patrol coming out of the mountains with any real chance of pinning it down.1
As our column snaked down the valley, a car going the other way pulled onto the dusty shoulder of the road. We were lumbering along in a slow-moving convoy of mine resistant vehicles called MRAPs that look like huge coyote-brown garbage trucks.2 A yellow bicycle leaned against the concrete barrier on the left-hand side of the bridge, no owner in sight.
The leading MRAP reached the bridge, drew level with the bike, and passed it.
At that instant the ambushers opened fire from the hillside with rocket-propelled grenades, long bursts from two machine guns, and rifles firing in support.3 They concentrated on the head of the column, most likely trying to disable the leading vehicle, block the bridge, and trap us. Had they succeeded, we would have had a bad day out. Strung out on the valley floor, we could not have maneuvered: they could have worked us over at leisure until nightfall let them slip away. Exactly this had happened to two of my friends in the past couple of years; it was something of an occupational hazard in the Afghan hills, where a sparse road network and mountain terrain made our movements predictable.
The RPGs passed close to the cab of the front gun truck but exploded harmlessly in the creek bed. Having failed to stop us in the first burst, the attackers had lost the element of surprise. Our patrol was now fully alert, laying down heavy suppressive fire as it rolled across the bridge. The ambushers had lost any chance of blocking the road.
Our column brushed past the ambush at a steady pace, neither pausing nor hurrying. The gunners traversed right, angled up, then fired, each vehicle hosing the ambush down as it moved through the killing area. Long streams of red tracer fire slid across the valley in a flattened arc, splashing onto the hillside. The enemy shooters fell silent, the dry grass and pine scrub caught fire, and smoke obscured the hill, ending the fight before it had properly begun. Our leading MRAP was hit by rifle fire but suffered no other damage, and we lost nobody killed or injured. The whole thing was over in less than three minutes. It was all very halfhearted: in fact, by the standards of eastern Afghanistan in the early autumn of 2009, it barely even qualified as a firefight at all.
It wasn’t a great ambush site, either. I say this as something of an involuntary connoisseur: in Iraq and Afghanistan I’d seen ambushes of varying severity, including so-called complex attacks that combined bombings with ground assaults. Earlier, as an Australian officer seconded to teach tactics at the British Army’s School of Infantry at Warminster in the mid-1990s, I’d taught ambush and counterambush techniques on a series of intensive four-month battle courses for infantry platoon commanders.
If these guys had been my students on the battle course, I would have failed them on their ambush plan. The ambush was too far down the valley to be sure of stopping us, too far from the road for the RPGs to be accurate, too high above the killing area for the machine guns to achieve a flat field of fire. The ambushers made no serious attempt to block the road, they sited themselves on a forward slope that made withdrawal impossible once things began to go wrong for them, and they had no cut-off, early warning, or backup. Their choice of a site on the forward slope meant that the ground rose up behind them, so there was no clear back-blast area for their RPGs. The dust that the RPGs kicked up made their position very obvious and probably cost them several dead and wounded. It was all rather incompetent.
Thirty minutes later and five miles farther down the road, we circled the wagons among the gray pebbles and scrappy trees of the riverbed and got out to wait for the helicopters.
The patrol was from the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province. They’d been in-country just over two months, and this was their first significant firefight. The guys were clearly relieved to have made it through unscathed, and to have acquitted themselves well. The presence of news media—the experienced war correspondent Lara Logan, her producer, Howard Rosenberg, and a 60 Minutes film crew were there, along with Ambassador Hank Crumpton, the legendary CIA officer who’d masterminded the 2001 invasion—probably elated them further, and they talked over the firefight with excitement. Listening to the discussion, I was reminded of Winston Churchill’s comment on a cavalry patrol he watched returning from an ambush in the Mamund Valley, thirty miles east of here, in September 1897: “They were vastly pleased with themselves. Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”4
“How many Taliban do you think we killed?” one of the drivers asked his gunner as they sat smoking. I was five feet away, leaning back against the riverbank to take the weight off my assault vest, and taking a long drink from my Camelbak.
“I don’t know, five to seven? We’ll know for sure when we get b
ack and clear the site.”
“How do you know they were Taliban?” I asked the soldiers, who both seemed to be in their early twenties.
They looked at me.
“Dude, they were shooting at us.”
“Fair enough.”
II
The two Black Hawks popped over the skyline with a sudden rotor thump, flaring to land on the dry watercourse in a cloud of grit and pine needles. Over the engine noise, we shouted our goodbyes and I headed for the rear aircraft, crouching with eyes half closed in the instant dust storm.
Flying back to Kabul, we followed the stupendous southern edge of the Hindu Kush, our minuscule helicopters hugging the giant mountains like dragonflies skirting a rockpile. We dropped down into the Alishang Valley, following the terrain, picked up the Kabul-Jalalabad road, then flew above it, the pilots using the highway as a handrail to guide us home. The sun was setting, and I gazed out the helicopter door, arms tightly folded, chin tucked into my chest against the cold, watching the clean rock of the mountaintops scroll beneath my climbing boots. The peaks threw long, sharp shadows in the clear tawny light of late afternoon. They seemed close enough to touch.
Something didn’t add up. Despite what the MRAP crew had said, the more I thought about it, the less this seemed like a Taliban ambush. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something was wrong with the picture.
For a start, Dara-i-Nur district, where the firefight happened, is 99 percent Pashai. The Pashai aren’t Pashtun; they speak their own language and keep to themselves. They’re not aligned with the government (that deep in the Afghan countryside, virtually nobody is “aligned” with anyone but themselves), but neither do they support the mainly Pashtun Taliban. In fact, like mountain people all over the world, the Pashai are militantly self-sufficient and can be suspicious and hostile toward outsiders, whatever their origin. This district, though only fifteen miles from the Pakistani frontier, had seen little Taliban activity to date, and it was a part of Nangarhar province that never really supported the Taliban even when they were in power during the late 1990s. Of course, Taliban fighters could have slipped in without the locals’ knowledge, but that would have been unusual this late in the season—there were only a few weeks left till the first snowfalls began to close the highest passes, making it harder for guerrillas to move in the mountains or cross over from their safe havens in Pakistan.
Out of the Mountains Page 1
