Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  Then again, perhaps I was wrong—maybe the Taliban had already infiltrated the district by then, as they certainly did later, and for some reason the local fighters were just having trouble getting it together that day. Ambushes are complex enterprises, the most difficult task an infantry small unit can undertake, and they’re won or lost in the first few seconds, with the outcome often decided in the very first burst of fire. Seemingly trivial details—the placement of a key weapon, the angle of the sun, a gust of wind, split-second timing in the moment of the first shot—can have disproportionately large effects. Maybe the ambushers did have a roadside bomb in place but it failed to go off, or perhaps they lacked time to put a bomb in. Another few inches to the left, and the first RPG would have hit the leading MRAP and disabled it in the middle of the bridge, with perhaps a far different outcome for the firefight. The quick response from the patrol—who, in their first real action, showed great composure and professionalism, calmly suppressing the ambush without overreacting—may also have had a lot to do with it.

  Either way, it seems clear to me, as I’m sure it does to any reader, that “classical” counterinsurgency theory doesn’t explain what happened here. Nor does it explain incidents like the Helmand road contractor attack, the Aegis team’s Iraq experience, or the battle of Wanat. Counterinsurgency most certainly offers a partial explanation, and is demonstrably correct as far as it goes. But other factors were at work here, beyond solely the existence of “an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent control.”15 Indeed, it’s impossible to determine what actually happened in any of these incidents on the basis of counterinsurgency theory alone.

  Not only is it possible that, in all these incidents, local elders were in the driver’s seat, not the insurgents, but it’s also clear that particular acts of violence may be easier to explain through constructs like relative deprivation in aid programming, perceived injustice among ethnic groups or business networks, local and tribal rivalries, perverse economic incentives, and traditional modes of warfare (none of which are specific to counterinsurgency theory, or even to theories of conflict at all) rather than through a counterinsurgency lens.

  That day in Dara-i Nur was just one of many days in the field when I’ve felt a sense of dissonance about our reliance on “pure” or binary theories that are framed around the nature of a specific threat group—in this case, a feeling that, for all its power in explaining certain types of conflict, counterinsurgency as a paradigm didn’t quite fit the facts on the ground, and did not quite cover the full range of what we were experiencing. I first wrote about this in 2005, and again in 2006, but over time this feeling has grown stronger.16

  In my work in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Libya and other conflict zones over the past several years, I’ve been lucky enough to gather around me an eclectic (not to say eccentric) team of experts, with deep experience in conflict mitigation, development, diplomacy, rule of law, peace-building, urban design, human rights, community mapping, systems design, alternative energy, conflict resolution and mediation, and other disciplines. As our field teams work with NGOs, aid agencies, institutions like the World Bank, communities, businesses, and governments, our collective sense of unease has grown. More and more, existing models simply don’t explain the full range of events we see on the ground. I’ve explored several frameworks, searching for ways to explain the complex patterns of violence we see in our work.

  This book documents some of those attempts to go beyond classical counterinsurgency, in search of models that better explain how conflict happens on the ground, and how local patterns of conflict nest in a wider system of human activity and within broader trends that will shape our planet over the next few decades. This, then, is a book about what may happen after Western military involvement in Afghanistan comes to an end. It’s a book about future conflicts and future cities. It’s about the challenges and opportunities that population growth, coastal urbanization, and escalating connectivity are creating across the planet. And it’s about what governments, cities, communities and businesses (and, of course, the military) can do to prepare for a future in which all aspects of human life—including, but not only, conflict, crime and violence—will be crowded, urban, networked and coastal.

  My background is as a student, theorist, and occasional practitioner of guerrilla warfare. So, naturally enough, with a base of field research and personal experience largely shaped by war, I started this book with a focus on conflict, searching for a unified field theory to explain the disconnects I was noticing in places like Dara-i-Nur, and looking for some insight into conflicts involving non-state armed groups—the “forever wars” that drag on across the world, even as conventional wars among nation-states continue to decline.17

  For various institutional reasons, governments, military forces, law enforcement agencies, and even (perhaps especially) university faculties tend to prefer theories of conflict framed around a single threat—insurgency, terrorism, piracy, narcotics, gangs, organized crime, and so on. This approach—which results in well-known concepts like counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, counter-piracy and so on—might be fine in a binary environment, where one government confronts one threat at a time, but in the real world—the world of complex, adaptive social systems such as cities, trading networks, and licit or illicit economies—there never has been, and never will be, a single-threat environment like this. Rather, many different groups coexist, compete, cooperate, and clash (sometimes violently), overlapping in, and competing for control over, the same territory and population.

  So I wanted to find a set of ideas that would do a better job at explaining the conflict ecosystem—the nonlinear, many-sided, wild, and messy world of real conflict—than do traditional binary paradigms such as counterinsurgency. I suspected such a unified theory might have something to do with the similarities we observe in the ways that nonstate armed groups of all kinds interact with populations they compete to control, and the way those populations manipulate and exploit nonstate armed groups in return. I began to call this set of ideas, which I describe in Chapter 3, the “theory of competitive control.”

  But as I worked on the theory, between teaching at a university in Washington, D.C., starting and running a strategic research and design firm in northern Virginia, and doing practical fieldwork with conflict-affected communities in many places around the world, I realized that the idea I was examining—a concept that took into account the four emerging megatrends of population growth, urbanization, littoralization, and networked connectivity—wasn’t really a theory of conflict at all. It was much broader than that.

  This is because these megatrends will affect all aspects of life on the planet in the next twenty to thirty years, not just conflict. And communities, companies, and cities that understand these trends, learn how to mitigate the risks they pose, and develop ways to maximize the opportunities they offer are quite likely to thrive in the future environment, while others may go under. My hope is that the reflections that follow, while often tentative or speculative, will at least help to begin a discussion on which others can build.

  1

  Out of the Mountains

  According to his son, Omar, Osama bin Laden would routinely hike from Tora Bora into neighboring Pakistan on walks that could take anywhere between seven and 14 hours. “My brothers and I all loathed these grueling treks that seemed the most pleasant of outings to our father,” Omar bin Laden later recalled. Bin Laden told his sons they had to memorize every rock on the routes to Pakistan. “We never know when war will strike,” he instructed them. “We must know our way out of the mountains.”

  —Peter Bergen, 2009

  I

  One wet, chilly night in New York, I was hanging out with my friend Steve Eames in the bar of the Bryan
t Park Hotel, in Manhattan’s Fashion District. It was October 2007, I was just back from Baghdad, and the dark, crowded, hipster vibe of the place—not to mention the claustrophobic feel of the enormous coastal city—was mildly freaking me out.

  Steve and I joined the army together in 1985. We were classmates at Duntroon, Australia’s military academy; both of us graduated into the infantry, and both of us served in airmobile light infantry units and military advisory missions across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Steve did a tour with the Special Air Service Regiment (Australia’s top-tier elite special operations unit, equivalent to the U.S. Army’s Delta Force) before leaving the army to become, by turns, an environmental activist, NGO advocate, war correspondent, industrial security planner in North Africa, and free trade zone developer in the Arabian Gulf. He eventually specialized in planning large-scale sporting events. Over a fifteen-year career designing public safety systems for some of the world’s biggest cities, he’d worked several Olympics, Asian Games, and Commonwealth Games.

  I was tired, after what turned out later to have been the worst months of the Iraq war, but relieved that the counterinsurgency techniques we’d designed under fire in Baghdad seemed to be working and were starting to save Iraqi and Allied lives. Over a nine-month period these techniques had brought civilian deaths in the city down from hundreds, sometimes thousands per week, in late 2006, to a few dozen at most by mid-2007—still tragic, but a massive drop in violence. I allowed myself to hope that we might have given Iraqis breathing space to pull back from what had been shaping up as an incredibly nasty sectarian genocide. Steve was unconvinced.

  “You killed the city, mate. You know that, right?”

  “What? Piss off.”

  “Seriously. All that barbed wire, concrete barriers, checkpoints. You shut the city down. You stopped it flowing—put it on life support. You stopped people getting around to do what they had to do. You cut the violence, sure, but you did it by killing the city.”

  “All right,” I said, “you’re so smart, how would you have done it?”

  And Steve pointed out what every police officer, paramedic, traffic engineer, and social worker knows, and what should have been obvious to me all along: a city is a living organism that flows and breathes, and any public safety solution that no longer lets it flow is no solution at all.

  In Olympic security, for example, Steve explained, it’s not enough to make sporting venues safe: if spectators and players can’t get to the events or people can’t go undisrupted about their business in the wider city, that would be a fail. In urban counterinsurgency, just keeping people safe is a failure, too: true success involves achieving an agreed level of service—an acceptable minimum level of disruption that lets the city flow—while also getting violence down to a level that people can accept. Of course, in Olympic security, organizers set up a system of cleared zones, connecting corridors, charter agreements with local communities, and so on—a layered all-hazards defensive system that considers every risk and threat—not just, say, a terrorist attack. But it’s usually temporary: after a few months, the organizers dismantle the system and let the city go back to how it was before.

  We began to speculate. What if we could combine what I’d learned in Baghdad about protecting urban populations from extreme violence with what law enforcement agencies know about community-based policing, city governments know about maintaining a functioning urban environment, and the Olympic community knows about achieving security while preserving urban flow? Could we craft an approach that would replicate the security-plus-service model of a big sporting event, but on a permanent basis? Was that even feasible in a place such as Baghdad, or would traditional civilian methods just break down above a certain level of violence? Could we design into the city itself the public safety systems that would both keep people safe and keep the city flowing? Could we forge the same level-of-service agreements and security charters that people enter into for the temporary purpose of Olympic security, but keep them in place for the long term? Would communities agree to that, even given the alternatives? Could we build in what civic architects know about urban metabolism and create a community-based system to secure a city as a living organism, not just a piece of urbanized terrain? And if we could retrofit that system to an existing city, could we also build it in from the outset to a new city or industrial site?

  None of these ideas is the slightest bit revolutionary: many cities in the developed world already embody just these kinds of systems. London, for example, has the world’s most sophisticated wide-area television surveillance system, and many of the measures put in place for the 2012 Olympic Games remained afterward, despite controversies over lack of community participation in decisions on surveillance, security, and urban disruption.1 Nor is this new: as any student of urban history knows, when you walk through the cityscape of Paris, for example, you’re moving in an interlocked defensive system of urban zones, built around design principles that include securing the state against a restive population.

  Central Paris was designed in the 1850s by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Haussmann was the prefect of the Seine département (and among other things, de facto chief of homeland security for Emperor Napoleon III). Haussmann’s boss knew about urban uprisings: it was the 1848 revolution that prompted his return from exile to become president of the French Republic, and when he overthrew that republic and seized power as emperor in 1851, he had to put down an uprising led by, among others, Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables. Haussmann’s Paris was designed—consciously and intensively—to prevent a recurrence of the kind of unrest that had affected the city for generations. He laid out wide, straight boulevards that just happened to be exactly one cavalry squadron wide (rather handy, in the event of riots) and created spacious squares that dominated the boulevards so that the state could put artillery on each square (and, if needed, sweep the streets between them with grapeshot). He imposed architectural codes that ensured buildings were set back at an angle from street corners—creating a delightful sense of light and air at street level but also, incidentally, making it far harder for demonstrators to put up barricades. Haussmann resettled unruly populations away from traditional urban strongholds that were hard for troops and police to penetrate—Hugo called them “narrow, uneven, sinuous streets full of turns and corners . . . a network of streets more intricate than a forest”2—and moved them to outlying districts into which the French state could more easily extend its authority. Haussmann placed railway stations and bridges to help troops and police maneuver quickly around the city, to stifle any revolution. The completed “Haussmann system” transformed central Paris from a wild, jungle-like thicket into a formal, manicured garden: it facilitated state control of the capital, while the process of constructing all those boulevards, buildings, and squares created jobs for disaffected workers and thus acted as a safety valve for public unrest.

  Many people are rightly concerned by the authoritarian tendencies that lie behind these kinds of urban systems, even while also recognizing that the alternative—as people had just lived it in Baghdad—might be even worse. In a free society, there’s clearly a balance to be struck between the risk of violence from insurgency, crime, or social chaos (nonstate violence, if you like) and the risk of state repression. This was exactly the problem in Iraq, with ordinary people caught between nonstate violence from Sunni extremists, on one hand, and state violence from the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi National Police, on the other. Could we, then, help a neighborhood become self-defending against all comers, making people both safer from nonstate violence and harder for the state to oppress? Would it be possible, on the basis of a charter agreement co-designed with local inhabitants, to work with rather than against a community, to help people design security into the actual fabric of their urban landscape? This would not just make it harder for militias, gangs and insurgents to prey on people but also minimize the need for security forces to flood into a threatened
area—a cure that many citizens might think was worse than the disease. In Baghdad, as in many places where Steve and I had worked, adding troops and cops wouldn’t necessarily make people safer: it might just give them more opportunities to get shaken down. And for an overstretched police service or a military lacking the numbers for counterinsurgency, this system would allow a far smaller force to secure a much greater area, making better use of scarce assets.

  Our brief drink became a long discussion: we cleared the whiskey glasses off the table, drew some maps and system diagrams, and tried to pull together the outlines of an approach. That first discussion became many more sessions, then structured design workshops over computer models and satellite photographs, then a long-term collaboration with Steve, my team at Caerus, software designers, architects, and an Oslo-based urban design firm. Over the years we’ve jointly developed a methodology that combines all the elements mentioned above, working on design solutions for cities as diverse as Kandahar, Muscat, and Rio de Janeiro, and developing community participative maps and urban violence models for cities in Liberia, Nigeria, and Honduras and for the U.S.-Mexico border area.