Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  Swinging, like hedging, consists of supporting all sides in a conflict, but unlike hedging (which involves simultaneously but covertly supporting each side), a swinging strategy involves periodic, carefully timed switching of sides. A population engaged in a swinging strategy supports only one side at any given moment but shifts its allegiance as the local balance of power changes. If hedging is like sleeping around, swinging is like serial monogamy. The population’s goal is to back the strongest local side at any given moment, changing sides when one group becomes more dominant, changing back when the situation shifts, and strategically throwing their own influence into the balance in order to ensure a result that benefits a local leader or group. Mullah Salaam’s behavior, described in detail above, exemplifies such a swinging strategy, along with a strong tendency toward autarky. Like hedging, swinging is popular since it minimizes subjective risk while maximizing opportunities to extract benefits and concessions from all sides. But it too is a dangerous game, since it depends on correctly predicting changes in the relative strength of armed actors: populations have to learn to switch sides at just the right moment to avoid being caught on the losing side. We might also note that populations tend to factor into their risk calculus the degree of violence an armed group is likely to inflict as punishment for changing sides. Violence trumps benefits in this context: if an insurgent or street gang is going to kill you for switching sides but the police or army is likely to try to win you back with benefits, then you’ll default to supporting the gang, since the downside risks of opposing it are greater. This is precisely why, as we saw in Chapter 2, Jamaican gangs reserved their harshest punishments for those who informed to the police or changed political allegiance. It’s also why, in our discussion of normative systems, we noted that the strength of a normative system—however well developed its persuasive and administrative elements might be—ultimately rests on the coercive capabilities of its enforcer.

  Commitment involves picking one side or actor and depending on that side for protection and support. Populations that adopt this strategy have effectively nailed their colors to the mast and are therefore accepting a very high degree of downside risk. For obvious reasons, such a strategy is not a popular one. It tends to be chosen by populations, such as the Tivoli Gardens residents in Chapter 2, who are so enmeshed in a resilient, full-spectrum normative system of control that it becomes effectively impossible for them to change sides. Such switching may even become literally unthinkable for the population if the proponent of the normative system can muster sufficiently persuasive discourse-framing propaganda capabilities. In the most developed cases, the population may internalize the ruling group’s ideology to the point where it eventually becomes seen as axiomatic, or as common sense rather than as an ideology at all, and where the population ceases to realize that it has any choice in the matter—the sort of situation Antonio Gramsci called “ideological hegemony.”79 Of course, while few nonstate armed groups ever get to this level, 100 percent commitment is the goal of any normative system, at least in theory. In practice, it takes enormous effort and intrusive presence in a population’s residential area to generate such commitment. The one exception to this is the case of ethnic or religious minority populations, or people with a public or family track record of supporting a given side—Assyrian Christians in Iraq, Hazaras in Afghanistan, Alawites and some Christians in Syria, regime supporters in Libya—who have no chance of successfully switching sides in a conflict and thus no choice but to commit.

  Self-arming—the final strategic option for a population at risk—involves taking an active, armed role in the conflict, coming off the sidelines to become involved in the armed struggle for control, and shedding any pretense of noncombatant status. It differs from commitment in that, rather than choosing an existing armed group and offering that group its support in exchange for protection, a population that adopts this strategy gives up its civil status, arming itself instead. For populations under extremely severe threat, this may be an attractive strategy, because whatever else it may do, it reduces the subjective perception of risk by making the population less of a soft target. Such a strategy may deter an armed group altogether, or (more likely) may make the population that adopts it less likely to suffer predation than some other, less well armed, population group in the same area. This attitude—“we may as well go down fighting”—probably lay behind the thinking of at least some of the Iraqi tribal leaders who joined the Anbar Awakening in 2006–7 in Iraq, and it clearly underpinned the thinking of tribal groups who raised their own arbakai in Afghanistan, participated in the Village Stability Operations program, or joined the anti-Taliban, antigovernment qiyam uprising in many districts in eastern Afghanistan in 2012–13.

  Conclusions: Urban Competitive Control

  As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, techniques that we might label as “fishing traps,” which attract populations and then lock them into a network of incentives to prevent them from escaping, are common to insurgencies, criminal organizations, mass movements, and other state and nonstate groups, as well as governments. In the context of violent conflict, however, the most relevant subset of these techniques is the group of methods I’ve described, using the theory of normative systems, as competitive control. These systems of competitive control apply a range of capabilities across a spectrum from persuasion through administration to coercion, and they are designed by armed actors—owners or proponents of the system—as a means to corral, control, manipulate, and mobilize populations. As we’ve seen, a wide-spectrum system of control tends to outcompete a narrow-spectrum one, because its proponent can always bounce back from a defeat in one part of the spectrum by compensating with capabilities from another.

  The initial examples we examined were from relatively simple rural settings in Afghanistan. Exactly the same types of behaviors and patterns of interaction are evident in the urban examples we looked at in previous chapters, and in the urban Iraqi examples discussed in this chapter. As we’ve also just noted, the interaction between armed groups and populations is not a one-way process: populations employ many strategies to manipulate and manage armed actors, seeking to minimize risk, maximize predictability, and limit encroachments upon their autonomy. Again, this pattern of behavior isn’t unique to insurgencies but is applicable to all forms of nonstate armed group that seek to control a population, and (in a functional sense) to states as well. It is thus potentially a useful explanatory tool as we examine the interplay between populations, nonstate armed groups, and governments in the marginalized urban and periurban environments that are becoming increasingly common across the planet.

  Where urban environments of the future will differ from these examples, however, is in the vastly increased local and transnational connectivity they can access, and thus in the ability of nonstate armed groups or state sponsors in marginalized areas in one part of the world to manipulate and mobilize populations on the other side of the globe, and vice versa. The next chapter looks at the broader connectivity and networking issue, and seeks to locate this theoretical discussion in some practical observations of current conflict in connected cities.

  4

  Conflict in Connected Cities

  [We] are engaged in a social netwar. The information age of the late 20th Century has enabled activists to work together globally while maintaining local autonomy. The power of this movement arises from its structure; namely, a decentralized network capable of instant communication, collaboration, coordination and action (C3A). The implications of this movement are profound and amount to what has been called an “‘associational revolution’ among nonstate actors that may prove as significant as the rise of the nation state.”

  —Christopher Burnett, 2000

  April 2011

  Yefren, Jabal al-Gharbi District, Libya

  It’s a cool night in western Libya. The uprising against Muammar Gaddafi is eight weeks old and intensifying by the day. Guerri
llas are maneuvering in the outskirts of Yefren, a town about fifty miles from the Mediterranean coast, southwest of Tripoli. Yefren district is home to about 180,000 people, mainly ethnic Berbers, and the whole area has been in open rebellion since mid-February. Now regime troops and loyalist militias have besieged the city, bringing up heavy ordnance to bombard the town center, seeking to cow its people into submission. Sifaw Twawa and his group of fighters are stalled on the edge of the city, armed only with AK-47s, facing off at close range against a Soviet-made Grad 122 mm multiple-barrel rocket launcher.1

  Twawa’s cell phone rings. Two friends are on the line, via a Skype conference call. Nureddin Ashammakhi is in Finland, where he heads a research team developing biomaterials technology, and Khalid Hatashe, a medical doctor, is in the United Kingdom. The Q addafi regime trained Hatashe on Grads during his compulsory military service. He explains that Twawa’s katiba—brigade—is well short of the Grad’s minimum range: at this distance, any rockets fired would shoot past them. Hatashe adds that the launcher can be triggered from several hundred feet away using an electric cable, so the enemy may not be in or near the launch vehicle. Twawa’s men successfully attack the Grad—all because two civilians briefed their leader, over Skype, in a battlefield a continent away.2

  This account is part of an impressive body of reporting by the technology writer John Pollock, produced in 2011 during months of courageous work on the frontlines of conflict in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.3 Pollock’s writing focuses on social media, youth mobilization, and digital connectivity in the Arab Awakening, a wave of anti-authoritarian uprisings that began in late 2010 in Tunisia, spread to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, destabilized Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon, and is continuing to transform the political landscape of the Middle East and coastal North Africa. The Arab uprisings brought down governments in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, led to a violent crackdown against democracy protestors in Bahrain, prompted the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, and triggered a bloody civil war in Syria. These uprisings are the most prominent recent illustration of the way that increased connectedness is affecting urbanized conflict.

  This chapter focuses on one aspect of this broader pattern of connectedness, namely, the rapidly expanding electronic connectivity that has been enabled by improved access to electricity, lower-cost mobile technology, and recent changes in the way the Internet is organized.4 This democratization of connectivity, which is closely connected to the patterns of population growth and coastal urbanization we’ve been examining, is part of the broader democratization of technology that we’ve already discussed. It enables alliances between online activists who operate in a contested global information space and nonstate armed groups who compete for control on the streets of marginalized urban and periurban communities. The aim of this chapter is to round out our discussion on urban metabolism, feral cities, and the range of urban threats in Chapter 2, and on the theory of competitive control in Chapter 3, with a look at how enhanced connectivity is transforming the way people fight in cities.

  In his account of Sifaw Twawa’s engagement at Yefren, Pollock is describing an important feature of conflict in this highly connected environment: the rise of remote warfare, and of what we might call virtual theaters. Before turning to the Arab uprisings, therefore, it’s worth examining these aspects in a little more detail.

  I. Remote Warfare and Virtual Theaters

  The military term theater of war means “the area of air, land and water that is, or may become, directly involved in the conduct” of a conflict.5 A theater of war can include theaters of operations—subareas containing forces that “conduct or support specific combat operations” and are normally thought of as “geographically separate and focused on different enemy forces.”6 Traditionally, theaters are thus discrete areas of geographical space, within which all the participants in a given conflict are physically located. This is an important legal construct, as well as a strategic and operational one: governments typically designate specific geographical areas as “war zones,” apply more or less restrictive laws of armed conflict to these zones, and assert certain legal protections for military forces and populations in such areas, while excluding other populations and territories (for example, the home populations of countries engaged in expeditionary wars overseas). In this way, a theater of war, like the rule set in a system of competitive control, defines an area of dangerous space, marks it off from safe territory, and establishes a set of sanctions that applies on one side of the boundary but not the other. The theater construct thus helps define spaces of normality. It’s part of a global normative system (international law) that divides physical space into a realm of war, where the laws and customs of war apply, and a realm of peace, where norms of civil society, domestic law and civil protections apply.7

  The key phrases in the official definition of a theater of war are “directly involved” and “conduct or support”: if everyone involved in conducting or supporting combat action in a given war is located within a definable geographical space (say, the European Theater of Operations or the South-West Pacific Area during World War II, or the Korean Theater of Operations during the Korean War), then it makes sense to bound that war in a geographical manner. But this is rarely so in contemporary conflict, and in the highly connected environment of the future it will be even more unusual.

  We’ve already discussed how the traditional notion of a “littoral area” has expanded to the broader idea of a “littoral influence zone,” taking account of the reach of modern weapons and mobility platforms such as cruise missiles or extended-range ship-borne helicopters, which can extend littoral warfare well beyond coastlines themselves. But in a general sense, modern long-range communications and globally networked connectivity, and the addition of cyberspace to the traditional land, air, and sea domains of the littoral zone, have already undermined the spatial conception of war zones, creating virtual theaters—conflict spaces that draw in populations and forces with no geographical connection to the conflict, and which may be located anywhere on the planet.

  In 2003, the Australian Army noted this emerging reality in its future operational concept, Complex Warfighting, which argued that “virtual theatres arise from globalised communications systems, allowing distributed command and control over vast distances. These systems, many of which are commercially available, benefit our enemies as well as us. . . . During the Afghan war in 2002, CIA operatives in Langley, Virginia, flew Predator remotely piloted aircraft, armed with Hellfire missiles, against Taliban targets. By the traditional definition, Virginia is not part of the Afghan theatre. But with globalised communications, an operator in Langley can participate in operations as effectively as can a soldier in Kabul. Langley is thus ‘virtually’ in theatre.”8

  In the decade of war since these words were written, the remote warfare capabilities of the United States (and many other states, not all of which are friendly to U.S. interests) have expanded dramatically. Nonstate armed groups can also access dramatically improved connectivity, giving them off-the-shelf capabilities for remote warfare, so virtual theaters are now the norm. Drone warfare is perhaps the foremost example of this “new normal.”

  Kill Shots and Soccer Games

  The 432nd Wing of the United States Air Force flies most of the U.S. military’s fleet of Predator and Reaper drones. The wing’s six squadrons are at Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs—a town in the high desert of Nevada, about fifty miles outside Las Vegas, on the edge of an old atomic test range. Forward-deployed teams launch, recover, and maintain the aircraft from airstrips close to their targets, but the Reapers and Predators are flown remotely—and their targets are chosen and killed—by operators at Creech.

  One of these operators, Major Erik Jacobson, said in 2012 that “the interesting thing about what our operations are at Creech is that we supported the war in Iraq from Creech . . . to know that you had a direct impact on battles and ops on the gr
ound just from being stateside . . . you’re executing a combat mission and then you drive home and you’re at your kid’s soccer game.”9 Note Jacobson’s language here: “we supported the war,” “direct impact on battles,” “executing a combat mission.” He is exactly restating the textbook definition of a theater of war. Yet Jacobson’s physical location is on the other side of the planet from the war, the city where he lives is at peace, and he (along with the rest of its population) is subject to U.S. domestic law. He’s in a virtual theater, not a physical one.

  Other remotely piloted aircraft are controlled from bases in suburban neighborhoods, such as Hancock Field in upstate New York. As the New York Times reported in July 2012:

  From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, [Colonel] D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks. . . . When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant—and only, Colonel Brenton said, when the women and children are not around—the hair on the back of his neck stands up, just as it did when he used to line up targets in his F-16 fighter jet . . . Colonel Brenton acknowledges the peculiar new disconnect of fighting a telewar with a joystick and a throttle from his padded seat in American suburbia.10