Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  Clearly, the pilots and crew who operate these aircraft, target the Taliban, and support ground troops in Afghanistan are not (in any spatial sense) located in the Afghan theater of operations, and neither are they in physical danger. It’s also worth noting that what’s new about remotely piloted aircraft is not so much the airframes and weapons (most of which are commercial off-the-shelf systems, or readily available technologies used in piloted aircraft for years) but rather, the communications systems that allow them to be controlled from the other side of the planet—along with the Internet, communications networks, and GPS navigation satellites that support these globalized systems. In other words, it’s not the aircraft themselves, but rather their access to globally networked connectivity that lets these crews take a direct and lethal role in the conflict, makes them an intimate (though geographically disconnected) part of the operation, and thus puts them virtually in theater.

  This has huge implications, and not only for the psychological welfare of the participants in this videogame-like conflict or for the human rights of their targets. Legally, how are we to conceive of cities such as Indian Springs, Nevada, or Syracuse, New York? These cities—deemed to be outside any war zone, with populations living under United States domestic law—are, through the emergence of virtual theaters, directly engaged in conflict overseas, whether the people who live there realize it or not. If Taliban militants managed to insert an assault team to raid these cities, in a variant of what Lashkar-e-Taiba did in Mumbai, would that action be illegal? During the Second World War, the Allies conducted hundreds of strategic air raids against German bomber airfields that were thousands of miles away from the front lines, many of which happened to kill civilians in nearby urban areas. Might an insurgent (or an enemy nation-state) argue that an attack on Indian Springs or Syracuse would be exactly equivalent to one of these air raids?

  The United States government has repeatedly asserted, and the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld, the legal position that America is in a state of war with al Q aeda and related terrorist groups.11 If we consider it a legitimate act of war for a Predator to strike a target in, say, a city in Pakistan, killing militants in the houses where they live, but also potentially injuring or killing noncombatant civilians, is it legitimate for those same Pakistani militants to strike the city where that Predator’s pilot lives? If it’s legitimate to kill a militant attending a wedding in the tribal areas, is it also legitimate to kill a Predator pilot at his kid’s soccer game in Indian Springs? The U.S. government considers Predator crews combatants, and awards them medals for their service; are they and their families, then, and the bases and communities where they live, legitimate targets, like the German bomber airbases of World War II? Do ordinary Americans living in these towns realize the implications, and would they have a different attitude about “overseas contingency operations”—the latest euphemism for the permanent, globalized war on terrorism established after 9/11—if they did? The answer to these questions is far from clear, let alone widely agreed. Much of the debate on so-called drone operations (drones are actually fully autonomous robotic platforms, whereas Predators and Reapers are remotely piloted aircraft that need to be controlled, moment to moment, by a human operator) has focused on questions of ethics and targeting—but the enormous conceptual and practical implications of remote warfare are yet to be fully explored.

  These aren’t academic questions: as I’ve just shown, any enemy who can read English can download the details of drone operations from the New York Times website and therefore almost certainly realized long ago that the suburbs of Syracuse, the crews who live there, and their families are much softer targets than the armored vehicles or special forces patrols those Predators support, and on whose operations U.S. ground forces rely. Any enemy suffering continual losses at the hands of remotely piloted aircraft would be stupid not to try to strike the aircraft’s controllers. In fact, something like this has already happened: Hakimullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistani Taliban, launched a suicide attacker against New York City in May 2010, in what he claimed were legitimate acts of war in retaliation for Predator strikes against his followers in the tribal areas of Pakistan—strikes that were controlled from the United States.12 One might suggest that the only reason such attacks don’t occur every week is that most populations targeted by Predators simply lack the means to strike back at intercontinental distances. In part, this is because (as Akbar Ahmed points out in The Thistle and the Drone, his excellent study of the effects of drone warfare on traditional populations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) over the last decade these have been tribal groups in remote, marginalized, landlocked communities, such as the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.13 But in this, as in other areas, we need to get our heads out of the mountains: as we’ve seen, settlement patterns are changing as the planet urbanizes, and populations in coastal, connected cities, plugged into global networks, have many more counterstrike options open to them.

  Such counterstrikes need not be physical. In one 2009 example, Iranian-backed insurgents in Iraq used Skygrabber, a “$26 piece of off-the-shelf software” made by the Russian company SkySoftware, “to intercept live video feeds from Predator drones, potentially providing the insurgents with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.”14 The insurgents simply pointed satellite television dishes at the sky, then used them to intercept video from the satellite uplink that connects the aircraft to their controllers back at bases such as Creech, exploiting the fact that the uplinks were (at that time) unencrypted. U.S. troops discovered the problem when they detained a Shi’a fighter whose laptop turned out to contain intercepted drone video feeds.15 Other detainees had similar pirated video on their laptops, “leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds . . . the military found ‘days and days and hours and hours of proof’ that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups.”16 In effect, the insurgents had hacked the drone control system, a far easier way to deal with the threat than to try to shoot down the actual aircraft.

  Like the Lashkar-e-Taiba raiders’ use of Twitter as a command network at Mumbai, this incident illustrates that—alongside the democratization of lethality that now lets individuals access weapon systems that were once only available to nation-states—we’re seeing a democratization of digital connectivity that lets individuals access very long-range communication and control systems (including encrypted systems) on the open market, giving them remote warfare capabilities that are starting to rival those of governments. Indeed, both these trends are part of a broader pattern that we have called the democratization of technology. This is affecting all aspects of human life and, at least in relation to warfare, is breaking down classical distinctions between governments and individuals, between zones of war and zones of peace, between civilians and combatants, and therefore between traditional concepts such as “war” and “crime” or “domestic” and “international.”

  In another incident in mid-2011, a virus carrying a so-called key-logger payload, which records every keystroke a computer user makes, infected computers at Creech and other Predator bases. Air Force security officers were unsure if the virus was just a random piece of malware that had somehow found its way onto the system or if it was part of a deliberate cyberattack.17 This highlights another very major recent shift in remote warfare capabilities: the entry of the United States into the business of offensive cyberwarfare.

  “Olympic Games” and Offensive Cyberwarfare

  In June 2012, David Sanger published Confront and Conceal, a description of the Obama administration’s covert and remote warfare programs that drew on a series of revelations by administration officials that were startlingly indiscreet, to say the least. The book included a well-sourced account of Operation Olympic Games, a joint U.S.-Israeli cyberoperation that combined virtual and physical attacks—using cyberweapons, including the S
tuxnet worm (and, possibly, the related DuQ u and Flame worms), to attack physical structures and infrastructure in Iran’s nuclear weapons program.18 Sanger claimed that the operation had begun under President George W. Bush and that President Obama had dramatically accelerated and expanded it.19 U.S. government sources later confirmed Sanger’s account in interviews with the New York Times.20

  Later the same year, U.S. defense secretary and former CIA director Leon Panetta cautioned of the threat of cyberwarfare, warning “that the United States was facing the possibility of a ‘cyber–Pearl Harbor’ and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could dismantle the nation’s power grid, transportation system, financial networks and government.”21 Panetta’s statement was met with derision from online activists and cybersecurity professionals, who accused the United States of hypocrisy, given its own use of offensive cyberweapons in Olympic Games. Mikko Hyppönen, the cybersecurity expert who exposed Stuxnet and Flame, wrote in an enraged blog post:

  It’s quite clear that real-world cris[e]s in the future are very likely to have cyber components as well. If we look for offensive cyber attacks that have been linked back to a known government, we mostly find attacks that have been launched by [the] United States, not against them. So far, antivirus companies have found five different malware attacks linked to operation “Olympic Games” run by US and Israel. When New York Times ran the story linking US Government and the Obama administration to these attacks, White House started an investigation on who had leaked the information. Note that they never denied the story. They just wanted to know who leaked it. As United States is doing offensive cyber attacks against other countries, certainly other countries feel that they are free to do the same. Unfortunately the United States has the most to lose from attacks like these.22

  Hyppönen highlights an obvious risk here: using a conventional kinetic weapon (say, a bomb or missile) generally destroys it. But using a cyberweapon is equivalent to sharing it—the code, and thus the capability, residing in the weapon is now loose in the virtual ecosystem, where it can be picked up, studied, and reused by the intended target, or anyone else.

  As Thomas Rid has suggested, this is a particular problem because the current U.S. focus on offensive cyberwarfare isn’t matched by an equivalent effort on defensive cybersecurity, despite the rhetoric of Secretary Panetta and others. “At present,” Rid argues,

  the United States government is one of the most aggressive actors when it comes to offensive cyber operations, excluding commercial espionage. The administration has anonymously admitted that it designed Stuxnet (codenamed Olympic Games), a large-scale and protracted sabotage campaign against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz that was unprecedented in scale and sophistication. Close expert observers assume that America also designed Flame, [an] operation against several Middle Eastern targets mostly in the energy sector. The same goes for Gauss [which was] designed to steal information from Lebanese financial institutions . . . The Obama administration seems to have decided to prioritize such high-end offensive operations. Indeed, the Pentagon’s bolstered Cyber Command seems designed primarily for such purposes.23

  What enables all these capabilities, both for drone warfare and cyberwar, is a dramatic rise over the past decade and a half in networked digital connectivity, part of the megatrend of enhanced connectedness that we’ve already identified as one of the main influences shaping future conflict. Through the democratization of technology, such connectivity is also, of course, available to nonstate armed groups, local regimes, civil society, and individual citizens—especially those in urbanized, connected societies. With this as prologue, let’s look at the impact of that networked connectivity on the Arab Awakening.

  II. The Arab Awakening

  John Pollock’s reporting, with that of technology writers such as Q uinn Norton and Julian Dibbell and war correspondents including Martin Chulov, C. J. Chivers, Robert Worth, Dexter Filkins, and the late Anthony Shadid, doesn’t just illuminate the rise of remote warfare among nonstate groups. It also helps highlight an important shift that occurred over the course of the Arab Awakening in 2011–12: the evolution from an alliance of online activists and street protestors during the Tunisian uprising through network-enabled urban revolution in Egypt to connectivity-enhanced insurgency in Libya and something approaching full-scale social netwar in Syria. This shift has seen evolving complexity, increasing lethality, and rising global engagement over the course of the uprisings, along with increasingly effective regime countermeasures and active and sophisticated repression from governments.

  I should note at the outset that this section doesn’t attempt a comprehensive discussion of these uprisings, or of the Arab Awakening as a whole. Complete accounts of the Libyan war or the Egyptian revolution alone would be full-length books in their own right, while the Syrian civil war is still going on as I write, its outcome very much in doubt. So all this section does is to examine how networked connectivity affected these conflicts, and the predominantly urban, coastal environment in which they occurred, seeking to illuminate some possible aspects of future conflict in similar environments.

  Throughout the entire region affected by the Arab Awakening, motivated, mobilized, and connected populations (most of which are urbanized and coastal) are opposing disrupted, disorganized governments that initially were on the defensive but now are pushing back hard, and all this is happening within a globally contested information space. As Pollock notes, this unrest is taking place against the backdrop of trends we have examined already. The “elderly regimes of the Middle East and North Africa are unwilling to leave the stage, yet unable to satisfy the political and economic demands of a demographic youth bulge,” he argues. “Around two thirds of the region’s population is under 30, and youth unemployment stands at 24 percent. Inevitably, the rapidly changing landscape of media technology, from satellite TV and cell phones to YouTube and Facebook, is adding a new dynamic to the calculus of power between the generations.”24

  Tunisia: Taks, Ultras, and Anons

  Online activists played a key role in Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution. “Takrizards” or “Taks” (members of Takriz, a hacker group founded in the late 1990s) had long been active opponents of the authoritarian regime of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had denounced them repeatedly since 2000 and sought to block their online presence. Many had been driven into exile, from where they collaborated closely with Taks still in Tunisia. They’d become increasingly innovative users of mobile communications technology, “‘geo-bombing’ the presidential palace by adding videos of human rights testimony that appear in the YouTube layer of Google Earth and Google Maps, and charting Tunisia’s prisons” as well as hosting satirical anti-regime chat forums, and using Mumble (a voice-over-Internet-protocol communications application which they considered more secure than Skype) to coordinate protests and anti-regime activities.25

  In the half century before the revolution, Tunisia had experienced rapid growth, its populace more than doubling from 4.2 million in 1960 to 10.7 million in 2010, with a high rate of coastal urbanization. As more and more Tunisians moved to coastal cities, they gained access to the Internet and global media, and acquired email addresses, Facebook accounts, smartphones, and digital cameras. Throughout the last decade of Ben Ali’s dictatorship, the expansion of electronic access for urban dwellers in Tunisia was especially fast-paced, and Takriz surfed this wave of increasing connectivity to propagate its anti-regime messages. And as rural-to-urban migration continued apace, many urban Tunisians retained close ties to their villages of origin, maintaining human networks that allowed information to circulate quickly by telephone and word of mouth among urban, periurban, and rural communities. Newer, virtual social networks thus meshed with preexisting, trusted human networks, generating synergies between activists in the real and virtual worlds when the uprising came.

  Similarly, since the late 1990s, the Takrizards had e
volved from merely mocking the regime online: they’d taken their protest action into the real world, forming a street-level alliance with disaffected youth in Tunisia’s cities. As well as the youth bulge, urbanization, and high youth unemployment mentioned above, Tunisia (as we saw in Chapter 1) has an extremely high level of urban littoralization, second only to Libya in the region, with 70 percent of its population concentrated in coastal cities.26 Soccer fans in these cities—especially disaffected young men who joined tight-knit, highly motivated, violent groups of militant fans known as “Ultras”—became central to the opposition movement. Since the early 2000s, Takriz had hosted a Web forum where Ultras from different teams could interact and discuss their street battles with the regime’s police. This forum helped build relationships and collaborative alliances among fans of different teams—urban youth tribes who normally would have spurned each other as enemies—so that over several years “a distinctive North African style of Ultra—one with more political character—spread quickly among Tunisia’s soccer-mad youth and then to fans in Egypt, Algeria, Libya and Morocco. When the revolution began, the Ultras would come out to play a very different game. They were transformed into a quick-reaction force of bloody-minded rioters.”27

  It’s important not to romanticize the Ultras here: radical soccer fans have a long history of involvement in ethnic cleansing, urban violence, radicalism, and street conflict, and historically have been just as willing to back authoritarian causes as to support liberal ones. In the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, for example, one of the most violent Serb paramilitary groups, Arkan’s Tigers—the group that led the Brčko ethnic massacres I described in Chapter 3—was recruited primarily from urban soccer fans and led by Zeljko Raznatovic, a former street criminal and gangster who became an Ultra mobilizer and head of the Red Star Belgrade supporters’ club.28 Several groups of Ultras also engaged in violent action in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.29 Likewise, in East Timor in 1999–2000, some of the most violent militias were recruited from urban soccer fans and marginalized teenage street youth, and their sponsors (often members of the urban political establishment or rogue members of Indonesia’s security forces) used them as proxies in mass killings and expulsions in Timorese coastal towns including Dili, Batugade, and Suai.30