Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  14.Richard Watson, “Mumbai: What Really Happened,” Telegraph, June 28, 2009.

  15.A hard compromise occurs when a raiding team is detected and attacked by security forces; a situation (as in this case) where local civilians detect the team’s presence but no security forces are engaged is usually defined as a soft compromise.

  16.Jedburgh Corp., “Mumbai Attack Timeline.”

  17.Onook Oh, Manish Agrawal, and H. Raghav Rao, “Information Control and Terrorism: Tracking the Mumbai Terrorist Attack Through Twitter,” Information Systems Frontiers 13 (September 2011): 33–43.

  18.“Mumbai Attacks 2008: ’40 Indians Involved in Terror Plot.’”

  19.Datta, “Terror Colours.”

  20.Watson, “Mumbai: What Really Happened.”

  21.“Saving the Patients and the Babies Was Our First Duty,” Rediff News, December 26, 2008, online at http://specials.rediff.com/news/2008/dec/26sld3-how-the-cama-nurses-saved-their-patient.htm.

  22.Vinay Dalvi, “Hemant Karkare Thanked for Exposing Saffron Terror,” Mid-Day (Mumbai), November 17, 2011.

  23.Amitav Ranjan, “Ashok Chakra for Only Two: Karkare and Omble,” Indian Express, January 21, 2009.

  24.Much of what we know about the internal workings of the raid comes from the interrogation and trial of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab. Kasab was tried on eighty-six terrorism-related offenses. He was found guilty and sentenced to death on May 6, 2010; he was hanged at Pune, Maharashtra State, on November 21, 2012. See Ashutosh Joshi, “India Hangs Gunman from Mumbai Attacks,” Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2012.

  25.Wilson John et al., Mumbai Attacks: Response and Lessons, Observer Research Foundation, 23–24, online at www.orfonline.org/cms/export/orfonline/modules/report/attachments/Mumbai%20attack_1230552332507.pdf.

  26.Damien McElroy, “Mumbai Attacks: Foreign Governments Criticize India’s Response,” Telegraph, November 28, 2008.

  27.John et al., Mumbai Attacks, 24.

  28.Ibid.

  29.Ibid., 25–27.

  30.Watson, “Mumbai: What Really Happened.”

  31.Ibid.

  32.“How Mumbai Attacks Unfolded,” BBC News, November 30, 2008.

  33.Author’s discussion with a U.S. counterterrorism analyst, Washington, DC, November 29, 2008.

  34.John et al., Mumbai Attacks.

  35.Nobhojit Roy, Vikas Kapil, Italo Subbarao, and Isaac Ashkenazi, “Mass Casualty Response in the 2008 Mumbai Terrorist Attacks,” Disaster Management and Public Health Preparedness 5, no. 4 (April 2011): 273–79.

  36.Ibid., 275.

  37.Ibid.

  38.Fred de Sam Lazaro, “Karachi and Mumbai: A Tale of Two Megacities,” PBS NewsHour, July 15, 2011.

  39.See Port of Karachi official website, at www.kpt.gov.pk/pages/default.aspx?id=39, accessed October 27, 2012.

  40.Roy et al., “Mass Casualty Response,” 273.

  41.Watson, “Mumbai: What Really Happened.”

  42.Ibid., 275.

  43.John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, “Postcard from Mumbai: Modern Urban Siege,” Small Wars Journal, February 16, 2009.

  44.Richard Norton-Taylor and Owen Bowcott, “‘Mumbai-Style’ Terror Attack on UK, France and Germany Foiled,” Guardian, September 28, 2010.

  45.Discussion with an officer from U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command, at U.S. Naval Amphibious Operations Base Coronado, November 14, 2012; discussion with officers and enlisted operators from Naval Special Warfare Development Group, September 9, 2010.

  46.Gwyn Prins’s 1993 notion of “threats without enemies” was originally formulated to describe environmental challenges of exactly the type discussed in this book, although the concept has since been more widely appropriated by nontraditional security analysts. See Gwyn Prins, Threats Without Enemies: Facing Environmental Insecurity (London: Routledge, 2009 [1993]).

  47.Richard J. Norton, “Feral Cities,” Naval War College Review 66, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 98.

  48.Ibid.

  49.M. V. Bhagavathiannan, “Crop Ferality: Implications for Novel Trait Confinement,” Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, 127, nos. 1–2 (August 2008): 1–6.

  50.Author’s personal experience hunting wild pigs in northern Australia, and discussions with animal-culling experts, Townsville, Q ueensland, 1998.

  51.Author’s personal observation of feral dogs, pigs, cats, and horses during operations in the destroyed or conflict-affected cities of Nicosia (Cyprus), 1997; Arawa (Bougainville), 1998; Dili (East Timor), 1999–2000; Kabul, Khost, Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Asadabad (Afghanistan), 2006–12; and Baghdad (Iraq), 2007.

  52.Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook 2012, field entry for “Urbanization,” online at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2212.html.

  53.As the anthropologist Graham St. John observes, “‘Feral’ designates an Australian youth milieu connected with grassroots resistance. . . . Adherents express dissonance from ‘the parent culture’ and, in acts of local defiance and identification, seek anarchist and ecological alternatives.” See Graham St. John, “Ferality: A Life of Grime,” UTS Review 5, no. 2 (1999): 102.

  54.Richard Littlejohn, “The Politics of Envy Was Bound to End Up in Flames,” Daily Mail, August 12, 2011.

  55.See, among many examples, the discussion of urban exclusion in Susan Parnell and Owen Crankshaw, “Urban Exclusion and the (False) Assumptions of Spatial Policy Reform in South Africa,” in Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt, eds., Mega-Cities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South (London: Zed Books, 2009), 161–67.

  56.See, for example, Charles Murray’s discussion of super-zips and self-segregation (often also referred to as internal secession) in the United States, in Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012).

  57.The same core/gap or core/periphery split that strategists such as Thomas P. M. Barnett (or theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein) have identified at the global level thus also arguably exists at lower fractal levels including cities, districts, blocks, or streets. What Barnett describes as “gap countries” and world-systems analysts call “semiperiphery” or “periphery” countries equate to marginalized or excluded populations and periurban settlements at the city level. See Thomas P. M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Berkley, 2005), and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Books, 1974).

  58.See, for example, the discussion in Tim Nieguth, “‘We Are Left with No Other Alternative’: Legitimating Internal Secession in Northern Ontario,” Space and Polity 13, no. 2 (August 2009): 141–57.

  59.Aristotle argued that “it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.” See Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 1999), book 1, ch. II, 5.

  60.Graham argues that “as societies urbanize and modernize, so their populations become ever-more dependent on complex, distanciated systems for the sustenance of the political ecological arrangements necessary to sustain life (water, waste, food, medicine, goods, commodities, energy, communications, transport, and so on) . . . [therefore] the collapse of functioning infrastructure grids now brings panic and fears of the breakdown of the functioning urban social order.” Stephen Graham, “Urban Metabolism as Target: Contemporary War as Forced Demodernization,” in Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw, eds., In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (London: Routledge, 2006), 252–53.

  61.Q uoted in Graham, “Urban Metabolism as Target.”

  62.Rasna Warah, Mohamud Dirios, and Ismail Osman, Mogadishu Then and Now: A Pictorial Tribute to Africa’s Most Wounded City (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2012), 3. />
  63.Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Grove Press, 1999), 7.

  64.President George H. W. Bush, “Towards a New World Order,” address to a joint session of the United States Congress, Washington, DC, September 11, 1990. Full video of the speech is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chm7vStGV5I.

  65.Human Rights Watch, “Somalia: Human Rights Developments,” Human Rights Watch World Report 1994, online at www.hrw.org/reports/1994/WR94/Africa-08.htm.

  66.Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 158.

  67.David J. Morris, “The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground,” Virginia Q uarterly Review 83, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 144–69.

  68.Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 328.

  69.Ibid., 21.

  70.See Marc Lacy, “Amid Somalia’s Troubles, Coca-Cola Hangs On,” New York Times, July 10, 2006.

  71.J. F. C. Fuller, Plan 1919, May 24, 1918, online at www.alternatewars.com/WW1/Fuller_1919.htm.

  72.Colonel John A. Warden, “Air Theory for the Twenty-first Century,” Air and Space Power Journal, September 1995.

  73.Nuruddin Farah, “Country Cousins,” London Review of Books 20, no. 17 (September 1998), 1.

  74.Ibid., 1–2.

  75.Hanna Batatu, “Some Observations on the Social Roots of Syria’s Ruling Military Group and the Causes for Its Dominance,” Middle East Journal 35, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 337.

  76.Malise Ruthven, Encounters with Islam: On Religion, Politics and Modernity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 95.

  77.Ibid., 2.

  78.U.S. State Department Cable Kingston 00682, dated 242332May2010, online at www.mattathiasschwartz.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tny-cable.pdf.

  79.Matthias Schwartz, “As Jamaican Drug Lord Is Sentenced, U.S. Still Silent on Massacre,” New Yorker, June 8, 2012.

  80.See Wayne Robinson, “Eradicating Organized Criminal Gangs in Jamaica: Can Lessons be Learnt from a Successful Counterinsurgency?” dissertation, U.S. Marine Corps Staff College, Q uantico, VA, online at http://cdn.bajanreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Jamaica-Tivoli.pdf.

  81.Richard Drayton, “From Kabul to Kingston: Army Tactics in Jamaica Resemble Those Used in Afghanistan—and It’s No Mere Coincidence,” Guardian, June 14, 2010.

  82.Horace Helps, “Toll from Jamaica Violence Rises to 73,” Reuters, May 27, 2010.

  83.Benjamin Weiser, “Jamaican Drug Lord Gets Maximum Term,” New York Times, June 8, 2012.

  84.See “Witness Provides Compelling Account of Jamaican ‘Garrisons,’” Caribbean News Now, May 25, 2012, online at www.caribbeannewsnow.com/news/newspublish/home.print.php?news_id=11049.

  85.Obika Gray, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 73–74.

  86.Ibid., 151.

  87.Christopher A. D. Charles and Orville Beckford, “The Informal Justice System in Garrison Constituencies,” Department of Sociology, Psychology, and Social Work, University of the West Indies, online at www.academia.edu/1438587/The_Informal_Justice_System_in_Garrison_Constituencies.

  88.Ibid.

  89.Ibid., 16.

  90.“Witness Provides Compelling Account of Jamaican ‘Garrisons.’”

  91.Charles and Beckford, “The Informal Justice System in Garrison Constituencies,” 18.

  92.See Ken Menkhaus, “Governance Without Government in Somalia: Spoilers, State Building, and the Politics of Coping,” International Security 31, no. 3 (Winter 2006–7): 74–106.

  93.Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 25.

  94.Ibid.

  95.See Enrique Desmond Arias, “The Structure of Criminal Organizations in Kingston, Jamaica and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” presentation delivered at the conference “Drug Trafficking, Violence, and Instability in Mexico, Colombia, and the Caribbean: Implications for US National Security,” Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies, University of Pittsburgh, October 30, 2009.

  96.See Enrique Desmond Arias, “The 2010 Emergency and Party Politics in Kingston, Jamaica: Towards a Less Violent Democracy,” Revista, Winter 2012, online at www.drclas.harvard.edu/publications/revistaonline/winter-2012/2010-emergency-and-party-politics-kingston-jamaica.

  97.Desmond Arias, personal communication via email, November 22, 2012.

  98.Ibid.

  99.Anonymous witness at the trial of Christopher Coke, May 2012, reported in “Witness Provides Compelling Account of Jamaican ‘Garrisons.’”

  100.Sullivan and Elkus, “Postcard from Mumbai,” 10.

  101.See David J. Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xi–xii.

  102.Nora Bensahel and Patrick M. Cronin, America’s Civilian Operations Abroad: Understanding Past and Future Requirements (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, 2012).

  103.Angel Rabasa, Robert D. Blackwill, Peter Chalk, Kim Cragin, C. Christine Fair, Brian A. Jackson, Brian Michael Jenkins, Seth G. Jones, Nathaniel Shestak, and Ashley J. Tellis, The Lessons of Mumbai (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009), 13.

  104.Ben Connable and Martin C. Libicki, How Insurgencies End (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010), xviii.

  105.See “DIY Weapons of the Syrian Rebels,” Atlantic, February 2013.

  106.Ibid.

  107.For detailed descriptions of the battle, see Richard S. Lowry, New Dawn: The Battles for Fallujah (New York: Savas Beatie, 2010), and Bing West, No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah (London: Bantam Press, 2006).

  108.Q iao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999).

  109.See Richard Dobbs, Jaana Remes, James Manyika, Charles Roxburgh, Sven Smit, and Fabian Schaer, Urban World: Cities and the Rise of the Consuming Class, McKinsey and Company, June 2012, online at www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/urban_world_cities_and_the_rise_of_the_consuming_class; IBM, “Smarter Cities,” online at www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html.

  110.See Scott Nelson et al., “Charlie Company 1/5 Marines: Lessons Learned, Operation Hue City,” operational after-action review, 1968, online at www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/lessons/hue.pdf. For a general description of the battle, see Erik Villard, The 1968 Tet Offensive Battles of Q uang Tri and Hue City (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 2008).

  111.See Olga Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars 1994–2000: Lessons from the Urban Combat (Washington, DC: Rand Publishing, 2001).

  112.See Amnesty International, Israel and the Occupied Territories: Under the Rubble: House Demolition and Destruction of Land and Property, May 2004, online at www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE15/033/2004; “Israel Levels Palestinian Homes: Israel Ignores UN Calls to Halt Destruction of Palestinian Properties in East Jerusalem,” Al Jazeera, October 28, 2009, online at www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2009/10/200910282211496109.html.

  113.Eyal Weizman, “The Art of War,” Frieze, no. 99 (May 2006), online at www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war.

  114.Ibid.

  115.Peter Arnett, “Major Describes Move,” New York Times, February 8, 1968.

  116.Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden (New York: Penguin, 2012), ch. 4.

  117.Paula Broadwell, “Travels with Paula (1): A Time to Build,” at Thomas E. Ricks, Best Defense (Foreign Policy) blog, January 13, 2011, online at http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/13/travels_with_paula_i_a_time_to_build.

  118.See Jonathan Rugman, “UN Food Stolen from the Starving in Somalia: Fake Camp Fraud,” Times (London), June 15, 2009, online at www.hiiraan.com/news4/2009/jun/11095/un_food_is_stolen_from_the_starving_in_somalia_fake_camp_fraud.aspx.

  119.Matt Potter, Out
laws Inc.: Under the Radar and On the Black Market with the World’s Most Dangerous Smugglers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001), 139–44.

  120.See David J. Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency: The State of a Controversial Art,” in Paul B. Rich and Isabelle Duyvesteyn, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency (London: Routledge, 2012).

  121.For a recent comprehensive study of insurgency outcomes, see Connable and Libicki, How Insurgencies End.

  Chapter 3

  1.Our partner unit at this time was the reconnaissance platoon of the 2nd Battalion, Pacific Islands Regiment, part of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF).

  2.See Leonid Zalizynak, “The Ethnographic Record, and Structural Changes in the Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Economy of Boreal Europe,” in Marek Zvelebil and Robin Dennell, eds., Harvesting the Sea, Farming the Forest: The Emergence of Neolithic Societies in the Baltic Region (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), ch. 5.

  3.For the “fishers of men” quote, see Matthew 4:19 and Mark 1:17 in the New Testament.

  4.“Random Stuff to Think About,” Life in Rocinha, April 2, 2012, online at http://lifeinrocinha.blogspot.com.

  5.This case study, though presented as a hypothetical example here in order to protect sources, is based on actual participant observation and interviews in the field conducted in Kandahar between March 2008 and May 2011. Where appropriate, individual interviews and sources are noted.

  6.According to the CIA World Factbook, 43.6 percent of the Afghan population is age fourteen or younger. See “Afghanistan Demographic Profile 2010,” at www.indexmundi.com/afghanistan/demographics_profile.html, accessed January 21, 2011

  7.See Thomas Ruttig, “How Tribal Are the Taleban?” Thematic Paper 04/10, Afghanistan Analysts Network, online at http://aan-afghanistan.com/index.asp?id=865, accessed December 20, 2010.

  8.In the Afghan context, the Sunni Muslim honorific mullah usually refers to a local religious leader, who may or may not have completed formal religious studies. The term maulawi normally refers to someone who has completed a full course of study at a recognized madrassa, or Islamic seminary.