http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/0507/ijpe/kilcullen.htm

New Paradigms for 21st Century Conflict

David J. Kilcullen

Countering the Terrorist Mentality
CONTENTS
About This Issue
Terrorism and Children
A Form of Psychological Warfare
Collective Identity: Hatred Bred in the Bone
Women as Victims and Victimizers
Terrorism: A Brief History
From Profiles to Pathways: The Road to Recruitment
Mass-Media Theater
A Case Study: The Mythology of Martyrdom in Iraq
New Paradigms for 21st Century Conflict
A Strategic Assessment of Progress Against the Terrorist Threat
Video Feature video feature icon
Terrorism: A War Without Borders
Bibliography
Internet Resources
Download Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version


The multinational force monitoring the ceasefire following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah is an example of recent cooperation among the international community to address the new types of conflict that have arisen in the 21st century. Here, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon thanks the men and women from the 30 countries participating in this effort. The multinational force monitoring the ceasefire following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah is an example of recent cooperation among the international community to address the new types of conflict that have arisen in the 21st century. Here, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon thanks the men and women from the 30 countries participating in this effort. ©AP Images/Hussein Malla

David J. Kilcullen, PhD, a former Australian Army lieutenant colonel, is currently senior counterinsurgency adviser to the commanding general, Multi-National Force - Iraq. He previously served as chief strategist in the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism and as the Pentagon's special adviser for irregular warfare and counterterrorism on the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review. He regularly contributes to the Small War Journal Blog. This paper, like his postings, solely reflects his personal views.

Despite our rather rosy hindsight view of World War II, there was considerable dissent at the time about the war's aims, conduct, and strategy. But virtually no one disagreed that it was indeed a war or that the Axis powers were the enemy/aggressors.

Contrast this with the war on terrorism. Some dispute the notion that the conflict can be defined as a war; others question the reality of the threat. Far-left critics blame American industrial interests, while a lunatic fringe sees September 11, 2001, as a massive self-inflicted conspiracy. More seriously, people disagree about the enemy. Is al-Qaida a real threat or a creature of Western paranoia and overreaction? Is it even a real organization? Is al-Qaida a mass movement or simply a philosophy, a state of mind? Is the enemy all terrorism? Is it extremism? Or is Islam itself in some way a threat? Is this primarily a military, political, or civilizational problem? What would "victory" look like? These fundamentals are disputed, as those of previous conflicts (except possibly the Cold War) were not.

In truth, the al-Qaida threat is all too real. But ambiguity arises because this conflict breaks existing paradigms—including notions of "warfare," "diplomacy," "intelligence," and even "terrorism." How, for example, do we wage war on nonstate actors who hide in states with which we are at peace? How do we work with allies whose territory provides safe haven for nonstate opponents? How do we defeat enemies who exploit the tools of globalization and open societies, without destroying the very things we seek to protect?

A New Paradigm

British General Rupert Smith argues that war—defined as industrial, interstate warfare between armies, where the clash of arms decides the outcome—no longer exists, that we are instead in an era of "war amongst the people," where the utility of military forces depends on their ability to adapt to complex political contexts and engage nonstate opponents under the critical gaze of global public opinion.1 Certainly, in complex, multisided, irregular conflicts such as Iraq, conventional warfare has failed to produce decisive outcomes. We have instead adopted policing, nation-building, and counterinsurgency approaches—and developed new interagency tools "on the fly."

Similarly, we traditionally conduct state-based diplomacy through engagement with elites of other societies: governments, intelligentsia, and business leaders, among others. The theory is that problems can be resolved when elites agree, cooler heads prevail, and governments negotiate and then enforce agreements. Notions of sovereignty, the nation-state, treaty regimes, and international institutions all build on this paradigm. Yet the enemy organizes at the nonelite level, exploiting discontent and alienation across numerous countries, to aggregate the effects of multiple grassroots actors into a mass movement with global reach. How do elite models of diplomacy address that challenge? This is not a new problem—various programs were established in U.S. embassies in the Cold War to engage with nongovernmental elements of civil societies at risk from Communist subversion. But many such programs lapsed after 1992, and problems of religious extremism or political violence require subtly different approaches.

Likewise, traditional intelligence services are not primarily designed to find out what is happening but to acquire secrets from other nation-states. They are well-adapted to state-based targets but less suited to nonstate actors—where the problem is to acquire information that is unclassified but located in denied, hostile, or inaccessible physical or human terrain. Even against state actors, traditional intelligence cannot tell us what is happening, only what other governments believe is happening. Why, for example, did Western intelligence miss the imminent fall of the Soviet Union in 1992? In part, because we were reading the Soviet leaders' mail—and they themselves failed to understand the depth of grassroots disillusionment with Communism.2 Why did most countries (including those that opposed the Iraq war) believe in 2002 that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction? Because they were intercepting the regime's communications, and many senior Iraqi regime members believed Iraq had them.3

Long-standing trends underpin this environment. Drivers include globalization and the backlash against it, the rise of nonstate actors with capabilities comparable to some nation-states, U.S. conventional military superiority that forces all opponents to avoid its strengths and migrate toward unconventional approaches, and a global information environment based on the Internet and satellite communications. All these trends would endure even if al-Qaida disappeared tomorrow, and until we demonstrate an ability to defeat this type of threat, any smart adversary will adopt a similar approach. Far from being a one-off challenge, we may look back on al-Qaida as the harbinger of a new era of conflict.

Adapting to the New Environment

Thus, as former U.S. Counterterrorism Ambassador Hank Crumpton observed, we seem to be on the threshold of a new era of warfare, one that demands an adaptive response. Like dinosaurs

The names of U.S. government agencies engaged in the fight against terrorism are displayed during a hearing on federal reorganization to combat terrorism in June 2002. The names of U.S. government agencies engaged in the fight against terrorism are displayed during a hearing on federal reorganization to combat terrorism in June 2002.
©AP Images/Kenneth
outcompeted by smaller, weaker, but more adaptive mammals, in this new era, nation-states are more powerful but less agile and flexible than nonstate opponents. As in all conflict, success will depend on our ability to adapt, evolve new responses, and get ahead of a rapidly changing threat environment.

The enemy adapts with great speed. Consider al-Qaida's evolution since the mid-1990s. Early attacks (the East African embassy bombings, the USS Cole, and 9/11 itself) were "expeditionary": Al-Qaida formed a team in Country A, prepared it in Country B, and clandestinely infiltrated it into Country C to attack a target. In response, we improved transportation security, infrastructure protection, and immigration controls. In turn, terrorists developed a "guerrilla" approach where, instead of building a team remotely and inserting it secretly to attack, they grew the team close to the target using nationals of the host country. The Madrid and London bombings, and attacks in Casablanca, Istanbul, and Jeddah, followed this pattern, as did the foiled London airline plot of summer 2006.

These attacks are often described as "home grown," yet they were inspired, exploited, and to some extent directed by al-Qaida. For example, Mohammed Siddeque Khan, leader of the July 7, 2005, London attack, flew to Pakistan and probably met al-Qaida representatives for guidance and training well before the bombing.4 But the new approach temporarily invalidated our countermeasures—instead of smuggling 19 people in, the terrorists brought one man out—side-stepping our new security procedures. The terrorists had adapted to our new approach by evolving new techniques of their own.

We are now, of course, alert to this "guerrilla" method, as the failure of the August 2006 plots in the United Kingdom and other recent potential attacks showed. But terrorists are undoubtedly already developing new adaptive measures. In counterterrorism, methods that work are almost by definition already obsolete: Our opponents evolve as soon as we master their current approach. There is no "silver bullet." Similar to malaria, terrorism constantly morphs into new mutations that require a continuously updated battery of responses.

Five Practical Steps

In responding to this counterintuitive form of warfare, the United States has done two basic things so far. First, we improved existing institutions (through processes like intelligence reform, creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and additional capacity for "irregular"—that is, nontraditional—warfare within the Department of Defense). Second, we have begun developing new paradigms to fit the new reality. These are yet to fully emerge, though some—such as the idea of treating the conflict as a very large-scale counterinsurgency problem, requiring primarily nonmilitary responses coupled with measures to protect at-risk populations from enemy influence—have gained traction.5

But in a sense, policy makers today are a little like the "Chateau Generals" of the First World War—confronting a form of conflict that invalidates received wisdom, just as the generals faced the "riddle of the trenches" in 1914-1918. Like them, we face a conflict environment transformed by new technological and social conditions, for which existing organizations and concepts are ill-suited. Like them, we have "work-arounds," but have yet to develop the breakthrough concepts, technologies, and organizations—equivalent to blitzkrieg in the 1930s—that would solve the riddle of this new threat environment.

There is no easy answer (if there were, we would have found it by now), but it is possible to suggest a way forward. This involves three conceptual steps to develop new models and, simultaneously, two organizational steps to create a capability for this form of conflict. This is not meant to be prescriptive, but is simply one possible approach. And the ideas put forward are not particularly original—rather, this proposal musters existing ideas and integrates them into a policy approach.

1. Develop a new lexicon: Professor Michael Vlahos has pointed out that the language we use to describe the new threats actively hinders innovative thought.6 Our terms draw on negative formulations; they say what the environment is not, rather than what it is. These terms include descriptors like unconventional, nonstate, nontraditional, unorthodox, and irregular. Terminology undoubtedly influences our ability to think clearly. One reason why planners in Iraq may have treated "major combat operations" (Phase III) as decisive, not realizing that in this case the post-conflict phase would actually be critical, is that Phase III is decisive by definition. Its full doctrinal name is "Phase III—Decisive Operations." To think clearly about new threats, we need a new lexicon based on the actual, observed characteristics of real enemies who:

* Integrate terrorism, subversion, humanitarian work, and insurgency to support propaganda designed to manipulate the perceptions of local and global audiences

* Aggregate the effects of a very large number of grassroots actors, scattered across many countries, into a mass movement greater than the sum of its parts, with dispersed leadership and planning functions that deny us detectable targets

* Exploit the speed and ubiquity of modern communications media to mobilize supporters and sympathizers, at speeds far greater than governments can muster

* Exploit deep-seated belief systems founded in religious, ethnic, tribal, or cultural identity, to create extremely lethal, nonrational reactions among social groups

* Exploit safe havens such as ungoverned or undergoverned areas (in physical or cyber space); ideological, religious, or cultural blind spots; or legal loopholes

* Use high-profile symbolic attacks that provoke nation-states into overreactions that damage their long-term interests

* Mount numerous, cheap, small-scale challenges to exhaust us by provoking expensive containment, prevention, and response efforts in dozens of remote areas

These features of the new environment could generate a lexicon to better describe the threat. Since the new threats are not state-based, the basis for our approach should not be international relations (the study of how nation-states interact in elite state-based frameworks) but anthropology (the study of social roles, groups, status, institutions, and relations within human population groups, in nonelite, nonstate-based frameworks).

2. Get the grand strategy right: If this confrontation is based on long-standing trends, it follows that it may be a protracted, generational, or multigenerational struggle. This means we need both a "long view" and a "broad view"7 that consider how best to interweave all strands of national power, including the private sector and the wider community. Thus we need a grand strategy that can be sustained by the American people, successive U.S. administrations, key allies, and partners worldwide. Formulating such a long-term grand strategy would involve four crucial judgments:

* Deciding whether our interests are best served by intervening in and trying to mitigate the process of political and religious ferment in the Muslim world, or by seeking instead to contain any spillover of violence or unrest into Western communities. This choice is akin to that between "rollback" and "containment" in the Cold War and is a key element in framing a long-term response.

* Deciding how to allocate resources among military and nonmilitary elements of national power. Our present spending and effort are predominantly military; by contrast, a "global counterinsurgency" approach would suggest that about 80 percent of effort should go toward political, diplomatic, development, intelligence, and informational activity, and about 20 percent to military activity. Whether this is appropriate depends on our judgment about intervention versus containment.

* Deciding how much to spend (in resources and lives) on this problem. This will require a risk judgment taking into account the likelihood and consequences of future terrorist attacks. Such a judgment must also consider how much can be spent on security without imposing an unsustainable cost burden on our societies.

* Deciding how to prioritize effort geographically. At present most effort goes to Iraq, a much smaller portion to Afghanistan, and less again to all other areas. Partly this is because our spending is predominantly military and because we have chosen to intervene in the heart of the Muslim world. Different choices on the military/nonmilitary and intervention/containment judgments might produce significantly different regional priorities over time.

Clearly, the specifics of any administration's strategy would vary in response to a developing situation. Indeed, such agility is critical. But achieving a sustainable consensus, nationally and internationally, on the four grand judgments listed above, would provide a long-term basis for policy across successive administrations.

3. Remedy the imbalance in government capability: At present, the U.S. defense budget accounts for approximately half of total global defense spending, while the U.S. armed forces

LambertIn a warehouse on the outskirts of the Jordanian capital of Amman, workers store blankets donated by the U.S. Agency for International Development for distribution in Iraq. LambertIn a warehouse on the outskirts of the Jordanian capital of Amman, workers store blankets donated by the U.S. Agency for International Development for distribution in Iraq. ©AP Images/Lefteris Pitarakis
employ about 1.68 million uniformed members.8 By comparison, the State Department employs about 6,000 foreign service officers, while the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has about 2,000.9 In other words, the Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined—there are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service.10

This is not to criticize Defense—armed services are labor- and capital-intensive and are always larger than diplomatic or aid agencies. But considering the importance, in this form of conflict, of development, diplomacy, and information (the U.S. Information Agency was abolished in 1999 and the State Department figures given include its successor bureau), a clear imbalance exists between military and nonmilitary elements of capacity. This distorts policy and is unusual by global standards. For example, Australia's military is approximately nine times larger than its diplomatic and aid agencies combined: The military arm is larger, but not 210 times larger, than the other elements of national power.

To its credit, the Department of Defense recognizes the problems inherent in such an imbalance, and said so in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review.11 And the Bush administration has programs in train to increase nonmilitary capacity. But to succeed over the long haul, we need a sustained commitment to build nonmilitary elements of national power. So-called soft powers, such as private-sector economic strength, national reputation, and cultural confidence, are crucial, because military power alone cannot compensate for their loss.

These three conceptual steps will take time (which is, incidentally, a good reason to start on them). But in the interim, two organizational steps could prepare the way:

4. Identify the new "strategic services": A leading role in the war on terrorism has fallen to Special Operations Forces (SOF) because of their direct action capabilities against targets in remote or denied areas. Meanwhile, Max Boot12 has argued that we again need something like the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) of World War II, which included analysis, intelligence, anthropology, special operations, information, psychological operations, and technology capabilities.

Adjectives matter: Special Forces versus Strategic Services. SOF are special. They are defined by internal comparison to the rest of the military—SOF undertake tasks "beyond the capabilities" of general-purpose forces. By contrast, OSS was strategic. It was defined against an external environment and undertook tasks of strategic importance, rapidly acquiring and divesting capabilities as needed. SOF are almost entirely military; OSS was an interagency body with a sizeable civilian component, and almost all its military personnel were emergency war enlistees (talented civilians with strategically relevant skills, enlisted for the duration of the war).13 SOF trace their origin to OSS; yet whereas today's SOF are elite military forces with highly specialized capabilities optimized for seven standard missions,14 OSS was a mixed civil-military organization that took whatever mission the environment demanded, building capabilities as needed.

Soldiers from many nations, including these Indonesian commandos who are applauding their colleagues during an anti-terror exercise conducted outside Jakarta in 2006, have joined in the international fight against terrorism.© AP Images/Irwin FedriansyiahA U.S. national guardsman works with an Iraqi police officer at the Major Crime Unit in western Baghdad. Soldiers from many nations, including these Indonesian commandos who are applauding their colleagues during an anti-terror exercise conducted outside Jakarta in 2006, have joined in the international fight against terrorism.© AP Images/Irwin Fedriansyiah

Identifying which capabilities are strategic services today would be a key step in prioritizing interagency efforts. Capabilities for dealing with nonelite, grassroots threats include cultural and ethnographic intelligence, social systems analysis, information operations (see below), early-entry or high-threat humanitarian and governance teams, field negotiation and mediation teams, biometric reconnaissance, and a variety of other strategically relevant capabilities. The relevance of these capabilities changes over time—some that are strategically relevant now would cease to be, while others would emerge. The key is the creation of an interagency capability to rapidly acquire and apply techniques and technologies in a fast-changing situation.

5. Develop a capacity for strategic information warfare: Al-Qaida is highly skilled at exploiting multiple, diverse actions by individuals and groups, by framing them in a propaganda narrative to manipulate local and global audiences. Al-Qaida maintains a network that collects information about the debate in the West and feeds this, along with an assessment of the effectiveness of al-Qaida's propaganda, to its leaders. They use physical operations (bombings, insurgent activity, beheadings) as supporting material for an integrated "armed propaganda" campaign. The "information" side of al-Qaida's operation is primary; the physical is merely the tool to achieve a propaganda result. The Taliban, GSPC (previously, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, now known as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb), and some other al-Qaida-aligned groups, as well as Hezbollah, adopt similar approaches.

Contrast this with our approach: We typically design physical operations first, then craft supporting information operations to explain our actions. This is the reverse of al-Qaida's approach. For all our professionalism, compared to the enemy's, our public information is an afterthought. In military terms, for al-Qaida the "main effort" is information; for us, information is a "supporting effort." As noted, there are 1.68 million people in the U.S. military, and what they do speaks louder than what our public information professionals (who number in the hundreds) say. Thus, to combat extremist propaganda, we need a capacity for strategic information warfare—an integrating function that draws together all components of what we say and what we do to send strategic messages that support our overall policy.

At present, the military has a well-developed information operations doctrine, but other agencies do not, and they are often rightly wary of military methods. Militarizing information

A U.S. national guardsman works with an Iraqi police officer at the Major Crime Unit in western Baghdad. A U.S. national guardsman works with an Iraqi police officer at the Major Crime Unit in western Baghdad. ©AP Images/David Guttenfelder
operations would be a severe mistake that would confuse a part (military operations) with the whole (U.S. national strategy) and so undermine our overall policy. Lacking a whole-of-government doctrine and the capability to fight strategic information warfare limits our effectiveness and creates message dissonance, in which different elements of the U.S. government send out different messages or work to differing information agendas.

We need an interagency effort, with leadership from the very top in the executive and legislative branches of government, to create capabilities, organizations, and doctrine for a national-level strategic information campaign. Building such a capability is perhaps the most important of our many capability challenges in this new era of information-driven conflict.

Tentative Conclusions

These notions—a new lexicon, grand strategy, balanced capability, strategic services, and strategic information warfare—are merely speculative ideas that suggest what might emerge from a comprehensive effort to find new paradigms for this new era of conflict. Different ideas may well emerge from such an effort, and, in any case, rapid changes in the environment due to enemy adaptation will demand constant innovation. But it is crystal clear that our traditional paradigms of industrial interstate war, elite-based diplomacy, and state-focused intelligence can no longer explain the environment or provide conceptual keys to overcome today's threats.

The Cold War is a limited analogy for today's conflict: There are many differences between today's threats and those of the Cold War era. Yet in at least one dimension, that of time, the enduring trends that drive the current confrontation may mean that the conflict will indeed resemble the Cold War, which lasted in one form or another for the 75 years between the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Many of its consequences—especially the "legacy conflicts" arising from the Soviet-Afghan War—are with us still. Even if this confrontation lasts only half as long as the Cold War, we are at the beginning of a very long road indeed, whether we choose to recognize it or not.

The new threats, which invalidate received wisdom on so many issues, may indicate that we are on the brink of a new era of conflict. Finding new, breakthrough ideas to understand and defeat these threats may prove to be the most important challenge we face.

Countering the Terrorist Mentality

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

Endnotes

(1)See Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), especially pp. 3-28 and 269-335.
(2)See Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett, Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2003), especially chapters VI and VII.
(3) See Kevin M. Woods et. al, Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam's Senior Leadership (Joint Forces Command, Joint Center for Operational Analysis), p. 92.
(4)Intelligence and Security Committee, Report Into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005 (London: The Stationery Office, May 2006), p. 12.
(5)See David Kilcullen, "Countering Global Insurgency," Small Wars Journal (November 2004) and available at http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/kilcullen.pdf ; Williamson Murray (ed.), Strategic Challenges for Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terrorism (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2006); and Bruce Hoffman, "From War on Terror to Global Counterinsurgency," Current History (December 2006): pp. 423-429.
(6)Professor Michael Vlahos, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, personal communication, December 2006.
(7) I am indebted to Mr. Steve Eames for this conceptual formulation.
(8) Compiled from figures in International Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance 2007, pp. 15-50.
(9) Compiled from U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, Congressional Budget Justification 2007, table 9.
(10)The U.S. Army alone employs well over 5,000 band musicians, according to a March 2007 job advertisement; see http://bands.army.mil/jobs/default.asp.
(11)Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (2 February 2006): pp. 83-91.
(12) See Max Boot, Congressional Testimony Before the House Armed Services Committee, 29 June 2006, at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/congress/2006_hr/060629-boot.pdf.
(13) See Central Intelligence Agency, The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency at https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/oss/index.htm.
(14)The seven standard SOF missions are Direct Action (DA), Special Reconnaissance (SR), Unconventional Warfare (UW), Foreign Internal Defence (FID), Counter-Terrorism (CT), Psychological Operations (PSYOP), and Civil Affairs (CA)

A House of Tribes for Iraq
By Theodore W. Karasik and Ghassan Schbley
This commentary appeared on Washingtonpost.com on April 25, 2008.
Many western notions of governance may be struggling to take hold in Iraq, but one that deserves a close look is the effort to create what would amount to a unique upper legislative body: The House of Tribes.

Iraq has over 100 tribes, some of whose roots trace back a thousand years. While modernization and urbanization have eroded tribal affiliations, tribal loyalties remain a bedrock of Iraqi society. Indeed, tribal affinities may matter as much as national, ethnic or religious identities.

Tribal influences in Iraq have a greater longer-term effect than religion in many parts of the country. The Iraqi tribes, with tens of thousands of members, are based on lineage. They are concentrated in parts of Iraq, yet branch across to Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and the Gulf region, including the United Arab Emirates.

The phenomenon of globalization might well have left tribes on the ash heap of history — yet tribes have instead been empowered by it. They are becoming stronger and more potent players across regional transnational lines. Iraqi tribes, as with tribes elsewhere in the region, operate across borders — in the Levant and on the Arabian Peninsula.

Tribes have historically been part of the political milieu, but not in ways familiar to the Western imagination. Western understanding of governance is not the same as the tribal effort to bring together the entire nation under a unified government via many tribal interlocutors. Tribes have been one of the most important components of Iraqi society and politics since well before Baathism, and traditionally tribal elders have sought governance from within, not imposed from outside. Today, they search for a more important role to play in a democratically nascent Iraq.

Tiny steps are already being taken. The tribal Awakening Council — a group of like-minded tribal leaders — was created in Anbar province in 2006, empowering tribes to fight al-Qaeda. Indeed, tribal leaders are an important component in the war on terror and insurgency. Al-Qaeda was pushed out of Anbar by tribes, and the U.S. should not commit the same mistake because Salafi jihadists failed to understand tribal affinity among the Iraqi populace.

But to honestly fight this fight, all tribes must be part of the Iraqi political process. Currently, the Iraqi tribal diaspora throughout the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula is left out. Some tribal leaders who are not in the Awakening Council were part of the insurgency in the past. They might again take up arms against multinational and Iraqi forces if they are not brought into the political and economic process soon.

The Iraqi government needs a nudge to work with tribes from all communities and ethnicities. Our proposal envisions revamping the Iraqi constitution to create a federal branch with two houses: a lower house comprised of all political parties and dealing with daily political, social and economic issues; and a higher House of Tribes, based on tribal affiliations, not provinces. This would introduce a check and balance system that would benefit all Iraqis and set the stage for pure Iraqi reunification. The governance scope of this higher body would be the same as the lower.

Tribal leaders should not be defined by geographic location but by their constituencies. Each tribe should have an equal number of representatives. In recent discussions with regional Iraqi tribal elders, Sunni and Shiite tribes sought a compact that would end violence and promote stability. They see other Gulf Arab countries, specifically the United Arab Emirates, as a model for federal development. Such an effort could enhance U.S. policy towards Iraq by diminishing the notion that Washington is taking sides.

Overall, a balance of power is missing from Iraq today, making the government weak. The Awakening Council is a first step, but not a long-term solution, because it is only a temporary entity, and is not fully inclusive. This contributes to splits and conflicts among tribes. Creating an institution for tribal leaders would provide them an incentive to participate in the political process and open the door to full integration of tribal forces into the Iraqi security and police forces. A House of Tribes could usher in a form of democracy, unique to Iraq, which heals and brings peace.

Theodore Karasik and Ghassan Schbley are RAND analysts

Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt

By Dave Kilcullen


Some aspects of the war in Iraq are hard to fit into “classical” models of insurgency. One of these is the growing tribal uprising against al Qa’ida, which could transform the war in ways not factored into neat “benchmarks” developed many months ago and thousands of miles away. I spent time out on the ground during May and June working with coalition units, tribal leaders and fighters engaged in the uprising, so I felt a few field observations might be of interest to the Small Wars community. I apologize in advance for the epic length of this post, but it's a complex issue, so I hope people will forgive my long-windedness. Like much else, it’s too early to know how this new development will play out. But surprisingly (surprising to me, anyway), indications so far are relatively positive.

To understand what follows, you need to realize that Iraqi tribes are not somehow separate, out in the desert, or remote: rather, they are powerful interest groups that permeate Iraqi society. More than 85% of Iraqis claim some form of tribal affiliation; tribal identity is a parallel, informal but powerful sphere of influence in the community. Iraqi tribal leaders represent a competing power center, and the tribes themselves are a parallel hierarchy that overlaps with formal government structures and political allegiances. Most Iraqis wear their tribal selves beside other strands of identity (religious, ethnic, regional, socio-economic) that interact in complex ways, rendering meaningless the facile division into Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish groups that distant observers sometimes perceive. The reality of Iraqi national character is much more complex than that, and tribal identity plays an extremely important part in it, even for urbanized Iraqis. Thus the tribal revolt is not some remote riot on a reservation: it’s a major social movement that could significantly influence most Iraqis where they live.

Birth of the revolt

The uprising began last year, far out in western Anbar province, but is now affecting about 40% of the country. It has spread to Ninewa, Diyala, Babil, Salah-ad-Din, Baghdad and – intriguingly – is filtering into Shi’a communities in the South. The Iraqi government was in on it from the start; our Iraqi intelligence colleagues predicted, well before we realized it, that Anbar was going to “flip”, with tribal leaders turning toward the government and away from extremists.

Some tribal leaders told me that the split started over women. This is not as odd as it sounds. One of AQ’s standard techniques, which I have seen them apply in places as diverse as Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia, is to marry leaders and key operatives to women from prominent tribal families. The strategy works by creating a bond with the community, exploiting kinship-based alliances, and so “embedding” the AQ network into the society. Over time, this makes AQ part of the social landscape, allows them to manipulate local people and makes it harder for outsiders to pry the network apart from the population. (Last year, while working in the tribal agencies along Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, a Khyber Rifles officer told me “we Punjabis are the foreigners here: al Qa’ida have been here 25 years and have married into the Pashtun hill-tribes to the point where it’s hard to tell the terrorists from everyone else.”) Well, indeed.

But this time, the tactic seems to have backfired. We often short-hand the enemy as “al Qa’ida” but in Iraq we primarily face tanzim qaidat al-jihad fil bilad al-Rafidayn (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s organization, which swore allegiance to bin Laden in 2004, is now taking strategic direction and support from Al Qa’ida central, and whose archaic name literally means “the qai’da organization for jihad in the land of the two rivers”, i.e. Al Qa’ida in Iraq, AQI). This group’s foot-soldiers are 95% Iraqi, but its leadership is overwhelmingly foreign. The top leaders and several key players are Egyptians and there are Turks, Syrians, Saudis, Chechens, Afghans and others in the leadership cadre. Moreover, the group is heavily urbanized, and town-dwellers – even urban Iraqis – may as well be foreigners as far as some tribal leaders are concerned. So there is a cultural barrier, and a natural difference in outlook, between the tribes and the terrorists.

These differences need not have been fatal – indeed, for years the tribes treated the terrorists as “useful idiots”, while AQI in turn exploited them for cover and support. One person told me that AQI’s pitch to the tribes was “we are Sunni, you are Sunni. The Americans and Iranians are helping the Shi’a – let’s fight them together”. But this alliance of convenience and mutual exploitation broke down when AQI began to apply the standard AQ method of cementing alliances through marriage. In Iraqi tribal society, custom (aadat) is at least as important as religion (deen) and its dictates, often pre-Islamic in origin, frequently differ from those of Islam. Indeed, as one tribal Iraqi put it to me, “if you ask a Shammari what religion he is, he will say ‘I am a Shammari’ ” – the Shammari being a confederation which, like many Iraqi tribes, has both Sunni and Shi’a branches.

Islam, of course, is a key identity marker when dealing with non-Muslim outsiders, but when all involved are Muslim, kinship trumps religion. And in fact, most tribal Iraqis I have spoken with consider AQ’s brand of “Islam” utterly foreign to their traditional and syncretic version of the faith. One key difference is marriage custom, the tribes only giving their women within the tribe or (on rare occasions to cement a bond or resolve a grievance, as part of a process known as sulha) to other tribes or clans in their confederation (qabila). Marrying women to strangers, let alone foreigners, is just not done. AQ, with their hyper-reductionist version of “Islam” stripped of cultural content, discounted the tribes’ view as ignorant, stupid and sinful.

This led to violence, as these things do: AQI killed a sheikh over his refusal to give daughters of his tribe to them in marriage, which created a revenge obligation (tha’r) on his people, who attacked AQI. The terrorists retaliated with immense brutality, killing the children of a prominent sheikh in a particularly gruesome manner, witnesses told us. This was the last straw, they said, and the tribes rose up. Neighboring clans joined the fight, which escalated as AQI (who had generally worn out their welcome through high-handedness) tried to crush the revolt through more atrocities. Soon the uprising took off, spreading along kinship lines through Anbar and into neighboring provinces.

Other tribesmen told me women weren’t the only issue. The tribes run smuggling, import/export and construction businesses which AQI shut down, took over, or disrupted through violent disturbances that were “bad for business”. Another factor was the belief, widespread among the tribes (and with at least some basis in fact) that AQI has links to, and has received funding and support from, Iran. In their view, women were simply the spark – AQI already “had it coming”. (Out in the wild western desert, things often tend to play out like The Sopranos… except that AQI changed the rules of the game by adding roadside bombs, beheadings, murder of children and death by torture. Eventually, enough was enough for the locals.)

Current Situation

Several major tribes are now “up” against AQ, across all of Anbar, Diyala, Salah-ad-din, parts of Babil and Baghdad (both city and province). Some in Anbar and Diyala have formed “Salvation Councils”, looking to well-known leadership figures like Sheikh Sittar ar Rishawi, or to community leaders. In other provinces things tend to be quite informal, based on local elders. In Anbar the movement has acquired the name “the awakening”.

The uprising against AQI has dramatically improved security. In Ramadi, Hit, Tikrit, Fallujah and other centers the rate of civilian deaths has dropped precipitously, and overall attacks are down far below historic trends, to almost nothing in some places. For anyone familiar with these places from earlier in the war, it can be quite disorienting to watch Iraqis walking safely and openly in streets which, a year ago, would have required a major operation just to traverse. This change seems to have passed some observers by, but it is one of the truly significant developments in Iraq this year. For example, a recent Washington Post article begins with a Staff Sergeant who was not expecting combat, “after many uneventful months in Iraq's Anbar province, as he jostled over the rough terrain of brush, fields and irrigation ditches in the lead Humvee of a routine patrol on the night of June 30”. Many uneventful months in Anbar? Not expecting combat? A routine patrol – at night? This is not the Anbar we think we know, a media byword for constant pointless violence.

Other provinces are experiencing similar patterns: in one farming district south of Baghdad, a treaty between an enterprising company commander and community elders has dramatically reduced bombings: by late May, one road that was attacked twice a day last year had not seen a single IED attack since the agreement was established in March. The locals have formed a neighborhood watch, are policing their own community, and are enrolling in the Iraqi police under government control and cooperating with local Iraqi Army units. And recently Shi’a tribes in the south have approached us, looking to cooperate with the government against Shi’a extremists.

Of course, this is motivated primarily by self-interest. Tribal leaders realize the extremists were leading them on a path to destruction, and have seized the opportunity to dump the terrorists and come in from the cold. They are also, naturally, looking forward to the day when coalition forces are no longer in their districts, and want to ensure that they, nor AQI, are in charge once we leave. And many of the tribal leaders have realized for themselves what our Army, Marines and Special Forces commanders have been telling them for years: “If you don’t like having us around, and you want us to get off your backs, the solution is staring you in the face: just get rid of the extremists, reduce the violence and cooperate with the government to stabilize your area, and we’re out of here”.

Internal tribal dynamics also play a part. Many older leaders, who consider themselves the true heads of clans or tribes, fled Iraq in 2003 because they were implicated in dealings with Saddam, and are now in exile in Syria or Jordan. The on-the-ground leaders are a younger generation, concerned to cement their positions vis-à-vis the old men in Damascus, who may one day want to return. By joining forces with the government, these leaders have acquired a source of patronage which they can re-direct to their people, cementing themselves in power and bolstering their personal positions.

Again, this is utterly standard behavior for tribal leaders pretty much anywhere in the Arab world: you can trust a tribal leader 100% – to follow his tribe’s and his own interests. And that’s OK. Call me cynical, but I tend to trust self-interest, group identity and revenge as reliable motivations – more so than protestations of aspirational democracy, anyway. In Iraq these motivations have proven very robust, especially when reinforced by bonds forged in fighting a common enemy alongside our forces and the government. Provided they are under Iraqi government control (a non-trivial proviso), “neighborhood watch” groups motivated by community loyalty and enlightened self-interest are not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, since the uprising has so far resulted in a significant drop in violence and a substantial increase (on the order of 30,000 people) in the number of Iraqis actively lining up with the government and the coalition to defend communities against extremists, it may turn out be a very good thing indeed.

The Baghdad Variant

An interesting variation on the general theme has arisen in Baghdad city. Baghdad, of course, is not tribal as such. But urbanization in Iraq is a relatively recent phenomenon, occurring mainly over the past 20 years or so – for example, around half the people living in Baghdad today belong to families that came to the city since the 1980s. This means many urban Iraqis still have close kinship relationships with rural tribes, and still have relatives living in their ancestral villages with whom they keep in touch. In several districts, community leaders (often the Sunni imams of local mosques) have turned against AQI in their areas. In these districts, which include Ameriya, Ghazaliya, Abu Ghraib and others, communities have formed neighborhood watch organizations, established access controls to prevent people from outside the district coming in without proper authorization and driven out terrorist cells. They are now providing information to the Iraqi and Coalition security forces, protecting their own families and conducting joint patrols and operations alongside the Iraqi army and police, both by day and night. This has happened most often in Sunni-majority districts, and locals have partnered with Shi’a dominated security forces in most cases (somewhat giving the lie to assertions that Sunni populations won’t ever work with Shia-dominated security forces: they often will, but the conditions – primarily some kind of honest broker, a relationship of trust between key individuals, or formal safeguards – have to be right). Coalition forces have provided support to the community and to Iraqi forces operating in the area, and hence tend to play the role of honest broker.

In Baghdad the revolt is based on informal district power structures that evolved through the intense period of sectarian cleansing that so damaged the city and its people in 2006. Having said that, we often find leaders who are acting in a community capacity but also have family ties or other links to the tribes who have rebelled against AQI. In one district Sunni imams were constantly being targeted for intimidation and violence by AQ – there was a spate of mosque bombings in May and June, for example, targeting imams deemed too moderate by the takfiri terrorists. These imams, working with local elders, banded together to drive out AQ. But to do so, they brought in a military advisor from another district, known to one of them through his tribal connections, who was also connected to one of the main tribes currently fighting AQI outside Baghdad. So while the surface level of activity in Baghdad is not so obviously tribal, clan connections, kinship links and the alliances they foster still play a key underlying role.

For its part, the Government of Iraq has chosen to work closely with these groups as a means to secure key districts and build partnerships with communities. This took a great deal of political courage, since many of those now fighting AQI are former adversaries of the government, or even current political opponents of the Da’wa Party and the Maliki cabinet. Part of the government’s motivation was almost certainly a desire to take credit for security progress, and there is still a degree of suspicion among some Iraqi political leaders (for good reasons discussed below). But in practical terms, on the ground, the Government’s policies have resulted in fewer civilian casualties, a drop in numbers of attacks, a much less permissive operating environment for terrorists, and the freeing up of Iraqi army and police units who would otherwise have been tied down in static guard duties. So on balance, the results are positive so far in my view.

Prospects

Having said all that, it is clear that the tribal revolt could still go either way.

The strategic logic, from our point of view, is relatively straightforward. Our dilemma in Iraq is, and always has been, finding a way to create a sustainable security architecture that does not require the “coalition-in-the-loop”, thereby allowing Iraq to stabilize and the coalition to disengage in favorable strategic circumstances. But taking the coalition out of the loop and into “overwatch” requires balancing competing armed interest groups, at the national and local level. These are currently not in balance, due in part to the sectarian bias of certain players and institutions of the new Iraqi state, which promotes a belief by Sunnis that they will be permanent victims in the new Iraq. This belief creates space for terrorist groups including AQI, and these groups in turn drive a cycle of sectarian violence that keeps Iraq unstable and prevents us disengaging. (There are several other drivers of violence, of course, but this one of the most significant ones).

AQI’s “pitch” to the Sunni community is based on the argument that only al Qa’ida stands between the Sunnis and a Shi’a-led genocide. The presence of local Sunni security forces – which protect their own communities but do not attack the Shi’a – gives the lie to this claim, undercuts AQI’s appeal, and reassures Sunni leaders that they will not be permanently victimized in a future Iraq. It may thus make such leaders more willing to engage in the political process, functioning as an informal confidence-building measure, and it may help marginalize al Qa’ida. This might represent a step toward an intra-communal “balance of power” that could potentially be quite stable over time. On the Shi’a side, AQI represents a bogey-man that extremist groups like Jaysh al Mahdi (JAM, Muqtada al-Sadr’s group) exploit to gain public acquiescence: their pitch is “we are all that stands between you and AQI”. By reducing the AQI threat, the tribal uprising also therefore undercuts JAM’s appeal. And as mentioned, Shi’a tribes have recently begun to turn against JAM and other Shi’a extremists also, with the potential to further reduce the level of intra-communal violence and bring non-sectarian Shi’a into the political process, marginalizing extremists and Iranian agents.

All this means that correctly handled, with appropriate safeguards, and in partnership with the Iraqi government, the current social “wave” of Sunni communities turning against AQI could provide one element in the self-sustaining security architecture we have been seeking. And if the recent spread of the uprising into the Shi’a community continues, we might end up with a revolt of the center against both extremes, which would be a truly major development. On the positive side of the ledger, some benefits of the tribal uprising are that it:

• Relieves coalition and Iraqi forces of garrison and local security requirements, freeing up forces for maneuver against insurgents and terrorists, and thus redresses to a significant extent our lack of coalition force troop numbers in Iraq;

• May help create a self-regulating security architecture, making population groups “self-securing” and thus providing a stable platform for redeployment of coalition forces out of these districts with less risk that insurgents might re-infiltrate into them once we leave;

• Provides the Sunni population with a security guarantee that helps marginalize AQI, while deterring Shi’a extremist groups that may seek to attack Sunni districts; and

• Taps into traditional approaches based on social and political structures that many Iraqis are comfortable with – it goes with, rather than against the grain of Iraqi society.

But there are also clear risks. The process may create armed groups outside Government control, which might engage in human rights violations that could be blamed on the government or coalition forces (though, in fact, we have yet to see any significant human rights violation by tribal forces) – indeed, they typically apply a very measured approach, probably because the people they are securing are their own families, and their local knowledge allows them to get things done without having to apply force, as an outside force might need to. Nevertheless risks remain, including the fact that:

• Some government ministries oppose arming the Sunni population, sometimes on sectarian grounds but also through legitimate concerns about future government control over Sunni-majority areas, and some Iraqi Army commanders have expressed concern about the potential for regional warlordism;

• There is an outside chance that tribes which have “flipped” from supporting AQI could simply flip back – especially if they believe the government is not effectively supporting them or taking their interests into account; and

• Unless re-integration measures are formally established, some tribes may come to see their security forces as a permanent entitlement, which would make control over their areas more difficult for any future central government.

Having watched this thing develop at close hand over several months, I believe the risk mitigation measures that we and the Iraqi government are currently putting into place stand a better-than-even chance of preventing major negative side-effects from the uprising. The risks are still significant, but with appropriate mitigation they are probably manageable. Such mitigation measures include:

• Developing programs, up front, to disarm, demobilize and reintegrate tribal forces in Iraqi society (a so-called “DDR” plan);

• Ensuring the government does not provide weapons to any group until its loyalty is demonstrated and members have sworn allegiance to the new Iraq;

• Conducting biometric registration of tribal fighters, and registering their weapon serial numbers (to discourage side-switching, detect infiltrators and reassure the Iraqi government of its control);

• Linking tribal loyalty to local governance structures, and then directly to the central government, through traditional tribal control mechanisms such as deera (tribal boundaries; tribal forces could not work outside these without an agreement with the neighboring sheikh) and Sulh (traditional tribal reconciliation processes, leading to compacts within and between communities);

• Vetting and training tribal security forces as a pre-condition for their enrolment into paid, government-sponsored organizations like the Police and Army; and

• Providing advisers, liaison officers and support infrastructure (ideally from the Iraqi government with our help) to prevent human rights abuses and enforce appropriate operational standards.

Implications

The implications of the tribal revolt have been somewhat overlooked by the news media and in the public debate in Coalition capitals. In fact, the uprising represents very significant political progress toward reconciliation at the grass-roots level, and major security progress in marginalizing extremists and reducing civilian deaths. It also does much to redress the lack of coalition forces that has hampered previous counterinsurgency approaches, by throwing tens of thousands of local allies into the balance, on our side. For these reasons, the tribal revolt is arguably the most significant change in the Iraqi operating environment for several years. But because it occurred in ways that were neither expected nor accounted for in our “benchmarks” (which were formulated before the uprising began to really develop, and which tend to focus on national legislative developments at the central government and political party level rather than grass-roots changes in the quality of life of ordinary Iraqis) the significance of this development has been overlooked to some extent.

One obvious outcome of the uprising is the political band-wagoning effect we are currently seeing: tribal leaders see the benefits other tribes have gained from turning against terrorists, and want the same benefits themselves, so they too turn against extremists in their own areas. At the same time, the Government of Iraq sees benefits in terms of grass-roots political reconciliation and reduced violence, and is keen to take control of, and credit for, the process. Provincial governments also see the benefits of self-securing districts, freeing up police and military forces for other tasks. This has the potential to help coalesce Iraqi society around competent, non-sectarian institutions (albeit informal ones).

From my point of view, the strongest positive implications are the possibility that the revolt might help create a self-sustaining local security architecture, and what we might call the “re-blueing” effect on the police. One of our problems all along has been that some police officers have behaved in a sectarian manner, a few have engaged in outright sectarian atrocities, while sectarian extremists have intimidated or coopted others. Police bias and partiality is a standard problem in counter-insurgency: it occurred in campaigns as different as Palestine, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Malaya and Vietnam. But it typically takes a long time to remedy (almost ten years in the case of the Royal Ulster Constabulary). The tribal forces being created as a result of the uprising could accelerate police reform, by changing the police recruiting base from a heavily Shi’a orientation to a more balanced structure, as Sunni tribal recruits join the Iraqi police. “Weeding out” bad sectarian actors in police services is a slow and difficult process; changing the recruiting base, as the uprising has done, can help move the process along more quickly.

There are also economic benefits. Enlisting tribal fighters into police units creates employment beyond the 90-day CERP model of the past. It also reduces the manpower pool for the insurgency, and is thus a form of “soft DDR”. Increased security in rural areas boosts agricultural and market activity (by making fields safe enough to cultivate crops, and making roads and markets safe enough to transport goods). Salaries earned by newly-enrolled auxiliary policemen inject capital into the goods and services economy, while vocational and educational training under DDR programs diversifies the labor pool and builds the absorptive capacity of local economies. Assistance to families channeled through tribal Sheikhs helps re-start the traditional patronage system, and although this involves risks of smuggling or black marketeering these can be mitigated through proper oversight. And such programs provide a “safe” outlet for CERP funds without corroding Iraqi government budget execution processes, as has sometimes happened in the past.

Another key implication is for force ratios and coalition troop numbers. It has become a truism to argue that we have too few troops in Iraq for “proper” counterinsurgency. This claim is somewhat questionable, in fact – there is a base level of troops needed for effective counterinsurgency, but this is a threshold: once you reach the minimum level, what the troops do becomes the critical factor, more so than how many there are. And as Robert Thompson pointed out more than 40 years ago, force ratio in counterinsurgency is an indicator of progress, not a prerequisite for it. You know things are starting to go your way when local people start joining your side against the enemy, thus indicating a growth of popular support, and changing the force ratio as a result. Merely adding additional foreign troops doesn’t make up for lack of local popular support – the British lost the Cyprus campaign with a force ratio of 110 to 1 in their favor, while in the same decade the Indonesians defeated Dar'ul Islam with a force ratio that never exceeded 3 to 1, by building partnerships with communities and employing them as village neighborhood watch groups, in cordon tasks and support functions. So we could deploy many more U.S. troops to Iraq and it wouldn’t necessarily fix the problem. On the other hand, the fact that 30,000 former insurgents and tribal fighters are now on our side and fighting the enemy is worth a great deal, because it indicates that more Iraqis are lining up with the government and against extremism. It simultaneously increases our forces, improves our reach into the population, reduces the enemy’s recruiting pool and active forces, lessens the number of civilians who need to rely on protection from coalition troops (and hence cuts the demand for our security services), and erodes the enemy’s ability to intimidate and control the population. All these things have a positive effect on the overall correlation of forces in theater.

The negative implications are easy to state, but far-reaching. For one thing, we have spent the last four years carefully building up and supporting an Iraqi political system based on non-tribal institutions. Indeed, the Coalition Provisional Authority deliberately side-lined the tribes in 2003 in order to focus on building a “modern” democratic state in Iraq, which we equated with a non-tribal state. There were good reasons for this at the time, but we are now seeing the most significant political and security progress in years, via a structure outside the one we have been working so hard to create. Does that invalidate the last four years’ efforts? Probably not, as long as we recognize that the vision of a Jeffersonian, “modern” (in the Western industrial sense) democracy in Iraq, based around entirely secular non-tribal institutions, was always somewhat unrealistic. In the Iraqi polity, tribes’ rights may end up playing a similar role to states’ rights in some other democracies. They will remain a competing power center to the religious political parties, and hence will probably never be popular with Baghdad politicians, but if correctly handled they have the potential to actually enhance pluralism in Iraq over the long-term, by restraining the excesses of any central government or sectarian faction.

The other implication is that, to be perfectly honest, the pattern we are seeing runs somewhat counter to what we expected in the “surge”, and therefore lies well outside the “benchmarks”. The original concept was that we (the Coalition and the Iraqi government) would create security, which would in turn create space for a “grand bargain” at the national level. Instead, we are seeing the exact opposite: a series of local political deals has displaced extremists, resulting in a major improvement in security at the local level, and the national government is jumping on board with the program. Instead of coalition-led top-down reconciliation, this is Iraqi-led, bottom-up, based on civil society rather than national politics. And oddly enough, it seems to be working so far. This does not necessarily invalidate the “surge” strategy: we are indeed seeing improved security and political progress, but at the local not national level. This was not what we expected, and probably will cut little ice with domestic opponents of the strategy, but the improvement in daily lives of Iraqis and willingness to talk rather than fight is a substantial real-world improvement nonetheless.

Tentative Conclusions

As we all know, there is no such thing as a “standard” counterinsurgency. Indeed, the basic definition of counterinsurgency is “the full range of measures that a government and its partners take to defeat an insurgency”. In other words, the set of counterinsurgency measures adopted depends on the character of the insurgency: the nature of counterinsurgency is not fixed, but shifting; it evolves in response to changes in the form of insurgency. This means that there is no standard set of metrics, benchmarks or operational techniques that apply to all insurgencies, or remain valid for any single insurgency throughout its life-cycle. And there are no fixed “laws” of counterinsurgency, except for the sole simple but difficult requirement to first understand the environment, then diagnose the problem, in detail and in its own terms, then build a tailored set of situation-specific techniques to deal with it.

With that in mind, it is clear that although the requirements for counterinsurgency in a tribal environment may not be written down in the classical-era field manuals, building local allies and forging partnerships and trusted networks with at-risk communities seems to be one of the keys to success – perhaps this is what T.E. Lawrence had in mind when he wrote that the art of guerrilla warfare with Arab tribes rests on “building a ladder of tribes to the objective”. Many excellent recent posts and discussions here at the Small Wars Journal have explored these issues. Marine and Army units that have sought to understand tribal behavior in its own terms, to follow norms of proper behavior as expected by tribal communities, and to build their own confederations of local partners, have done extremely well in this fight. But we should remember that this uprising against extremism belongs to the Iraqi people, not to us – it was their idea, they started it, they are leading it, it is happening on their terms and on their timeline, and our job is to support where needed, ensure proper political safeguards and human rights standards are in place, but ultimately to realize that this will play out in ways that may be good or bad, but are fundamentally unpredictable. So far so good, though….

David Kilcullen has just completed a tour in Iraq as senior counterinsurgency adviser to the Multi-National Force. These are his personal opinions.

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DISPATCH NOVEMBER 2007 UNBOUND ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Quelling anarchy in Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere, will require building on tribal loyalties—not imposing democracy from the top down

BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN
It's the Tribes, Stupid!
For more than 230 years, Americans have assumed that because we have had a happy experience with democracy, so will the rest of the world. But the American military has had a radically contrary experience in Iraq. And Iraq may be but prologue for what our troops may encounter in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Iraq has had three elections that have led to chaos. Bringing society out of that chaos has meant a recourse not to laws or a constitution, but to blood ties. The Anbar Awakening has been a rebuff not only to the extremism of al-Qaeda, but to democracy itself. Restoring peace in Anbar has been accomplished by a lot of money changing hands, to the benefit of unelected but well-respected tribal sheikhs, paid off with cash and projects by our soldiers and marines. Progress in Iraq means erecting not a parliamentary system, but a balance of fear among tribes and sectarian groups.

Because Iraq was among the most backward parts of the Ottoman Empire, tribalism has always been strong there. The power of the tribes intensified during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when the state was weakened in part by economic pressures. Because the tribes in Anbar, along the desert smuggling route to Syria, were too strong to subdue, Saddam Hussein had no choice but to co-opt them and make them part of his power structure – exactly as our military has lately been doing.

It is such traditional loyalties existing below the level of the state that historically both Marxist and liberal intellectuals, in their efforts to remake societies after Soviet and Western democratic models, tragically underestimated. A realist like St. Augustine, in his City of God, understood that tribes, based on the narrow bonds of kinship and ethnicity rather than on any universalist longing, may not constitute the highest good; but by contributing to social cohesion, tribes nevertheless constitute a good in and of themselves. Quelling anarchy means starting with clans and tribes, and building upwards from those granular elements.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

"THE LAWLESS FRONTIER"
(September 2000)
The tribal lands of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border reveal the future of conflict in the Subcontinent, along with the dark side of globalization. By Robert D. Kaplan

The tribal nature of Pakistan is even more pronounced than in Iraq. Pakistan, divided among geographically based ethnic groups, is a nuclear Yugoslavia-in-the-making. Our troops are already in Afghanistan. So it is highly conceivable that we will have boots on the ground in Pakistan’s border area with Afghanistan. This is the true frontline in the war on terrorism, where presumably the leadership of al-Qaeda is ensconced. Our troops will find there a deathly volcanic landscape of crags and winding canyons and alkaline deserts 1,000 miles long and 100 miles wide. In this high desert, the tribes rule: Dravidian Raisanis, Turko-Iranian Baluchis, and Indo-Aryan Pushtuns. Neither the British nor any succeeding Pakistani government has managed to subdue them.

The tribes of Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Province don’t require Western institutions because they already have institutions of their own. What we call warlords are often, in reality, tribal elders who settle divorce cases, property disputes, and other civil conflicts for which we resort to the courts or government. If the American military deploys to these badlands in numbers large or small, it will follow the Anbar example of working with the tribes, greasing their palms for information on al-Qaeda, while accepting their social and political way of life.

There is nothing wrong or cynical about this. Where democratic governance does not exist, we must work with the material at hand. We have inherited our Anglo-Saxon traditions of liberty and democracy just as other peoples, with different historical experiences and geographical circumstances, have inherited theirs. And these other peoples yearn for justice and dignity, which does not always overlap with Western democracy. Throughout the Arab world, old monarchial and authoritarian orders are now weakening. Keeping societies stable will depend largely on tribes, and the deals they are able to cut with one another. In the Middle East, an age of pathetic, fledgling democracies is also an age of tribes.

When George W. Bush first ran for president in 2000, he spoke about the need for “humility” in foreign affairs. Now that our troops are practicing what he preached, after years of failure we’re finally seeing some tenuous results. In striving for a new, post-modern order in the Middle East, we have awakened a medieval one, from which we must now build something permanent.

The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711u/kaplan-democracy.

Beijing Embraces Classical Fascism
By Michael A. Ledeen
Posted: Tuesday, May 6, 2008

ARTICLES
Far Eastern Economic Review (May 2008)
Publication Date: May 1, 2008


Freedom Scholar
Michael A. Ledeen

In 2002, I speculated that China may be something we have never seen before: a mature fascist state. Recent events there, especially the mass rage in response to Western criticism, seem to confirm that theory. More significantly, over the intervening six years China's leaders have consolidated their hold on the organs of control--political, economic and cultural. Instead of gradually embracing pluralism as many expected, China's corporatist elite has become even more entrenched.

Even though they still call themselves communists, and the Communist Party rules the country, classical fascism should be the starting point for our efforts to understand the People's Republic. Imagine Italy 50 years after the fascist revolution. Mussolini would be dead and buried, the corporate state would be largely intact, the party would be firmly in control, and Italy would be governed by professional politicians, part of a corrupt elite, rather than the true believers who had marched on Rome. It would no longer be a system based on charisma, but would instead rest almost entirely on political repression, the leaders would be businesslike and cynical, not idealistic, and they would constantly invoke formulaic appeals to the grandeur of the "great Italian people," "endlessly summoned to emulate the greatness of its ancestors."

Substitute in the "great Chinese people" and it all sounds familiar. We are certainly not dealing with a Communist regime, either politically or economically, nor do Chinese leaders, even those who followed the radical reformer Deng Xiaoping, seem to be at all interested in treading the dangerous and uneven path from Stalinism to democracy. They know that Mikhail Gorbachev fell when he tried to control the economy while giving political freedom. They are attempting the opposite, keeping a firm grip on political power while permitting relatively free areas of economic enterprise. Their political methods are quite like those used by the European fascists 80 years ago.

The Chinese now enthusiastically, even compulsively, embrace the glories of China's long history.

Unlike traditional communist dictators--Mao, for example--who extirpated traditional culture and replaced it with a sterile Marxism-Leninism, the Chinese now enthusiastically, even compulsively, embrace the glories of China's long history. Their passionate reassertion of the greatness of past dynasties has both entranced and baffled Western observers, because it does not fit the model of an "evolving communist system."

Yet the fascist leaders of the 1920s and 1930s used exactly the same device. Mussolini rebuilt Rome to provide a dramatic visual reminder of ancient glories, and he used ancient history to justify the conquest of Libya and Ethiopia. Hitler's favorite architect built neoclassical buildings throughout the Third Reich, and his favorite operatic composer organized festivals to celebrate the country's mythic past.

Like their European predecessors, the Chinese claim a major role in the world because of their history and culture, not just on the basis of their current power, or scientific or cultural accomplishments. China even toys with some of the more bizarre notions of the earlier fascisms, such as the program to make the country self-sufficient in wheat production--the same quest for autarky that obsessed both Hitler and Mussolini.

To be sure, the world is much changed since the first half of the last century. It's much harder (and sometimes impossible) to go it alone. Passions for total independence from the outside world are tempered by the realities of today's global economy, and China's appetite for oil and other raw materials is properly legendary. But the Chinese, like the European fascists, are intensely xenophobic, and obviously worry that their people may turn against them if they learn too much about the rest of the world. They consequently work very hard to dominate the flow of information. Just ask Google, forced to cooperate with the censors in order to work in China.

Some scholars of contemporary China see the Beijing regime as very nervous, and perhaps even unstable, and they are encouraged in this belief when they see recent events such as the eruption of popular sentiment against the Tibetan monks' modest protests. That view is further reinforced by similar outcries against most any criticism of Chinese performance, from human rights to air pollution, and from preparations for the Olympic Games to the failure of Chinese quality control in food production and children's toys. The recent treatment of French retailer Carrefour at the hands of Chinese nationalists is a case in point. It has been publicly excoriated and shunned because France's President Nicolas Sarkozy dared to consider the possibility of boycotting the Olympics.

In all these cases, it is tempting to conclude that the regime is worried about its own survival, and, in order to rally nationalist passions, feels compelled to portray the country as a global victim. Perhaps they are right. The strongest evidence to support the theory of insecurity at the highest levels of Chinese society is the practice of the "princelings" (wealthy children of the ruling elites) to buy homes in places such as the United States, Canada and Australia. These are not luxury homes of the sort favored by wealthy businessman and officials from the oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Rather they are typically "normal" homes of the sort a potential émigré might want to have in reserve in case things went bad back home.

Moreover, there are reasons to believe that eruptions of nationalist passion do indeed worry the regime, and Chinese leaders have certainly tamped down such episodes in the past. In recent days, the regime has even reached out to the Dalai Lama himself in an apparent effort to calm the situation, after previously enouncing the "Dalai clique" as a dangerous form of separatism and even treason.

The violent denunciations of Westerners who criticize Chinese repression may not be a sign of internal anxiety or weakness. They may instead be a sign of strength, a demonstration of the regime's popularity.

On the other hand, the cult of victimhood was always part of fascist culture. Just like Germany and Italy in the interwar period, China feels betrayed and humiliated, and seeks to avenge her many historic wounds. This is not necessarily a true sign of anxiety; it's an integral part of the sort of hypernationalism that has always been at the heart of all fascist movements and regimes. We cannot look into the souls of the Chinese tyrants, but I doubt that China is an intensely unstable system, riven by the democratic impulses of capitalism on the one hand, and the repressive practices of the regime on the other. This is a mature fascism, not a frenzied mass movement, and the current regime is not composed of revolutionary fanatics. Today's Chinese leaders are the heirs of two very different revolutions, Mao's and Deng's. The first was a failed communist experiment; the second is a fascist transformation whose future is up for grabs.

If the fascist model is correct, we should not be at all surprised by the recent rhetoric or mass demonstrations. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy were every bit as sensitive to any sign of foreign criticism as the Chinese today, both because victimhood is always part of the definition of such states, and because it's an essential technique of mass control. The violent denunciations of Westerners who criticize Chinese repression may not be a sign of internal anxiety or weakness. They may instead be a sign of strength, a demonstration of the regime's popularity. Remember that European fascism did not fall as the result of internal crisis--it took a bloody world war to bring it down. Fascism was so alarmingly popular neither Italians not Germans produced more than token resistance until the war began to be lost. It may well be that the mass condemnation of Western calls for greater political tolerance is in fact a sign of political success.

Since classical fascism had such a brief life span, it is hard to know whether or not a stable, durable fascist state is possible. Economically, the corporate state, of which the current Chinese system is a textbook example, may prove more flexible and adaptable than the rigid central planning that doomed communism in the Soviet Empire and elsewhere (although the travails of Japan, which also tried to combine capitalist enterprise with government guidance, show the kinds of problems China will likely face). Our brief experience with fascism makes it difficult to evaluate the possibilities of political evolution, and the People's Republic is full of secrets. But prudent strategists would do well to assume that the regime will be around for a while longer--perhaps a lot longer.

If it is a popular, fascist regime, should the world prepare for some difficult and dangerous confrontations with the People's Republic? Twentieth-century fascist states were very aggressive; Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were both expansionist nations. Is it not likely that China will similarly seek to enlarge its domain?

I believe the answer is "yes, but." Many Chinese leaders might like to see their sway extend throughout the region, and beyond. China's military is not so subtly preparing the capability to defeat U.S. forces in Asia in order to prevent intervention in any conflict on its periphery. No serious student of China doubts the enormous ambitions of both the leadership and the masses. But, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, the Chinese tyrants do not urgently need quick geographical expansion to demonstrate the glory of their country and the truth of their vision. For the moment, at least, success at home and global recognition of Chinese accomplishments seem to be enough. Since Chinese fascism is less ideological than its European predecessors, Chinese leaders are far more flexible than Hitler and Mussolini.

Nonetheless, the short history of classical fascism suggests that it is only a matter of time before China will pursue confrontation with the West. That is built into the dna of all such regimes. Sooner or later, Chinese leaders will feel compelled to demonstrate the superiority of their system, and even the most impressive per capita GDP will not do. Superiority means others have to bend their knees, and cater to the wishes of the dominant nation. Just as Mussolini saw the colonization of Africa and the invasion of Greece and the Balkans as necessary steps in the establishment of a new fascist empire, so the Chinese are likely to demand tribute from their neighbors--above all, the Chinese on the island nation of Taiwan, in order to add the recovery of lost territory to the regime's list of accomplishments. Even today, at a time when the regime is seeking praise, not tribute, in the run-up to the Olympic Games, there are bellicose overtones to official rhetoric.

The short history of classical fascism suggests that it is only a matter of time before China will pursue confrontation with the West.

How, then, should the democracies deal with China? The first step is to disabuse ourselves of the notion that wealth is the surest guarantor of peace. The West traded with the Soviet Union, and gave them credits as well, but it did not prevent the Kremlin from expanding into the Horn of Africa, or sponsoring terrorist groups in Europe and the Middle East. A wealthy China will not automatically be less inclined to go to war over Taiwan, or, for that matter, to wage or threaten war with Japan.

Indeed, the opposite may be true--the richer and stronger China becomes, the more they build up their military might, the more likely such wars may be. It follows that the West must prepare for war with China, hoping thereby to deter it. A great Roman once said that if you want peace, prepare for war. This is sound advice with regard to a fascist Chinese state that wants to play a global role.

Meanwhile, we should do what we can to convince the people of China that their long-term interests are best served by greater political freedom, no matter how annoying and chaotic that may sometimes be. I think we can trust the Chinese leaders on this one. Any regime as palpably concerned about the free flow of information, knows well that ideas about freedom might be very popular. Let's test that hypothesis, by talking directly to "the billion." In today's world, we can surely find ways to reach them.

If we do not take such steps, our risk will surely increase, and explosions of rage, manipulated or spontaneous, will recur. Eventually they will take the form of real actions.

Michael A. Ledeen is the Freedom Scholar at AEI.