Cutting the Knot

Cutting the Knot

Daniel Trombly

Slouching Towards Colombia

The challenge for this strategy, in both tactical and policy terms, is answering the question of who the enemy is. Tactics are a question for another author, let alone another post, but it suffices to say that if you do not have an intelligence apparatus capable of functioning in a non-permissive environment in those moments where popular support has yet to be won – because the enemy’s coercion is a more credible threat to the people than your troops are to the enemy – then you are in for a long and ugly conflict.

In policy terms, though, much of the problem has been with defining the enemy in relation to the ends we seek. When our goal in Afghanistan was creating a democratic, relatively free, pro-US Afghanistan with a monopoly on force, our objectives inevitably gave us a very broad set of enemies – not just al Qaeda, but the reconstituted Taliban, a panoply of other warlords and militias who did not particularly like Kabul or the people running it, criminals feeling left out of the implicitly US-sanctioned going concern the Karzai family was involved in, an ISI seeking to avoid either a pro-Delhi or Pashtun-revanchist government on the other side of the Durand Line, the Haqqani Network and any number of other AQ or ISI fellow-travelers, and ordinary Afghans – some of whom are in the armed forces we’re training – who took issue with the US goals or methods of achieving them. Changing our objectives would certainly alter the emphasis we needed to place on the various recalcitrants in this laundry list.

If the goal was pure CT, we could just focus on killing al Qaeda and their close affiliates. If our goal was to simply have some kind of government and we did not particularly care how they treated their people, as long as they kept AQ out and the lid on Afghanistan on, we could take many other groups off this list. And so on. I won’t pretend to solve the Afghan war here, but to demonstrate that the friend/enemy distinction, and the violent relationship it describes, as a bridge between war and the political.

Joseph Fouche, my Fear Honor and Interest co-blogger, brilliantly described how this dynamic played out in his discussion of Ollivant’s debunking of the “New Orthodoxy” surrounding the Iraq surge (something Adam also comments on in the aforementioned post). The surge did not succeed simply because it protected the population – this is far too reductive. Instead, the surge ultimately capitalized on the Sunni failure to win the Iraqi civil war, at which point cooperation with the United States and the government in Baghdad seemed like a more attractive option. Although there is certainly truth in the argument that AQI overplayed its hand, Ollivant demonstrates the more comprehensive answer is that AQI were dead-enders perpetuating a conflict that was now posing an existential threat to the political viability of the Sunni in Iraq. Similarly, victory in the civil war allowed Maliki to begin a process of internal – and yes, quasi-authoritarian – consolidation that we still see in motion today.

As for the role of the US military, Ollivant points out that the so-called industrial scale killing machine of JSOC, with support from Brigade Combat Teams, also played an important role in targeting the dismantling the absolute enemies – AQI and the most direct pawns and partners of the Iranian Qods Force, while many of the effective forms of civilian protection employed, such as the concrete barriers Coalition forces began erecting everywhere, were not exactly heart-and-mind winners.* I do not think Ollivant does not use “political” in exactly the sense I do in this post, but this quote is nevertheless vital:

However, determining which portion of the insurgency can be acceptably integrated— again, keeping in mind the interests of both the host and intervening nation—is an inherently political decision.

I would go further and argue that, because this question is fundamentally tied up with the purpose of the host government and the intervening state’s objectives, the distinction between friend and enemy is the essence (dare we say, The Concept) of the Political. If your stated enemies cannot be killed without subverting your objectives, then you have likely defined your objectives wrongly or too broadly. In focusing your objectives more narrowly, you also gain clarity about who the main enemy is (and conversely, recognizing your enemy throws light onto your objectives). As Adam said earlier, the inability to identify the enemy towards which we must direct our force is a policy failure. Trying to go around this problem by papering over the gaping void in policy and strategy through aimless and unsustainable attempts to court the populace, engorge the local economy on aid, or creating a fractious coterie of political actors willing to accept becoming rentiers of the US commander as a temporary diversion from killing one another are not policy solutions, but, bereft of the political decision about objectives and the enemy, salves which make the costs of policy failure more bearable (though, as the Decent Interval showed us, perhaps salves which make the most psychologically painful political decision bearable – the one that says we have no enemies worth dying to defeat, and ends US involvement in the war entirely).