War From the Ground Up (15 page)

The 1980s Afghan conflict exhibited similar political dynamics. The two-way fight between the Mujahideen and the government was the most visible dynamic during the conflict. Yet the government side was continuously fractured between different interest groups, most obviously
the two factions of the Communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (Parcham and Khalq). Moreover, any assumption that there was an underlying two-way ideological polarity which defined friend and enemy would have to contend with what happened in the subsequent ‘Mujahideen' period of the early 1990s. The Mujahideen fought one another. Many changed sides and backed what was left of the Afghan government side; the original Taliban then fought the Mujahideen, most of whom merged into the new Taliban. A polarised conception of war cannot comprehend situations in which force is used directly in the interplay of normal, untidy, political intercourse.

The political loyalties of the Afghan people are complicated. The majority of civilians in Afghanistan do not want to be ruled by the radical elements among the Taliban; that is consistently clear in private conversation, even if Afghans will rarely say so publicly. The north of Afghanistan in particular generally has strong antipathy towards the Taliban. That does not, however, necessarily translate into support for the government of Afghanistan, against which many civilians have legitimate grievances. Often the problem for coalition efforts is that locals often want ISAF, whom they essentially trust, and whose presence they want, but are more wary of parts of the Afghan security forces. Yet the same people that plead for coalition troops not to leave will enthusiastically rehearse the somewhat enervating rumours of secret foreign plots to occupy Afghanistan, which are ubiquitous. One of the most common rumours is that America and Britain are secretly backing the Taliban to facilitate a Pakistani takeover. The fact that such a ludicrous proposition is genuinely so widespread is an indication of how vulnerable people are to superstitious nonsense after thirty years of violence.

At the local level the most important motivation for the inhabitants is self-preservation. The people have been in war, more or less, since 1979; if they were not good at survival they would probably already be dead. In light of self-preservation, the relative benefits of life under either side proposed by the competing narratives are peripheral: people become actors in their own right. For locals to have family associations to both the Taliban and the Afghan government, sometimes with a son in both, is not uncommon, and is logical from their point of view. As one Afghan village elder once put it to Major Shaun Chandler, in a quintessentially memorable expression: ‘everyone holds two watermelons in one hand'.

Finally, conflict evolves. The conflict in Afghanistan I have described here is only its present state. There are several variables which can significantly change the dynamics. If the Pakistani state, for example, should amplify its support for the insurgency after coalition forces have left, the conflict might move closer to being a more genuine war. Pakistani state support was a key factor in the original Taliban's success at taking power in 1994–6. Whether this scenario will be repeated is perhaps a ‘known unknown'.

Strategic thought tends to reject the idea that ‘gang warfare' is really war. Gangs and criminals use force for direct advantage rather than within a mechanism that provides a military decision on which a political outcome is based. This is political advantage in the broad sense of an adjustment of circumstances in one's favour, as opposed to just describing competition for state offices. Yet this is close to the way in which force is used by many actors in the war in Afghanistan, although it does not make the use of violence any less lethal.

In the Clausewitzian paradigm of war, the enemy is coerced into subscription to one's strategic narrative: he dies, or becomes no longer relevant. This makes the translation of force into political meaning relatively simple. Even if the enemy utilises a different interpretive structure, one can ultimately force an outcome upon him. While armed conflict continues to be at its core a clash of organised violence, the Clausewitzian notion that attack is the ‘positive' and defence the ‘negative' component of translating force into political meaning, a war's ‘decision', is compromised in Afghanistan. Ultimately the more fragmented a political environment, the more actions are interpreted individually in directly political terms rather than as part of the military balance in the scale of a conflict's military outcome. The proliferation of strategic audiences beyond the enemy means that force no longer has a clear target: one cannot ‘force' an outcome on a strategic audience that is not the enemy; they may well be free to ignore the war's military outcome.

Clausewitz saw three elements at play in war: policy, passion and war's uncertain dynamics, ‘the play of chance and probability'. He referred to this as the ‘trinity' of war, in that these three elements formed the ‘one', which was war. These three elements of war were for Clausewitz represented
in his conception of the state at war. Reason (or policy) was represented by the government (bearing in mind that Clausewitz's Prussia was a monarchy) and passion by the people. The army did not strictly represent war's dynamics, but was the component of the state that had to confront the uncertainty inherent in combat.
²²

The nature of war was for Clausewitz constant, even though its character evolved. By situating war's nature in terms of the interaction of three variables, his definition remains flexible. While the Afghan conflict is not war in an inter-state sense, its basic nature can still be comprehended in terms of an interaction of these three elements. However, unlike in conventional inter-state war (in which policy tends to be the dominant characteristic), as there are a multitude of political actors, the role of human passion, and the unpredictable, potentially explosive, dynamics of violent clash, increasingly infrom the conflict's basic definition.

The consequence of the use of violence in war is often that fighting generates an antagonism of its own that distances people from their political common ground. Clausewitz acknowledged this: ‘even where there is no national hatred and no animosity to start with, the fighting itself will stir up hostile feelings'.
²³
Clausewitz understood violence to be an explosive, reciprocal force. The idea that ‘violence begets violence' has always been part of human conflict; as Tacitus put it: ‘once killing starts, it is difficult to draw the line'.
²⁴
However, while the Clausewitzian paradigm recognises that violence may accentuate, or entirely generate, emotional antagonism, that antagonism is delimited by the strategic audiences' location within two polarised constituencies, typically the state parties to a conflict.

Where force is used within a fragmented political environment, it creates new enemies, who are not necessarily linked to any state. The essential feature of such an environment is that violence is not bound within the bilateral, polarised conception of two states at war; it has unpredictable, and often tragic, political outputs. The sectarian violence following the break-up of Yugoslavia, and in Iraq, occurred between communities who had previously co-existed, but were torn apart by the reciprocal hatred which violence causes.

This dynamic would appear to run in parallel with what Stathis N. Kalyvas has so persuasively argued in
The Logic of Violence in Civil War
(2006).
²⁵
He posits that the mainstream narratives of most civil
wars tend to locate violence in terms of macro-level emotions, ideologies or cultures. However, the empirical evidence points to a far more complex and fragmented analysis. What can be incorrectly labelled as ‘madness' (i.e. complex, fragmented and irregular patterns of violence) actually has logic, but this is often to be found at the micro, not the macro level: ‘because of the domination of national-level cleavages, grassroots dynamics are often perceived merely as their local manifestations. Likewise, local actors are only seen as local replicas of central actors'.
²⁶
Violence at the local level is often produced by actors trying to avoid the worst and taking opportunities:

For many people who are not naturally bloodthirsty and abhor direct involvement in violence, civil war offers irresistible opportunities to harm everyday enemies… Rather than just politicizing private life, civil war works the other way around as well: it privatises politics. Civil War often transforms local and personal grievances into lethal violence; once it occurs, this violence becomes endowed with a political meaning that may be quickly naturalised into new and enduring identities. Typically, the trivial origins of these new identities are lost in the fog of memory or reconstructed according to the new politics fostered by the war.
²⁷

Kalyvas argues that agency in the violence of civil wars is partly a function of ‘alliance' between the centre and the periphery in that both use the other to their advantage. This allows for multiple, not unitary actors. He recognises that ‘master-narratives' can legitimately identify the ‘master-cleavage' in a civil war, but it is usually accorded too much significance post-conflict in the desire to ‘simplify, streamline, and ultimately erase the war's complexities, contradiction and ambiguities'. Hence:

Actions in civil war, including ‘political violence', are not necessarily political, and do not always reflect deep ideological polarisation … an approach positing unitary actors, inferring the dynamics of identity and action exclusively from the master-cleavage, and framing civil wars in binary terms is misleading… Civil war fosters a process of interaction between actors with distinct identities and interests. It is the convergence between local motives and supralocal that endows civil war with its intimate character and leads to joint violence that straddles the divide between the political and the private, the collective and the individual.
²⁸

When the interpretive framework of Clausewitzian war is dragged into a situation which is closer to being a direct extension of policy through ‘armed politics', be it in civil war as analysed by Kalyvas, or in
the current politically kaleidoscopic Afghan conflict, serious strategic confusion can occur. The key difference being that the interpretive framework of war in the Clausewitzian tradition presupposes a bilateral polarity which channels violence and a stability of association between strategic audiences and their state. Thus violence may well escalate hostilities, but it exaggerates them rather than creating new ones.

The use of political violence for a prolonged period of time outside of the interpretive framework of ‘war' is not a new phenomenon. The British attempt to keep in check the Pathan (now known as Pashtun) tribes on India's North-West Frontier with Afghanistan saw virtually not a single year pass between 1849 and 1947 without one or more military campaigns in the region (there were 60 campaigns pre-1900 alone). David Loyn in
Butcher and Bolt
(2008) has described this as ‘an intensity of conflict unique in the world'.
²⁹
The 1897 General Uprising against the British led to the deployment of an army 44,000 strong in the Tirah Campaign of 1897–98; this was the largest force ever deployed by the British in Asia to that point, and even then, it was outnumbered by the tribesmen.
³⁰
Each campaign was intended to reach some kind of political settlement with the various tribes; force was used with an admixture of money and threats to maintain a delicate political balance for almost a century.