Notes
Introduction
1. This account draws on my field notes for September 10, 2009, written the morning after the ambush from personal observation during the firefight, discussions with patrol members and a film crew at the landing zone approximately forty-five minutes after the ambush, and a conversation with civilian and military members of the patrol the following night at the United States Embassy compound, in Kabul.
2. Mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs) were introduced into Iraq and Afghanistan beginning in 2006, in response to the escalating threat of roadside bombs. There are several variants; our patrol had four Category 2 MRAPs, each with a crew of two plus eight fully equipped infantry in the troop-carrying compartment, and three Category 1 vehicles, with smaller capacity but marginally less atrocious maneuverability.
3. Rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) are Soviet-designed shoulder-launched rockets intended to destroy buildings and lightly armored vehicles. The weapon is recoilless, directing its blast backward through a rear-facing venturi. Unless carefully sited with a clear area behind the firer, this back-blast can kick up a large cloud of dust, giving away the weapon’s position. These disadvantages are more than compensated for, however, by the RPG’s low weight, low cost, and rapid rate of fire. Along with the Kalashnikov assault rifle, the RPG is one of the most common weapons used worldwide by guerrillas and those who fight them.
4. Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1898), 199–200.
5. This characteristic was something the Taliban shared with the mujahideen of the Soviet-Afghan War, who, as Ali Jalali and Les Grau showed, had a strong tendency to set patterns and repeat the same maneuvers in the same places over and over again. See Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester A. Grau, The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Foreign Military Studies Office, 1998). For a detailed explanation of pattern setting in the Afghan approach to conflict, see also Rob Johnson, The Afghan Way of War: Culture and Pragmatism, a Critical History (London: Hurst, 2011).
6. The delgai, or small group, is the basic operational unit of main-force (i.e., regular, full-time) Taliban in eastern and southern Afghanistan. It comprises eight to twenty guerrillas under a commander, and may—for reconnaissance, or in an urban environment—be further broken down into cell groups (otaq). Several delgai may loosely cooperate under a regional commander for a specific operation such as a large-scale ambush or major ground assault.
7. The battle of Wanat, which occurred in July 2008, has been extensively discussed in print and in the electronic and online media, and is likely to be seen as one of the defining battles of the Afghan war, at least in the eastern part of the country. The most comprehensive accounts of the battle are Douglas R. Cubbison’s untitled working paper on the battle, completed in 2009, and Combat Studies Institute, Wanat: Combat Action in Afghanistan 2008 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Army Command and General Staff College Press, 2010).
8. See Alissa Rubin and Sharifullah Sahak, “Taliban Attack Afghan Guards in Deadly Raid,” New York Times, August 20, 2010.
9. Ibid.
10. Combat Studies Institute, Wanat, 49.
11. Ibid., 4–5.
12. Author’s discussion with German officers, Kabul, March 2008. This story was confirmed by General Kasdorf, head of the German Army and former Bundeswehr commander in Afghanistan, in discussion with the author in Washington, DC, October 2011.
13. Author’s interview with Aegis RLT, Baghdad, June 30, 2007.
14. Analysts including Hilton Root, Paul Collier, Anke Hoefflery, and others have described this phenomenon for African development and in the historical patterns of civil war, while Andrew Wilder, Sarah Chayes, Clare Lockhart, Anand Gopal, and Carl Forsberg have noted its prevalence in Afghanistan. See Hilton Root, Alliance Curse: How America Lost the Third World (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008); Paul Collier and Anke Hoefflery, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4 (August 2004): 563–95; Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (New York: Penguin, 2007); Clare Lockhart, “Learning from Experience,” Slate, November 2008; Anand Gopal, Battle for Afghanistan: Militancy and Conflict in Kandahar (Washington, DC: New America Foundation, 2010); and Carl Forsberg, Power and Politics in Kandahar (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of War, 2010).
15. U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps, FM 3–24/MCWP 3–33.5, Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC: Headquarters Department of the Army, 2006), paragraph I-2, page 1–1.
16. See David J. Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency Redux,” Survival 48, no. 4 (December 2006), and “Countering Global Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (August 2005).
17. I draw this formulation from Jeffrey Gettleman, “Africa’s Forever Wars: Why the Continent’s Conflicts Never End,” Foreign Policy, March/April 2010.
Chapter 1
1. For a cogent set of criticisms, see Stephen Graham, “Olympics Security 2012: Welcome to Lockdown London,” Guardian, March 12, 2012.
2. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. C. E. Wilbour (New York: Carleton, 1862), 134.
3. Some parts of this chapter and the next appeared in David Kilcullen, “The City as a System: Future Conflict and Urban Resilience,” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 36, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 19–39.
4. For a comprehensive survey of the role of war in contemporary geopolitics—and a strong argument that interstate war is becoming increasingly rare—see Christopher J. Fettweis, Dangerous Times? The International Politics of Great Power Peace (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010).
5. Since the mid-nineteenth century the United States has engaged in only six conventional wars. But over the same period, interventions involving irregular warfare, stability operations, or counterinsurgency have included the Mexican War of 1846–48, the Indian Wars against Native American peoples throughout the second half of the nineteenth century; the Philippine Insurrection of 1899–1902; the 1916–17 punitive expedition into Mexico; the intervention in Russia in 1918–20; the banana wars in the Caribbean (including interventions in Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic) during the 1920s and 1930s; the post–World War II occupation and reconstruction of Japan and Germany; several wars in Indochina, including Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam; engagements in Thailand, Lebanon, Panama, Pakistan, Grenada, Somalia, Liberia, El Salvador, and Colombia; peace operations in the Balkans; and of course the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Long though it is, this list is only a small selection of dozens of such engagements over the past 150 years.
6. For a detailed study of these operations, see the excellent account in Brian McAllister Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
7. See Roy E. Appleman, South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 1992), 722–24.
8. More broadly, a Defense Science Board summer study in 2004 found a long-standing five-to-seven-year cycle of repeated interventions in small and medium-scale stabilization operations since the end of the Cold War, imposing an increasing burden on the U.S. military. See Defense Science Board, 2004 Summer Study on Transition to and from Hostilities, online at www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA430116.pdf, 14.
9. I am of course aware that there are many competing definitions of irregular warfare. In this book, I use the term simply to mean any conflict where one or more of the actual or potential protagonists is a nonstate armed group.
10. United States Department of Defense, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, January 2012), 3 (emphasis in the original).
11. See Nick Turse, “The New Obama Doctrine,” Nation, June 14, 2012, and Leon Wieseltier, “Welcome to the Era of the Light Footprint: Obama Finally Finds His Doctrine,” New Republic, January 29, 2013.
12. A total of forty-nine coalition members participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom under the command of Multi-National Force—Iraq between 2003 and 2010; of these, however, a much smaller number (between three and five, depending on the year of the conflict) provided actual combat troops at battalion scale or larger, and at the height of the fighting (in October 2007) the U.S. troop presence of 171,000 accounted for 94 percent of the total coalition troop presence of 182,668. See US-Iraq War: Coalition Forces in Iraq, Procon.org, available online at http://usiraq.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000677. By contrast, fifty coalition members participated in Afghanistan under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force between 2001 and 2012, and of these, between eight and ten (again, depending on the year concerned) provided battalion- or larger-sized combat units, all of which operated outside the capital city. See ISAF, Troop Numbers and Contributions, online at www.isaf.nato.int/troop-numbers-and-contributions/index.php.
13. See Iraq Body Count, “Civilian Deaths from Violence in 2007,” figures in final table, online at www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2007.
14. David Kilcullen, “Don’t Confuse the ‘Surge’ with the Strategy,” Small Wars Journal, January 19, 2007.
15. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007).
16. Harry Holbert Turney-High, The Military: The Theory of Land Warfare as Behavioral Science (North Q uincy, MA: Christopher, 1981), 34, quoted in Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 47–48. Likewise, the historian Philip Bobbitt considers warfare to be one of the three key influencers (along with law and commerce) upon the formation and shape of the state throughout history. And Lawrence Keeley argues convincingly, in War Before Civilization, that “a society’s demography, economy, and social system provide the means for, and impose limits on, military technique.” See Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (New York: Knopf, 2002).
17. Keeley’s groundbreaking 1997 study integrates research from several different statistical sources to suggest that somewhere between 90 and 95 percent of all known societies throughout history have regularly engaged in organized warfare. See Keeley, War Before Civilization, Chapters 2 and 3.
18. Even piracy, an apparent exception to this general pattern, turns out on closer observation to be a phenomenon that clusters in and around coastal towns and on the sea routes between such towns.
19. See Micheal Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1618–1991 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992); see also Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Viking, 2000). Mazower estimates total battle deaths in the range of 48 million for both world wars; some estimates range as high as 76 million.
20. This estimate represents the median prediction of the United Nations population progression model, as reported in United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, online at http://esa.un.org/wpp/Documentation/publications.htm.
21. See Q iu Aijun, How to Understand the Urbanisation Rate in China?, Cities Development Institute for Asia, online at www.cdia.asia/wp-content/uploads/How-to-understand-the-urbanisation-rate-in-China.pdf.
22. See “Concrete Jungles: A Mainly Rural Country Is Ill-Prepared for Its Coming Urban Boom,” Economist, September 29, 2012.
23. Q uoted in Casey Kazan, “Sprawl! Is Earth Becoming a Planet of SuperCities?” The Daily Galaxy, June 24, 2009.
24. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision, 1, online at http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Documents/WUP2009_Highlights_Final.pdf (emphasis added).
25. Ibid.
26. For a discussion of these factors as they apply to rapid urbanization and slum growth in one African city, see Emmanuel Mutisya and Masaru Yarime, “Understanding the Grassroots Dynamics of Slums in Nairobi: The Dilemma of Kibera Informal Settlements,” International Transaction Journal of Engineering, Management, and Applied Sciences and Technologies 2, no. 2 (March 2011): 197–213.
27. See United Nations Environment Program, Cities and Coastal Areas, online at www.unep.org/urban_environment/issues/coastal_zones.asp.
28. See Ethan Decker, Scott Elliott, Felisa Smith, Donald Blake, and Sherwood Rowland, “Energy and Material Flow Through the Urban Ecosystem,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 25 (2000): 690–91. Decker and colleague list the top twenty-five megacities as Karachi, Cairo, Teheran, Tianjin, Beijing, Seoul, Moscow, New York, Delhi, London, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Osaka, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Mexico City, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Jakarta, Dhaka, Manila, Bangkok, Calcutta, and Mumbai. Of these, only Delhi, Moscow, Teheran, and Beijing are inland cities—all the others lie within 100 miles of a coastline or on a major coastal river delta.
29. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook 2012, field listing for “Urbanization,” online at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2212.html. This entry lists the ten largest cities on the planet as Tokyo, 36.7 million; Delhi, 22.1 million; São Paulo, 20.3 million; Mumbai, 20 million; Mexico City, 19.5 million; New York–Newark, 19.4 million; Shanghai, 16.6 million; Kolkata, 15.6 million; Dhaka, 14.6 million; and Karachi, 13.2 million. Of these, only Delhi and Mexico City are not littoral cities.
30. This definition is similar in some respects to that used by the United States and British Commonwealth navies. It is adapted from the definition applied by the Australian Army’s Directorate of Future Land Warfare, where the author worked in 2003–5, in developing Australia’s future operational concepts for Manoeuvre Operations in the Littoral Environment and Complex Warfighting. For the equivalent U.S. Navy definition, see U.S. Department of the Navy, Naval Warfare, Naval Doctrine Publication 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Navy, 1994).
31. United States Marine Corps, Task Force 58, “Execution 25 November to 25 December” (after-action review), Strategy Page, online at www.strategypage.com/articles/tf58/execution.asp.
32. French Republic, Parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technical Assessment, The Pollution in Mediterranean: Current State and Looking Ahead to 2030, summary of the report by M. Roland Courteau, online at www.senat.fr/fileadmin/Fichiers/Images/opecst/quatre_pages_anglais/4p_mediterranee_anglais.pdf.
33. Olivier Kramsch, “Towards a Mediterranean Scale of Governance: Twenty-First Century Urban Networks Across the ‘Inner Sea,’” in Barbara Hooper and Olivier Kramsch, eds., Cross-Border Governance in the European Union (London: Routledge, 2007), 200.
34. Iginio Gagliardone and Nicole Stremlau, Digital Media, Conflict and Diasporas in the Horn of Africa (London: Mapping Digital Media Program of the Open Society Foundations), December 2011, 9–10.
35. World Bank, Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011, quoted in Gagliardone and Stremlau, Digital Media, 12.
36. Rasna Warah, Mohamud Dirios, and Ismail Osman, Mogadishu Then and Now: A Pictorial Tribute to Africa’s Most Wounded City (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2012), 3.
37. In fact, it’s worth speculating that there may be a critical mass for the size of a diaspora relative to the home population, a kind of quantum effect threshold, above which flows of money, information, and people suddenly jump to a much greater level and home populations and diaspora populations begin to move in a synchronized manner despite the geographical distance between them. Several researchers have examined this issue in passing, but it’s unclear how big a diaspora is needed to generate a critical mass of connectivity. Still, what is very clear is that there is a link between conflict at home and diaspora size, and that some populations—including Somalis, Tamils, Tunisians, Libyans, and perhaps Jamaicans, Haitians, and Filipinos—have reached this tipping point. See Dilip Ratha and Sonia Plaza, Harnessing Diasporas, International Monetary Fund, September 2009, online at www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2011/09/pdf/ratha.pdf. See also Yevgeny Kuznetsov, ed., Diaspora Networks and the International Migration of Skills (Washington, DC: World Bank Institute, 2006), and Rodel Rodis, “The Tipping Point of the Filipino Diaspora,” Global Nation Inquirer, September 23, 2011, online at http://globalnation.inquirer.net/13403/the-tipping-point-of-the-filipino-diaspora.
38. See Nicholas Van Hear, Frank Pieke, and Steven Vertovec, The Contribution of UK-Based Diasporas to Development and Poverty Reduction, ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford, April 2004, online at www.compas.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/files/People/staff_publications/VanHear/NVH1_DFID%20diaspora%20report.pdf. See also “Sri Lankan President Calls Influential Tamil Diaspora to Invest in Post-War Progress,” People’s Daily, November 30, 2011.
39. See “UN Bans Trade in Charcoal from Somalia,” East African, February 25, 2012, online at www.hiiraan.com/news4/2012/feb/22927/un_bans_trade_in_charcoal_from_somalia.aspx.
40. Sean Everton, Disrupting Dark Networks: Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences (London: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
41. See Gordon H. Hanson, “Regional Adjustment to Trade Liberalization,” Regional Science and Urban Economics 28 (1998): 419–44, quoted in Zhao Chen, Ming Lu, and Zheng Xu, “Agglomeration Shadow: A Non-Linear Core-Periphery Model of Urban Growth in China (1990–2006),” paper presented at Global Development Network 13th Annual Conference, June 16–18, 2012, online at http://cloud2.gdnet.org/~research_papers/Agglomeration%20shadow:%20A%20non-linear%20core–periphery%20model%20of%20urban%20growth%20in%20China%20(1990–2006).
42. Josh Eells, “Chaosopolis: A Wild Week in Lagos,” Men’s Journal, May 2012, online at www.mensjournal.com/article/print-view/chaosopolis-20120504.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. See Asian Development Bank, Climate-Induced Migration in Asia and the Pacific, September 2011, online at http://beta.adb.org/features/climate-induced-migration-asia-and-pacific.
46. Ibid.
47. See Independent Evaluation Group, Facts and Figures on Natural Disasters (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006), online at www.worldbank.org/ieg/naturaldisasters/docs/natural_disasters_fact_sheet.pdf; see also PPRD South, Tackling Floods, the Most Common Natural Disaster in the Mediterranean, February 9, 2011, online at www.euromedcp.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=706%3Atackling-floods-the-most-frequent-natural-disaster-in-the-mediterranean&catid=199%3Ageneral-news&Itemid=881&lang=en, and Patrick Cronin and Nora Bensahel, America’s Civilian Operations Abroad: Assessing Past and Future Requirements (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, 2012), online at www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_AmericasCivilianOperationsAbroad_BensahelCronin_0.pdf.
48. See T. B. C. Alavo, A. Z. Abagli, M. Accodji, and R. Djouaka, “Unplanned Urbanization Promotes the Proliferation of Disease Vector Mosquitoes,” Open Entomology Journal 4 (2010): 1–7.
49. See Colleen Lau, “Urbanisation, Climate Change, and Leptospirosis: Environmental Drivers of Infectious Disease Emergence,” conference paper presented at Universitas 21 International Graduate Research Conference: Sustainable Cities for the Future, Melbourne and Brisbane, November 29–December 5, 2009.
50. David M. Bell et al., “Pandemic Influenza as 21st Century Urban Public Health Crisis,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 15, no. 12 (December 2009): 1963–9.
51. See N. Sarita Shah et al., “Worldwide Emergence of Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 13, no. 3 (March 2007): 380–87. See also Joshua M. Epstein et al., “Controlling Pandemic Flu: The Value of International Air Travel Restrictions,” PLOS One 2, no. 5 (2007): 401.
52. Decker et al., “Energy and Material Flow Through the Urban Ecosystem,” 710.
53. See Muhammad Hayat, “Fishing Capacity and Fisheries in Pakistan,” in S. Pascoe and D. Greboval, eds., Measuring Capacity in Fisheries, Food and Agriculture Organization , Fisheries Technical Paper no. 445, 2003, online at ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/006/y4849e/y4849e00.pdf.
54. Stephen Graham, “Urban Metabolism as Target: Contemporary War as Forced Demodernization,” in Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swingedouw, eds., In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (London: Routledge, 2006), 236.
55. See Dominic Wabala, “65 Criminal Gang Members Arrested in Nairobi Major Swoop,” Nairobi Star, March 23, 2012, online at http://allafrica.com/stories/201203231381.html; Kenfrey Kiberenge, “Saccos Bring Sanity to Public Transport,” Kenya Standard, May 5, 2012, online at www.standardmedia.co.ke/index.php/business/mag/radio-maisha/?articleID=2000057647&;pageNo=1; County Team, “Fears of Mungiki-Like Gangs Disrupt Transport Sector,” Kenya Standard, September 6, 2012, online at www.standardmedia.co.ke/index.php?articleID=2000065490&;story_title=Fears-of-Mungiki-like-gangs-disrupt-transport-sector.
56. Mutisya and Yarime, “Understanding the Grassroots Dynamics of Slums,” 197–99.
57. Christopher Eastwood, “Identifying Sustainable Water Supplies: A Preliminary Assessment of Sustainable Water from an Urban Metabolism Perspective,” master’s thesis, Q ueensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 2007, 5.
58. Yan Han, Shi-guo Xu, and Xiang-zhou Xu, “Modeling Multisource Multiuser Water Resources Allocation,” Water Resource Management 22 (2008): 911–12.
59. Decker et al., “Energy and Material Flow Through the Urban Ecosystem,” 697–700.
60. Sheela Patel, founding director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, Mumbai, interviewed by Gary Hustwit in the documentary film Urbanized, Plexifilm, New York, 2012.
61. Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt, “Conclusions: Governing Exclusion and Violence in Megacities,” in Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt, eds., Mega-Cities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South (London: Zed Books, 2009), 174–75.
62. Jamaican garrison communities such as Tivoli Gardens are discussed later in this book. See also “Witness Provides Compelling Account of Jamaican ‘Garrisons,’” Caribbean News Now, online at www.caribbeannewsnow.com/news/newspublish/home.print.php?news_id=11049.
63. Widespread rioting and civil unrest in outlying and periurban areas struck Paris (and several other French cities) in 2005 and again in 2007 and 2010, while large-scale rioting and looting occurred in parts of London in 2011.
64. See (among many other works) Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2007); Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2011); Diane E. Davis, Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Politics in Urban Spaces (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); and Saskia Sassen, Global Networks, Linked Cities (London: Routledge, 2002).
65. The Australian Army published its operational concepts Manoeuvre Operations in the Littoral Environment and Complex Warfighting in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and the Royal Marines developed the Commando 21 concept in 2003. Like these military concept papers, the U.S. Marine Corps Vision and Strategy 2025 and the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Operating Environment 2010 discuss the implications of urbanized littoral areas on modern warfare. See Department of Defence (Australia), Future Warfighting Concept (Canberra: Headquarters Australian Defence Force 2002), online at www.defence.gov.au/publications/fwc.pdf; Australian Army, Complex Warfighting (Canberra: Australian Army Headquarters 2005), online at www.quantico.usmc.mil/download.aspx?Path=./Uploads/Files/SVG_complex_warfighting.pdf; United States Department of Defense, Joint Operating Environment 2010, online at www.fas.org/man/eprint/joe2010.pdf; and United States Marine Corps, Marine Corps Vision and Strategy 2025 (Q uantico, VA: Headquarters USMC, 2009), online at www.onr.navy.mil/~/media/Files/About%20ONR/usmc_vision_strategy_2025_0809.ashx.
66. For a useful review of the literature on this approach, see Elizabeth Rapoport, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Metabolism: A Review of the Literature,” University College London Environmental Institute Working Paper, October 27, 2011, online at www.ucl.ac.uk/environment-institute/forthcoming-events/urbanlitreview.
67. Joel Tarr, “The Metabolism of the Industrial City: The Case of Pittsburgh,” Journal of Urban History 28, no. 5 (July 2002): 511.
68. We should note that this is a contested approach that includes a range of perspectives. Some view biological systems as useful metaphors for the physical and sociopolitical dynamics of urban space, while others view the interdependent subsystems that overlap within this space as organic elements of a material flow system that is truly (not just metaphorically) biological.
69. Tarr, “Metabolism of the Industrial City.”
70. See John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundation for Environmental Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (September 1999): 366–405.
71. Ibid.; Abel Wolman, “The Metabolism of Cities,” Scientific American 213 (July-December 1965): 179–93.
72. Rapoport, “Urban Metabolism,” 5.
73. I am grateful to officials of the Colombian government for insights into the concept of “territorial logic,” which I extend in this context to the notion of “systems logic.” Author’s discussions with Colombian National Police and the Presidency of the Republic of Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia, December 2011.
74. David J. Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” in Small Wars Journal, November 22, 2004, 22–23.
75. See “Honduran City Is World Murder Capital; Juarez Drops for Second Year in a Row,” Fox News Latino, February 6, 2013.
76. James Bargent, “Latin America Dominates World’s Most Dangerous Cities List,” Insight Crime, February 8, 2013, online at www.insightcrime.org/newsbriefs/latin-america-dominates-worlds-most-dangerous-cities-list.
77. See Mark Kukis, “Is Baghdad Now Safer than New Orleans?” Time, May 1, 2009; Citizens Report, “All London Murders, 2006–2013,” online at www.citizensreportuk.org/reports/london-murders.html.
78. This section draws on original research produced by a Caerus Associates field team led by Stacia George and Dr. Christopher Johnson, which conducted fieldwork in 2012–13 in San Pedro Sula. See Caerus Associates, “The City as a System: Understanding Illicit and Licit Networks in San Pedro Sula, Honduras,” Washington, DC, February 6, 2013.
Chapter 2
1. The following account draws on multiple sources, including contemporaneous media accounts, published analyses of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and testimony at the trials of the sole surviving attacker, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, and of David Coleman Headley (a Pakistani American allegedly involved in the support network for the attack).
2. Testimony by Willi Brigitte, quoted in Sebastian Rotella, “On the Trail of Pakistani Terror Group’s Elusive Mastermind Behind the Mumbai Siege,” Washington Post, November 10, 2010.
3. Saikat Datta, “Terror Colours, in Black and White: Outlook Accesses the Dossier India Has Sent to Pakistan and Its Unabridged Version That Proves the Pakistani Link,” in Outlook (India), January 19, 2009.
4. Jedburgh Corporation, “Mumbai Attack Timeline and Order of Battle,” online at http://jedburgh-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/Mumbai%20Reconstruction.pdf.
5. Sebastian Rotella, “Mumbai Case Offers Rare Picture of Ties Between Pakistan’s Intelligence Service, Militants,” ProPublica.org, May 2, 2011.
6. “Mumbai Attacks 2008: ’40 Indians Involved in Terror Plot,’” One India News, July 2, 2012, online at http://news.oneindia.in/2012/07/02/mum-26–11–2008-attacks-40-indians-involved-terror-plot-1027835.html.
7. “Serving Major Among 4 Pak Nationals Behind 2008 Mumbai Attacks: US Chargesheet,” Times of India, May 9, 2011.
8. Gordon G. Chang, “India’s China Problem,” Forbes, August 14, 2009.
9. The inclusion of these items of escape-and-evasion gear have led some to speculate that the raiding team intended to survive the attack and exfiltrate by blending in with the city afterward.
10. Damien McElroy, “Mumbai Attacks: Terrorists Took Cocaine to Stay Awake During Assault,” Daily Telegraph, February 9, 2009.
11. S. Ahmed Ali, “26/11: Kuber Skipper Didn’t Re[s]ist When Militants Used Ship,” Times of India, January 6, 2009, online at http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009–01–06/mumbai/28005435_1_vinod-masani-kuber-amar-narayan.
12. S. Ahmed Ali and Vijay V. Singh, “Terrorists Used Code Words to Evade Suspicion,” Times of India, December 6, 2008.
13. In an uncharacteristic error, the LeT raiding party failed to sink the Kuber, which seems to have been their original intention. As a result the ship drifted, abandoned, until it was discovered along with Solanki’s body several days after the attack. A GPS unit and satellite phone on board provided valuable intelligence to Indian investigators, showing the team’s origin in Karachi, a fact later confirmed by Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the sole surviving terrorist.
14. Richard Watson, “Mumbai: What Really Happened,” Telegraph, June 28, 2009.
15. A hard compromise occurs when a raiding team is detected and attacked by security forces; a situation (as in this case) where local civilians detect the team’s presence but no security forces are engaged is usually defined as a soft compromise.
16. Jedburgh Corp., “Mumbai Attack Timeline.”
17. Onook Oh, Manish Agrawal, and H. Raghav Rao, “Information Control and Terrorism: Tracking the Mumbai Terrorist Attack Through Twitter,” Information Systems Frontiers 13 (September 2011): 33–43.
18. “Mumbai Attacks 2008: ’40 Indians Involved in Terror Plot.’”
19. Datta, “Terror Colours.”
20. Watson, “Mumbai: What Really Happened.”
21. “Saving the Patients and the Babies Was Our First Duty,” Rediff News, December 26, 2008, online at http://specials.rediff.com/news/2008/dec/26sld3-how-the-cama-nurses-saved-their-patient.htm.
22. Vinay Dalvi, “Hemant Karkare Thanked for Exposing Saffron Terror,” Mid-Day (Mumbai), November 17, 2011.
23. Amitav Ranjan, “Ashok Chakra for Only Two: Karkare and Omble,” Indian Express, January 21, 2009.
24. Much of what we know about the internal workings of the raid comes from the interrogation and trial of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab. Kasab was tried on eighty-six terrorism-related offenses. He was found guilty and sentenced to death on May 6, 2010; he was hanged at Pune, Maharashtra State, on November 21, 2012. See Ashutosh Joshi, “India Hangs Gunman from Mumbai Attacks,” Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2012.
25. Wilson John et al., Mumbai Attacks: Response and Lessons, Observer Research Foundation, 23–24, online at www.orfonline.org/cms/export/orfonline/modules/report/attachments/Mumbai%20attack_1230552332507.pdf.
26. Damien McElroy, “Mumbai Attacks: Foreign Governments Criticize India’s Response,” Telegraph, November 28, 2008.
27. John et al., Mumbai Attacks, 24.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 25–27.
30. Watson, “Mumbai: What Really Happened.”
31. Ibid.
32. “How Mumbai Attacks Unfolded,” BBC News, November 30, 2008.
33. Author’s discussion with a U.S. counterterrorism analyst, Washington, DC, November 29, 2008.
34. John et al., Mumbai Attacks.
35. Nobhojit Roy, Vikas Kapil, Italo Subbarao, and Isaac Ashkenazi, “Mass Casualty Response in the 2008 Mumbai Terrorist Attacks,” Disaster Management and Public Health Preparedness 5, no. 4 (April 2011): 273–79.
36. Ibid., 275.
37. Ibid.
38. Fred de Sam Lazaro, “Karachi and Mumbai: A Tale of Two Megacities,” PBS NewsHour, July 15, 2011.
39. See Port of Karachi official website, at www.kpt.gov.pk/pages/default.aspx?id=39, accessed October 27, 2012.
40. Roy et al., “Mass Casualty Response,” 273.
41. Watson, “Mumbai: What Really Happened.”
42. Ibid., 275.
43. John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, “Postcard from Mumbai: Modern Urban Siege,” Small Wars Journal, February 16, 2009.
44. Richard Norton-Taylor and Owen Bowcott, “‘Mumbai-Style’ Terror Attack on UK, France and Germany Foiled,” Guardian, September 28, 2010.
45. Discussion with an officer from U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command, at U.S. Naval Amphibious Operations Base Coronado, November 14, 2012; discussion with officers and enlisted operators from Naval Special Warfare Development Group, September 9, 2010.
46. Gwyn Prins’s 1993 notion of “threats without enemies” was originally formulated to describe environmental challenges of exactly the type discussed in this book, although the concept has since been more widely appropriated by nontraditional security analysts. See Gwyn Prins, Threats Without Enemies: Facing Environmental Insecurity (London: Routledge, 2009 [1993]).
47. Richard J. Norton, “Feral Cities,” Naval War College Review 66, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 98.
48. Ibid.
49. M. V. Bhagavathiannan, “Crop Ferality: Implications for Novel Trait Confinement,” Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, 127, nos. 1–2 (August 2008): 1–6.
50. Author’s personal experience hunting wild pigs in northern Australia, and discussions with animal-culling experts, Townsville, Q ueensland, 1998.
51. Author’s personal observation of feral dogs, pigs, cats, and horses during operations in the destroyed or conflict-affected cities of Nicosia (Cyprus), 1997; Arawa (Bougainville), 1998; Dili (East Timor), 1999–2000; Kabul, Khost, Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Asadabad (Afghanistan), 2006–12; and Baghdad (Iraq), 2007.
52. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook 2012, field entry for “Urbanization,” online at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2212.html.
53. As the anthropologist Graham St. John observes, “‘Feral’ designates an Australian youth milieu connected with grassroots resistance. . . . Adherents express dissonance from ‘the parent culture’ and, in acts of local defiance and identification, seek anarchist and ecological alternatives.” See Graham St. John, “Ferality: A Life of Grime,” UTS Review 5, no. 2 (1999): 102.
54. Richard Littlejohn, “The Politics of Envy Was Bound to End Up in Flames,” Daily Mail, August 12, 2011.
55. See, among many examples, the discussion of urban exclusion in Susan Parnell and Owen Crankshaw, “Urban Exclusion and the (False) Assumptions of Spatial Policy Reform in South Africa,” in Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt, eds., Mega-Cities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South (London: Zed Books, 2009), 161–67.
56. See, for example, Charles Murray’s discussion of super-zips and self-segregation (often also referred to as internal secession) in the United States, in Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012).
57. The same core/gap or core/periphery split that strategists such as Thomas P. M. Barnett (or theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein) have identified at the global level thus also arguably exists at lower fractal levels including cities, districts, blocks, or streets. What Barnett describes as “gap countries” and world-systems analysts call “semiperiphery” or “periphery” countries equate to marginalized or excluded populations and periurban settlements at the city level. See Thomas P. M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Berkley, 2005), and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Books, 1974).
58. See, for example, the discussion in Tim Nieguth, “‘We Are Left with No Other Alternative’: Legitimating Internal Secession in Northern Ontario,” Space and Polity 13, no. 2 (August 2009): 141–57.
59. Aristotle argued that “it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.” See Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 1999), book 1, ch. II, 5.
60. Graham argues that “as societies urbanize and modernize, so their populations become ever-more dependent on complex, distanciated systems for the sustenance of the political ecological arrangements necessary to sustain life (water, waste, food, medicine, goods, commodities, energy, communications, transport, and so on) . . . [therefore] the collapse of functioning infrastructure grids now brings panic and fears of the breakdown of the functioning urban social order.” Stephen Graham, “Urban Metabolism as Target: Contemporary War as Forced Demodernization,” in Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw, eds., In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (London: Routledge, 2006), 252–53.
61. Q uoted in Graham, “Urban Metabolism as Target.”
62. Rasna Warah, Mohamud Dirios, and Ismail Osman, Mogadishu Then and Now: A Pictorial Tribute to Africa’s Most Wounded City (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2012), 3.
63. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Grove Press, 1999), 7.
64. President George H. W. Bush, “Towards a New World Order,” address to a joint session of the United States Congress, Washington, DC, September 11, 1990. Full video of the speech is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chm7vStGV5I.
65. Human Rights Watch, “Somalia: Human Rights Developments,” Human Rights Watch World Report 1994, online at www.hrw.org/reports/1994/WR94/Africa-08.htm.
66. Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 158.
67. David J. Morris, “The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground,” Virginia Q uarterly Review 83, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 144–69.
68. Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 328.
69. Ibid., 21.
70. See Marc Lacy, “Amid Somalia’s Troubles, Coca-Cola Hangs On,” New York Times, July 10, 2006.
71. J. F. C. Fuller, Plan 1919, May 24, 1918, online at www.alternatewars.com/WW1/Fuller_1919.htm.
72. Colonel John A. Warden, “Air Theory for the Twenty-first Century,” Air and Space Power Journal, September 1995.
73. Nuruddin Farah, “Country Cousins,” London Review of Books 20, no. 17 (September 1998), 1.
74. Ibid., 1–2.
75. Hanna Batatu, “Some Observations on the Social Roots of Syria’s Ruling Military Group and the Causes for Its Dominance,” Middle East Journal 35, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 337.
76. Malise Ruthven, Encounters with Islam: On Religion, Politics and Modernity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 95.
77. Ibid., 2.
78. U.S. State Department Cable Kingston 00682, dated 242332May2010, online at www.mattathiasschwartz.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tny-cable.pdf.
79. Matthias Schwartz, “As Jamaican Drug Lord Is Sentenced, U.S. Still Silent on Massacre,” New Yorker, June 8, 2012.
80. See Wayne Robinson, “Eradicating Organized Criminal Gangs in Jamaica: Can Lessons be Learnt from a Successful Counterinsurgency?” dissertation, U.S. Marine Corps Staff College, Q uantico, VA, online at http://cdn.bajanreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Jamaica-Tivoli.pdf.
81. Richard Drayton, “From Kabul to Kingston: Army Tactics in Jamaica Resemble Those Used in Afghanistan—and It’s No Mere Coincidence,” Guardian, June 14, 2010.
82. Horace Helps, “Toll from Jamaica Violence Rises to 73,” Reuters, May 27, 2010.
83. Benjamin Weiser, “Jamaican Drug Lord Gets Maximum Term,” New York Times, June 8, 2012.
84. See “Witness Provides Compelling Account of Jamaican ‘Garrisons,’” Caribbean News Now, May 25, 2012, online at www.caribbeannewsnow.com/news/newspublish/home.print.php?news_id=11049.
85. Obika Gray, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 73–74.
86. Ibid., 151.
87. Christopher A. D. Charles and Orville Beckford, “The Informal Justice System in Garrison Constituencies,” Department of Sociology, Psychology, and Social Work, University of the West Indies, online at www.academia.edu/1438587/The_Informal_Justice_System_in_Garrison_Constituencies.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., 16.
90. “Witness Provides Compelling Account of Jamaican ‘Garrisons.’”
91. Charles and Beckford, “The Informal Justice System in Garrison Constituencies,” 18.
92. See Ken Menkhaus, “Governance Without Government in Somalia: Spoilers, State Building, and the Politics of Coping,” International Security 31, no. 3 (Winter 2006–7): 74–106.
93. Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 25.
94. Ibid.
95. See Enrique Desmond Arias, “The Structure of Criminal Organizations in Kingston, Jamaica and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” presentation delivered at the conference “Drug Trafficking, Violence, and Instability in Mexico, Colombia, and the Caribbean: Implications for US National Security,” Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies, University of Pittsburgh, October 30, 2009.
96. See Enrique Desmond Arias, “The 2010 Emergency and Party Politics in Kingston, Jamaica: Towards a Less Violent Democracy,” Revista, Winter 2012, online at www.drclas.harvard.edu/publications/revistaonline/winter-2012/2010-emergency-and-party-politics-kingston-jamaica.
97. Desmond Arias, personal communication via email, November 22, 2012.
98. Ibid.
99. Anonymous witness at the trial of Christopher Coke, May 2012, reported in “Witness Provides Compelling Account of Jamaican ‘Garrisons.’”
100. Sullivan and Elkus, “Postcard from Mumbai,” 10.
101. See David J. Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xi–xii.
102. Nora Bensahel and Patrick M. Cronin, America’s Civilian Operations Abroad: Understanding Past and Future Requirements (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, 2012).
103. Angel Rabasa, Robert D. Blackwill, Peter Chalk, Kim Cragin, C. Christine Fair, Brian A. Jackson, Brian Michael Jenkins, Seth G. Jones, Nathaniel Shestak, and Ashley J. Tellis, The Lessons of Mumbai (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009), 13.
104. Ben Connable and Martin C. Libicki, How Insurgencies End (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010), xviii.
105. See “DIY Weapons of the Syrian Rebels,” Atlantic, February 2013.
106. Ibid.
107. For detailed descriptions of the battle, see Richard S. Lowry, New Dawn: The Battles for Fallujah (New York: Savas Beatie, 2010), and Bing West, No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah (London: Bantam Press, 2006).
108. Q iao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999).
109. See Richard Dobbs, Jaana Remes, James Manyika, Charles Roxburgh, Sven Smit, and Fabian Schaer, Urban World: Cities and the Rise of the Consuming Class, McKinsey and Company, June 2012, online at www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/urban_world_cities_and_the_rise_of_the_consuming_class; IBM, “Smarter Cities,” online at www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html.
110. See Scott Nelson et al., “Charlie Company 1/5 Marines: Lessons Learned, Operation Hue City,” operational after-action review, 1968, online at www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/lessons/hue.pdf. For a general description of the battle, see Erik Villard, The 1968 Tet Offensive Battles of Q uang Tri and Hue City (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 2008).
111. See Olga Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars 1994–2000: Lessons from the Urban Combat (Washington, DC: Rand Publishing, 2001).
112. See Amnesty International, Israel and the Occupied Territories: Under the Rubble: House Demolition and Destruction of Land and Property, May 2004, online at www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE15/033/2004; “Israel Levels Palestinian Homes: Israel Ignores UN Calls to Halt Destruction of Palestinian Properties in East Jerusalem,” Al Jazeera, October 28, 2009, online at www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2009/10/200910282211496109.html.
113. Eyal Weizman, “The Art of War,” Frieze, no. 99 (May 2006), online at www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war.
114. Ibid.
115. Peter Arnett, “Major Describes Move,” New York Times, February 8, 1968.
116. Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden (New York: Penguin, 2012), ch. 4.
117. Paula Broadwell, “Travels with Paula (1): A Time to Build,” at Thomas E. Ricks, Best Defense (Foreign Policy) blog, January 13, 2011, online at http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/13/travels_with_paula_i_a_time_to_build.
118. See Jonathan Rugman, “UN Food Stolen from the Starving in Somalia: Fake Camp Fraud,” Times (London), June 15, 2009, online at www.hiiraan.com/news4/2009/jun/11095/un_food_is_stolen_from_the_starving_in_somalia_fake_camp_fraud.aspx.
119. Matt Potter, Outlaws Inc.: Under the Radar and On the Black Market with the World’s Most Dangerous Smugglers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001), 139–44.
120. See David J. Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency: The State of a Controversial Art,” in Paul B. Rich and Isabelle Duyvesteyn, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency (London: Routledge, 2012).
121. For a recent comprehensive study of insurgency outcomes, see Connable and Libicki, How Insurgencies End.
Chapter 3
1. Our partner unit at this time was the reconnaissance platoon of the 2nd Battalion, Pacific Islands Regiment, part of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF).
2. See Leonid Zalizynak, “The Ethnographic Record, and Structural Changes in the Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Economy of Boreal Europe,” in Marek Zvelebil and Robin Dennell, eds., Harvesting the Sea, Farming the Forest: The Emergence of Neolithic Societies in the Baltic Region (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), ch. 5.
3. For the “fishers of men” quote, see Matthew 4:19 and Mark 1:17 in the New Testament.
4. “Random Stuff to Think About,” Life in Rocinha, April 2, 2012, online at http://lifeinrocinha.blogspot.com.
5. This case study, though presented as a hypothetical example here in order to protect sources, is based on actual participant observation and interviews in the field conducted in Kandahar between March 2008 and May 2011. Where appropriate, individual interviews and sources are noted.
6. According to the CIA World Factbook, 43.6 percent of the Afghan population is age fourteen or younger. See “Afghanistan Demographic Profile 2010,” at www.indexmundi.com/afghanistan/demographics_profile.html, accessed January 21, 2011
7. See Thomas Ruttig, “How Tribal Are the Taleban?” Thematic Paper 04/10, Afghanistan Analysts Network, online at http://aan-afghanistan.com/index.asp?id=865, accessed December 20, 2010.
8. In the Afghan context, the Sunni Muslim honorific mullah usually refers to a local religious leader, who may or may not have completed formal religious studies. The term maulawi normally refers to someone who has completed a full course of study at a recognized madrassa, or Islamic seminary.
9. Presentation by Dr. Carter Malkasian during pre-deployment training for 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, U.S. Naval Base Point Loma, San Diego, November 2011.
10. During a tour on Cyprus in 1997 with the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, I regularly observed Greek Cypriot Orthodox priests taking a leading role in organizing demonstrations in Eleftheria Square, Nicosia, and at major crossing points across the Green Line that divides Greek and Turkish Cypriots. On the similar roles of Catholic clergy during the uprising in East Timor, see David J. Kilcullen, “The Political Consequences of Military Operations in Indonesia, 1945–99,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of New South Wales, 2001, 115, 146–50.
11. For an outstanding account of Afghan warlord state-building behavior during this period, see Antonio Giustozzi, Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan (London: Hurst, 2009).
12. See Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef [‘Abd al-Salam Za’if], with Alex van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, My Life with the Taliban (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), xxii.
13. Anand Gopal, “The Battle for Afghanistan: Militancy and Conflict in Kandahar,” New America Foundation, Washington, DC, 2010, 7, online at http://security.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/kandahar_0.pdf.
14. For one of several versions of this story in wide circulation in Kabul in late 2009, see Miles Amoore, “Taliban Bring Order, Say Afghans,” Sunday Times (London), December 14, 2009.
15. Interviews with Afghan respondents SP in Jalalabad, September 2009; RP and RSP in Kabul, December 2009; and FA in Kabul, October 2010.
16. Interview with Afghan respondent RP, a Taliban-aligned businessman from Kandahar, in Kabul, December 2009.
17. See Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
18. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12.
19. Ibid.
20. C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London: HMSO, 1906), 21. The familiar notion of “nonstate actors” is too broad to be useful here, because in modern conflict there may be dozens of nonstate actors in any given space, including humanitarian NGOs, local or international businesses, development contractors, bilateral and multilateral aid donors, the news media, and local or international civil society organizations. Many of these are not armed, do not apply violence, and do not prey on population groups. Likewise, the concept of “illegal armed groups” (like the related concept of “illicit networks”) has extremely limited applicability in failed or failing states, where there is no clear sovereign legal authority. Also, in civil wars where sovereignty is fragmented and legal frameworks are contested, the construct of “legal” and “illegal” armed groups lacks real-world meaning. Under my definition, a nonstate armed group may or may not be formally structured, it may or may not have an overt political motivation or an explicit ideology, and its actions may or may not serve a broader purpose than the self-interest of its members. But equally, the violence it applies is not merely random, psychotic, or bestial (though atrocious cruelties can and do occur) but rather purposeful—it is violence that supports a wider goal, that shows a pattern of rational intent.
21. For example, members of the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam) in Indonesia or the Zeta Killers in Mexico would fall into the category of vigilantes or armed public defender groups.
22. I am indebted for this last insight to Professor Tammy S. Schultz of the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College, Q uantico, Virginia.
23. David Witwer, “‘The Most Racketeer-Ridden Union in America’: The Problem of Corruption in the Teamsters Union During the 1930s,” in Emmanuel Kreike and William Chester Jordan, eds., Corrupt Histories (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 200.
24. Ibid., 212–13.
25. See, for example, Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, 1960), 27–28, 72–73.
26. Ibid., 26.
27. Ilse Derluyn, Eric Broekaert, Gilberte Schuyten, and Els De Temmerman, “Post-traumatic Stress in Former Ugandan Child Soldiers,” Lancet 363 (May 2004): 861–63.
28. Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 17.
29. See United Nations, Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts, Annex IV, “The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing,” United Nations, New York, December 28, 1994, online at www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/IV.htm#0-VI.
30. See Lijepa Nasa Domovina Hrvatska, “Brcko BC001-EA,” online at www.lijepanasadomovinahrvatska.com/dokumenti-mainmenu-70/79-iskazi/433-br-bc001ea.
31. Author’s interview with British officers recently returned from service in Bosnia with UNPROFOR and SFOR, British Army training area, Copehill Down, UK, September 8, 1997.
32. Author’s interviews and personal observation in the Balibo, Maliana, Batugade, and Ermera areas of East Timor, September 1999 to February 2000.
33. Interview with a U.S. diplomat serving in rural areas of Peru during the early period of the Shining Path uprising, Washington, DC, February 20, 2012.
34. Bernard B. Fall, “The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency,” Naval War College Review, Winter 1998 [1965].
35. See the Appendix for a more detailed explanation of the theoretical basis for this discussion, which draws on the theory of normative systems and in particular on the work of Carlos Alchourron and Eugenio Bulygin in legal theory, David Dressler in sociology, and Thomas Agotnes et al. in computer science.
36. In taking this definitional approach, I draw in part on Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), 110ff., and in part on Carlos E. Alchourron and Eugenio Bulygin, Normative Systems (New York: Springer Verlag, 1971), 53–59.
37. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 154.
38. Mao Zedong, “Problems of War and Strategy,” Selected Works of Mao Tse Tung, vol. 2 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967).
39. Simon Neville, “U.S. Road Deaths at Lowest Levels for 60 years . . . but Still One Killed Every 16 Minutes,” Daily Mail, April 1, 2011.
40. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: New American Library, Signet Classics,1959), 121–22
41. For instance, Adam Hochschild argues that the character of Kurtz is drawn from Conrad’s direct observation of colonial officials in the field, in particular Captain Leon Rom of the Belgian Force Publique. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (New York: Mariner Books, 1999), ch 9.
42. Joseph Conrad, “An Outpost of Progress,” in Tales of Unrest, 1898, online at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/conrad/joseph/c75ta/chapter3.html
43. Author’s personal observation in Baghdad and surrounding areas, January to March 2006, and February to September 2007.
44. Author’s observation; see also “Informant Led U.S. to Strike Zarqawi Dead,” Courier (James Logan High School, Union City, CA), June 9, 2006, online at http://jameslogancourier.org/index.php?itemid=365.
45. See Nir Rosen, Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Middle East (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 257.
46. David Kilcullen, “Reading al-Anbar,” American Interest, September/October 2010.
47. For a detailed description of these events, see United States Marine Corps, Al-Anbar Awakening, 2 vols. (Q uantico, VA: USMC, 2010).
48. Kilcullen, “Reading al-Anbar.”
49. See Human Rights Watch, “Flooding South Lebanon: Israel’s Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006,” February 17, 2008; BBC News, “Million Bomblets in S Lebanon,” September 26, 2006.
50. Robert Fisk, “Hizbollah’s Reconstruction of Lebanon Is Winning the Loyalty of Disaffected Shia,” Independent, August 24, 2006.
51. “Israel’s Barak Says Hezbollah Stronger than Ever,” Agence France-Presse, January 7, 2008,
52. Fisk, “Hizbollah’s Reconstruction of Lebanon.”
53. Roula Khalaf, “Hezbollah Hopes to Engineer a Q uick Recovery,” Financial Times, August 27, 2006.
54. Ibid.
55. See, for example, Benjamin S. Lambeth, Air Operations in Israel’s War Against Hezbollah: Learning from Lebanon and Getting It Right in Gaza (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2011); David E. Johnson, Military Capabilities for Hybrid War: Insights from the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon and Gaza (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2011); Avi Kober, “The Israel Defense Forces in the Second Lebanon War: Why the Poor Performance?” Journal of Strategic Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 3–40.
56. “Israel’s Barak Says Hezbollah Stronger than Ever.”
57. Q uoted in Physicians for Human Rights, The Taliban’s War on Women: A Health and Human Rights Crisis in Afghanistan (Boston: Physicians for Human Rights, 1998), 117–18.
58. Nushin Arbabzadah, “The 1980s Mujahideen, the Taliban and the Shifting Idea of Jihad,” Guardian, April 28, 2011.
59. Ibid.
60. Q uoted in Roy Gutman, “We’ve Met the Enemy in Afghanistan, and He’s Changed,” McClatchy Newspapers, March 14, 2010.
61. Interviews with schoolchildren, teachers, and school principals in the Jalalabad, Kunduz, and Kunar regions, September and December 2009.
62. Ray Rivera, “Taliban Challenge U.S. in Eastern Afghanistan,” New York Times, December 25, 2010.
63. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). Migdal’s work develops a functional model of state effectiveness, drawing on previous work by Gabriel Almond, G. Bingham Powell, Harry Eckstein, and others.
64. Ibid., 3.
65. William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 13.
66. Robert Kemp, “The District Delivery Program in Afghanistan: A Case Study in Organizational Challenges,” Small Wars Journal, June 26, 2012.
67. Author’s discussion with Afghan provincial government official, Kabul, December 2009.
68. Steve Bowman and Catherine Dale, War in Afghanistan: Strategy, Military Operations, and Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2009), 5ff.
69. Jerome Starkey, “Former Warlord Blames UK for Breakdown in Security,” Independent, June 9, 2008.
70. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 1, 3–4.
71. Ibid., 5.
72. Ibid.
73. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
74. Obika Gray, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 60.
75. Karl D. Jackson, Traditional Authority, Islam, and Rebellion: A Study of Indonesian Political Behavior (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
76. David J. Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 76.
77. Author’s personal observations and discussions with community elders in Sadr City, Abu Ghraib, Dora, and Kadhimiya districts of Baghdad, March to July 2007.
78. Ibid.
79. For a discussion of this concept, see C. Boggs, Gramsci’s Marxism (London: Pluto, 1976), 39.
Chapter 4
1. John Pollock, “People Power 2.0: How Civilians Helped Win the Libyan Information War,” MIT Technology Review, April 20, 2012, 1.
2. Ibid.
3. See Pollock’s reporting in MIT Technology Review, including “Watching a Digital ‘Jasmine Revolution’ Unfold: Using Facebook and Twitter to track trouble on the streets of Tunisia,” June 21, 2011; “Play It Again, King Mohammed: Oldest Arab Monarchy Uses Classical Tactics to Stifle Latest Protests,” June 22, 2011; “Streetbook: How Egyptian and Tunisian Youth Hacked the Arab Spring,” August 23, 2011; and “The Voice of Libya: An Inspiring Story of Citizen Journalism,” September 5, 2011.
4. In this chapter, as throughout this book, I use the term “connectedness” to describe the general phenomenon of increasingly dense informational, financial, human and electronic linkages among populations across the planet, and the term connectivity or network connectivity to describe the narrower subset of those linkages that is associated with access to mobile communications technology and, especially, the Internet.
5. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, United States Government Joint Publication 1–02 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2001), 533.
6. Ibid.
7. Obviously, there’s a lot more to the international law of armed conflict than just this territorial aspect, and lawyers generally recognize that a person’s combatant status “travels” with that person if he or she leaves an area of conflict. My point here is merely that the “theater of war” construct, which drives part of this legal regime, is a spatial one.
8. Australian Army, Future Land Warfare Operating Concept: Complex Warfighting (Canberra: Australian Army Headquarters, Directorate-General of Future Land Warfare, 2004), 8–9.
9. Karoun Demirjian, “Creech Drone Pilot, Instructor Feted in White House Dinner Honoring Iraq Veterans,” Las Vegas Sun, March 2, 2012.
10. Elisabeth Bumiller, “A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away,” New York Times, July 29, 2012.
11. Relevant Supreme Court judgments include Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), and Boumedienne v. Bush (2008). See also David Rivkin and Lee Casey, “Within His Rights,” American Lawyer, February 9, 2013.
12. See James Gordon Meek and David Saltonstall, “Pakistani Taliban Leader Hakimullah Mehsud Is Brutal Mastermind Behind Thwarted Times Square Bombing,” New York Daily News, May 9, 2010; United States Department of State, Rewards for Justice Program, wanted poster for Hakimullah Mehsud, online at www.rewardsforjustice.net/index.cfm?page=mehsud.
13. Akbar Ahmed, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013).
14. Siobhan Gorman, Yochi Dreazen, and August Cole, “Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones,” Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2009.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Noah Schachtman, “Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet,” Wired, October 7, 2011.
18. David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Random House, 2012).
19. David Sanger, “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran,” New York Times, June 1, 2012.
20. Ibid.
21. Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker, “Panetta Warns of Dire Threat of Cyber-attack Against U.S.,” New York Times, October 11, 2012.
22. Mikko Hypponen, “Cyber Pearl Harbor,” F-Secure blog, October 18, 2012, online at www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002446.html.
23. Thomas Rid, “CyberFail: The Obama Administration’s Lousy Record on Cyber-Security,” New Republic, February 4, 2013.
24. Pollock, “Streetbook,” 2.
25. Ibid.
26. Olivier Kramsch, “Towards a Mediterranean Scale of Governance: Twenty-First Century Urban Networks Across the ‘Inner Sea,’” in Barbara Hooper and Olivier Kramsch, eds., Cross-Border Governance in the European Union (London: Routledge 2007), 200.
27. Ibid., 4.
28. Paul Wood, “Gangster’s Life of Serb Warlord,” BBC News, January 15, 2000.
29. Dave Fowler, “Football, Blood and War,” Observer, January 18, 2004.
30. Author’s participant observation and discussions with community elders in Dili, Balibo, Ermera, and Batugade districts, East Timor, September 22–23, 1999, November 15, 1999, and January 2, 2000. See analysis in Chapter 4 of David J. Kilcullen, “Political Consequences of Military Operations in Indonesia, 1945–1999,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of New South Wales, 2000.
31. James M. Dorsey, “Pitched Battles: The Role of Ultra Soccer Fans in the Arab Spring,” Eurasia Review, December 24, 2012.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Robert F. Worth, “How a Single Match Can Ignite a Revolution,” New York Times, January 21, 2011.
37. Jonathan Adams, “Tunisian Protests Escalate, Reflecting Widespread Discontent,” Christian Science Monitor, January 10, 2011.
38. See the Web portal of the democracy activist group Nawaat for screenshots of Amamou’s smartphone post, at http://nawaat.org/portail/2011/01/06/tunisia-blogger-slim-amamou-arrested-today.
39. Peter Beaumont, “The Truth About Twitter, Facebook and the Uprisings in the Arab World,” Guardian, February 24, 2011.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Pollock, “Streetbook,” 6.
43. Ibid.
44. Q uinn Norton, “How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down,” Wired, July 3, 2012.
45. Evan Hill, “Hackers Hit Tunisian Websites,” Al Jazeera, January 3, 2011.
46. See Open Net Initiative at https://opennet.net, WikiLeaks at http://wikileaks.org, Cryptome at http://cryptome.org, and Nawaat at http://nawaat.org.
47. Kramsch, “Towards a Mediterranean Scale,”
48. See “Egypt Population Reaches 91 Million, Grows 18 Percent in Eight Years,” Ahram Online, August 30, 2012, online at http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/51634.aspx.
49. Andrew McLaughlin, “Egypt’s Big Internet Disconnect,” Guardian, January 31, 2011.
50. Ibid.
51. David Kirkpatrick and David Sanger, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History,” New York Times, February 13, 2011.
52. Kamel Labidi, “Ben Ali and Mubarak: Brothers in Arms,” Index on Censorship, February 8, 2011, online at www.indexoncensorship.org/2011/02/ben-ali-and-mubarak-brothers-in-arms.
53. Kirkpatrick and Sanger, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link.”
54. Ibid.
55. Pollock, “Streetbook,” 6.
56. Q uinn Norton, “2011: The Year Anonymous Took On Cops, Dictators and Existential Dread,” Wired, January 11, 2012.
57. Chavala Madlena, “Telecomix: Tech Support for the Arab Spring,” Guardian, July 7, 2011.
58. John Naughton, “How Twitter Engineers Outwitted Mubarak in One Weekend,” Observer, February 6, 2011.
59. Kirkpatrick and Sanger, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link.”
60. Jenna Krajeski, “The Taking of Kasr Al Nil,” Newsdesk blog, New Yorker, January 28, 2011.
61. Ibid.
62. Kareem Fahim, “Egyptian Hopes Converged in Fight for Cairo Bridge,” New York Times, January 28, 2011.
63. Kirkpatrick and Sanger, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link.”
64. Krajeski, “The Taking of Kasr Al Nil.”
65. Fahim, “Egyptian Hopes Converged in Fight for Cairo Bridge.”
66. Kirkpatrick and Sanger, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link.”
67. See “Egyptian Activist Shares Evolution of a Revolution,” UCLA Today, n.d., online at http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/PRN-activist-ahmed-maher-on-campus-219353.aspx.
68. Labidi, “Ben Ali and Mubarak.”
69. “Who Are the Pro-Mubarak Supporters?” Euronews, February 3, 2011, online at http://www.euronews.com/2011/02/03/who-are-the-pro-mubarak-supporters.
70. “Who Are the Pro-Mubarak Protestors?” MSNBC News, February 2, 2011.
71. “Gunfire Breaks Out as Mubarak’s Allies and Foes Clash,” MSNBC News, February 2, 2011.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Timothy Phelps and Laura King, “Hosni Mubarak Supporters Attack Protestors in Cairo’s Tahrir Square,” Los Angeles Times, February 2, 2011.
75. Kirkpatrick and Sanger, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link.”
76. Hassan Aly, “Reflections on the Libyan Uprising,” Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences, February 16, 2011, online at http://artsandsciences.osu.edu/news/reflections-on-the-libyan-uprising.
77. Simon Shuster, “The Tyrant of Belarus: Gaddafi’s Friend Far, Far to the North?” Time, March 2, 2011.
78. Matthew Weaver, “Muammar Gaddafi Condemns Tunisia Uprising,” Guardian, January 16, 2011.
79. Ian Black, “Gaddafi Urges Violent Showdown and Tells Libya ‘I’ll Die a Martyr,’” Guardian, February 22, 2011.
80. See Osama Kh. Ali, Noorazuan Hashim, Katiman Rostam, and Hamzah Jusoh, “Population Growth in the Region of Tripoli, Libya,” Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences 5, no. 11 (November 2011): 1609–15; Central Intelligence Agency, entry for Libya in The World Factbook, 2012, online at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ly.html
81. Hassan Aly, “Reflections on the Libyan Uprising.”
82. For example, Benghazi’s only sewage treatment plant was four decades old and raw sewage was regularly pumped into the sea. See Andrew Lee Butters, “Dispatch from Libya: Why Benghazi Rebelled,” Time, March 3, 2011.
83. Black, “Gaddafi Urges Violent Showdown.”
84. Nick Meo, “Libya Protests: 140 ‘Massacred’ as Gaddafi Sends In Snipers to Crush Dissent,” Daily Telegraph, February 20, 2011.
85. John Hooper and Ian Black, “Libya Defectors: Pilots Told to Bomb Protestors Flee to Malta,” Guardian, February 21, 2011.
86. Ibid.
87. Martin Chulov, “Inside Libya’s First Free City: Jubilation Fails to Hide Deep Wounds,” Guardian, February 23, 2011.
88. Ibid.
89. Beaumont, “The Truth About Twitter.”
90. Pollock, “People Power.”
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid.
93. See Pollock, “People Power” and Andy Carvin, “Munitions in Misrata: A Virtual Investigation by @acarvin’s Twitter Followers,” Storify, online at http://storify.com/acarvin/munitions-in-misurata.
94. See Pollock, “Streetbook” and the Anonymous #OpLibya IRC Channel, online at http://irc.lc/Anonops/OpLibya
95. Audrey Kurth Cronin, “Cyber-mobilization: The New Levee en Masse,” Parameters 36, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 77–87.
96. Ibid., 77–78.
97. Ibid., 79.
98. Ibid., 81.
99. Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 66.
100. Chulov, “Inside Libya’s First Free City.”
101. Dorsey, “Pitched Battles.”
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid.
104. Gaddafi’s mercenaries were not all black—there were eastern Europeans, Pakistanis, and a few white South Africans among them—but many allegedly came from Chad, Ghana, Kenya, Sudan, and other black African countries. This led to protests by the African Union that the rebels were indiscriminately targeting black migrant workers and people from Libya’s black ethnic groups.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.
108. Ian Black, “As Libya Uprising Reaches Tripoli Gaddafi Vows to ‘Open Up the Arsenals,’” Guardian, February 25, 2011.
109. Ibid.
110. “ICC to Probe Gaddafi over Violence,” Al Jazeera, March 3, 2011.
111. United Nations News Centre, “Security Council Authorizes ‘All Necessary Measures’ to Protect Civilians in Libya,” March 17, 2011.
112. Author’s interview with a member of the Libyan National Transitional Council, Oslo, Norway, June 29, 2011.
113. See Portia Walker, “Q atari Military Advisers on the Ground, Helping Libyan Rebels Get into Shape,” Washington Post, May 12, 2011.
114. Pollock, People Power 2.0.
115. Indeed, these problems are perhaps an inevitable downside of the light-footprint, limited-ground-presence approach, since with extremely few NATO boots on the ground, target identification and coordination with rebel forces were more difficult than they might otherwise have been.
116. Martin Chulov, “Gaddafi’s Last Moments: ‘I Saw the Hand Holding the Gun and I Saw It Fire,’” Guardian, October 20, 2011.
117. Media analysis by Nathaniel Rosenblatt, Caerus Associates, Middle East North Africa Analysis team, March-April 2012.
118. Andrei Netto, “Muammar Gaddafi’s ‘Trophy’ Body on Show in Misrata Meat Store,” Guardian, October 21, 2011.
119. Butters, “Dispatch from Libya.”
120. Ibid.
121. Ibid.
122. For a description of this enormous project, see MEED, “The Great Man-Made River Project,” December 2011, online at www.meed.com/Journals/1/Files/2011/12/11/Sample%20Chapter.pdf.
123. Butters, “Dispatch from Libya.”
124. Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman, Al Q aeda’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar Records (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, 2007), 11–12.
125. Butters, “Dispatch from Libya.”
126. Ibid.
127. Amr Hamdy, Survey of ICT and Education in Africa: Libya Country Report (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007).
128. African Economic Outlook, Libya Country Note, African Development Bank, 2012, 11.
129. Ibid.
130. Ibid., 13.
131. In part, the restraint shown by the army in Egypt was perhaps a result of attempts—by the United States, in particular—over several decades of military assistance and advisory effort, to professionalize the Egyptian army. This professionalization effort was aimed at helping the army become less politicized, more cognizant of human rights and international law, and more focused on external threats rather than internal repression. When the crisis hit, phone calls between senior U.S. military officers and their Egyptian counterparts (who, in some cases, had attended professional training courses in the United States) may have helped encourage Egyptian military leaders, at the moment of crisis, to refuse to attack their own people. Obviously, no such cooperation or professionalization effort existed for Libya.
132. “Gaddafi Survival Means Weak Army, Co-opted Tribes,” Associated Press, February 23, 2011.
133. “Libya—130 Soldiers Executed,” Agence-France Press, February 23, 2011.
134. Nick Lockwood, personal communication via email from Benghazi, March 2011.
135. Personal observation and interviews by a Caerus field team, Benghazi, February–May 2011.
136. See “DIY Weapons of the Libyan Rebels,” Atlantic, June 14, 2011.
137. Pollock, “Streetbook”.
138. Stéphanie Plasse, “Libya: Gaddafi and his Mali-Chad Tuareg Mercenaries,” Afrik News, March 24, 2011.
139. “Gaddafi Hires Separatist Militants from Niger, Mali, Algeria and Burkina Faso to Fight Rebels in Libya,” Agence-France Presse, March 4, 2011.
140. Michael Gunning, “Background to a Revolution,” N Plus One Magazine, August 26, 2011.
141. Author’s interview with Nathaniel Rosenblatt, Caerus senior analyst, Washington, DC, March 11, 2013.
142. Suzanne Saleeby, “Sowing the Seeds of Dissent: Economic Grievances and the Syrian Social Contract’s Unraveling,” Jadiliyya, February 16, 2012.
143. Kareem Fahim and Hwaida Saad, “A Faceless Teenage Refugee Who Helped Ignite Syria’s War,” New York Times, February 8, 2013.
144. Katherine Marsh, Matthew Taylor and Haroon Siddique, “Syria’s Crackdown on Protesters Becomes Dramatically More Brutal,” Guardian, April 25, 2011.
145. See Yassin al-Haj Salih, The Syrian Shabiha and Their State (Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2012).
146. Ibid.
147. Helmi Noman, “The Emergence of Open and Organized Pro-Government Cyber Attacks in the Middle East: The Case of the Syrian Electronic Army,” Information Warfare Monitor, May 30, 2011.
148. Rosenblatt, interview, March 11, 2013
149. Marcus F. Franda, Launching into Cyberspace: Internet Development and Politics in Five World Regions (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 70.
150. Ibid.
151. See “Asad’s Wife,” uploaded by XxHAMSHOURExX, April 3, 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRfs1qJQ _ J8.
152. Nathaniel Rosenblatt, personal communication via email to the author, March 11, 2013.
153. Ibid.
154. Ibid.
155. Interview with researcher studying Libyan and Syrian anti-regime networks, Washington, DC, March 11, 2013.
156. Ibid.
157. “Rebels in Syria’s Largest City of Aleppo Mostly Poor, Pious and from Rural Backgrounds,” Associated Press, October 16, 2012.
158. For a discussion on youth unemployment and social exclusion in Syria’s cities, see Nader Kabbani and Noura Kamel, Youth Exclusion in Syria: Social, Economic, and Institutional Dimensions (Dubai: Wolfensohn Center for Development, 2007).
159. Nour Ali, “Assad’s Forces Pound Syrian Port City of Latakia,” Guardian, August 14, 2011.
160. See “DIY Weapons of the Syrian Rebels,” Atlantic, February 20, 2013.
161. Ibid.
162. Ibid.
163. David Ronfeldt, John Arquilla, Graham E. Fuller, and Melissa Fuller, The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1998), 7.
164. Author’s field notes, Baghdad, January–March 2006.
165. Peter Harling, Popular Protest in North Africa and the Middle East (VII): The Syrian Regime’s Slow-Motion Suicide (Damascus: International Crisis Group, 2011), 9.
166. “BART Officials Blocked Cell Phones During Transit Protest,” Associated Press, August 12, 2011.
167. Ibid.
168. Michael Cabanatuan, “BART Admits Halting Cell Service to Stop Protests. Move to Disrupt Protesters’ Plans Blasted as Violation of Free Speech,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 2011.
169. Paul Elias and John S. Marshall, “‘Anonymous’ Hackers Protest San Francisco’s BART Cellphone Blocking,” Associated Press, August 15, 2011.
170. Zusha Ellison, “After Cellphone Action, BART Faces Escalating Protests,” New York Times, August 20, 2011.
171. Ibid.
172. Pollock, People Power 2.0.
Chapter 5
1. “DIY Weapons of the Syrian Rebels,” Atlantic, June 14, 2011.
2. See Caitlin Dewey, “Are Syria’s Pro-Assad Hackers Up to Something More Nefarious?” Washington Post, March 1, 2013; Max Fisher, “Syria’s Pro-Assad Hackers Infiltrate Human Rights Watch Web Site and Twitter Feed,” Washington Post, March 17, 2013.
3. Abigail Fielding-Smith, “Alawite Heartland on Syria’s Coast Remains Loyal to Assad Regime,” Washington Post, March 15, 2013.
4. See Spencer Ackerman, “Syria Fires Scud Missiles, Burning Bombs and Even Sea Mines at Rebels,” Wired, December 12, 2012; Joby Warrick, “Intelligence on Syrian Troops Readying Chemical Weapons for Use Prompted Obama’s Warning,” Washington Post, December 13, 2012.
5. See Ken Dilanian and Brian Bennet, “CIA Begins Sizing Up Islamic Extremists in Syria for Drone Strikes,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2013; Press TV (Iran), “US Drone Strikes in Syria ‘Dangerous Escalation,’” online at http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/293911.html
6. Author’s interview with Nathaniel Rosenblatt, Washington, DC, March 19, 2013.
7. Associated Press, “Opposition Activists Set Off Small Bombs During General Strike in Bangladesh’s Capital,” Washington Post, March 18, 2013.
8. For a discussion of groundwater arsenic poisoning and fecal contamination of surface water in Bangladesh, see Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (New York: Free Press, 2012), 110ff.
9. Sirajul Haq Talukder, “Managing Megacities: A Case Study of Metropolitan Regional Governance for Dhaka,” Ph.D. dissertation, Murdoch University, Perth, 2006, iii.
10. Economist Intelligence Unit, “The Liveability Ranking and Overview,” August 2012, online at https://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=Liveability2012.
11. “Dhaka Reels Under High Population Growth,” New York Daily News, January 1, 2013.
12. Saleemul Huq and Mozaharul Alam, “Flood Management and Vulnerability of Dhaka City,” in Alcira Kreimer, Margaret Arnold, and Anne Carlin, eds., Building Safer Cities: The Future of Disaster Risk (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003), 126.
13. Jo Beall, Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, and Ravi Kanbur, Creating Place for the Displaced: Migration and Urbanization in Asia, paper presented at the 13th Annual Conference of the Global Development Network, 16–18 June, 2012, p.1–5, online at http://www.gdn.int/admin/uploads/editor/files/2012Conf_Papers/Paper_Basudeb%20Guha_1_1.pdf
14. United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), “Dhaka’s Extreme Vulnerability to Climate Change,” State of the World’s Cities, 2008/2009, online at http://www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/presskitsowc2008/Dhaka%20extreme.pdf.
15. Ibid., 122; Munich Re, Megacities—Megarisks: Trends and Challenges for Insurance and Risk Management, online at http://www.preventionweb.net/files/646_10363.pdf, p. 21.
16. GRID-Arendal Centre, “Potential Impact of Sea-Level Rise on Bangladesh,” online at www.grida.no/publications/vg/climate/page/3086.aspx.
17. For Hurricane Sandy, see Hal Needham, “Hurricane Sandy Produces Record-Breaking Storm Surge,” Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program, online at www.southernclimate.org/index.php/main/news/451. For Hurricane Katrina, see Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown, Tropical Cyclone Report Hurricane Katrina 23–30 August 2005 (Washington, DC: National Hurricane Center, 2005 [updated 2011]), online at www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-AL122005_Katrina.pdf.
18. See, for example, the connections and partners listed on the highly socially networked blog Life in Rocinha, online at http://lifeinrocinha.blogspot.com.
19. See “Police Occupation and UPP,” Life in Rocinha, October 15, 2012, online at http://lifeinrocinha.blogspot.com.
20. “Destroying Makoko,” Economist, August 18, 2012.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Adam Nossitter, “Cholera Epidemic Envelops Coastal Slums in West Africa,” New York Times, August 22, 2012.
24. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 26.
25. United Nations News Centre, “Deputy UN Chief Calls for Urgent Action to Tackle Global Sanitation Crisis,” March 21, 2013.
26. Antonio Giustozzi, Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
27. Of course, this is true of the natural landscape, too, which is shaped by war in a similar manner. But this happens, if anything, on a much longer time scale even than for urban areas, which are distinguished by the constant and intensive human interaction with the built environment of a densely inhabited landscape.
28. For a seminal description of hegemonic stability theory and its problems, see Duncan Snidal, “The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory,” International Organization 39, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 579–614.
29. Population growth figures drawn from Mongabay, online at http://population.mongabay.com.
30. Sara V. Flanagan et al., “Mitigation of Arsenic in Tube Well Water in Bangladesh,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, September 14, 2012.
31. See, for example, Jenny Stefanotti, “Fighting Malaria: The Bed Net Controversy,” Developing Jen (blog), April 26, 2009, online at www.developingjen.com/blog/fighting-malaria-the-bed-net-controversy.
32. See Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Knopf, 2006), and his Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (New York: Vintage, 2012); Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006); George Packer, The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006); L. Paul Bremer, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Threshold Editions, 2006).
33. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (London: Gollancz, 1990), 146.
34. Jacques Attali, A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century, trans. Jeremy Leggatt (New York: Arcade, 2011), 132.
35. Richard Dobbs, Jeremy Oppenheim, Fraser Thompson, Marcel Brinkman, and Marc Zornes, Resource Revolution: Meeting the World’s Energy, Materials, Food, and Water Needs (Washington, DC: McKinsey Global Institute, November 2011), 2.
36. See Witold Rybczynski, “The Green Case for Cities,” Atlantic, October 2009; Robert Bryce, “Get Dense,” City Journal 22, no. 1 (Winter 2012).
37. Bryce, “Get Dense.”
38. Zolli and Healy, Resilience, 98.
39. See, for example, Charles Murray’s argument in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012).
40. Zolli and Healy, Resilience.
41. See Kylin Navarro, “Liberian Women Act to End Civil War, 2003,” case study at Swarthmore College Global Nonviolent Action Database, October 2010, online at http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/liberian-women-act-end-civil-war-2003.
42. Ibid.
43. United States Institute of Peace, Women’s Role in Liberia’s Reconstruction (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, May 2007).
44. The Yemeni journalist Tawakkol Karman was separately honored with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her part in the peaceful overthrow of President Ali Abdullah Saleh during Yemen’s 2011 uprising, mentioned briefly in Chapter 4.
45. For a description of Gbowee’s experience, including her mentoring by Doe and Ekiyor and the support of external organizations and expertise, see her memoir: Leymah Gbowee and Carol Mithers, Mighty Be Our Powers (New York: Beast Books, 2011).
46. Ibid.
47. For a description of JTF Liberia, see Blair A. Ross, “The U.S. Joint Task Force Experience in Liberia,” Military Review, May-June 2005, 60–67; for the UN peacekeeping mission, see http://unmil.unmissions.org.
48. For a street-level description of this program, see Beth Cohen, “On the Street with Violence Interrupters,” Pop!Tech, June 7, 2010, online at http://poptech.org/blog/on_the_street_with_violence_interrupters.
49. Alex Kotlowitz, “Blocking the Transmission of Violence,” New York Times Magazine, May 4, 2008.
50. Ibid.
51. See Cure Violence’s website at http://cureviolence.org for details of the program.
52. Gary Slutkin biography at Cure Violence website, online at http://cureviolence.org/staff-member/gary-slutkin.
Appendix
1. John Paul Vann, quoted in Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988), 67.
2. See Bruce Elleman, Waves of Hope: The U.S. Navy’s Response to the Tsunami in Northern Indonesia (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2007).
3. See United States, Government Accountability Office, “State Department: The July 2006 Evacuation of American Citizens from Lebanon,” memo dated July 7, 2007, online at www.gao.gov/new.items/d07893r.pdf.
4. See “France Confirms Failed Somalia Hostage Rescue Attempt,” Al Jazeera, January 13, 2013.
5. As we noted in Chapter 4, there have been instances where nonstate armed groups, attacked by powerful expeditionary militaries, have mounted retaliatory attacks against those forces’ homelands. The Pakistani Taliban-sponsored attempt to bomb Times Square in New York City is one such example; the London bombing of July 7, 2005, shows a similar pattern, in that three of the four bombers were of Pakistani immigrant descent (the fourth was a Jamaican immigrant) and their expressed motivation was retaliation for Western (including British) support of actions—including expeditionary operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—they deemed as “anti-Islamic.”
6. See Charles Krulak, “The Three Block War: Fighting in Urban Areas,” Vital Speeches of the Day 64, no. 5 (December 15, 1997): 139–41; Charles Krulak, “The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War,” Marine Corps Gazette 83, no. 1 (January 1999): 18–23.
7. See, for example, Walter Dorn and Michael Varey, “Fatally Flawed: The Rise and Demise of the ‘Three-Block War’ Concept in Canada,” International Journal 63, no. 4 (Autumn 2008): 967–78, and Hans de Marie Hengoup, “Tactique et stratégie dans la guerre nouvelle: place du caporal stratégique,” Revue Défense National (Paris) 128 (2011): 1–5.
8. Dorn and Varey, “Fatally Flawed.”
9. See the Cartography of the Anthropocene images by Felix Pharand-Deschenes at Globaia, online at http://globaia.org/en/anthropocene/#Maps.
10. Author’s interview with Admiral Thisara Samarasinghe, commander of the Sri Lanka Navy, Colombo, June 2, 2011.
11. Ibid.
12. Author’s interview with officers of the 4th Fast Attack Flotilla, Sri Lanka, Colombo, June 1, 2011.
13. Public Radio International, “Maritime Immigrant, Drug Smuggling Picking Up Along California Coast,” January 18, 2013.
14. Author’s interview with John P. Sullivan, Los Angeles, November 9, 2012.
15. Tom Phillips, “Brazil Creating Anti-Pirate Force After Spate of Attacks on Amazon Riverboats,” Guardian, June 17, 2011.
16. Ibid.
17. United States Special Operations Command, U.S. SOCOM Factbook 2012 (Tampa, FL: U.S. Special Operations Command, 2012), 28.
18. See Louis Hansen, “New Riverine Force Will Take Fight Upriver in Iraq,” Virginian-Pilot, April 10, 2006, and Erik Sofge, “Behind the Scenes with a Special Operations Boat Crew,” Popular Mechanics, October 1, 2009,
19. Interviews with SWCC crews, SEAL officers, and navy intelligence support team, Baghdad, June 3, 2007.
20. See the official Royal Navy unit Web page at www.royalnavy.mod.uk/The-Fleet/The-Royal-Marines/3-Commando-Brigade/539-Assault-Squadron.
21. Information on the Stridsbåt 90H is at www.soldf.com/strb90h.html.
22. For a detailed timeline and description of the disaster, see Ingrid Eckerman, The Bhopal Saga—Causes and Consequences of the World’s Largest Industrial Disaster (New Delhi: Universities Press, 2005).
23. Ibid.
24. For the company’s version, see Union Carbide, “Statement of Union Carbide Corporation Regarding the Bhopal Tragedy,” 2012, online at www.bhopal.com/~/media/Files/Bhopal/ucs_2012.pdf.
25. For an account of the Halifax disaster, see David Flemming, Explosion in Halifax Harbour: The Illustrated Account of a Disaster That Shook the World (Halifax, NS: Formac, 2004). For a description of the Texas City explosion, see Hugh Stephens, The Texas City Disaster, 1947 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).
26. U.S. Department of Defense, Amphibious Operations, JP 3–02 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, August 2009), I-2.
27. See Russell Stolfi, “A Critique of Pure Success: Inchon Revisited, Revised, and Contrasted,” Journal of Military History 68, no. 2 (April 2004): 505–25.
28. United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, Operations in Iraq: Lessons for the Future (London: DCCS, 2003), 11.
29. Ibid., 11–13.
30. Ibid., 13.
31. U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Forcible Entry Operations, JP 3–18 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2012).
32. Department of Defense, Amphibious Operations, IV-1.
33. Department of Defense, Joint Forcible Entry Operations.
34. See United States Marine Corps, Marine Corps Operations, MCDP 1–0 (Washington, DC: HQ Marine Corps, 2011), I-15.
35. See United States Marine Corps, Marine Corps Operations, MCDP 1–0 (Washington, DC: HQ Marine Corps, 2001), 2–15ff.
36. Ibid., 5–23ff.
37. United States Marine Corps, Marine Corps Concept Paper: Seabased Logistics, n.d., online at www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/docs/sbl.htm.
38. With the retirement from service in 2005 of the Navy’s Sacramento-class fast combat supply ships (AOEs) and the decommissioning in 2004 of the remaining Supply-class fast combat supply ships (T-AOEs) and their transfer to Military Sealift Command (MSC), the principal supply vessel for afloat replenishment and support of amphibious operations is now the Lewis and Clark–class (T-AKE) dry cargo ship operated by the civilian-crewed Naval Fleet Auxiliary Force of MSC, of which only the last three ships (USNS William McLean, Medgar Evers, and Cesar Chavez) have a selective-offload capability allowing them to support amphibious operations using the sea-based logistics model.
39. See United States Marine Corps, Expeditionary Energy Strategy and Implementation Plan (Washington, DC: Headquarters USMC, 2010), and Department of Defense, Operational Energy Strategy Implementation Plan (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2012).
40. See U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, Experimental Forward Operating Base, online at www.mcwl.marines.mil/Divisions/Experiment/ExFOB.aspx.
41. For Burke’s work on natural resource security and energy policy, see U.S. Department of Defense, “Sharon E. Burke: Assistant Secretary of Defense for Oeprational Energy Plans and Programs,” www.defense.gov/bios/biographydetail.aspx?biographyid=259, and Center for a New American Security, “Sharon E. Burke,” http://cnas.org/node/64.
42. U.S. Army, The Modular Force, FMI3–0.1 (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 2008), vii.
43. For a detailed discussion of Commando 21, see Major H. J. White RM, “Future War: Commando 21, an Increase in Combat Power and Flexibility,” master’s thesis, U.S. Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting, Q uantico, VA, May 5, 2002.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. For a description of these initiatives, see Mark Unewisse, Land NCW: An Australian Perspective (Adelaide: Defence Science and Technology Organisation, 2010).
48. See Steven Kornguth, Rebecca Steinberg, and Michael D. Matthews, eds., Neurocognitive and Physiological Factors During High-Tempo Operations (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), and North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Human Performance Enhancement for NATO Military Operations (Science, Technology and Ethics), 2009.
49. See E. Williams et al., Human Performance (McLean, VA: Mitre Corporation, JASON, 2008).
50. For an assessment of the last two operations, see Daniel Helmer, “Not Q uite Counterinsurgency: A Cautionary Tale for US Forces Based on Israel’s Operation Change of Direction,” Australian Army Journal 5, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 117–28.
51. Organizations such as the U.S. Marine Corps Force Headquarters Group or the U.S. Army’s 95th Civil Affairs Brigade (Airborne) would seem ideally suited to this role, provided they were given appropriate command authority and resources. For descriptions of these organizations, see U.S. Army Special Operations Command, “95th Civil Affairs Brigade (Airborne),” www.soc.mil/Assorted%20pages/95th%20CAB.html, and U.S. Marine Corps, “Force Headquarters Group,” www.marforres.marines.mil/MajorSubordinateCommands/ForceHeadquartersGroup.aspx.
52. Author’s interviews with civil affairs, commanders and planning staff, Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa, Djibouti, May-June 2011.
53. For a description of the IDG, established in 2004, see Australian Federal Police, “International Deployment Group,” www.afp.gov.au/policing/international-deployment-group.aspx.
54. Author’s interview with commanders and staff, COESPU, Vicenza, November 2012.
55. For a description of the Israeli system, see Israel Defense Forces, “Trophy,” www.idf.il/1557-en/Dover.aspx.
56. For a description of AMAP-ADS, see ADS, “AMAP-ADS: The Active Defence System,” http://ads-protection.org/amap-ads/active-defence-system.
57. Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (London: Verso, 2007).
58. U.S. Government, Joint IED Defeat Organization, JIEDDO Annual Report 2010, 8, online at https://www.jieddo.mil/content/docs/JIEDDO_2010_Annual_Report_U.pdf.
59. U.S. Government, Joint IED Defeat Organization, Counter Improvised Explosive Device Strategic Plan 2012–2016, 2, online at https://www.jieddo.mil/content/docs/20120116_JIEDDOC-IEDStrategicPlan_MEDprint.pdf.
60. Ibid.
61. See Michael Petit, Peacekeepers at War: A Marine’s Account of the Beirut Catastrophe (New York: Faber and Faber, 1986).
62. See David Kuhn and Robert Bunker, “Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #15: IED Recovered from Trunk of Car by Police Station in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas (January 2012),” Small Wars Journal, January 14, 2013.
63. U.S. Government, White House, Countering Improvised Explosive Devices, February 26, 2013, online at www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/cied_1.pdf.
64. See “Bombs Behaving Oddly,” Strategy Page, August 24, 2011, online at https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htweap/articles/20110824.aspx.