The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon

The invasion of Afghanistan, which quickly followed the events of 9/11, had widespread international sympathy. It involved the use of U.S. airpower allied to the Northern Alliance, and local forces who opposed the Taliban. American forces did not succeed in capturing Osama bin Laden, but they destroyed the terrorist camps where Al-Qaeda operatives had been trained, and they toppled the vicious, misogynist Taliban regime. In the case of Iraq, by contrast, there was widespread global opposition and the attempt to garner United Nations approval failed. Nevertheless, U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq over a short three-week period and succeeded in overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein. President Bush claimed that the invasion of Iraq marked “the arrival of a new era,”² in which, thanks to information technology, war had become rapid, precise, and low in casualties. Max Boot, writing in Foreign Affairs, described the invasion as “dazzling”: “That the United States and its allies won anyway—and won so quickly—must rank as one of the single achievements of military history.”³ Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, talked about “overmatching” power as opposed to “overwhelming” power:

In the twenty-first century, mass may no longer be the best measure of power in a conflict. After all, when Baghdad fell, there were just over 100,000 American forces on the ground. General Franks overwhelmed the enemy not with the typical three-to-one advantage in mass but by overmatching the enemy with advanced capabilities in innovative and unexpected ways.⁴

Actually, Western forces had entered both countries, by and large, with the consent of the local populations. In Iraq, there was almost no resistance. The Iraqi army and the Republican Guard melted away. The Americans dropped leaflets in Arabic telling soldiers to take off their uniforms and go home, and most of them obeyed. There was, as one commentator put it, an “unpleasant, short-lived episode of violent irregular combat” in the third week of March, when Firqat Fedayeen Saddam (Saddam’s Martyrs) and other small units established to defend the regime tried to resist, but not much more.⁵

The situation appeared calm initially not because the Coalition Forces controlled the country but because the Iraqi people were ready to give the Coalition Forces the benefit of the doubt. In other words, the invasion was more like an exercise than a war. Precisely because the invasions were so easy, the Americans, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, only controlled their own bases.

But what Afghanistan and Iraq had in common at the time of the invasions was that they were both on the verge of state collapse. Afghanistan had always had a weak state dependent on revenue from outside powers, and the national government exercised limited control outside Kabul. Decades of war, involving physical destruction and large-scale population displacement, had greatly weakened both traditional governance structures and the capacity of the state.

But in fact, at the time of the invasion, the regime exhibited characteristics that are typical of the last phases of totalitarianism—a system that is breaking up under the impact of globalization, unable to sustain its closed, autarchic, tightly controlled character. After two major wars and the imposition of economic sanctions, tax revenue had declined dramatically, as had the provision of services. The last years of Saddam’s rule saw the rise of tribalism, as he made deals with tribal leaders to maintain power; the spread of criminality because of both sanctions and the failures of the command economy; and the emergence of sectarian politics, both ethnic and religious, as Ba’athist ideology lost its appeal.

The invasions of both countries effectively destroyed not just the regimes but what was left of the states as well. In Afghanistan, the security forces were undermined by infiltration of the militias that had assisted the Americans in toppling the regime. In addition, the small civil service fell apart as the huge international effort diverted skills and knowledge so that poorly paid government employees were ready to take lower-level but better-paid positions (e.g., as drivers or interpreters) in international agencies or NGOs.⁷ In Iraq, the newly established Coalition Provisional Authority further undermined the state by two decrees. First they dismissed all former members of the Ba’ath Party, effectively denuding government service of all skilled people, since membership in the Ba’ath Party had been a necessary condition for promotion. Secondly they dismantled the army, thereby removing the one unifying security service and humiliating and impoverishing the very people who had taken off their uniforms and allowed the Americans to intervene (and who still had access to weapons).

Conventional military force cannot rebuild states. At the time of the invasions, the general view in the United States, expressed forcefully by both Colin Powell, the secretary of state, and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, was that the job of the military was fighting wars and that soldiers should not be used for what Powell dismissively called “constabulary duties.”⁸ “The President must remember,” wrote Rice in Foreign Affairs, “that the military is a special instrument. It is lethal and it is meant to be. It is not a civilian peace force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society.”⁹ The result of this kind of thinking was a security vacuum and the beginnings of the vortex of violence. While the Americans in Afghanistan continued to hunt for Al-Qaeda leaders through Operation Enduring Freedom, the internationally authorizd NATO force, ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), which might have acted as a “peace force,” was initially confined to Kabul. In Iraq, the Americans did nothing to prevent the widespread looting that followed the invasion (except to protect the oil ministry and oil installations), allowing the loss of irreplaceable ancient objects and manuscripts from museums that are part of the world’s civilizational heritage. “Stuff happens,” was Donald Rumsfeld’s famously laconic response.

Nor was there a serious civilian effort to reconstruct the state. Much more was done in Afghanistan than in Iraq. The United Nations led a nation-building process based on the Bonn Agreement, which had brought together all of the different Afghan factions and power brokers except the Taliban. Even so, the process was hampered by the continued American reliance on the Northern Alliance, which brought the former commanders (or warlords) and their militias into the government, and also by the lack of security outside Kabul.

In Iraq, inexperienced Republican staffers sat in the protected green zone—a large area of Baghdad where the Coalition Provisional Authority was based. Grass and palm trees, fountains and pools, palaces and rose gardens offered a calm environment for coalition staff, who were beavering away, trying to introduce “off the shelf” models of democracy in Iraq. They developed a twelve-step plan for introducing democracy, and one official told Kaldor in November 2003 that “we have to finish this quickly because we know best how to do democracy; political pressure will force us to hand over sovereignty to Iraqis who don’t know how to do it as well as us.” At that time there were signs all over the green zone saying “What have you done for Iraq today?” Kaldor met consultants running training courses on how to be a civil servant with flip charts and “facilitated session techniques.” As the instructors explained what they were doing, they kept stumbling over the name of the country, confusing it with the various places where they had done the same thing—Croatia, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Afghanistan. . . . And millions of dollars were being spent on American contractors like Creative Associates International, Inc., and Research Triangle International, who were supposed to teach Iraqis how to have civil society.

Traveling around the red zone (i.e., unsafe areas in Iraq) in 2003 and 2004, Kaldor met with many groups, including the intellectuals in the House of Wisdom, women’s groups who had organized support for the victims of Saddam Hussein, and student groups who were building their own dormitories after American forces had commandeered the university dormitories. She visited the Hewar (Dialogue) Art Gallery, which was established by a well-known artist who left the Ba’ath Party at the time of the invasion of Kuwait. Here, artists could exhibit their work and meet and talk with foreign buyers in a café. Kaldor drank dried-lime tea with artists from the group Najeen (Survivors), who had openly opposed the regime. She also talked to the Council of Muslim Clerics—the Sunni clerics who were the main source of political and moral authority for many of those who had been implicated in the Ba’athist regime and who were to become the backbone of the insurgency. The meeting took place in a huge mosque that had been built in celebration of the “mother of all battles” (Saddam Hussein’s description of the first Gulf war). The cavernous structure featured minarets designed to look like rockets and was built around water in the shape of the Arab world.

But few of these people had much contact with the Coalition Forces and their partners, hidden away in the green zone. Instead, the Coalition Forces relied on expats like the former halal butcher from North London whom Kaldor met who was made policy planner in the newly created ministry of defense. When an interim Iraqi government was eventually established, along with a political process leading to elections, it was organized largely by a bevy of foreign and Iraqi-exile advisers who rarely left the green zone. Moreover, influenced by the experience of the former Yugoslavia, the political process was heavily shaped by ethno-sectarian considerations so that when, in 2005, elections did take place, electoral choices were defined in sectarian terms—there were separate Kurdish, Shi’ia, and Sunni lists.

In other words, the invasions created a security and political vacuum into which rushed the typical actors of a “new war,” the elements of a twenty-first-century vortex of violence, or what has been called a “complex adaptive system”—“sprawling multi-organizational networks” that have the capacity to communicate with each other and adapt.¹⁰ One element of the vortex of violence is, of course, the insurgencies, whose stated goal is to end the occupation of both countries. In Iraq, the bulk of the insurgency was Iraqi nationalist and Sunni Islamist and arose more or less spontaneously starting in the summer of 2003. The most important recruits were former military personnel. Their weapon of choice was the roadside bomb, or the improvised explosive device (IED), which became increasingly sophisticated over the course of the insurgency.

In Afghanistan, the majority of the insurgents are members of the Taliban based in the southern part of the country. There are also smaller insurgent groups in other areas—for instance, the Haqqani network (linked to a series of daring attacks like the Serena Hotel bombing in January 2008 and the attempted assassination of President Karzai) and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, which has been fighting since the Soviet occupation. As in Iraq, these groups fuse nationalism with a severe form of Salafist Islam, which harks back to the early years of Islam.

Al-Qaeda is present in both Iraq and Afghanistan, although it was not evident in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion.¹¹ Al-Qaeda is a global organization and is much more antipolitical than the locally based insurgent groups. In effect, its goal is the struggle against the West. It specializes in grisly, well-publicized attacks, especially suicide attacks, and in communications and information. The invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq acted as a magnet for jihadists all over the world and have greatly expanded their field of operations and opportunities for training and experience.

It was Al-Qaeda that was responsible for gruesome public executions of Western hostages, and it was Al-Qaeda that fomented the sectarian violence in Iraq, so that the insurgency morphed into a civil war, with spectacular attacks on Shi’ia areas and monuments. The most celebrated was the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, one of the most important Shi’ia shrines in the world, on February 26, 2006.

Another element of the vortex of violence is local militias of various kinds. There are tribal militias in Afghanistan and Iraq. Tribes are often considered traditional structures, but in both countries tribes have been reinvented in response to colonialism, war, and the modern state. Thus, in Iraq, tribes are really common-interest groups with some element of clan or kinship. Whereas traditional tribes were rural organizations, in Iraq, rural-urban tribal networks developed during the Saddam period both, because Saddam Hussein increasingly relied on the tribes for security, and because personal ties became more important with the decline of social welfare and the crushing of civil society.¹² Many tribal militias were linked to insurgent groups. For example, the Zobai tribe was closely associated with the Revolutionary Brigades and the Islamic Army of Iraq. In Afghanistan, tribes have sustained local networks and often work with the Taliban and other insurgent groups, partly out of fear and partly because they are disillusioned with the Afghan government.

In Afghanistan, there are also militias controlled by former commanders who are now allied to the government or even part of the government, serving as provincial governors or ministers. Consider the case of Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord who controlled a northern fiefdom before 2001 and who led the horsemen who liberated Mazar-i-Sharif in 2001 with great brutality. (Hundreds of his captives were locked inside containers and suffocated to death.) Until 2008, he was commander in chief of the Afghan army. Other commanders include Nazir Mohammed, who runs the provincial capital Faizabad and whose militias are supposed to protect NATO, and Ismail Khan, who dominates the western city of Herat.

In Iraq, probably the most important armed militias are attached to political parties and are part of the sectarian competition to control the state apparatus. The Peshmerger are attached to the Kurdish parties who resisted Saddam Hussein in the north. Some militias were created by parties in exile; the most important of these is the Badr Corps, which is attached to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Of the militias created since 2001, the most important is the Mahdi army of Muqtada al-Sadr, known as Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM). Both the Badr Corps and the JAM infiltrated the ministry of interior and the police between 2005 and 2007. One of the former commanders of the Badr Corps, Bayan Jabr, was minister of the interior from 2005 to 2006.

Starting in 2005, these Iraqi groups engaged in sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing reminiscent of the Yugoslav wars. While the Sunni groups favored the use of explosives in Shi’ia areas or monuments, the Shi’ia groups used death squads to kill prominent Sunnis in spectacular ways and to take over neighborhoods, expelling the residents. They would seize Sunni properties, including houses, villas, and stores that had belonged to the Baghdad bourgeoisie since Ottoman times, and rent them to Shi’ia families or loot them. They would extort money from local merchants, festoon the area with Shi’ia flags, and infiltrate, co-opt, or replace the local police. They would take over gas stations and control the essential sale of gas, propane, and kerosene. And they would levy extensive local “taxation,” in effect setting up a sort of parallel system. Intellectuals and people in the middle class were particularly targeted; hundreds of academics were killed during the worst of the violence.

A third element of the vortex of violence is criminal groups. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein released criminals from prison shortly before the invasion. The most important criminal activity is oil smuggling, which can take various forms, including siphoning off oil at its source and drilling holes in pipelines. During the height of the violence, tribes who were paid to protect pipelines developed a profitable business, siphoning the oil before protecting the pipeline. Other groups were involved in smuggling historic artifacts, taking hostages, kidnapping for ransom, looting, and pillaging. In Afghanistan, the most important criminal activity is the production and sale of opium. Afghanistan is responsible for some 93 percent of the world’s poppy production, largely concentrated in the south and linked to the Taliban. Criminal groups are also engaged in timber smuggling, illicit gem smuggling, human trafficking, kidnapping, and taking hostages.

All of these groups are interrelated. The insurgents and the militias are involved in crime to finance their organizations. And the criminal groups use political violence as a cover for their criminal activities. The insurgents are engaged in internal political violence, and many of the militias, especially JAM, are also part of the insurgency. Many of these groups are organized into loosely connected networks of cells with more or less centralized discipline. None of them are confined to Iraq and Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is, of course, a global network, recruiting young men throughout the Middle East and Europe as well as Asia. The Afghan groups mostly operate from Pakistan and have close ties with both Pakistani groups and the Pakistan intelligence service Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which helped to build up the mujahideen during the Soviet occupation and supported the Taliban. The Iraqi groups, both insurgents and militias, receive money and technical expertise from Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Iran seems to have helped to develop increasingly sophisticated IEDs for all sides. All of the groups also depend on remittances from families abroad.

Thus the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan involves a multifaceted, shifting pattern of attacks against American forces and their allies, widespread human-rights violations by warlords and their militias, and, of course, criminal violence—the deadly components of a twenty-first-century vortex of violence, or a “new war.” While some participants may have specific political goals, others are using the nexus of violence and criminality to enrich themselves, and yet others are using it as an opportunity to settle personal scores or merely for excitement. It is sometimes assumed that the cycle of violence involves an ever-deepening cycle of retaliation as one group seeks revenge for an attack by the other and vice versa. But actually the attacks can be viewed as a sort of legitimization for violence that is usually directed at civilians rather than against other fighting groups. In other words, the cycle of violence provides a sort of cover, a sanction for illicit and brutal behaviour.

The fundamental problem has been the inability to establish effective institutions of law and order. In Iraq, the government is composed of a coalition of sectarian interests who cannot agree on shared policy, and who infiltrate the security sector, even though since mid-2007 some steps have been taken to establish a more centralized nationalist government. In Afghanistan, the problem of impunity for commanders, not just for past crimes, but for what is happening now, erodes any legitimacy President Karzai might have once enjoyed. Because there is no trust in government (or in outside forces), people turn to local strongmen, insurgents, and militias for protection.

The main victims of all this violence are civilians. The killing of civilians in American attacks is considered “collateral damage.” Civilians are killed in insurgent attacks because they do not have the same protection as soldiers. They are the victims of human-rights violations and ethnic cleansing. One of the most telling aspects of this sorry story that illustrates the value that is put on the lives of American and British soldiers is that no one knows the full extent of civilian casualties.

The deaths of soldiers are carefully recorded, but civilian deaths are not counted. Iraq Body Count, which is based on media reports, estimated that over 90,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq up to April 2009. Figures estimated by the British medical journal The Lancet, using the epidemiological method of interviewing sample families, are much higher. They suggest some 650,000 excess deaths between March 2003 and the middle of 2006, of which over 600,000 were due to violence.¹³ The really intense period of violence when 3,000 to 4,000 people were killed each month from mid-2005 to mid-2007 was after the period of the Lancet estimate.

In Afghanistan, systematic collection of civilian fatality data only began in 2007. The United Nations now maintains a database, but it is not publicly accessible. According to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), some 1,523 people were killed in 2007 and 2,118 in 2008 (these numbers are thought to be an underestimate by Afghan NGOs particularly the Independent Commission on Human Rights). According to these figures, slightly more people were killed by the Taliban and their allies than by NATO and government forces. Thirty-two percent of casualties were the result of suicide and IED attacks; 24 percent were the result of air strikes; and 20 percent were criminal murders.¹⁴

Afghans constitute the largest refugee population in the world, mostly as a result of earlier wars and the Taliban regime. Since 2001, over 4 million refugees returned to Afghanistan. Yet, as of January 2007, the Congressional Research Service estimates that there are probably 3.5 million registered and unregistered Afghans still in Pakistan and Iran, 2.46 million in the former and nearly 1 million in the latter.¹⁵ And many returned refugees are leaving again. Official estimates suggest that there are also over 200,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), of which over half were displaced by earlier tragedies. However, the number of IDPs seems to have increased sharply from 2007 especially in the south of the country.¹⁶

The conventional military tactics adopted by American military forces were a significant contributing factor to the violence. Both during and after the invasions, the United States adopted “old war” tactics in complex, twenty-first-century, “new war” conditions. In pursuing Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and in responding to the growing insurgency in Iraq, American military forces largely stayed in their bases, venturing out primarily to attack the enemy. Confronted with the brutal reality of the insurgencies, coalition troops seemed to default to military logic. As in earlier, similar counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam and Algeria: the excessive use of force; widespread detention, torture, and abuse as a means of extracting information; and hatred on both sides inevitably followed. The pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib were published while Kaldor was in Iraq, but they made much less impact there since reports of torture and abuse were already widespread.

The events in Fallujah in April 2004 illustrate the overriding nature of military logic in the early years of the war in Iraq. The Marines Expeditionary Force had recently replaced the 82nd Airborne as the force in charge of this restive city. The Marines went to Fallujah with the explicit intention of turning a new page, trying to win over the population while isolating the insurgents who used the city as a base from which to launch attacks throughout the country. The Marine commander confidently predicted that his troops would be playing football with the locals in a few weeks. What happened, however, was the exact opposite. An attempt to surgically remove the terrorists gradually deteriorated into a siege and an all-out war when four American security contractors were killed and their bodies mutilated in front of television cameras.

Iraqis were pushed to rally behind their worst enemies—assorted Arab jihadists and regime loyalists who gathered there from all over the country. Once they started taking casualties, the Marines’ overriding objective turned from winning hearts and minds to avenging fallen comrades, “pacify[ing] the city,” and “finish[ing] the job.” Only intense political pressure allowed the establishment of the cease-fire that paved the way for the subsequent security arrangement whereby control of the city was handed over to a former Republican Guard commander. The anti-American sentiment caused by the attack allowed insurgents including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, to return to the city. And in November 2004, U.S. forces attacked again, causing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, much physical destruction, and thousands of civilian casualties.

Fallujah confirmed, for many Iraqis, an overriding impression that soon everyone’s house would be broken into, civilians fired upon, and young men arbitrarily arrested. It was not possible to be in Iraq in the early years after the invasion without experiencing firsthand the nervy young soldiers at checkpoints and searches. Kaldor’s car was stopped and searched because of a tip-off saying that someone in a black Opel was about to blow up the Sheraton Hotel. At every checkpoint, ominous signs warned in English and Arabic that troops were “Authorized to use live fire.” In addition, of course, people were afraid of the presence of the Coalition Forces because they are targets for terrorist attacks and because of their habit of shooting indiscriminately when attacked.

It was this experience of Coalition Forces’ casual attitude toward civilian casualties; the practice of detaining young men, undermining their dignity and inadvertently creating opportunities for them to be recruited to the various armed groups; and lack of respect for civilians—combined with a general absence of jobs and normal activities—that contributed to burgeoning insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan under cover of which other kinds of sectarian and criminal violence started to evolve. In Iraq, the perception that the Americans were on the side of the Shi’ia helped to foment sectarian conflict. Above all, the conventional military approach makes it extremely difficult to gather useful intelligence that might guide a more effective approach. Sitting in their compounds or in the green zone, American commanders simply did not know what was going on; they only had satellite information, which helped them pinpoint the whereabouts of specific enemies, but did nothing to increase their understanding of the politics.

“There were 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq [in 2006],” wrote Thomas Ricks, “but they were becoming irrelevant as fighting swirled around the tall walls of their bases. To a surprising degree, they were off-stage and ill-informed. U.S. military intelligence gathering tended to focus on two sorts of events, anything that affected American troops and the killing of Iraqis. Other action affecting Iraqi civilians—kidnappings, rape, robberies, acts of extortion, and other forms of intimidation—didn’t appear on the U.S. radar. As one soldier in the 4th infantry brigade put it, all that was ‘background noise.’”¹⁷

According to Ricks, the “old war” in Iraq ended on November 19, 2005, when a Marine squad went on a killing spree after being hit by a roadside bomb in Haditha; they killed twenty-four Iraqis, including children. The subsequent report by Army Major General Eldon A. Bargewell found that the killings had been carried out “indiscriminately” and that the leaders of the Marine command thought it was the right approach: “All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even if in significant numbers, as routine.” ¹⁸ This was the event that started a rethinking of the military approach that was to be associated with the surge in Iraq, although not yet in Afghanistan.

Elements of the new strategy in Iraq had already been tried out in Tal Afar by Colonel H. R. McMaster and in Ramadi by Colonel Sean MacFarland. While the focus was on Baghdad, the strategy involved the establishment in many Iraqi cities of joint security stations staffed by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi police. In Sunni areas, the aim was to make it harder for Shi’ia militias to infiltrate. And in Shi’ia areas, “gated communities” were established with perimeter security measures such as barriers, walls, and checkpoints and with hardened markets, shops, and public places to prevent explosive attacks by Sunnis. The joint security stations were also supposed to provide a way of mentoring Iraqi forces and ensuring that they performed better; at the same time, the presence of Iraqis may have helped to improve American attitudes toward Iraqi civilians. Petraeus’s injunction to “live amongst the people” was of key importance. And this was not just a matter of improved knowledge and understanding of the situation, it also led to greater empathy and respect for Iraqis. As one senior officer told Kaldor, “Everyone has a humanitarian conscience in the end.”

A key feature of the new strategy was the treatment of detainees. “You had to identify the hard core and remove them,” General Petraeus told Kaldor, “and it resulted in a transformation in behavior. We introduced a new program in the camps including moderation in religion, civic education, literacy, and sports. Some 18,000 were released last year [2008]. There are now less than 14,000 in Camp Bucca. Only 200 had to be rearrested; that’s much lower than in U.S. prisons.”

Despite these efforts, violence continued to intensify until the middle of 2007. Two factors were responsible for the drop in violence after July 2007. One was the Awakening. This was the change of sides by the Sunni tribes. The Sunni tribes had begun to distance themselves from Al-Qaeda as early as 2005. There were plenty of reasons. They rejected some of Al-Qaeda’s more horrific tactics and didn’t like Al-Qaeda’s version of Islam. They objected to the way Al-Qaeda was muscling in on their communities and, in particular, taking control of their sources of revenue. One story has it that Al-Qaeda killed a sheikh who refused to give daughters of his tribe to them in marriage. Some tribes first approached the U.S. Marines for help in defeating Al-Qaeda in 2005, but it was not until the end of 2006 that the U.S. forces responded to these overtures. Before that, tribal efforts had failed disastrously and led to great brutality and intimidation from Al-Qaeda. The first concerted campaign was in Ramadi, and it had a dramatic effect on security. Sheikh Sattar al-Rishawi, a smuggler and highway robber of the Dulaimi tribe, joined with Fasal al-Gaoud, a former governor of Anbar whose Hamza forces came from the Albu Mahal tribe, to establish the Anbar Salvation Council. After joining forces with the Americans, Sattar was made “counterinsurgency coordinator” and the tribal militias were named “emergency response units.” (Despite, or maybe because of his efforts, Sattar was assassinated in September 2007.) Newly created neighborhood-watch organizations—euphemistically called “concerned local citizens” or, as the militias preferred, “sons of Iraq”—began providing information, protecting families, and patrolling streets along with the Shi’ia-dominated army and police. They were paid $360 a month by the Americans. The model was copied throughout Iraq.

The other factor was the Sadrist cease-fire of August 2007. The reasons for the cease-fire are various: ethnic cleansing in Baghdad was virtually complete; the decline in Sunni violence had weakened Sadrist legitimacy; the Sadrist militias were becoming more undisciplined, acting more and more autonomously, and needed to be reined in; and there was a growing popular backlash against Sadrist tactics. Muqtada’s orders for a cease-fire were largely obeyed; this led to a dramatic fall in anti-Sunni violence.

What was the role of the new U.S. strategy in all this? In the end, Iraqis themselves were substantially responsible for the decline in violence. But the presence of Coalition Forces on the streets (which drew Al-Qaeda fire away from Shi’ia communities) helped to lift the pall of fear; the provision of basic services; American responsiveness to Sunni overtures; the readiness of Coalition Forces to act as local mediators—all of these things may have created space in which deals could be made. The decline in violence was the result of local cease-fires made with some 779 militias composed of 10 to 800 men each. As David Kilcullen, General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency adviser, put it,

The original concept of the Joint Campaign Plan was that we [the Coalition and the Iraqi government] would create security, which would in turn create space for a “grand bargain” at the national level. Instead, in 2007, we saw the exact opposite: a series of local political deals displaced extremists, resulting in a major improvement in security at the local level, and the national government then began to jump on board with the program. Instead of Coalition-led top-down reconciliation, this process is Iraqi-led, bottom-up and based on civil society rather than national politics.²¹

General Petraeus has insisted that the decline in violence is fragile. Much depends on whether the government can overcome its sectarian character and act on behalf of Iraqis as a whole, on whether the Sunni constituency feels represented, on whether enough tribal militias can be integrated into the security services, on whether the demands of the poor who are attracted to the Sadrist movement can be met, and on whether the issue of the status of Northern Iraq, especially the role of Kirkuk, can be resolved. Many have warned of the dangers of embracing the “concerned local citizens,” or “sons of Iraq,” groups and of ceding control of some areas to informal tribal structures. “You have taken a crocodile as a pet,” one Iraqi official warned. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has managed to establish himself as a national leader, not least because of the action he took against Shi’ia militias in Basra (described in the next chapter). But in 2009, there was a sinister spike in Sunni violence against Shi’ia areas—probably a prelude to elections by tribal, sectarian, and criminal elements who hope to unseat the present government.

Petraeus was subsequently appointed as commander of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees both Iraq and Afghanistan. Can the strategy used in Iraq be applied in Afghanistan? Petraeus is the first to point out that no two situations are the same, even though the principles of counterinsurgency as he interprets it (secure and serve the population; separate the reconcilables from the irreconcilables) remain relevant. There is much hope that tribal militias who fight alongside the Taliban out of fear, as a source of income, or because they do not trust the Afghan government can be weaned away from the Taliban at local levels. One of General Petraeus’s first acts was to issue a tactical directive reducing the use of air strikes.

General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan since June 2009, produced a comprehensive report in August 2009 proposing an integrated military-civilian campaign. The plan goes even further than Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy for Iraq. It emphasizes protecting civilians rather than defeating enemies and even uses the term human security. It covers such issues as sustainable jobs, access to justice, governance and communication, and the importance of the Afghan role in all this. It deals with “irreconcilables” through isolation rather than direct attack.²² And already greater emphasis is being placed on creating “population hubs” and “gated communities.”

Afghanistan, however, is more demanding because it is more diverse and simply larger than Iraq. There is also the huge difficulty of imposing unity of command and implementing changes of strategy within a sprawling multinational organization. There are two military commands in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO command, which involve many different national commands. There is also a separate civilian effort under UN auspices, not to mention myriad NGOs and private contractors. It will take a long time to shift the enemy-centric strategic culture of most armed forces. What is more, the war is spreading to Pakistan and Central Asia, and it is not yet clear whether Pakistani efforts to clear the Taliban from the border will make things better or worse.

But perhaps the fundamental obstacle to counterinsurgency is the fact that counterinsurgency is not actually human security, however the term is defined. In counterinsurgency, human security, or population security, is a tactic, not a strategy. The end goal is not the security of Afghans or Iraqis—that is a means to an end. The end goal is the defeat of America’s enemies, a point that General Petraeus and others frequently repeat. “The fundamental objective in Afghanistan,” said General Petraeus at the Munich Security Conference in February 2009, “is to ensure that transnational terrorists are not able to re-establish the sanctuaries they enjoyed prior to 9/11.” And among the many items on his list of what has to be done—which includes such instructions as “live alongside the people” (“alongside,” not “among,” because of Afghan cultural sensibilities), “drink lots of cups of tea,” provide basic services, stimulate local economic development, and help establish legitimate forms of governance—is the instruction to “pursue the enemy relentlessly.” A human security approach may involve pursuing the enemy, but it would be a means to the end of human security rather than the other way around. Even though McChrystal’s report puts much less emphasis on pursuing enemies than did the Iraqi strategy, this is not reflected in the political rhetoric. On the contrary, the emphasis of President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, or the U.S. Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, is on the pursuit of Al-Qaeda.

As we argued in the introduction, this matters both politically and practically. In political terms, a strategic narrative of human security that is actually put into practice would greatly help to garner local support and to increase the coherence of the multinational effort. The narrative has to address not only the insurgency but also the continuing problems of human insecurity that Afghans—especially women—face as a result of the combination of poverty, crime, and human-rights violations. Many Afghans feel they face an unsavory choice between the Taliban, whom they do not want to return to power, and a repressive, corrupt, and ineffective government. What this means is that the problems of governance—of the establishment of trustworthy law-and-order institutions and legitimate sources of livelihood—are much more important than the pursuit of the “enemy.” Finding ways to remove the impunity of former commanders and other government officials and to build a relationship between government and civil society are priorities in both Afghanistan and neighboring countries.

The focus on the enemy has meant continuing air strikes, often by unmanned drones called Predators, against suspected Taliban or Al-Qaeda positions, especially in Pakistan. One of the most significant technological changes that has resulted from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the increased use of robots. U.S. forces had no robots at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. By the end of 2004, there were 150 robots; the numbers increased to 2,400 in 2005, 5,000 in 2006, and 12,000 in 2008.²³ Robots can search for mines and explosives, greatly improve surveillance and reconnaissance, and carry out targeted attacks without risking the lives of American soldiers. They can vary from the expensive Global Hawk, which will replace the U-2 spy plane and can stay in the air for thirty-five hours, to the small Raven, which can be thrown by a soldier like a javelin and stay in the air for ninety minutes. Jeff Hofgard, a Boeing executive, described to Kaldor and Beebe the new toy being developed by his company: it will be the size of a baseball, capable of seeing over walls, and easy to control because it uses “guess what—an Xbox” (a popular video-game console).

Drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, have been widely used to identify and kill insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan. This was, for example, how Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed. A tip-off from Jordanian intelligence suggested that Zarqawi was increasingly listening to the advice of a certain cleric. U.S. drones followed the cleric twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and eventually tailed the cleric to a farmhouse where he was meeting with Zarqawi. According to Peter Singer, “the farmhouse was then taken out by a pinpoint air strike, guided in by lasers and GPS coordinates courtesy of the drone.”²⁴

Many of the people interviewed for this book expressed great enthusiasm for the use of Predators against Al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. Predators are very light unmanned aerial vehicles that can stay in the air for twenty-four hours; they have two cameras and a laser designator to lock onto targets. They are operated from drone bases in Nevada and other locations in the United States as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan. General Tommy Franks described the Predator as “my most capable sensor in hunting down and killing Al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership” and “critical to our fight.”²⁵ The Predator reportedly has been very efficient in destroying the Al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.

Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, who has written about the growing military use of robots, says that robots are the American answer to suicide bombers. They allow for much more cost-effective attacks. Robots, like suicide bombers, don’t have to worry about risking their lives. This raises ethical questions about whether war can be carried on remotely. Even if it is true, and this is not at all clear, that the Predator does not cause civilian casualties, the morality of killing enemies remotely is not only questionable but also highly problematic in political terms. General David Barno, former U.S. commander in Afghanistan and now director of the National Defense University, says, “[W]hen we attack like that in the middle of the night even if we don’t kill any civilians we are seen as cowards, hitting from afar in the middle of the night. We should go in there on foot in daylight with Afghan elders and arrest them.”²⁶

For anyone not schooled in the current debates in U.S. military circles, the semantic change seems rather bemusing. For Europeans, for example, counterterror means policing and intelligence, while counterinsurgency calls to mind the excesses of Vietnam or Algeria. And the term long war is reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld’s early description of the War on Terror as a long war that would last fifty years. But the problem is not merely semantic.

At a tactical level, counterinsurgency is, first and foremost, a military doctrine, seen through a military prism. In particular, rules of engagement are determined by the “laws of war” (jus in bello) rather than by civil law, which offers guidelines for policemen. Thus, a judgment about whether hitting a military target justifies civilian casualties must be made differently from the same judgment in a domestic or civil context. The war-minded way of thinking is integrated into military units, however much they are drilled in the importance of population security. As long as population security is a tactic rather than a goal or a strategy, the starting point for soldiers will be how to identify targets or disrupt networks rather than the needs of the people. This means they risk deploying force that will escalate the conflict. There may indeed be times when military action has to be used against terrorists or insurgents, putting civilian lives at risk. But this is never the priority under a human-security approach. Moreover, the starting point for a judgment about when to use lethal force is different; for a human-security approach, the starting point is self-defense or the defense of a third party. The balance of judgment is, therefore, more likely to be on the side of saving lives. Even though McChrystal’s report goes a long way in the direction of human security, its implementation is likely to be hampered by the fact that it was his report and not the report of civilian leaders such as Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special representative to the area, or Kai Eide, the UN’s special representative.

At a strategic level, counterinsurgency, and indeed “long war,” remains situated within a framework of “us” and “them.” Which is to say, the equation is framed with twentieth century algebra rather than a twenty-first century calculus. It is about the conflict between the West and the global network of Islamic extremists even if it is no longer framed as the War on Terror. It still appears to have nostalgic remnants of the 1945 consensus—something that is perhaps required for domestic American consumption. A human security approach is about how to make everyone safe; it dispenses with easy dualism. When Kaldor asked General Petraeus if the new counterinsurgency doctrine had replaced the traditional war-fighting roles of the U.S. armed forces, he stated very clearly that counterinsurgency is just one element of the spectrum of conflict and that it remains important to prepare for major interstate wars. Human security is about a common global effort to make people safe. Of course, interstate war is perhaps the biggest threat to human security, but the threat lies in the threat of war itself, not a foreign attack; it is a threat to all human beings, not just to Americans. Traditional war thinking will always find an echo among competing powers or in notions of jihad. It legitimizes Russian militarists, Chinese traditionalists, and, of course, angry young Muslim men.

The War on Terror, as it was fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, unleashed a complex and lethal twenty-first century phenomenon on which the global networks of terror feed; it is engulfing many of the places mentioned by Bush in his War on Terror speeches—the suburbs of European cities, and large parts of Africa and Asia. The situation is actually much more dangerous than it was in 2001—and in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, not to mention Central and Eastern Africa—the challenges are mind-boggling. The effort to produce security using twentieth-century notions has actually consumed security for the twenty-first century. There is a huge tension in current thinking. On the one hand, the new counterinsurgency tactics are an extraordinary step forward that should in no way be dismissed. The shift from a mentality of killing to the idea of population security marks a definitive break with the dominant assumptions in the U.S. military. On the other hand, the language of war and counterinsurgency; the continued enthusiasm for technological solutions, as signified by the sinister evolution of combat robots and Predator drones; and the dominance of military actors—could easily overturn the gains of “living amongst the people.”

Learning the Right Lessons?