9
If war loses its integrity as a common interpretive structure for strategic narrative to rely upon, actions in conflict may well be subject to significantly differing interpretations. This establishes a tension at the core of the strategic narrative that can pull it apart: for strategic narrative to be legitimate in the eyes of a strategic audience, its rational argument needs to find resonance with the identity of that audience in human, emotional terms; emotional interpretation legitimises the rational narrative.
Yet as the differences in socio-political identity between strategic audiences proliferate in an ever more interconnected world, no single narrative can usually satisfy everyone. That is, to define victory absolutely would mean universally to convince strategic audiences of victory, or success, in one’s own terms, which is generally impossible. This chapter examines how to stabilise the relationship between the rational and emotive components of strategic narrative—logos and pathos—in order to generate a sense of legitimacy and to gain purchase on strategic audiences.
Three themes are suggested: the centrality of the moral component, or ethos; the power of historical association; and the necessity for liberal powers to avoid literalism in their arguments with fundamentalists, and instead present a strategic vision confident in its own values.
Strategic narrative and ethos
The First World War came to be justified by several participants through explanations that went beyond national interest. President Woodrow Wilson in his speech announcing the US Declaration of War on Germany on 2 April 1917 appealed to universal motives:
It is a war against all nations… It is a challenge to all mankind… Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion… Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up among the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.
While such justifications make apparently powerful appeals to domestic and worldwide audiences, the idea of fighting for universal values is clearly a paradox since there would be no enemy if those values were genuinely universal. Given the scale of destruction in the First World War, an ironic dimension can be detected in the post-war label of a ‘war to end all wars’. The need to bind people together through narratives that appeal to ‘universal’ values, which are more heavily located in the emotional than the rational rhetorical domain, is at odds with the inherent fragility of such universal claims. This is a difficult tension that often finds expression in contemporary conflict.
In a highly interconnected world, rational strategic narratives based on national interest, which might equate to Aristotle’s logos, are less able in a conflict scenario to gain broad traction, as strategic audiences beyond the enemy, and beyond the state, proliferate in their diversity. This is common sense. Why would Afghan civilians, for example, support coalition efforts (or even be passive) in Afghanistan if the coalition was purely there for its own interests, and not for the well-being of Afghans? Strategists delve increasingly into the emotional domain, pathos, to gain purchase on target audiences beyond the enemy and the state. Thus ‘freedom’, for example, becomes a strategic aim. President Bush in November 2003 spoke about the ‘forward strategy of freedom’ at a speech in London.1 In terms of rhetoric, fighting for freedom suggests an experience which can be universally shared by the target audiences and thus bind them together.
The experience of applying a forward strategy of freedom suggests that emotionally-based narratives are highly problematic. Many audiences did not interpret freedom in the same way as President Bush. The key tension in strategic narrative in the context of contemporary globalisation is between universal themes, which tend to be situated in the emotional domain, and themes based on particular political agendas, which tend to be defined in rational terms. Strategy has to keep them in an uneasy relationship to maintain coherence.
The difficulty of so doing can be illustrated with reference to coalition aims in Afghanistan. Over the course of the conflict the following sets of objectives, which have all appeared at various points, have often competed and clashed with one another rather than be mutually reinforcing: democracy, development, drug eradication, women’s rights, the removal of the Taliban, the denial of Afghanistan to al-Qaeda and its associated syndicates, the credibility of NATO, regional stability, the denial of a safe haven to the Pakistani Taliban, the commitment to the Afghan people.
To deal with the problem of universality of appeal versus national interests, other countries have opted for a simple, and sometimes brutal, alternative: to define their strategic audiences far more narrowly. This is the equivalent of a political approach in domestic politics that focuses on the satisfaction of a narrow part of the electorate without concern for the alienation of other audiences. Russia, for example, has in a sense succeeded in securing Chechnya in two wars. The Sri Lankan government forces also seem to have succeeded in their war against the Tamil Tigers. However, the definition of success in both of these instances is partial. The extent of human rights violations committed in these cases qualifies the recognition of victory in the eyes of much of the international community. To operate in this way is to make a Faustian pact, as the resentment which such methods inevitably will arouse may come to compromise the stability of any strategic effect achieved in the shortterm. The use by liberal powers of extraordinary rendition is another example of such practice. The moral high ground, once evacuated, is very hard to regain.2
How can this problem be resolved, or at least mitigated? Strategy needs to pay attention to the third rhetorical resource: ethos. Ethos stabilises and insulates strategic effect, which otherwise can be over-exposed to the conflicting relationship between rational and emotional narrative, which, in terms of Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric, can broadly be equated with logos and pathos.
Strategic narrative is permanently aspirational. Strategy is necessarily arrogant in the sense that it seeks to impose a permanence of meaning against the challenge of future interpretation.
The Pyrrhic victory is an extreme example. In fact the outcomes of most wars have evolved, as their consequences mesh with the future and people interpret the outcome—the meaning—of the war differently. The two world wars of the twentieth century were seen as victories for Britain by the majority of British people at the time; they also, however, broke the British Empire, a result that will itself be read differently by various constituencies. Vietnam could legitimately have been interpreted as a partial American success, or at least a draw, when President Richard Nixon declared that the 1973 Paris peace agreement brought ‘peace with honour in Vietnam and South East Asia’. That view was re-interpreted after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was, to my mind legitimately, not considered a failure by the USSR at the time (and Western analysis has been heavily distorted by a victor’s view of the Cold War’s end); the USSR had handed power over to a relatively stable Afghan state headed by President Najibullah. Although his army suffered reverses, it stabilised the situation and decisively defeated the Mujahideen at the battle of Jalalabad in 1989. (The most dangerous moment for an insurgency is often when it has to convert to a conventional force finally to topple the state forces; since conventional high-intensity battle is far more complex and resource-intensive than guerrilla warfare, insurgencies often fail at this point. The Mujahideen here are not the only example of this; note the same phenomenon with the Tamil Tigers. This factor will, I think, come to play a role in the current Afghan conflict too.)
The more genuine reason for the collapse of the Najibullah regime is fairly obvious: the collapse of the USSR itself in 1991, which had been funding the Afghan government. However, for the USSR, a perception of having at least forced a stalemate in 1989 was seen as a failure once the Mujahideen entered Kabul. As Clausewitz himself recognised: ‘in war the result is never final’.3 The requirement to maintain the narrative—perpetually to win the argument—is enduring, not finite.
One deduction is that where the meaning of war is not compartmentalised by a common interpretive structure, strategic effect is often based on how future interpreters perceive the moral component of a strategic narrative. The British policy of appeasement in the 1930s is remembered with shame less because it was strategically unsuccessful than because it was cowardly; in one analysis Hitler’s perception of moral weakness was a key factor in the strategy’s failure from the British perspective, so the two factors were linked at the time too, not just in retrospect. In Unfinest Hour (2002) Brendan Simms documents how British policy during the Bosnian War of the 1990s was plagued by a morally questionable foreign policy.4 There may be rational reasons why Dutch troops failed to act to prevent a massacre at the Srebrenica enclave in 1995, but they have little purchase on most audiences. Troops at another safe area in Gorazde in 1994–5 were under largely the same authority and successfully prevented a massacre by taking on Serbian soldiers.
The Second World War, although globally more damaging in human terms than the First, is remembered as more purposeful because questions of right and wrong were far more distinct. The original supporters of the Iraq War today often focus on Saddam Hussein’s removal as a positive fact, despite the subsequent narrative of the conflict. Even many of those who did not support the war would agree that Saddam Hussein’s removal, in itself, was a good thing. Conversely, many of the rational reasons, such as weapon of mass destruction (WMD), or the emotional reasons, such as the general, confident, mood of ‘what next’ in the US administration after the 2001 Afghanistan success, have long since evaporated. At the time of writing it is unclear how things in Iraq will progress. However, depending on the outcome, those earlier rational reasons may be rehabilitated, or not, while Saddam Hussein’s removal is permanent. The point is that rational and emotional reasons oscillate; moral reasons are more stable.
There are some important caveats to this argument. First, one cannot construct foreign policy exclusively on the basis of moral imperative. The danger would be that it is very hard to limit moral arguments, and limitation of conflict is critical to wider international stability. State sovereignty, for example, needs to be taken into consideration. In short, there also have to be other forms of strategic rationale. Yet to gain traction on a politically diverse range of target audiences, strategic narrative in contemporary conflict may struggle if it appeals purely to national interest, which might be associated with more logos-type rational arguments; the narrative may also struggle if over-exposed to fragile universal claims more associated with the emotional domain of pathos. Appeal to ethos is a powerful binding force. However, used on its own it is also a destabilising force, as it has no obvious limit. The alternative approach is to try not to have wide appeal in the first place and to ignore wider strategic audiences, for which the Russian approach in Chechnya provides an example, but this evidently brings problems of its own.
Counter-insurgency theory stresses living among people to develop human relationships, and thereby persuading people to see the counter-insurgent in a different light. There are several instances in Afghanistan where a local inhabitant may not agree with the presence of British forces in his area, but has told a soldier he has got to know personally of an improvised explosive device (IED) ahead. The effect of living among people in the context of counter-insurgency has an extraordinary effect, which is hard to quantify in rational terms.
As a Gurkha battlegroup in Central Helmand during the summer of 2010, we found that the single greatest shift in popular perceptions of us came when we started to live among people. This meant getting out of our forward operating bases and actually permanently living in the villages in much smaller fortified compounds. The people then got to know us as other human beings. Greeting people on patrol by name makes a massive difference. Sergeant Govinda Gurung, who commanded a checkpoint, was actually clapped out by villagers, who lined the streets, when his multiple left the village at the end of their tour. The fact that this side of the narrative in Afghanistan is consistently pushed back by the more sensational emotional appeal of violent activity, even if the latter may be less prevalent in a given area, accounts for much of the quality of perceptions of contemporary conflicts.
Conversely, I often thought when I was a platoon commander that turning up to a remote village for the first time, despite our best efforts to adopt a soft posture, and despite explaining that we were here to hand out medical supplies, was, from the villagers’ perspective, rather odd. They may well have been grateful for the medical care but they were suspicious about its context. Doctors in the UK don’t typically turn up with an armed entourage! It is far easier to communicate intention if one feels at ease and trusts one’s interlocutor.
Living among the people in small outposts was also one of the key success stories of the surge in Baghdad. General Lamb in his commander’s guidance for counter-insurgency writes that ‘your morality defines your legitimacy’, and advances an association between ‘minimum force’ and ‘moral force’.5 In short, humanity often cuts across prejudice. In an information age in which public diplomacy is as important as traditional diplomatic activity, engagement with whole peoples on a human level becomes ever more necessary as a form of persuasion.
As war fuses with politics, humanitarian considerations can become the lowest common denominating cognitive unit among very diverse audiences. As time progresses, the perceived moral component of strategic narrative becomes increasingly important in the stability of strategic effect: a perceived victory does not suddenly appear as a defeat. In the longer term, strategy convinces less through Aristotle’s logos, the rational component of narrative, and pathos, emotional appeals, but more through ethos, the moral component of narrative. Moreover a strategic narrative which neglects ethos completely is in danger of finding itself illegitimate in the longer term.
Strategic narrative and history
The construction of an interpretive framework is critical to give meaning to actions in order to achieve a policy outcome. During the global financial crisis of 2008 the world looked to the US government’s actions in order to decipher the ‘pathology’ of the crisis against which to act.6 This was a combination of how the US government acted in terms of its support (or absence of support) to financial institutions and in terms of how that behaviour was situated in a broader historical framework. In Andrew Ross Sorkin’s account of the crisis, Too Big to Fail (2009), he relates an answer which Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave in response to a question asking whether this would be a second Great Depression, or another ‘lost decade’, as Japan had experienced: ‘No. Because we’ve learnt so much about them that we won’t have either’.7
In the summer of 2010 in one of the villages that our battlegroup patrolled, an old mud-walled stables is still known as the ‘British fort’. British forces occupied Gereshk and its outskirts during both the First and Second Afghan Wars, and the outpost probably dates from one of these interventions. In both cases the British backed the Barakzai tribe of central Helmand, who were traditional enemies of the Alizais in the north of the province, and in both cases provoked a fierce Alizai reaction.8 The second time the Alizais actually made common cause with the Barakzai and chased the British out of Gereshk; this led to the destruction of a British brigade at the battle of Maiwand in 1880. In 2006 British forces were drawn into the key towns of northern Helmand: Sangin, Nowzad and Musa Qala. The Alizais reacted in the same way, especially as the British deployment had been preceded by the removal of Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the Alizai provincial governor. Mike Martin has argued that, in 2006, following his dismissal due to British pressure:
Sher Mohammad, the excluded powerbrokers and the cross-border elements simply played to the Helmandi feeling that the British were historical enemies and that the deployment was ‘revenge for Maiwand’. In a scenario that could have happened 170 years earlier, the British had managed to align previously antagonistic groups again, and the uneducated population did not know any better than the narrative that ‘They [the British] have come to oppress your wives, they are infidels’, with religion being used to sharpen grievances felt.9
History matters. Strategic narrative, which effectively provides the interpretive structure that seeks to give particular meaning to tactical actions, must take this into account. The British did not do so in 2006 and suffered, when many Helmandis, especially in the north of the province, came to see what Britain genuinely intended to be a reconstruction mission as a rehearsal of older grievances. If history is ‘a dialogue between the past and the present’, the ability to tap into, and channel, historical currents, is important in the construction of effective strategy. The power of how people perceive history can be a powerful ‘force multiplier’, or can alternatively be a huge drain on resources where strategy tries to swim upstream against historical perception.10
This theme is more familiar in the context of domestic politics. Competition over the interpretation of American history (in rhetoric which, for example, stresses the intentions of the founding fathers, and the polarisation of responses to movements such as the Tea Party, whose very name claims a particular interpretation of US history) is at the heart of current US political competition.11 Political messaging in a domestic context is aware of popular perceptions of history and is attuned accordingly.
In Afghanistan the Taliban make frequent appeal to historical analogy: ‘Are you a son of Shah Shuja or Dost Mohammed?’ is one of their recruiting slogans. Shah Shuja was the ruler of Afghanistan installed by the British following the First Afghan War who ruled 1839–42; he is remembered in Afghanistan as a weak and effeminate ruler. Dost Mohammed was the great ruler of Afghanistan who overthrew Shah Shuja and ruled 1826–39 and 1843–63. The intention of this slogan today seeks to connect the comparison of Shah Shuja and Dost Mohammed to that between President Karzai and Mullah Omar. Virtually every aspiring Afghan political group since Dost Mohammed has tried to associate itself with him. Mullah Omar himself in April 1996 wore the cloak of Mohammed in Kandahar and professed himself leader of all Muslims, the Amir-al-Mu’minin. The last man to have performed this act was Dost Mohammed in 1834, who used it as a rallying call for war against the Sikhs.
Historic claims are often highly subjective. The banter between the Afghan police and the Taliban over unsecure radio offers an amusing insight into the subjective nature of historic claims. Both groups claim that they are the true Afghans, and that they are the ones continuing the struggle against foreigners for which the 1980s Mujahideen fought. The Taliban call the Afghan police ‘American slaves’, to which the Afghan police usually reply that the Taliban are the ‘Pakistani slaves’; the same historical figures and anecdotes, as well as a choice selection of insults, are thrown in by both sides to communicate the opposite meaning.
History is a powerful spring of emotion; the strategist who can construct his narrative to tap into that well gains access to its power. The malleability of history is in part due to the instability of ‘national’ histories. For example, the oft-recited argument that Britain actually achieved its strategic objectives in the First and Second Afghan War despite some tactical defeats may well be a legitimate interpretation of the historical record. However, it has no purchase for Afghans, whose belief in the defeat of the British is an idea ingrained in their national history.
Yet neither is there any such thing as a universal ‘Afghan’ view of history. This was made evident to me in March 2008 when my company was sent to Maiwand, a small town on the road between Helmand and Kandahar. We were the first coalition troops to have spent any length of time in the area since the start of the war in 2001. We had been briefed that Maiwand was the site of a famous British defeat mentioned above, and that villagers might comment on this. Moreover, the Taliban had actually been spreading rumours in Helmand that the ‘real’ reason the British were there was to avenge the battle of Maiwand. During the first patrol in the town my platoon sergeant, Bel Gurung, was earnestly asked by some of the villagers if he was Russian, followed by ‘I didn’t realise you people were still here’. This was all the more odd since he is Nepali! (To be fair, a lot of the Soviet troops in the 1980s were from the Asiatic parts of the USSR, and perhaps it was I who had the wrong pre-conceptions).
In another case, at a place called Hyderabad in the Upper Gereshk Valley, I remember one of the villagers asking why the American army had come, even though all the troops were in British uniform. For them, at that time, we were all much the same. The point is that it is perhaps too simplistic to extrapolate clear ideas about how people in rural southern Afghanistan make political judgements based on a particular oral historical tradition. I cannot claim to understand how exactly we fitted into the historical traditions at play in southern Afghanistan; it would have been a complex web of historical anecdote, conspiracy, current news, actual human interaction and mutual miscomprehension.
Because history is not stable, strategy can work with it and weave its narrative into its tapestry. Strategy can use the flow of history as an emotional current upon which to float its rational narrative. Leo Tolstoy wrote in the second epilogue to War and Peace (1869):
In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.12
A common metaphor for Tolstoy’s theory is that of the shepherd looking at his flock from a hill. All the sheep are acting of their own free will and the flock moves around in different directions. The sheep at the head of the flock is seen to be the leader at that point in time, although his position is really a function of the particular alignment of the flock at that time; the leader is a label for events.
Although Tolstoy’s view is an extreme position, the idea that we can associate strategic effect by aligning ourselves with the currents of history is an important consideration. For example, what was effectively regime change in Libya, going with the current of the Arab Spring, generated much less opposition than in Iraq. In an alternative example, in an analysis of President Truman’s foreign policy, Nick Cullather argues that the idea of ‘development’ was forged in the context of the conflict against the Soviet Union to further US strategic interests. Yet by situating development in a particular historical framework, US strategy was able to avoid the anti-colonial opprobrium for an idea which closely resembled colonial practice:
When President Harry S. Truman announced a ‘bold new program … for the improvement of underdeveloped areas’13 in January 1949, the global response was startling. Truman ‘hit the jackpot of the world’s political emotions’, Fortune [Magazine] noted.14 National delegations lined up to receive assistance that a few years earlier would have been seen as a colonial intrusion. Development inserted a new problematic into international relations, and a new concept of time, asserting that all nations followed a common historical path and that those in the lead had a moral duty to those who followed… Leaders of newly independent states, such as Zahir Shah of Afghanistan and Jawaharlal Nehru of India, accepted these terms, merging their own governmental mandates into the stream of nations moving toward modernity. Development was not only the best, but the only course: ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time’,15 Nehru observed.16
Cullather’s article exemplifies how the United States was able to exercise far more strategic influence by situating its strategic narrative within a powerful historical discourse, to which US strategy contributed by channelling that discourse towards its own interest. Cullather also argues that development as an abstract idea did not work very well on the ground in Helmand. The Helmand Valley Development Project, which tried to settle immigrants from all over Afghanistan on land reclaimed from the desert through irrigation, caused as many problems as it addressed. The events in the Middle East today show the importance (and difficulty) of being on the ‘right’ side of history. Yet, like the actual conduct of development, the difficulty for strategy is to balance what gains purchase on a wide audience with what that entails on the ground.
The issue of strategy and the flow of historical narrative plays out in Helmand today. The main Soviet forces withdrew from Helmand in 1988, leaving garrisons of the Soviet Afghan Army in the main cities. Subsequently, the remaining political actors, including the then local government, the army and the Mujahideen factions, fought each other in a vicious struggle for power which had been building throughout the 1980s (under the surface of the two-dimensional Soviets-versus-Muja-hideen narrative). The eventual outcome was colonisation of much of Helmand by the most successful Mujahideen group, which was effectively a tribal-based faction run by the Akhundzada family.
When one looks under the bonnet of the conflict today, local power-brokers (most of whom lived through the 1980s conflict) often talk of the fighting in terms of an extension of the same conflict—making reference to which Mujahideen party/communist faction an actor belongs/belonged to, and generally trying to figure out who will be sitting in what chairs when the music stops (or at least changes records). Moreover in Helmand the rural farmers’ perception of the Afghan National Army is historically informed. As locals sometimes remind us, the Taliban used to conscript men from their villages to fight Ahmed Shah Massoud’s predominantly Tajik group in the north of Afghanistan in the 1990s. The Afghan National Army today is largely composed of northerners. On the other hand, Taliban conscription was very unpopular, and the Afghan National Army in other areas is seen positively because it is more impartial in the factional disputes of the south.
The competition between strategic narrative and historical experience is as much a problem for the Taliban leadership as it is for the coalition. The Mujahideen split up after the Soviets left in the 1980s and fought among themselves. The Taliban leadership know that and, more to the point, the Taliban leadership must know that everyone else knows that too. The Taliban has a weak political identity because it means different things to different people. Many Taliban fighting groups themselves do not even follow orders from their leadership in any formal sense, and often ignore direction.
How does the Taliban leadership deal with this? Given their lack of a solid corporate identity, how do they communicate a strategic narrative that is remarkably effective? They attach labels to stories. They seek to transform anything into an information effect. Any coalition actions are ‘spun’ by the Taliban to communicate a certain message. Several actions are invented, and the Taliban invariably blame the coalition publicly for civilians killed by their IEDs (even though the statistics show that, at least since 2009, the insurgency has caused far, far more civilian casualties than the coalition).
In a strategic sense, their campaign plan is not to lose: ‘you have the watches, we have the time’ is the standard expression of this. History is what is remembered. The Taliban leadership hopes to claim victory by placing a label on a narrative before it has even happened, which is a good strategy if you have nothing to lose. By staking out a claim to future victory the Taliban leadership takes credit for the actions of those who are within its franchise, who may in reality be fighting for personal gain rather than any wider cause.
Is this strategic narrative effective? On the one hand, yes: by placing an overwhelming emphasis on perception and communication, the Taliban are able to persuade people faster than the coalition can. On the other hand, to base one’s entire strategy on perception rather than on the reality that lies beneath it is highly unstable. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, it is clear that strategies which depend massively on perception without a base in physical reality are very dangerous!
The Taliban leadership looks powerful, but in claiming small successes illegitimately they are giving themselves far more authority than they really have. At some point people might see that the emperor is naked. That point may come about in negotiations with the Taliban, as it becomes clear that either they will not negotiate, or that they will not agree on anything, because the groups they claim to command may well ignore them and they would lose all credibility. While they are merely negotiating, however, they appear to represent all of the Taliban, which improves their stature. To use a financial analogy, the Taliban leadership may well be creating a bubble in their own stock price.
In a broader sense, both the coalition-Afghan government and the Taliban are anti-historical in their treatment of historical experience. Both wish to ignore the 1980s war in Afghanistan, despite it being the most powerful lens through which many Afghans understand the present. The process of transition to Afghan forces was relatively successful for the Soviets, but the Afghan army really only controlled the roads and cities after the Soviet withdrawal. This is an important memory for much of Afghanistan’s rural population, especially in the south. Conversely, for the Taliban, the Mujahideen split up and fought among one another after the Soviet withdrawal, and many of them had no problem joining the government because their fight had been against foreigners, not Afghans.17
People are not a clean slate on which a strategic narrative can be imposed. The situation in sixteenth-century England during the Reformation provides an unusual, but useful, analogy.18 In the 1520s and early 1530s Thomas More argued that individual readers were not passive tabulae rasae, ‘clean slates’, who receive the self-contained literal meaning of the Biblical text without mediation of any kind. On the contrary, More contested the notion of a ‘literalist’ interpretation of the Bible, since, he argued, readers inevitably come to the text with presuppositions as to probable meanings from beyond the text.19 Without such presuppositions, interpretive communities fragment and fall to internecine dispute.
This is by analogy the position that the international coalition, and indeed the Taliban leadership, find themselves in today; by treating people as a-historical personages, competition over the meaning of most events in the conflict involves tearing apart their factual stability, as ‘facts’ are put on a pedestal, over the broader context of what each side is trying to do. When there are an endless number of potentially significant events, as there are in mosaic conflicts, the effect is a loss of overall meaning; ISAF investigations of ‘what happened’ compete with insurgent counter-claims amid all sorts of alternative views presented by other actors, from Afghan villagers to internet bloggers: this produces not a comprehensible Roman mosaic but a postmodern jumble with no discernible story.
The result of the dynamic is that audiences latch on to stories that have some kind of linear thread, which can range from casualty figures to number of girls in schools, which ultimately generate eccentric, partial, and incoherent comprehensions of conflict. Indeed, one of General Petraeus’ successes as commander of ISAF was to set out a clear story of how transition would occur, a structure through which audiences could make some sense of an eclectic range of facts available to them that might relate to the conflict.
Fighting fundamentalists on literalist battlefields is a terrain as tedious as it is dangerous for liberal powers. Liberal powers should be confident about the values that underpin their title. Those values should be expressed in terms of strategic vision that beats fundamentalists because they have nothing to offer in the longer term, apart from a sort of puritanical, purgatorial, stasis (take the Taliban rule in the 1990s for example). Liberal powers have failed to present a convincing vision of their role in the world in the first decade of this century. Engaging fundamentalists on a literalist plane is the corollary of this loss of strategic self-confidence: if people had confidence in what liberal powers stood for they would have some faith in what we are trying to do in Afghanistan, and interpret our actions more sympathetically.
Strategic narrative and strategic vision
The importance of vision in strategic narrative, in the sense of an aspirational proposition, was brought home to me by a remarkable encounter I had in Nepal in 2008. I was in the west of the country in a town called Tamghas, which suffered in the Maoist civil war. The town was racked by the troubles which result from the polarisation of political affiliations that civil wars encourage. I met a local teacher who was also one of the wealthier peasants, and one of the few moderates left. He was fairly despondent about the situation. The moment of complete surprise for me came when he started talking about ‘1215 Magna Carta’, which, since we were speaking Nepali, I initially thought was some kind of technical Nepali term. It turned out that he listened to the BBC World Service and, incredibly, was familiar with this episode of English legal history.
He said I was lucky to live in the UK, even though to him the UK was more of an imagined community than a real place. This informed the entire way in which he conceived the work of the British government in Nepal, namely the good work that the Gurkha Welfare Scheme did in the town. This kind of narrative is essential; the Maoists could all too easily dress up what the Gurkha Welfare Scheme does in anti-imperialistic terms. Vision and confidence in one’s values is today at the core of strategy. Vision provides stability to the interpretive structure proposed by strategic narrative, because it offers a way for people to understand confused situations on the basis of their belief in that vision; this is superior to dependency on an exclusively literal understanding of ‘what happened’, which can be unclear and often invented in the competition in conflict to persuade people of a particular agenda. Vision of strategic narrative is therefore of little value if not accompanied by confidence in that vision.
The construction of strategic narratives in fragmented political environments often generates a paradox for the strategist. On the one hand, the orchestration of actions directly to target people’s perceptions is an immensely powerful strategic tool; on the other hand, it is a dangerous drug which can encourage huge instability by forgetting that there should be a physical reality underpinning perceived reality. How does the strategist deal with this? Ultimately strategy faces a rhetorical question: how do we combine actions with the perception of those actions in order to persuade an audience over a period of time?
When strategy operates in a stable interpretive structure, such as when the inter-state paradigm of war is used symmetrically by both sides, the meaning of actions only makes sense as part of a larger whole. When that interpretive constraint is removed, as is often the case in contemporary conflict, the meaning of every action can be contested. The way in which actions are contested on a global scale in the Long War and in Afghanistan between the coalition-Afghan government and the Taliban is typical of a literalist, unstable, interpretive environment, unconstrained by agreed presuppositions. Virtually every action is challenged by and within either side.
At the local level, if there is a civilian killed, the Taliban will always blame it on the coalition; the reality is usually that they have accidently trodden on an IED. If there is any fire-fight, the Taliban will claim that there was damage to civilian property or casualties. If the coalition arrests anybody, a crowd of locals will turn up at the gate of the patrol base insisting that the man is innocent; it can be hard to distinguish genuine argument from those that are forced by the Taliban to complain to the coalition. Indeed on one occasion in 2010 a village elder harangued us for hours about how two people whom we had detained were innocent. At the end of the meeting when he was out of earshot he said privately and discreetly that the men were guilty but that there were Taliban spies in the meeting who had told him what to say.
This type of situation is commonplace. Every coalition action is woven into conspiracy theories of what is ‘really’ going on. I remember how many villagers I met in 2007–8 genuinely thought that my platoon had arrived to spy on their women. The idea that the coalition ‘really’ supports the Taliban to prolong the struggle to control resources is but one of innumerable conspiracies which, disappointingly, are rife.20 The outcome is that every action has to be contested and explained, as there is no stability to its meaning. For strategic audiences, this resembles a vicious, never-ending argument about who did what, which is never resolved, and ultimately provides no stable basis for a strategic narrative to persuade them.
The Daily Telegraph’s information campaign during the 2009 British parliamentary expenses scandal illustrates how the speed of information in a fragmented story makes actual fact less important than the overall impression. On one day, the paper would run with the accusations against an MP on the front page and present a short explanatory statement from the MP which he or she would have had little time to work up. The next day, by which time the MP would have had time to investigate and present a proper response, the caravan had moved on and another MP was under scrutiny, and responses from the previous day were old news. Thus the reality of whether the accused MPs were guilty, and all of the mitigating circumstances, were far less important than the initial perception.21 This offers an analogy with events in Afghanistan. The endless argument over the facts of individual events is less significant than the overall impression. The overall impression in turn is far more related to people’s pre-existing prejudices than attention to individual facts.
This kind of situation, where sides argue tooth and nail over the meaning of every point or action, is typical of unstable interpretive environments, and those environments are in turn produced when people are insecure about who they are, and what they are about. Returning to the analogy of sixteenth-century England, we find that a parallel situation would be the debate over the interpretation of the English translation of the Bible in the 1520s and 1530s. The translators of the Bible into the vernacular claimed that it would allow every person to read it individually without the distorting intervention of Catholic doctrine. The immediate result was that every word was contested, as people disagreed over precise literal meanings, since there is clearly no such thing as an incontrovertible ‘literal’ meaning.
Texts mean different things to different readers, according to the presuppositions they bring to the text in the first place. The Protestants of the 1520s and 1530s courageously translated the Bible into the vernacular; once the project was completed, however, Protestants vehemently disagreed both with Catholics and with other Protestants over all kinds of meanings; every word became a battlefield. Hence key ideas were contested on the basis of technical philological points (that is, not on the basis of the overall direction of the text’s meaning), until Protestant traditions formed that stabilised scriptural meanings with the establishment of alternative presuppositions.
As has been argued in Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (2007), in such unstable interpretive circumstances the authority of the philologist, the expert on the translation and meaning of words, replaced the authority of the Church; now the text was ‘not property of the reader and interpreters but its translators’, thus creating ‘new frontiers for confusion’.22 The role of the philologist provides a neat parallel with the role of the media today. There are essentially two rhetorical responses to such a problem. The first is to state that some people will always understand the ‘real’ meaning, and that these are the people one is trying to persuade. Thus one Protestant reaction in the 1530s was to claim that the elect (those predestined by God to go to heaven) had the real meaning of the Bible ‘written on the heart’, and would always interpret a text correctly.23
This is similar to propositions which claim to act on the basis of universal values, such as the persistent rehearsal by President George W. Bush of the argument that the United States was engaged in a war with those who ‘hated freedom’. The argument is essentially that it is the ‘other’ which irrationally does not understand something that is universal. This rhetorical approach imposes blame not on the text, or in the context (here the strategic narrative), but on the reader, or the strategic audience. Thus the sixteenth-century culture of blaming the ‘bad reader’ who missed the point of a text whose meaning should be literal finds resonance today in the frequent assertions that audiences domestic and foreign ‘don’t understand’ what the coalition is doing in Afghanistan. This suggests that the problem is one of communication for which the audience is responsible, rather than the issue itself.
The other, more positive, rhetorical response to an unstable interpretive environment is to persuade people of the overall intention, as opposed to becoming trapped in an endless ‘who did what’ argument about each action. In terms of our Biblical analogy, this is a tradition strongly associated with Augustine (354–430 ACE). His key argument was that people should read the Bible with a general sense of the text’s overall meaning and direction, which was elucidated by non-textual elements of the wider Christian tradition. The theme of charity, for example, provided an essential interpretive guide to understand obscure passages. That Augustine stressed confidence in vision and the overall message, while living at a moment of profound self-doubt for the Roman Empire, with barbarians at its gate and the fall of its western half approaching, makes his views particularly resonant today. Augustine’s is a very different, and more stable, interpretive tradition than the simplistic idea that words, or actions, can speak for themselves if the right person interprets them. Essentially it privileges intention over specific content.
An alternative and perhaps more familiar example would be the debate about how British judges interpret the law. One of the key issues is how far they should understand the intention of Parliament in the literal words of the statute, or look beyond the text to other sources. The late Lord Denning, who was judge in a 1950 case, stated controversially that ‘we do not sit here to pull the language of Parliament and of Ministers to pieces and make nonsense of it… We sit here to find out the intention of Parliament and of Ministers and carry it out, and we do this better by filling in the gaps and making sense of the enactment than by opening it up to destructive analysis’.24
Nor were Augustine or Lord Denning’s views so different from the way the British army today emphasises the need for ‘mission command’ in battle: that commanders should be clear about what their commander wants to achieve and select the best route to get there; this is a much more stable way of communicating meaning than describing in detail exactly what to do, which would unnecessarily have people debate whether to go left or right around a hill if it hasn’t been exactly specified.
The acknowledgement of the centrality of vision in strategy is certainly not new. It seems at present, however, that the literalist approach is in the ascendancy. For actions in contemporary conflict to have political utility—to be in support of an idea—strategy needs to understand that the role of strategic narrative is to convince people; in imitation of the good orator, that requires effectively binding logos, ethos and pathos together. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech are both classic examples of highly successful presentations of strategic narrative. They blend rational argument with passion, history and vision; they are essentially persuasive in terms of all three of Aristotle’s rhetorical resources. From a strategic perspective, they set conditions for future actions to be understood in a particular context which encourages people to see those actions in terms of what they were driving at, rather than in terms of the action itself.
An episode related by General Sir Graeme Lamb captures the effective matching of words, actions and vision. He speaks about the issue of General Stanley McChrystal’s effort to reduce civilian casualties on taking command in 2009:
[The insurgents] operate in the communication space incredibly better than we do. It is the area in which we are horribly deficient. It was important therefore that we change the dynamic through the ways people drove [road traffic accidents, and a perception of coalition arrogance by defensive driving, had been a big problem]—so it was how we were perceived by the population—and how we tried to reduce the casualties in the use of force and other ways.
Hobbes world is a grim old place. Both sides are getting broken up, killed and damaged in the process of this, and people apply the Surrey [an English county] map to it, which just doesn’t work. Trying to reduce those casualties is recognised by the people. There was an incident in the North, in Kunduz … when a tanker was blown up and a number of locals who had been told by the Taliban to get the fuel were killed. McChrystal went straight there, and a lot of people said, ‘What are you doing? We haven’t had the inquiry yet, and Germany are upset about this’. The bush net [informal communication] of Afghanistan is every bit as good as the bush nets you will find in other parts of the third and second world. It is often far better than where we have a clever communication space. It went around the country that he was someone who was genuinely trying to reduce civilian casualties, and the vast majority of Afghans got that. So McChrystal was seen as somebody who was in charge of ISAF and the coalition forces, who was genuinely aware of Afghans. That is not how they had perceived it before.25
The dry, banal, bureaucratic language and legalese of official justifications for a conflict, or the endless announcement of ‘investigations’ into who did what in relation to allegations of wrongdoing, characterise the West’s strategic narratives today (President Obama’s speeches, or General McChrystal’s actions, are perhaps exceptions which prove the rule). This is not just a case of finding it hard to persuade people because we are boring; by engaging fundamentalists on the battlefield of literal interpretation, we fight on ground that favours them, because their messages are simplistic and work better in that environment. Moreover, the Taliban are able to exploit the fact that the coalition is honest; the Taliban continuously gain political advantage by lying and making up stories. To shift the interpretive environment by emphasising ultimate intentions plays to the West’s strengths, because fundamentalism has nothing to offer in the long-term.