2
The notion that war involves armed opponents (one’s own side and the enemy) is as old as war itself. For example, in The Art of War written by Sun Tzu in ancient China (possibly sixth century BCE), this idea is taken for granted. Polarity between two sides allows war to provide a see-saw-like outcome: defeat and victory are mutually exclusive; they are defined in inverse relation to one another.
In Afghanistan, in the earlier phase of the conflict, the coalition shoehorned the actual political situation into a construction that was more polarised than was the case in reality. The overly binary conception within which military force was used antagonised the political situation. The 2006 International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) deployment into Helmand Province, Southern Afghanistan, which was based on a British-led task force, exemplifies this.
One argument concerning the UK deployment into Helmand is about miscalculation: that the deployment was not the primary British governmental option in terms of the UK role in Afghanistan, but was a course that was not corrected when events unfolded to bring about such a move. The purpose of the deployment was then not clear, or at least, there were significantly different interpretations, creating a misalignment between policy and method. This argument, interesting though it is, lies outside the scope of this book. To offer a properly researched evaluation of this line of argument would require far more access to UK government and North Atlantic Treat Organization (NATO) policy documents than is currently available. Hence I take the UK deployment as a start point, and examine some of the issues that shaped the early development of the campaign once it had started.
Figure 4: This Louis XIV cannon bears the inscription ‘ultima ratio regum’ (the final argument of kings), a powerful visual statement asserting that war in its traditional conception has been seen as the ultimate form of political decision.1
The factor I focus on is the extent to which the interpretive framework of Clausewitzian war, in which armed forces are supposed to set military conditions for a political solution, was dragged into a circumstance that was in actuality far closer to the use of force for directly political outcomes.
Helmand 2006
On 4 June 2006 one of the earliest major contacts of the British army in Helmand took place in the village of Alizai, just east of the town of Nowzad, in northern Helmand. A Gurkha platoon was ambushed while driving through the village on its way to form an outer cordon to arrest a suspected insurgent commander. The Gurkhas’ role was part of a larger operation by the 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment, called Op Mutay. The arrest operation turned into an intense six-hour battle for the Gurkha and Para soldiers. Before the operation, the local Afghan police commander advised the Gurkha platoon commander to expect a fight in the village and refused to go on the operation himself.2 The Alizais are a tribe of northern Helmand, and this village was one of theirs. The symbolism that the British army’s first big fight should be here was perhaps obvious to the Afghan police commander at the time. Yet in 2006 the language of the British army in Helmand was of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, ‘GIRoA’, versus the Taliban.
This vignette exemplifies in microcosm a wider conceptual problem of the British campaign in 2006. A traditional, polarised view of the conflict was overly privileged, which encouraged the army and its political masters to understand those who offered armed opposition to the Afghan government primarily as a unified ‘Taliban’ movement. This had reciprocal consequences, and encouraged the polarisation against British forces of actors and groups who were not particularly ideologically committed to the Taliban.
In a formal submission of evidence to the British parliament’s 2009 report on Afghanistan-Pakistan, Lord Malloch-Brown, a Foreign Office minister in Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government, stated: ‘as with any good military action by this country over the centuries, we have stepped up our game and our commitment, and reinforced our effort to deal with an enemy who has been tougher than we initially thought would be the case. Please do not misunderstand me: it is not a surprise that we faced an insurgency in Helmand, which is the reason why we went there. We knew it was there, we wanted to take it on and it has been a hard fight’.3 Apart from the fact that it has been a hard fight, this analysis is confused.
While there was certainly serious tribal and factional tension, there was not a significant pre-existing Taliban insurgency in Helmand. There had been sporadic but intense individual fights involving coalition forces across southern Afghanistan pre-2006. However, if there were a more genuine Taliban-led insurgency in the south, its focus was on Kandahar more than Helmand. The ferocious fighting in 2006 between the Canadians and insurgents in Panjwai District to the west of Kandahar city was arguably the Taliban leadership’s focus in the south.
In Helmand, there was a spate of assassinations of people associated with the Afghan government in late 2005 and early 2006, but not widespread fighting. The British Secretary of Defence John Reid saw the mission in 2006 as a reconstruction mission. His statement at a Kabul press conference on 23 April 2006 about his aspiration that there might have been no shots fired has been taken out of context. The statement communicated his intention that British forces were not looking for a fight; this made sense at the time precisely because there was no large-scale insurgency in Helmand. This perspective is at odds with Lord Malloch-Brown’s recollection of the facts. So where did the insurgency come from?
A large core of the ‘Taliban’ of 2006 used to be on the Afghan government ‘side’, in that they were the militia controlled by Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the Provincial Governor from 2001 to 2005. Akhundzada stepped down as the Provincial Governor of Helmand in December 2005, largely due to British pressure in Kabul to have him removed, mainly because he was involved in narcotics and had abused his position in government to further his own interests: nine tons of opium had been found in his compound in June 2005. In a 2009 interview with the Daily Telegraph, Akhundzada stated what is common knowledge in Afghanistan, but has bizarrely not received much attention in the UK:
‘When I was no longer governor the government stopped paying for the people who supported me’, he said. ‘I sent 3,000 of them off to the Taliban because I could not afford to support them but the Taliban was making payments’.4
Akhundzada’s argument exploits the polarised model through which the coalition viewed the conflict. Thus he presents himself as the victim who is forced to support his men by having the ‘Taliban’ pay them. Akhundzada hides behind the idea of the ‘Taliban’ to conceal his real agenda, which was to keep himself in power. Many of the ‘Taliban’ in northern Helmand were his men, over whom he still exercised control. Akhundzada’s actions in Helmand were consistent with his self-interest, in that his line has always been that only he can deliver security in the province; after he was sacked as governor, his subsequent actions could be interpreted as a message that he wanted to show that the coalition needed him because he was the only one who held real power. Akhundzada had been shamed and lost face: a key factor given his family’s importance in the province, which was perhaps not sufficiently recognised at the time.
Akhundzada’s actions following his dismissal are only to be considered a change of ‘sides’ if one erroneously imposes a polarised model of war on the conflict. Akhundzada and his men did not ‘change sides’; they remained on their own side. Akhundzada was, and remains at the time of writing, very close to President Karzai. The two families became friends in exile in Pakistan in the 1990s, and have intermarried.5 After Akhundzada was dismissed, his brother became the Deputy Provincial Governor and he himself became a Senator in Kabul. He has consistently undermined the Provincial Governor Gulab Mangal, at the time of writing, and has sought to have Kabul appoint district governors and police chiefs in Helmand who are loyal to him. The Governor of Kajaki District in northern Helmand, for example, is at the time of writing Mullah Sharafudin Akhundzada, his brother-in-law. As long as such nuances are viewed through a polarised model, we fail to understand the politically kaleidoscopic dynamics of the conflict.
The majority of insurgents in Helmand in 2006 were Afghan militias, including Akhundzada’s Alizai militia in northern Helmand, who were fighting for their interests.6 There was a strong interplay between their motivations and that of the Taliban leadership, which had been trying to re-assert itself in the south from 2002. However, this relationship is better understood in terms of subscription to a franchise movement rather than as a unified, ideologically driven Taliban insurgency.
The same would apply to the other major block of the 2006 Helmand insurgency, who were fighters from the Ishaqzai tribe around Sangin. They had been badly abused by the representatives of the Afghan government when Akhundzada was the Provincial Governor, specifically by the Provincial National Directorate of Security Chief Daud Mohammed Khan, who was from the rival Alikozai tribe.7 Ironically the Alizai and Ishaqzais who joined the insurgency overcame their previous hostility to one another to fight a new common enemy in ISAF and the reconfigured Afghan Provincial Government. These insurgent factions used the Taliban as a franchise which they could tap into for support. In this sense their behaviour was entirely consistent and logical in Afghan political terms.
Despite the popular conception of the Taliban surging over the Pakistan border in 2006 into southern Afghanistan, the majority of fighters in Helmand in 2006 were Afghans, albeit with support from groups of foreign fighters, who were mainly from Pakistan. The real surge in foreign fighters in Helmand, fighting in formed groups, seems to have come later in 2007 when a group from South Waziristan based itself in an area south of Sangin for the best part of the year. This foreign group became very unpopular in Sangin, as they were far more ruthless in the application of sharia law than the local insurgents, which contributed to the unsuccessful Sangin uprising against the Taliban in 2007 led by the Alikozai tribe.
The political history of Helmand between 2001 and 2005 exemplifies how labels such as ‘Taliban’ and ‘government’ were used figuratively by local actors to benefit their interests in a kaleidoscopic political environment, manoeuvring vis-à-vis one another. Elements of the insurgency, and indeed elements of the Afghan National Security Forces, could be seen as holding patterns for factional interests until the next stage of their conflict with each other.
After 2001 local militia commanders had carved up Helmand between them as the coalition looked for allies to sweep up the remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Apart from Akhundzada, Malem Mir Wali brought his militia recruited mainly from the Barakzai tribe, which was based out of Gereshk, Helmand’s second city, within the Afghan government security structure. He subsequently served as Member of Parliament for Helmand in Kabul. Other key posts went to militia commanders who had de facto control in the districts. Thus Daud Mohammed Khan, who controlled an Alikozai militia from Sangin, became the provincial head of the National Directorate of Security. Abdul Rahman Jan, who controlled a militia from the Noorzai tribe, became the Chief of Police.
Mike Martin, a British army officer, and Pashto speaker, with close knowledge of central Helmand, has argued in A Brief History of Helmand (2011) that the fact that these militia commanders were all on the government ‘side’ meant little. They continued to attack one another, and those outside the government patronage network, and dressed up this ongoing low-level violence as government versus ‘Taliban’. Martin cites several clashes in the early days between Abdul Rahman Jan and Akhundzada, and between Malim Mir Wali and Akhundzada; subsequently Abdul Rahman Jan joined Akhundzada in attacking Malim Mir Wali’s men. Martin makes clear how all actors used their connections to the coalition to attack their rivals. At one point Malem Mir Wali and Gul Agha Sherzai, the Barakzai governor of Kandahar, almost managed to persuade the US military to strike Akhundzada himself. This was only vetoed with the intervention of the senior US general in Kabul.8
The background to this was another layer of tribal-factional conflict that involved the Barakzai tribe and Malim Mir Wali, the leader of a mainly Barakzai militia called the 93rd Division, an anachronistic legacy of the Soviet era. Daud Mohammed Khan had come into confrontation with Malim Mir Wali over the expansion of the former’s power base in Sangin into the latter’s in central Helmand. This tension linked into wider power balances in southern Afghanistan between Barakzai strongman Gul Agha Sherzai (who backed Mir Wali) and President Karzai’s late half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai (who backed Sher Mohammed Akhundzada and Daud Mohammed Khan), both powerful government figures who were competing for power in Kandahar city. This led to a series of clashes near Gereshk, the second city of Helmand, which ultimately resulted in the disarmament of the 93rd Division by the government and the marginalisation of Barakzai power in central Helmand.
These clashes were dressed up as part of the government against Taliban fight, as comments from Sher Mohammed Akhundzada’s spokesman concerning Afghan army and police operations in September 2005 exemplify: ‘anti-insurgency operations conducted in Gereshk District of the southern Helmand Province have led to the killing of a large number of miscreants and arrest of 60’.9 Indeed the practice of arresting tribal enemies as ‘Taliban’, and the theft of one another’s opium stocks as operations against ‘drug smugglers’, was commonplace.10 Sarah Chayes’ book, The Punishment of Virtue (2006), paints a similar picture of the kaleidoscopic dynamics in Kandahar city in the early years of the current Afghan conflict.11
In the context of Helmand, Martin makes clear that the biggest losers were groups who were ‘not included in government patronage networks’. The Ishaqzai in Sangin, the Kharotei in Nad-e Ali and the Kakars in Garmsir, for example, were tribal groups not represented in the provincial government, and were rapaciously abused. These groups are today associated with the insurgency in Helmand. Their reasons for appealing to the Taliban were logical in terms of self-interest rather than as part of a wider ‘Taliban’ ideological agenda. Antonio Giustozzi has argued in Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan 2002–2007 (2008) that the extent to which ‘Karzai’s cronies’ antagonised particular groups of people gave the Taliban a ready base of support.12In a Chatham House paper on Afghanistan of December 2010, Stephen Carter and Kate Clark argued that:
The human rights officer at the European Union told one author that they had documented illegal arrests, torture and other abuses carried out by government officials and police in the province [Helmand pre-2006]… Tribal enmity aggravated many of these injustices: Alizai circles around Governor Akhundzada marginalised and ‘taxed’ Achakzai communities, and officials have been accused of selectively eradicating poppy crops and punishing smugglers belonging to tribal rivals, and of packing state offices and security forces with their tribal supporters… The conflict in Helmand is to a large extent a drugs turf war … with figures on both the government and Taliban sides protecting their interests.13
The actual reasons for the violence of 2006 are complex. There was no doubt an element of cross-border pressure directed by the Taliban leadership from Pakistan, which increased in late 2005. However, tribal loyalties and the self-interest of the Afghan government power brokers cut across a neat insurgent-versus-government narrative.
Martin argues that after Daud Mohammed Khan, Abdul Rahman Jan and Akhundzada were successively removed from office by international pressure in 2005 and threatened (or actually disarmed) by the national disarmament process, there was a power vacuum, as they had been the de facto government forces. Critically, ejecting them from the Afghan government structure removed their incentive to support President Karzai. The deployment in 2006 thus tried to extend the rule of the by-then non-existent Provincial Afghan Government. This was particularly problematic in northern Helmand, the heartland of the Alizais who had a history of hostility to the British. When British troops legitimately fought back against those who attacked them, they antagonised what was a more complex political issue; this contributed to the formation of a more genuine and lethal insurgency.
General Sir Peter Wall, in evidence to the Defence Select Committee’s July 2011 report, discusses the earlier part of the summer of 2006 in Helmand. He states that the ‘crisis started to unfold’ when:
the Taliban had the District Centres in Northern Helmand under pressure (…) There was, undoubtedly, pressure coming from the Akhundzada axis. If the Government flag had fallen in any of these district centres and the Taliban flag had replaced it—it was totemic stuff like that, it was the battle of the flagpoles in some ways—the UK effort, in terms of its recognition of Afghan political motivation from the district level through the provincial level up to the national level … would have been in political jeopardy.14
Hence General Wall acknowledges the importance of local political dynamics, but identifies that as the wider perception of the conflict was framed in terms of government versus Taliban, this constrained British actions. More specifically, the British had to intervene in northern Helmand, in the sense that Afghan government authority, as subjective a term as that may have been in 2006 in Helmand, could not be seen politically to have been displaced by that of the ‘Taliban’. This was despite the ‘Taliban’ insurgents being in actuality for the most part local political factions, who had previously themselves effectively been the Afghan government forces. General Wall’s evidence illustrates how of having understood the conflict through an overly polarised lens was a broad issue, engaging the perceptions of wider strategic audiences, as much as that of the military on the ground, who may have understood some of the basic local political factors at the time (as General Wall does), but were nonetheless trapped in a two-way narrative.
In Helmand in 2006, and indeed more widely in Afghanistan, the reciprocal escalation of violence, unconstrained by genuinely bilateral state structures which serve to channel and contain violence, has unnecessarily created enemies for the coalition and catalysed the insurgency in its earlier phases. This encouraged the growth of what David Kilcullen has termed ‘accidental guerrillas’.15
The case of the Kharotei tribe in central Helmand’s Nad-Ali district, which I base on Michael Martin’s personal involvement in understanding these dynamics, exemplifies the problem of a polarised concept of conflict generating ‘accidental guerrillas’. The Kharotei are one of a number of groups who moved to Nad-Ali from eastern Afghanistan as economic migrants during the 1950s and 1960s. There had been long-running tension over land rights there with other tribes, particularly the Noorzai. This tension was emphasised in the control of revenue from the opium crop, a hostility which pre-dated the 2001 Afghan conflict.
Nad-Ali was not a ‘Taliban’ area during the early part of the British operation in Helmand. In 2006 and 2007 British convoys could generally drive through it without attack. The local Afghan police in 2007 were dominated by the Noorzai tribe. They wanted the Kharotei opium crop, and fought them for it. This group of the Afghan police then claimed to be fighting the ‘Taliban’ and got support from British troops, who were indeed engaged by fighters of the Kharotei tribal militia. That move itself had been prefigured by the British forces’ suspicions of the village where the Kharotei tribal leadership lived, called Shin Kalay. When British forces had first moved into Nad-Ali in 2008 and asked the district governor, a Noorzai, where the Taliban were based, he had pointed this village out, in line with his interests.16 The Kharotei fighters then were accidental guerrillas; later they could probably be more genuinely defined as Taliban, as war’s reciprocal violence accentuated emotional antagonism.
In summary, the political history of Helmand immediately before and during 2006 demonstrates that this was not a two way fight, but an extension of pre-existing, normal, kaleidoscopic political activity, albeit within a context in which the use of violence to further political ends was relatively normal too. To an extent local factional interests were able to exploit the coalition’s initial naivety as to the actual political dynamics of Helmand in 2006 and tap into coalition resources to further their interests against other factions. However, the coalition was also achieving its aims in Helmand and in Afghanistan, which had more to do with global issues such as terrorism than purely the benefit of the Afghan people. So the extent to which local actors used the coalition to pursue their own ends needs to be seen in the context of the whole Afghan operation having aims beyond Afghanistan: there was give and take operating in both directions—between the coalition and local partners.
The category of people who are most ruthlessly exploited by subscription to a polarised conception of the conflict are often the foreign jihadists. They are typically, and somewhat tragically, Pakistani teenagers who are exploited by local Afghan insurgent commanders as ‘martyrs’ for cannon fodder. In my experience idealistic young foreign jihadists are often viciously bullied by older local insurgent commanders to perform attacks in which they will very likely die; their terrified pleadings and regrets at the last minute are frequently the response. I have tended to come across this reality, which presents a far more authentic voice than jihadist videos, when Afghan insurgent commanders have been known to banter to one another about their ‘unwilling martyr’, a standard, and grotesque, joke among them. Far from participating in what they thought was an ideological war, many young jihadists are in fact being exploited by local actors to pursue their own interests. Indeed, suicide bombers are sometimes sold between Afghan insurgent commanders.
Just as the polarised Afghan government-Taliban model is insufficient to comprehend the conflict in itself, so too is an exclusive retention of other models, for example the idea that it is not a war but a tribal conflict. Tribal motivations are important, but tend to be quickly discarded when they do not serve the actor’s self-interest. The ruthless pragmatism that has characterised the political history of Helmand since the start of the Soviet war supports this.
There are definite axes of tension in the conflict, which can in themselves be polarised, such as the most important driver of the conflict: the Afghan government-insurgency antagonism. To deconstruct that to the point where it plays no role would be nonsense; it remains the most important tension. However, the point is that these central tensions exist within a far more complex web of affiliations, and to see everything through a single, if pre-eminent, axis of tension is myopic. The key tensions are simply powerful magnets, which can work to repel and attract actors in the political kaleidoscope; the only truly consistent themes are self-interest and survival, the latter meant in both a political and a literal sense.
The illegitimacy of the rigidly polarised narrative went for a long time undetected by the British parliament’s official reports on Helmand, which did not understand that many of the ‘Taliban’ were already there before 2006, albeit as militias who had backed the Afghan government. Such narrow conceptual boundaries led to confusion. Lord Malloch-Brown elsewhere in his evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 2009 asserts that ‘the strength of the insurgent opposition we have faced in Helmand has surprised us; there is no way around that’.17 Actually, there might well have been a way around that, which was to have understood the situation on its own terms, rather than to have imposed an artificial and simplistic polarity. The February 2011 House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Report presents a more realistic assessment. For instance, it recognises the insurgency as a franchise:
For the purposes of propaganda, the Taliban is keen for the insurgency to be regarded as a unified movement under the banner of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which is ostensibly controlled by Mullah Mohammed Omar and the Rahbari Shura (Supreme Council). In reality, the Afghan insurgency is a mix of Islamist factions, power-hungry warlords, criminals and tribal groupings, all pursuing their own economic, political, criminal and social agendas and interests, from local feuds to establishing a pan-Islamic caliphate. Three major groups operate under the banner of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: Mullah Omar’s Taliban, the Haqqani Network and the Hizb-e-Islami faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. While the latter two sometimes co-operate with the Taliban leadership, they are considered autonomous factions.18
While it should be credited with a far better standard of analysis than what had gone before, this February 2011 parliamentary report received very little media attention in the UK. However, the wider debate does seem to be evolving towards a more sophisticated appreciation of the insurgency. An article by Anthony King in April 2011, for example, is cognisant of the actual political dynamics at play in Afghanistan, which are fragmented rather than binary:
The British see Helmand and the conflict in which they are involved in dualistic terms; the legitimate centralised state of Afghanistan represented in Helmand by the governor against the Taliban insurgency—the white state against the shadow state. The British are seeking to ensure that the balance of power is in favour of GIRoA. Yet, this binary perspective, although in line with conventional counter-insurgency thinking, seems to be simplistic in relation to Helmand. Indeed, it may fundamentally misrepresent the political conflict in Helmand… The battle for Helmand may perhaps surprisingly not primarily be between GIRoA and the Taliban, represented as the legitimate and shadow governments, but between Britain’s projected and idealised model of GIRoA and actual, existing power structures and power-brokers in Helmand: Sher Mohammed Akhundzada and his patrimonial networks.19
The latest official version of the UK 2006 Helmand deployment at the time of writing is the July 2011 House of Commons Defence Committee Fourth Report on Operations in Afghanistan.20 Lack of intelligence about the situation in Helmand before the deployment is a theme that runs throughout the report. The report cites a military view that the assessment of the Taliban’s intent in 2006 was correct, but not the assessment of their capability.21
This view, however, does not take into account the key nuance in terms of defining the insurgency’s ‘intent’ that the 2011 Foreign Affairs Committee report recognised. The insurgency is a fragmented franchise organisation. Hence the Taliban senior leadership may well have a coherent intent. But can ‘the Taliban’ in the sense of the wider insurgency have ‘an intent’ if they are a constellation of different groups? No. Moreover, the argument that their capacity was underestimated is not correct. The scale of the insurgency increased with the British deployment, not before it; the subsequent resource mismatch followed from this. That in 2011 much of the report’s oral evidence still held on to the highly problematic notion that ‘the Taliban’ could be characterised as a coherent enemy force in 2006 is perhaps indicative of how far ingrained is the basic conception that conflict is polarised, and how powerfully such a lens can distort, and erase the nuance, from the historical record.
In summary, there was not a significant ‘Taliban’ insurgency in the south in 2005. Partly this was because Kabul exercised so little visible presence there from 2002 to 2005 that there was little to rebel against. The violence that did take place was mainly a reaction against the behaviour of Akhundzada and his associates. In one sense this could legitimately be said to represent insurgent violence against the government, Akhundzada being the Provincial Governor; but to characterise this as a ‘Taliban’ insurgency is drastically to oversimplify the local political driving factors.
There was undoubtedly growing violence, but most of the violence that did occur was the product of factional interests sometimes dressed up as polarised conflict to exploit ISAF resources. The British deployment catalysed the insurgency because it shoehorned a kaleidoscopic political environment into an overly polarised model, which gave disparate groups a violent focus in a common enemy. Combined with political moves, such as the timing of Akhundzada’s dismissal, this led to a reconfiguration whereby political interests that had supported the Afghan government turned against it. When local political actors moved away from the Afghan government franchise, this left only a rump of an Afghan government in Helmand whose rule was to be extended. The factions that had supported the Afghan government, but switched to the Taliban franchise, put pressure on the towns of northern Helmand, forcing a response. British soldiers on the ground were left holding the baby.22
This book is not primarily about Afghanistan. However, the Helmand case study illustrates how strategy must understand a problem on its own terms, not through dogmatically applied conceptual structure. In Afghanistan the coalition has moved away from a binary way of seeing and has since 2009 performed better; it now recognises the legitimacy of the franchise argument, but took a long time to do so—almost a decade of violence since 2001.
How did this happen? We need to trace the history of how war and strategy have been understood to understand the problem of how war is conceived in the present. The remainder of this chapter examines three cornerstones of war as traditionally understood in the Clausewitzian tradition: the principle of polarity; the physical and perceived components of war’s outcome; and strategic audiences (those upon whom the strategist through war seeks to have an outcome) and their relationship to the state.
The principle of polarity and the role of the enemy
The enemy is traditionally what a ‘military’ outcome in war is defined against. War, according to Carl von Clausewitz, the most influential theorist of war in the Western tradition, was by necessity a polarised contest: ‘war is the impact of opposing forces’, which could be likened to a ‘giant duel’ made up of countless smaller duels.23 This two-way polarity is depicted by Clausewitz in the first paragraph of On War by two men wrestling, which symbolised how war’s function is ‘an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will’.24 The polarity between opponents is what makes war a contest which provides a decision, a resolution of the argument.25
Clausewitz categorised wars in accordance with how far they sought to achieve a decision. Ganze Krieg, which can be translated as absolute war, was not just the unrestrained use of violence; it was war that aimed at absolute political settlement through total destruction, or total submission, of the enemy.26 Absolute war was ‘saturated by the urge for a decision’ in the sense that the absolute means of such a war were consistent with its absolute political aims. As wars moved away from the conceptual pole of ganze Krieg there was a corresponding reduction between the application of violence and the intended political outcome, until one reached the point where violence was merely threatened as part of normal political activity: ‘the less a decision is actively sought by the belligerents, the more the war becomes a matter of mutual observation’.27
Clausewitz’s analytical originality was to associate the forms of war between polarised opponents, attack and defence, with war’s capacity to provide political meaning through a decision. For Clausewitz, war starts with defence, in that unresisted attack is not war.28 So polarity is present from the outset as resistance is a prerequisite of war. War necessarily brings both forms into being, because attack and defence cannot exist without the other.29
Force can then be understood as a type of language. As in a verbal argument, the negative form (defence) is about prevention of the enemy’s argument; the positive form (attack) is about the assertion of one’s argument. For example, in a purely defensive battle (a siege with no counter-attack, for instance) the defending commander seeks to delay the decision as far as possible: ‘a defensive battle that remains undecided at sunset can be considered to be won’. In offensive battle ‘the aim of the commander is to expedite the decision’.30 The positive and negative forms are present at all levels of war, in battle, both sides alternate between attack and defence, right down to the lowest level where a soldier alternates between use of a sword and shield, or their modern equivalents.
Hence polarity provided a military scale to give meaning to actions in combat. The meaning of actions in combat for Clausewitz was a synthesis of both forms, as in a verbal argument in terms of landing blows and parrying the opponent’s to produce a result: attack pushed the counter of war’s outcome on this scale towards victory, and defence pushed against attack: ‘polarity does not lie in the attack or the defence, but in the object both seek to achieve: the decision’.31 The decision could be absolute: ‘in battle each side aims at victory; that is a case of true polarity, since the victory of one side excludes the victory of the other’.32 However, Clausewitz recognised that the outcome was usually relative: ‘it is not possible in every war for the victor to overthrow his enemy completely’. However, according to the principle of polarity, war provided a single, mutually-recognised scale which determined the relative superiority that set military conditions for a political outcome: ‘victory normally results from the superiority of one side; from a greater aggregate of physical and psychological strength … every reduction in strength on one side can be regarded as an increase in the other’.33
In summary, Clausewitz interpreted the antagonistic polarity between opponents in terms of a dialectic expressed in the form of attack and defence which provided meaning to their clash in combat. That meaning was defined in terms of a see-saw-like military scale: whether an outcome (victory or defeat) was absolute or more limited, was, critically, defined against one’s enemy. This concept gives a cognitive stability to what military actions mean in war.
Without polarity, force loses decisive political meaning. Sometimes it is necessary to accentuate an existing polarity to give force political utility. In the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s, for example, the UN forces failed to achieve any decisive outcome because their political masters took a morally relative point of view. The desire to avoid another such scenario was influential in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decisive stance on Kosovo in 1999.
However, the right and wrong of the Kosovan issue were not at all clear. There were in fact crimes being committed by both sides, by the Serbian para-military forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). This was reported by a fact-finding mission led by the Organisation for Co-operation and Security in Europe prior to the NATO intervention. The criminal associations of the KLA, and its follow-on groups (it was officially disbanded in 1999), have since been widely documented. However, the NATO coalition presented the conflict in terms of a case of right versus wrong and achieved a decisive outcome against Serbia, at least in the short-term. In the longer term the legacy of the conflict is less clear-cut in political terms, not least in the on-going issue of the recognition of Kosovo.
In 1999 the NATO coalition was able to shape the battlefield in Kosovo in terms of its presentation of a clear case of right versus wrong; even though things were more morally complex on the ground, by taking a clear stance decisive action was possible. Yet this needs to be distinguished from the situation in Afghanistan. In Kosovo a polarity between two sides already existed; the shaping of the battlefield in political terms was to bring the international community, especially NATO countries, behind one side, allowing war’s mechanism in the Clausewitzian sense to function. Yet in circumstances in which there is very little polarity to begin with, war’s mechanism in the traditional Clausewitzian conception is compromised from the outset.
What pre-2001 polarity exists in the Afghan conflict is strongly associated with the tension between the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance and the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. The difficulty here is that accentuating such polarity to define the enemy better can engender its own unwanted sectarian tensions. This is partly why the Afghan government try not to present themselves as the reincarnated Northern Alliance, and the Taliban distance themselves from the label of being a Pashtun nationalistic movement: it is the conflict itself that encourages tensions that both sides, wanting to avoid the break-up of Afghanistan on ethnic lines, resist.
The Kosovo example also illustrates that polarity is relative. Parties to a conflict may only be drawn together temporarily. Part of strategy’s role is thus the orchestration and manipulation of polarity in relation to another party to present an enemy against whom a ‘military’ result can be defined. This is usually most obvious in the escalatory moves that anticipate armed conflict.
The physical and perceived components of war’s political outcome
Polarity can give cognitive stability to what military action in war means, but how then does a military outcome translate into a political outcome? Power can be understood as a relationship. This idea resonates with how Clausewitz understood war as the clash of wills, in which one sought to impose one’s will on the enemy. For Clausewitz, the ‘decision’ provided by the mechanism of war through the polarised dialectic of attack and defence had a physical and a perceived component.
The physical component of a war’s outcome can be adjusted to give little room to be persuaded of an alternative view. As Admiral J. C. Wylie argued in Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (1967): ‘the ultimate determinant in war is the man on the scene with a gun’.34 This can be taken to extremes in war. If the enemy is entirely destroyed, one’s own side can dictate the interpretation of events into the historical record. There is no Carthaginian interpretation of the destruction of Carthage. Rome’s victory was truly written by the victors. This theme comes across powerfully in the speech the Roman historian Tacitus attributes (fictitiously) to the tribal chief Calgacus, who describes Roman imperial practice in a speech defying the extension of Roman rule in Britain: ‘to robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of ‘government’; they create a wasteland and call it peace’.35
The outcome of war at its end, in the Clausewitzian conception, connected a military outcome (the physical component, as defined by the use of force) into a political outcome which ideally served the ends of policy. In a very few cases the political outcome took the form of the utter destruction of the enemy in lieu of a political settlement, such as the total destruction of Carthage by Rome in the Third Punic War (149–146 BCE). However, in most instances the political settlement is a verdict subscribed to by the enemy: this may be imposed on the defeated party, who lies prostrate; in other cases the relative gains and losses in war give a military outcome which provides the basis of a negotiated or de facto political settlement. Hence beyond extreme cases in which a war’s outcome is exclusively defined by the total destruction of the enemy, war’s outcome includes a perceived component in terms of having forced the enemy to accept a certain behaviour.
Thus the purpose of force in war was for Clausewitz to make the enemy acquiesce in one’s intent: ‘war…cannot be considered to have ended so long as the enemy’s will has not been broken’.36 The strategist used war to impose a decision on the enemy; that decision, the war’s outcome, was as much what was perceived to be real as what was real. This is encapsulated by none other than Russell Crowe as General Maximus in the film Gladiator when, taunted by the enemy commander across the battlefield, one of his officers states: ‘People should know when they are conquered’; Maximus answers: ‘Would you, Quintus? Would I?’37
The problem Clausewitz identified was that perception is often not durable; it can evolve. The enemy’s ‘will’ could return: ‘the hardships of that situation [defeat] must not of course be transient—at least not in appearance. Otherwise the enemy would not give in but wait for things to improve’.38 For instance, the rhetoric of the ‘undefeated army’ in inter-war Germany compromised the notion of German ‘defeat’ upon which the stipulations of the Great War peace treaties were predicated. Field Marshal Viscount Slim deals with this problem in Defeat into Victory (1956), his classic account of the Burma campaign.39 He ordered all the Japanese officers ceremonially to snap their own swords at the surrender parades so that there could be no myth of the undefeated army. The stability of strategic effect—the output which war’s mechanism offers—corresponds to how durable is the perception of defeat.
Defeat for Clausewitz was a perceived state, a construct. As perceptions can change, defeat is not a stable concept, and therefore neither is victory. For instance, a battle may destroy part of the enemy force, but it is how that event is interpreted by the enemy that invests the battle with significance in terms of the wider war: the enemy may perceive himself to be defeated or, alternatively, carry on. Clausewitz argued that there was a ‘culminating point’ of attack which is the furthest extent to which one can go before one’s position becomes over-extended and indefensible.40 That is where attack must turn to defence. If one goes too far, what might initially have been interpreted to have been a success may come to be seen as failure.
The unstable nature of victory is evident in history. For example, the Roman Emperor Trajan conquered vast swathes of territory, such as the new province of Mesopotamia; many of these ‘gains’ subsequently had to be abandoned by his successor Hadrian, as they were not realistically sustainable. In retrospect Trajan’s victories seemed more like failures for the Roman Empire. The idea of the culminating point makes just as much sense in political as military terms in contemporary conflict: coalition policy goals in Afghanistan, whose ambitions inflated after the success of the initial Taliban defeat, have had to be scaled back to allow the coalition to succeed in the goals it sets itself.
This applies as much to wars as to battles. In 1529 Sultan Suleiman failed to take Vienna after an unsuccessful siege. A major Ottoman campaign had failed. Yet he returned to his capital Constantinople in celebration, as if he had won a major victory through the campaign’s moderate extension of Ottoman territory in the Balkans. By adjusting his strategic narrative he was received as a victor, and has been remembered as ‘Suleiman the Magnificent’. Ironically this is an appellation used by Westerners, who tend to identify with those who defeated him at Vienna; the Ottomans themselves called him the ‘lawgiver’. Ultimately victory is what is interpreted as such.
So is defeat. Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued in The Culture of Defeat that defeat is a malleable concept.41 He focuses primarily on three cases of defeat: the Confederacy after the US Civil War; France after the Franco-Prussian War; and Germany after the First World War. In each instance post-war narratives were suggested, and gained considerable purchase, by the ostensibly ‘defeated’ who rejected that claim.
Even at the lowest level of war victory and defeat are often subjective constructs. For example, there was a small skirmish on 27 September 2007 near the village of Hyderabad in the Upper Gereshk Valley, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. 8 Platoon of C Company, First Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles (1 RGR), was engaged by insurgents on the banks of the River Helmand. Objectively, one could describe the events in terms of its physical reality. Gurkha soldiers and insurgent fighters moved in a certain way. Bullets, rocket-propelled grenades and mortarfire were exchanged, which travelled on certain trajectories. Commands were given. There were casualties. However, no person ever has access to that complete and objective understanding. The underlying physical reality is understood though subjective, perceived interpretation.
I remember the event mainly in terms of staying low and moving fast, as the army’s expression goes, in a field of high corn which was above head height, speaking to my company commander on the radio, and trying to reposition my three sections (eight-man combat teams) based on my fragmentary understanding of what was going on. Even after the skirmish, when experiences were compared with the rest of the platoon, the event, like all combat, remained a subjective collection of experiences as remembered by members of the group. Rifleman Padam Shrees, for example, spent twenty minutes pinned down in a field at the forward point of the platoon, returning fire despite being highly exposed. Corporal Basanta, commanding the forward section, was at the most vicious point of the action, with great courage directing his section to suppress the various enemy firing points to the front while under sustained rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) and machine-gun fire themselves.42
The platoon sergeant, Bel Gurung, assisted by Lance Corporal Chaman’s section, was focused on dealing with two of our casualties, both riflemen: one with RPG fragment in his leg; the other, the platoon radio operator, with a small piece of shrapnel in his neck. The two four-man fire teams of Corporal Tara’s section were bounding past one another and firing in turn up an irrigation stream at 90 degrees to the forward section, trying to set up some depth to our platoon position to block the insurgents who were trying to outflank us.
All the participants in this skirmish would only see it from a particular and fragmentary perspective. Even if the insurgents’ recollections of the event were incorporated, or indeed those of the local villagers (some of whom may well have been insurgents themselves), the interpretation of the event would remain subjective, both in terms of what happened and who ‘won’.
However, this was a small and short skirmish, which makes it possible to gather together the various perspectives, at least on one’s own side, and paint a relatively coherent picture of what happened. The problem of subjective interpretations correlates to the size of the picture. When a battlespace is an entire country, and there are multiple, overlapping sets of target audiences, the instability of any assertion of ‘what happened’ really starts to become problematic.
This subjectivity makes narratives malleable, just as Suleiman the Magnificent understood. In July 2010 Major Shaun Chandler was commanding A Company 1 RGR in central Helmand. He knew the insurgents were telling villagers that we were cowards because we did not fight man to man, but used aircraft and artillery. Major Chandler shaped perceptions by very rarely using helicopter support, never using aircraft, and never using artillery. He repeatedly outmanoeuvred the insurgents using basic infantry tactics and snipers. At one point he invited the insurgents, through the villagers, to a ‘fair’ fight in a field at a given time in which he would only bring twelve men, and not use air support or artillery. He showed up on time, the villagers showed up to watch, but the insurgents refused to fight. After thirty minutes Major Chandler walked into the middle of the field by himself and looked around, making a visual statement to the villagers. This lost the insurgents a lot of credibility in the village as the events were perceived by all parties—us, the villagers and the insurgents—as a defeat for the insurgents’ narrative.43
In the language of strategic thought today, Clausewitz’s emphasis on the perceived quality of a war’s decision is expressed in terms of the ‘strategic narrative’. War has an underlying physical reality (the events), and the interpretation of that reality (the version). Strategic narrative is essentially an aspirational version of events which associates the two. If one’s strategic narrative is to defeat the enemy in order to impose a given political outcome on him, one is victorious, or has ‘succeeded’ in today’s parlance, once that is understood to have happened. In this sense, success or failure in war are perceived states in the minds of one’s intended audience. War can be understood as a competition between strategic narratives, a theme fully considered in Chapters 8 and 9.
Strategic audiences: the objects of war’s outcome
Clausewitz understood that the perceived component of a war’s ‘decision’ was subjective because the interpretation of the physical component could vary depending on the interpreter. It may therefore appear paradoxical that Clausewitz both recognised the conceptual instability of war’s outcome—its decision—but equally stressed that war’s function was a mechanism to provide a decision. This paradox is largely resolved by two concepts that Clausewitz implicitly presupposed in all war. The first, described above, was the polarisation of war on a single axis, which produced two ‘sides’. This narrowed the possible conceptualisation of war’s outcome in terms of a see-saw of victory and defeat. The second was the idea that, even though war’s outcome was an interpreted state, its interpreters—the strategic audiences—were primarily the sides themselves. To return to the metaphor of war as a trial, this is the idea that each side is its own judge and seeks to impose its verdict on the other.
For Clausewitz, although he did not use the term, the definition of ‘strategic audiences’ in war was very straightforward: the first division was between one’s own side and the enemy, according to the principle of polarity; the second division was between the army, people and government within each side (assuming, as Clausewitz did, that the sides were state actors). In today’s terms these would be seen as ‘strategic audiences’, that is, the groups of people whom strategy seeks to convince of its narrative. Ultimately they are the arbiters of war’s outcome: their perceptions are the strategist’s objective, in terms of influencing them, or of making them irrelevant, in accordance with the intent of policy.
Thus in war one seeks to defeat an enemy. The enemy loses when he is defeated. This can be either because he accepts himself that he is defeated, or because even if he does not accept it, he is now irrelevant to one’s definition of victory. For example, the remnants of the Malayan Communist Party only surrendered in 1989. However, for most people, including Britain, the Malayan Emergency had been ‘won’ by 1960. The Malayan Communist Party in this sense could interpret the outcome however it wanted; it was no longer relevant to British policy, and thus no longer a strategic audience.
What is central in Clausewitz’s conception of war is the idea that the strategic audiences of war were contained within the ‘state’ of either side. They won or lost the war with their state. This is really the essence of inter-state war as a mechanism of war, as opposed to just the description of two states fighting. The element ‘inter’ communicates the notion that the issue is between these two polarised constituencies, and does not primarily involve other ‘audiences’. The mechanism by which war provided an outcome was for Clausewitz brutally simple. Rendered in today’s parlance, strategy sought to impose its strategic narrative on the enemy through force, or its threat. The enemy came to subscribe to one’s narrative, died, or became no longer relevant.
Yet success in war was not just about the defeat of the enemy; it was also necessary to unify the strategic audiences who were within one’s own side behind one’s strategic narrative. Strategy had to maintain unity between the strategic audiences who were within one’s state: government, army and people. Since war was for Clausewitz a ‘clash of wills’, all three of these elements contributed to the coherence and strength of a given side’s will. Clausewitz discussed cases where the government resists the people’s ‘passion’ for war because it is not a good idea in rational terms. He also discussed cases in which the people’s passion has to be artificially stoked to get support for the government plan.44 Clausewitz repeatedly stresses the ‘moral’ component in terms of the army. The army is not a robotic tool; soldiers are human; the inference for strategy today is that the army is an audience in itself.
When strategy fails to unify the strategic audiences who are within one’s own side, the state cannot act as a ‘judge’ to provide a coherent verdict of war’s outcome. During the Vietnam War there were massive differences in perceptions of success between the US administration on the one hand and large tranches of domestic public opinion; this is not to mention disillusion among sections of lower ranks of the military on the ground later on in the conflict. That is, if victory, or success, is only interpreted as such by one element of the state, it is compromised as a legitimate analysis.
The flexibility of the Clausewitzian paradigm of war
This chapter started in Afghanistan, as an example of a contemporary conflict in which the implicit application of the conceptual structure of war in the Clausewitzian paradigm was inappropriate. The temptation is to indicate the redundancy of Clausewitzian thought to contemporary conflict. That would be incorrect. Clausewitz’s analysis was not intended to describe circumstances in which armed force was used as a direct extension of political activity outside of war.
An astute evaluation of the conceptual framework of a conflict outside traditional war was presented by US army General Raymond Odierno, who had extensive command experience in Iraq 2006–10, including as overall coalition commander. When asked at a press conference in March 2010 if the war in Iraq was effectively over, he replied: ‘war is a very different concept… I call [Iraq] more of an operation, not a war’.45
The traditional, Clausewitzian, paradigm of war assumes that there is mutual understanding of war as an interpretive unit. This provides mutual recognition of the military outcome. Strategy can then focus on the application of military force itself (combat), which Clausewitz argued was the ‘only means of war’.46 Yet Clausewitz realised that war’s interpretive structure would be revised if the military outcome were not mutually observed. This occurred when a more effective form of war made the previous one redundant.
For Clausewitz, who wrote On War between 1816 and 1830, after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, a more limited form of war would only have a function ‘so long as it is tacitly understood that the opponent follows suit. But is it possible to tell how long this condition will be observed? The French Revolution surprised us in the false security of our ancient skills, and drove us from Châlons to Moscow’. The function of war in the Napoleonic paradigm made war’s previous function redundant; to enter into war with Napoleon with a mindset of limited political goals, and a corresponding limitation of the use of force, was not possible.47 The relevance of this observation today would be that the evolution of the use of force directly for political purposes, outside of war, on a large scale, is quite possibly irreversible: armed actors imitate what is effective in each other’s practice, especially in response to the information revolution.
In Clausewitz’s analysis, in the eighteenth century war was mutually understood by European powers in terms that did not make it ‘absolute’: the enemy was out-manoeuvred rather than totally destroyed; this emphasised the perceived over the physical component of defeat.48 Yet in his own lifetime Clausewitz saw warfare expand beyond its eighteenth-century limitations to approach its absolute state: ‘we might doubt whether our notion of its [war’s] absolute nature had any reality, if we had not seen real warfare make its appearance in this absolute completeness right in our own times’.49 The social forces of the French Revolution of 1789 led to a French force which in 1793 ‘beggared all imagination’ because ‘suddenly war became the business of the people, all thirty million of them’. The massive perception shift in the scale of war that he directly experienced in his own lifetime is essential to understand what Clausewitz attempted intellectually to come to terms with in On War. In 1792 at the Battle of Valmy, towards the start of the Revolutionary Wars, 64,000 men on one side fought against 30,000 on the other in a battle lasting one day. By 1813 at the Battle of Leipzig, 365,000 men fought 195,000 in a battle lasting three days.50
The numbers were only one aspect of a massive evolution in how people understood war’s basic form. What Clausewitz terms ‘strategic manoeuvre’ did not work against Napoleon’s asymmetric approach that emphasised physical, as opposed to perceived, superiority. Napoleon’s emphasis on seeking victory in physical terms through the pursuit of decisive battle was taken to extremes by employment within an unrestrained political context. This approach was characterised by the concept of exploitation: the ruthless pursuit of the enemy to his total submission. War was now a fight for state survival, not a political game: ‘the sole aim of war was to overthrow the opponent’.51
The concept of failure to identify a transformation in war informed Clausewitz’s analysis of Prussia’s crushing defeat at the Battle of Jena by Napoleon in 1806. Prussia entered still thinking in the eighteenth-century mode; this was the mode that saw war’s objectives in terms of ‘a couple of fortresses and a medium-sized province’. Yet Napoleon, ‘the God of War himself’, thought of war in terms of far greater objectives: ‘would Prussia…have risked war with France if she had suspected that the first shot would set off a mine that would blow her to the skies?’52 In Clausewitz’s view, Prussia’s strategists had not understood the significance of the novelty and asymmetry of Napoleon’s concept of war:
In the eighteenth century…war was an affair of governments alone… At the onset of the nineteenth century, peoples themselves were in the scale on either side… Such a transformation might have led to new ways of thinking about it. In 1805, 1806, and 1809 they might have recognised that total ruin was a possibility—indeed it stared them right in the face… They did not however change their attitudes sufficiently… They failed because the transformations of war had not yet been fully revealed by history.53
The functionality of war in terms of its provision of a military decision has been constantly revised. The point Clausewitz makes is that military victory meant a very different thing at the time of his birth than after the Napoleonic Wars. The deliberate subversion of the interpretive unit provided by war can be understood in terms of asymmetric warfare in the strategic sense: Napoleon deliberately, and brutally, ignored the conventions of eighteenth-century warfare to gain an advantage. The interpretive evolution of war can therefore occur within the Clausewitzian paradigm, indeed it is normal.
Clausewitz’s analysis of war’s mechanism is flexible and does not resist change; it accounts for it. For Clausewitz war retained utility through reconfiguration, and evolved frequently. Napoleon may have changed the rules of war, but he still thought of victory in terms of the defeat of the enemy. In this paradigm military action sets conditions for a political solution, but two circumstances are presupposed: first is the principle of polarity; second is the notion that strategic audiences in war are primarily contained within the states at war. In short, war in its traditional form can work as a mechanism to deliver a political decision when there is an enemy, and one defines the outcome against him. Asymmetry within that paradigm drives war’s evolution in terms of military innovation and the ends that policy seeks in war; war, however, remains distinct from peace.
Strategic asymmetry is therefore not what is distinctive about contemporary conflict. Clausewitz’s paradigm of war accepts that it is a normal feature of war’s evolution. The distinctive feature of contemporary conflict is the absence, or more typically the compromise, of the two prerequisites that bound the circumstance of war, and thus allow war’s mechanism to function as a political instrument. Afghanistan is one example of the consequence of confusing Clausewitzian war with armed politics outside war. The next chapter deals with the subversion of the Clausewitzian paradigm of war that occurs when it is used to incorporate strategic audiences beyond the enemy.