Out of the Mountains
Page 4
This chapter sets the scene for the rest of this book. It lays out some of the insights that emerged from these conversations, from the field experiments and projects that followed, and from the wider body of research on what things will be like on the future planet. It’s an attempt to formulate what it is about the urban, networked environment that makes conflict there so different from conflict in places such as Dara-i-Nur, before we begin (in the chapters that follow) to describe how real-world conflict happens on the ground today.
II
Since the start of this century many soldiers, diplomats, and aid workers have had their heads in the Afghan mountains. Governments have expended enormous effort on hunting down fast-moving, lightly equipped bands of guerrillas in the world’s most forbidding terrain. Aid agencies have grappled with the need to stabilize and reconstruct the remote communities where these guerrillas operate. But if, as I’ll show in this book, the future is actually going to be urban, networked, and coastal, then the issues that Steve and I were discussing—the need to ensure that cities can both meet their populations’ needs and preserve people’s safety—will be the main challenges of the next generation. To deal with them, we’ll need to get ourselves, mentally and physically, out of the mountains.3
International troops have left Iraq, and most will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014. But there will be strong elements of continuity after these conflicts wind down. Formally declared warfare among nation-states, for example, is likely to keep getting rarer, while violence involving nonstate armed groups (whether we call it “war” or “crime”) will probably remain the most common and widespread form of conflict.4 As just one example of this, we might note the long-standing historical pattern in which the United States conducts a large-scale or long-duration counterinsurgency or stabilization operation about once a generation and a small or short-term mission about once every five to ten years—far more often than it gets into declared wars against other nation-states.5
Since the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, the United States has been drawn into literally dozens of small wars and irregular operations. Even the few conventional wars during this period—including the U.S. Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First and Second World Wars, and the Korean War—involved guerrilla conflict, stability operations, and postconflict nation building. The Spanish-American War, for example, triggered a drawn-out and controversial counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines, and several follow-on operations in Cuba.6 During the Korean War, which is generally regarded as “conventional,” General Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Incheon (discussed in the Appendix) stranded thousands of North Korean troops behind United Nations lines—they fought as guerrillas for several years, preying on local villagers, creating no-go areas, and attacking lines of communication. It took a major effort, over several years, to deal with this threat.7 Likewise, the 1991 Gulf War, the quickest and most cleanly conventional of recent American conflicts, brought with it a long tail of humanitarian, enforcement, and stabilization operations. These included the northern and southern no-fly zones, a major U.S. Air Force effort intended to deter Saddam Hussein from reprisals against the Iraqi people, and Operation Provide Comfort, a humanitarian assistance effort that kept U.S. troops on the ground in Iraqi Kurdistan more than five years after the hundred-hour ground war was over.8
This pattern of frequent irregular warfare—the military term for conflict that involves nonstate armed groups—seems to be totally independent of policy makers’ preferences.9 In particular, presidential desire (or lack of desire) to carry out these operations has no detectable impact on how often they occur. President Lyndon Johnson, for example, considered Vietnam a distraction from his domestic goals, yet oversaw an escalation that drew almost six hundred thousand U.S. troops into the war at its peak in 1968. President Bill Clinton came into office with a similarly domestic focus and a desire to avoid overseas entanglements. He delayed committing troops to the Balkans and sidestepped Rwanda altogether, scarred by a failed intervention in Somalia. Yet he ultimately sent troops to Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Haiti, and Liberia, maintained no-fly zones against Iraq (including a major air campaign in 1998), and deployed ships and planes to support the Australian-led intervention in East Timor in 1999. As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush opposed stability operations and derided nation building. But as president, he led the United States into its largest war since Vietnam, its largest nation-building effort since World War II, and the largest NATO stabilization operation ever. He committed forces to not one but two simultaneous large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns, along with counterterrorism and nation-building interventions worldwide. None of these presidents had any subjective desire to get involved in irregular conflict: all of them did so anyway, and all at about the same rate as their predecessors.
In January 2012 President Obama became the latest in the long line of leaders to express a desire to avoid this kind of conflict. In his guidance to the Defense Department, the president signaled a rebalancing toward Asia and the Pacific in the aftermath of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and directed that U.S. forces “no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.”10 If we leave aside the inconvenient reality that the Afghan war was, even at that time, far from over (and that conflicts were ongoing in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Nigeria, and the Congo), history suggests that the president’s directive, even though undoubtedly sincere and well intentioned, won’t change much. Leon Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” American policy makers clearly don’t like irregular operations, and the U.S. military isn’t much interested in them, either, as an institution. But the deep structure of American engagement with the world, over at least the past 150 years, has meant that the military ends up doing these operations anyway, much more often than it does conventional state-on-state wars.
To be sure, new technologies—drones and offensive cyberwarfare, for example, both of which are discussed in Chapter 4—give policy makers ways to avoid putting boots on the ground, and we’re already seeing more emphasis on what we might call remote warfare as part of what some have dubbed the “Obama Doctrine.”11 But literally dozens of new technologies have entered the arsenal over the past 150 years, without any detectable effect on the number of irregular operations. If anything, these technologies may make policy makers more likely to intervene in future conflicts, because they offer the tempting possibility of fewer troops deployed, fewer body bags coming home, and less political controversy, through the promise of a lighter “footprint.”
This history suggests that there will be a strong, continuing demand into the foreseeable future for military operations against a variety of nonstate actors, and not just for the United States: in 2013 alone, the French undertook a major irregular intervention in Mali, British forces deployed to several countries in Africa and Asia, Australian troops were operating in East Timor and several Pacific islands as well as in Afghanistan, twenty-seven nations contributed ships to a naval anti-piracy task force in the Gulf of Aden, there were regional peacekeeping and counterinsurgency operations all over Asia and Africa, and many other countries were engaged in military operations against nonstate armed groups.
But the evidence also suggests that the future environment—the context for these operations—will differ radically from what we’ve known since 9/11. In particular, research on demography and economic geography suggests that four megatrends are driving most aspects of future life on the planet, including conflict. These are rapid population growth, accelerating urbanization, littoralization (the tendency for things to cluster on coastlines), and increasing connectedness. If we add the potential for climate-change effects such as coastal flooding, and note that almost all the world’s population growth will happen in coastal cities in low-income, sometimes unstable countries, we can begin to grasp the complex challenges that lurk in this future environment.
Crowded, Co
astal, Connected Cities
As I just noted, Western governments and militaries have focused since the turn of the century on wars like those in Afghanistan. This is the world of the Dara-i-Nur ambush I described in the preface: a place of mountain terrain, micropolitics, and remote villages, where outsiders move—only half understanding what they see—in a landscape defined by centuries of tradition and by a harsh and unchanging geography. The last decade has also, of course, seen intense urban fighting, mainly in Iraq—from high-intensity battles such as in Fallujah or Ramadi to urban insurgency in Baghdad or Basra.
Urban warfare in Iraq had a huge impact on the American military, but its international effect was far less pronounced. For one thing, although roughly the same number of governments sent troops to Iraq as to Afghanistan (fifty in Iraq versus fifty-one in Afghanistan), far fewer sent combat troops to Iraq, so a smaller number of countries bore the brunt of the actual fighting.12 For another, the Iraq war was very concentrated in time and space. Almost all the fighting happened between 2004 and 2008, with by far the heaviest combat occurring from March 2006 to September 2007, the deadliest eighteen months in Iraq’s modern history. During this period, as for much of the war, the violence was concentrated in Baghdad. In 2006, for example, almost twice as many civilians were killed in Baghdad city as in the rest of the country combined.13 As I wrote while preparing to deploy to Iraq in January 2007, almost half of all combat incidents at that time happened within the Baghdad city limits, in a purely U.S.-Iraqi operational sector.14 Thus Americans and Iraqis experienced sustained, heavy urban combat, but most others—with the sole significant exception of the British in Basra—were lucky enough to miss this experience, either because they didn’t send combat troops or because their soldiers were in more rural, less violent areas outside the capital.
So, by default, Afghanistan has been the defining experience of modern conflict for many of the developed world’s armies and air forces—the model, in effect, for twenty-first-century warfare. And the war in Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is extremely diffuse. The conflict is spread across the country, and the heaviest fighting happens mostly in rural areas, far from Afghanistan’s cities—which, for most of the war, have been far safer than the countryside. To be sure, as the counterinsurgency fight intensified in 2010–12, the Taliban shifted to urban attacks (bombings, drive-by assassinations, and raids) and the level of guerrilla fighting in the countryside dropped in relative terms. But in absolute terms, the war is still mainly one of small mountain villages, farming areas, and frontier valleys.
Also, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the heaviest fighting was far from coastlines. Afghanistan, of course, is landlocked, and the parts of Iraq that saw the worst of the conflict were also a long way from the coast. Again, the British experience in the Faw Peninsula (discussed in the Appendix) and in the coastal city of Basra was the sole important exception to this pattern. It was an exception that proves the rule, though, since it only emphasized how rare coastal fighting has been for Western forces in twenty-first-century conflict so far. But the urban littoral will indeed be the arena for much of future conflict, simply because it will be where most people live, according to currently available data.
Imagining Future War
These data don’t permit specific predictions, of course—only general projections based on current trends. It’s absolutely certain that there will be outliers, shocks, and nonlinear shifts. There will be disruptive technologies, political discontinuities, and “black swans.”15 Specific future wars will undoubtedly happen in a range of environments and conditions, and landlocked rural mountainous areas will of course continue to see a share of conflict proportional to their share of population. It’s just that, since the population of the planet is shifting from rural to urban areas, that proportion will be a diminishing part of the whole.
Thus, just as climate projections don’t say much about tomorrow’s weather, projections of current trends say little about future wars. But they do suggest a range of conditions—a set of system parameters, or a “conflict climate”—within which those wars will arise. This is because, as the anthropologist Harry Turney-High suggested more than thirty years ago, social, economic, political, and communications arrangements influence war making so profoundly that “warfare is social organization.”16 Thus, the specifics of a particular war may be impossible to predict, but the parameters within which any future war will occur are entirely knowable, since wars are bounded by conditions that exist now, and are thus eminently observable in today’s social, economic, geographic, and demographic climate.
If we accept this idea, along with the fact that war has been endemic to roughly 95 percent of all known human societies throughout history and prehistory, it follows that warfare is a central and probably a permanent human social institution, one that tends (by its very nature as a human activity) mainly to occur where the people are.17 This is especially true of nonstate conflicts (guerrilla, tribal, and civil wars, or armed criminal activity such as banditry and gang warfare), which tend to happen near or within the areas where people live, or on major routes between population centers.18 And it follows that since the places where people live are getting increasingly crowded, urban, coastal and networked, the wars people fight will take on the same characteristics.
We can summarize the conflict climate in terms of four drivers, sometimes called megatrends, that are shaping and defining it. These are population growth (the continuing rise in the planet’s total population), urbanization (the tendency for people to live in larger and larger cities), littoralization (the propensity for these cities to cluster on coastlines), and connectedness (the increasing connectivity among people, wherever they live). None of these trends is new, but their pace is accelerating, they’re mutually reinforcing, and their intersection will influence not just conflict but every aspect of future life.
Population growth and urbanization are closely related. More and more people are living in larger and larger cities, and the greatest growth is in the low-income (sometimes poorly governed) areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that are least equipped to handle it. This is easy to see if we just look at the numbers. At the start of the industrial revolution in 1750, world population was about 750 million. This population took 150 years to double, reaching 1.5 billion in 1900. It then doubled again in only 60 years, to reach 3 billion by 1960. This, of course, represents a sharp increase in population growth—one that occurred despite the enormous effects of the two world wars, which between them killed more than 70 million people.19 Population growth kept accelerating after 1960, with the world population doubling yet again in only 39 years, to reach 6 billion by 1999, and adding another billion in just one decade to reach a total (in 2012) of about 7.1 billion. This growth won’t continue indefinitely: global population is expected to level off at somewhere between 9.1 and 9.3 billion humans on the planet by about 2050.20 Still, that’s a lot of people—about a twelve fold increase in just three centuries.
As population has grown, urbanization has accelerated. In 1800, for example, only 3 percent of people lived in a city with 1 million inhabitants or more; by the year 2000, 47 percent of the global population lived in cities this size. In 1950, there were only 83 cities with populations over 1 million; by 2007, there were 468. By April 2008, the world had passed the 50 percent urbanization mark, and in December 2011, the world’s most populous nation, China, announced that it had reached a level of 51.3 percent urbanization.21 India, with the second-largest population on the planet, will not only overtake China’s population by 2025 but will also undergo a radical shift in settlement patterns, going from approximately two-thirds rural in 2012 to two-thirds urban by 2040. Some Indian population centers will become megacities, and “according to one vision, India’s entire western seaboard could turn into a single conurbation . . . within two decades India will probably have six cities considerably bigger than New York, each with at least 10 million people.”22 By 2
050, roughly 75 percent of the world’s population will be urbanized. In more immediate terms, about 1.4 million people across the world migrate to a city every week.23
This unprecedented urbanization is concentrated in low-income areas of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Cities are expected to absorb all the new population growth on the planet by 2050, while simultaneously drawing in millions of migrants from rural areas. And this growth will be “concentrated in the cities and towns of the less developed regions. Asia, in particular, is projected to see its urban population increase by 1.7 billion, Africa by 0.8 billion, and Latin America and the Caribbean by 0.2 billion.”24 What this means is that population growth is becoming “an urban phenomenon concentrated in the developing world.”25
To put it another way, these data show that the world’s cities are about to be swamped by a human tide that will force them to absorb—in just one generation—the same population growth that occurred across the entire planet in all of recorded history up to 1960. And virtually all this urbanization will happen in the world’s poorest areas—a recipe for conflict, for crises in health, education, and governance, and for food, energy, and water scarcity.26
I should mention that many places affected by rapid urbanization happen to be majority-Muslim, and that takfiri extremists—successors and imitators of Osama bin Laden—will undoubtedly keep threatening their own societies and the world at large. Indeed, the freedom from repression that emerged from the Arab Awakening—in itself an entirely positive thing—may have prompted a spike in violence in these parts of the world, at least for the time being. Thus the Muslim world certainly won’t be spared the disruption we’re discussing here; indeed, it may experience more conflict and unrest than other parts of the planet. But the challenges I’m describing will dwarf the terrorist threat of the last decade. If a city’s infrastructure is collapsing—overwhelmed by a rapidly growing population, unplanned slum development, political instability, violent crime, conflict, disease, increased vulnerability to natural disaster, and shortages of energy, food, and water—then the fact that extremists are also out there will of course be highly unpleasant and dangerous, but it will be far from the main threat. Groups such as Al Qaeda will still exist and will pose a danger that needs to be dealt with one way or another. But the main cluster of threats, both for individuals (sometimes known as threats to human security) and from a collective standpoint (threats to public safety or national security), will come from the environment itself, not from any one group in it.