Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  Beyond Military Urbicide

  Another insight is that military operations have immense destructive effects on cities, so military “solutions” to problems in future urbanized environments may be no solution at all.

  It’s a hard fact of life that armies kill cities. We’ve already seen how Ambassador Oakley, negotiating after the battle of Mogadishu, warned Somali leaders that large-scale military intervention in their city would inevitably kill it. The destruction sustained by Tivoli Gardens during Operation Garden Parish was on a far smaller scale, yet the engagement of the JDF inevitably brought far greater disruption, death, and damage than previous police-led operations had done. Even in Baghdad in 2007, in an operation designed to save rather than destroy the city, we made people safe but only, to use Steve Eames’s phrase, by “putting the city on life support.”

  We could think of classical examples such as the battles of Stalingrad in 1942, Warsaw in 1944, or Berlin in 1945, all of which inflicted immense and enduring damage on the cities involved. More recently, in irregular conflicts, Marines in Hue City during the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam engaged in heavy urban fighting, while the Russian army more or less flattened the city of Grozny during the First Chechen War of 1994–96.110 The Russians—after losing many troops during their failed New Year’s Eve assault of December 31, 1994—spent most of January 1995 shelling, mortaring, and bombing the city before moving in to systematically destroy it block by block.111 The U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq, during the two battles of Fallujah in April and November 2004, took extraordinary measures to avoid this kind of wholesale destruction, yet the city still suffered immense damage and dislocation.

  The ethics of military proportionality and protection of noncombatant civilians become extremely important in conflicts involving nonstate armed groups in urban terrain. In the Palestinian Territories, for example, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have used armored bulldozers and heavy artillery in towns including Jenin and Gaza, and Israel has been criticized for its policy of punitively destroying the houses of suicide bombers (which IDF spokesmen argue is an important deterrent) and for demolishing Palestinian homes it claims have been built illegally.112 Yet in the extremely densely populated, heavily urbanized Palestinian Territories, even “normal” IDF combat maneuvers can involve massive damage to the fabric of a city, as the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman pointed out in May 2006 in his description of the battle of Nablus four years earlier:

  During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of “overground tunnels” carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so “saturated” into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as “infestation,” seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of “walking through walls” involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare—a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.113

  This IDF tactic of moving within the actual fabric of the city’s buildings, burrowing into the concrete and brick of the urban environment itself, takes notions of infestation, nesting, and property destruction to an entirely new level. An Israeli commander interviewed by Weizman described his unit as moving “like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing.” Weizman also quotes a Palestinian mother on the effect of such tactics on the local civilian population:

  Imagine it—you’re sitting in your living-room, which you know so well; this is the room where the family watches television together after the evening meal, and suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if they’re after you, if they’ve come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else. The children are screaming, panicking. Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, 12 soldiers, their faces painted black, sub-machine-guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall?114

  John P. Sullivan, to whom I’m greatly indebted for these insights, quotes Weizman at length in his writings on what he, like others including Stephen Graham, calls “military urbanism”—the response to urbanized threats that turns cities into fortresses and populations into denizens of occupied territory. This has the extremely negative side effect of shutting down a city’s flow, or even physically destroying the city itself, in order to save it from an external threat, as in the famous words of a U.S. Army major in Vietnam, who said of the 1968 battle of Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”115

  Lest we imagine that such actions are a thing of the past, we should remember that in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military urbicide—the “deliberate destruction of the urban fabric”—has at times been a United States policy also, albeit on a smaller scale than that of Grozny or the Palestinian Territories. Mark Owen, in No Easy Day, his account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, describes an operation against an Iraqi insurgent weapons facilitator in Baghdad in 2005, in which his team was unable to subdue the target and ended up using cannon fire from an armored vehicle, plus a thermobaric demolition charge, to destroy an entire two-story home in a densely populated Baghdad neighborhood.116 Dozens of similar operations took place in 2006, 2007, and 2008, leaving significant damage across the city.

  More recently, in early 2011 Paula Broadwell drew controversy when she approvingly reported the total destruction of the village of Tarok Kolache in Arghandab district of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. The village had been occupied by Taliban fighters and laced with improvised explosive devices that caused numerous U.S. casualties; as a consequence, rather than engage in the difficult and dangerous task of clearing the village, on October 6, 2010, the U.S. Army approved the use of heavy artillery and aircraft to destroy the village, dropping just under fifty thousand pounds of ordnance on the area and totally leveling it. Although the operation allegedly caused no civilian casualties, and the same unit followed up with a massive reconstruction program that commanders expected to take up the entire remainder of their combat tour in the area, the notion that an American counterinsurgency force in 2010 would literally destroy a village in order to save it led to intense criticism.117

  If we want to move beyond military urbanism and urbicide, we need to think much more creatively about ways to secure urban environments. As I’ve suggested, focusing on cities as systems, exploring ways to expand the carrying capacity and improve the flow of the urban metabolism, may be important preventive measures. But—as discussed in Chapter 1—historical patterns of intervention suggest that military forces will still be dragged into these environments on a regular basis, responding to problems (as in Tivoli Gardens) that have spiraled beyond the capacity of civilian government to handle them.

  Governments such as that of the United States that draw sharp distinctions between warfare and law enforcement and between domestic and overseas legal authorities will experience great difficulty, and may find it impossible to act with the same agility as irregular actors who can move among these artificial categories at will. Capabilities that combine policing, administration, and emergency services, backed up with military-style capabilities so that police can deal with well-armed adversaries—capabilities traditionally associated with constabulary, gendarmerie, carabinieri, or coast guard forces—may be more effective against these hybrid threats than c
ivil police forces alone, and less destructive than unleashing the military.

  Nested Networks

  Another implication from this discussion of the future threat is that it will be nested—threat networks will be embedded in a complex urban littoral environment, illicit activities will nest within licit systems and processes, and local threats will nest within networks at the regional and global level.

  In the extremely complex, coastal, urban, and connected environment I’ve outlined, threat actors (like the terrorists in Mumbai, the Somali militias, or the Jamaican organized crime posses in Kingston) will be able to nest, avoiding detection, by remaining beneath the clutter of dense urban development and overpopulation. Because of the connectedness among threat networks, periurban communities, and city systems, it will be virtually impossible to target a dark network without also harming the community within which it nests. This will deter some governments from acting, while making it harder (as we’ve just seen in the case of Israel in Nablus and the United States in Tarok Kolache) for those who do act to justify their actions.

  As well as nesting in the urban environment itself, threats can nest within international and national systems, including international transportation networks, financial networks such as the remittance industry, and even humanitarian assistance systems. In Mogadishu, for example, there’s evidence of connectivity among Somali piracy syndicates, organized crime networks in Europe, and the Shabaab insurgency. Clans and criminal networks in Mogadishu, or in Somali coastal cities including Kismaayo and Haraadhere, draw little distinction between their military and political activities, on one hand, and their business activities (both legitimate and criminal), on the other. Conflict entrepreneurs—such as the clan traders who set up refugee camps around Mogadishu in 2008 to divert humanitarian assistance into the black market or to their business partners in Shabaab—operate on a continuum from legitimate business through illicit activity, outright crime, terrorism, and insurgency.118

  Because threat networks often nest within essential licit flows, it can be virtually impossible to shut them down. For example, as the investigative journalist Matt Potter showed, drawing from official and academic sources as well as local eyewitness accounts, some (though, of course, by no means all) of the same air charter companies that operate humanitarian assistance flights into drought-stricken or conflict-affected areas such as the Horn of Africa also smuggle weapons, drugs, and other contraband. Humanitarian aid workers and NGOs are perfectly well aware of this, but neither they nor the governments involved in relief efforts can shut down these trafficking flows, since it would mean an end to the movement of humanitarian assistance cargo.119

  Beyond Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism

  A final, very obvious point is that counterterrorism and counterinsurgency (dominant discourses of the past few years) are clearly only part of the solution here—and to only part of the problem. Neither of these approaches would have allowed us to fully understand, let alone deal with, any of the three cases discussed in this chapter.

  I’ve written elsewhere in detail on the intellectual history of counterinsurgency, and on various critiques of the theory.120 For now, though, it’s enough to note that there is solid evidence that counterinsurgency, or COIN, can work if done properly, with sufficient resources, for long enough.121 But it’s also clear that COIN is not the answer to every question. Likewise, counterterrorism (ranging from the comprehensive “global war on terrorism” of President George W. Bush’s administration to President Obama’s unrestrained drone warfare) can help to temporarily suppress a particular type of threat, but it can’t do much about the broad and complex range of challenges we’re about to face. In fact, any theory of conflict that’s organized around dealing with a single type of enemy is unlikely to be very helpful in a conflict environment that includes multiple overlapping threats and challenges.

  Instead, to deal with complex future conflicts, we’re going to need something more like a unified field theory: an approach that is framed around the common features of all types of threats (rather than optimized for the particular characteristics of any one type of threat) and considers the environment in toto as a single unified system. We’ll need to acknowledge that many security challenges in the future environment will be “threats without enemies,” which, by definition, are just not amenable to military solutions. And we’ll need to recognize that even when there’s an identifiable adversary—usually, but not always, a nonstate armed group—there are still no purely military solutions to many of the challenges we will encounter, meaning that disciplines such as law enforcement, urban planning, city administration, systems design, public health, and international development are likely to play a key part in any future theory of conflict.

  The unified field theory that best fits the currently known facts is what I call the “theory of competitive control.” This is the notion that nonstate armed groups, of many kinds, draw their strength and freedom of action primarily from their ability to manipulate and mobilize populations, and that they do this using a spectrum of methods from coercion to persuasion, by creating a normative system that makes people feel safe through the predictability and order that it generates. This theory has been part of many people’s thinking about insurgency and civil war for a long time. But the cases we’ve examined in this chapter suggest that it applies to any nonstate armed group that preys on a population. It applies to insurgents, terrorists, drug cartels, street gangs, organized crime syndicates, pirates, and warlords, and it provides useful explanations and insights for law enforcement, civil war, and diffuse social conflict—not just for insurgency. I will suggest that we treat this theory (until another theory emerges that better fits the available facts) as a working model for dealing with future threats. The next chapter explores the theory of competitive control in detail.

  3

  The Theory of Competitive Control

  Development in my area was slow until a huge migration of people especially from the northeast of Brazil, in the late 70’s came to Rocinha. Then some major building took place in many areas of the favela. The drug gangs came into power around this same time and instituted rules in the favela. Since the government and police never came here anyways, the drug guys took control of the neighborhoods and set the rules, no stealing, raping or killing inside the favela. I am not sure on the exact details because I was a kid. . . . The drug gang bought hearts and minds by aiding some of the poorest residents by providing food and necessities. Also many in the drug gang were “cria” or from the favela. Interesting dynamic it is and far more complicated than I can explain here. The drug gang became the parallel power and filled the role of the government. The gang built community centers and had simple roads paved. If you live in the community what would you think? After years of being neglected and shunned by the government, who do you turn to? The gang filled that role. I wouldn’t say people were happy about it, but they accepted it. What else could they do?

  —Life in Rocinha, 2012

  I. The Fish Trap

  5:20 a.m., April 15, 1999

  Mushu Island, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea

  The camp is quiet in the dawn. I’ve just rolled out of my mosquito net by the buttress roots of the enormous jungle tree my signalers are using as an antenna mast for our high-frequency radio, the only link for over a thousand miles back to our headquarters in northern Australia. Most of my soldiers are still sleeping, but a few have been up for hours, fishing in the inlet with spears and traps, which they and our local partners made the day before. We’re in our third week of survival training with our sister unit, 2nd Battalion of the Pacific Islands Regiment, on an island off the north coast of New Guinea.1 And I’m looking closely at the fishing trap as I rub the sleep out of my eyes.

  Many societies in Australasia and the Pacific, like most others throughout the world, seem to have independently invented the fishing trap some time
in the late Mesolithic period of prehistory.2 One traditional type is woven from narrow strands of bamboo, reeds, or grass, to form a cylinder that is closed at one end, with a conical opening at the other that lets fish enter but stops them from backing out. This is a standard type of trap in New Guinea, and as well as being a beautifully intricate work of traditional art, a trap like this is a highly effective hunting tool. With the right bait, placed with a good understanding of tides, currents, fish behavior, and movement patterns, it can produce at least one catch every day. The trap I’m looking at is only a few hours old, but it has already caught four coral trout from the inlet.

  Fish traps look ephemeral, but their flimsiness is a deliberate deception: the strands, individually weak, form a resilient network. Indeed, the flimsier the trap looks, the less the fish notice it—on their way in, hungry for bait, they brush nonchalantly past the very spikes that will later imprison them. The trap’s strength is its structure.

  Insurgents make fish traps, as do militias, gangs, warlords, mass social movements, religions (Jesus, for instance, called his apostles to be “fishers of men”) and, of course, governments.3 Like real fish traps, these metaphorical traps are woven of many strands—persuasive, administrative, and coercive. Though each of the strands may be brittle, their combined effect creates a control structure that’s easy and attractive for people to enter, but then locks them into a system of persuasion and coercion: a set of incentives and disincentives from which they find it extremely difficult to break out.