I could continue this coastal tour at length, but the overall point is clear: the same patterns exist in littoral cities across the entire developing world. As well as occurring simultaneously in different cities, these problems—from poverty and social unrest to gang warfare, organized crime, insurgency, terrorism, and even out-and-out civil war—can coexist in one city at the same time. Feral cities are emerging in some countries, and feral districts have arisen in many cities. Acute violence exacerbates deeper, chronic issues, making every other problem worse and harder to get at. In the words of Mike Davis, the world is becoming a “planet of slums,” with “more than 200,000 slums on earth, ranging in population from a few hundred to more than a million people” and the emergence of “‘megaslums’ . . . when shantytowns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery.”24 The periurban world is also, as we’ve seen, highly connected: as of early 2013, more than six billion people across the planet own cellphones (that is, about two billion more than have access to clean water or toilets)—and problems in one place can rapidly escalate and spread to others.25
This, then, is the suite of problems—framed by the megatrends of population growth, urbanization, littoralization, and connectedness—that will define the environment for future conflict, and for every other aspect of life, in the next generation. How do we react to this? How should we think about the coming environment, how can we prepare for it, and what can we do about it?
That depends on what the word we means in that sentence. In cities under stress, there’s no inclusive “we,” no single unified society, but rather a complex shifting ecosystem of players cohabiting in segregated communities with competing interests, clashing cultures, and differing perspectives. Are we Baron Haussmann, trying to manicure an urban jungle, or Victor Hugo, lamenting the loss of people’s autonomy? Are we the Jamaican constabulary, or the population who get their law and order from the gang dons of the Kingston garrison communities? Are we the community organizations trying to mitigate violence in San Pedro Sula, the businesses making clothes in its outskirts, or the workforce in those factories? Or are we the American public, buying clothes and cocaine, both of which stage through Honduras on their journey to the U.S. market, supporting the deportation of Honduran gang members (and thus both funding and fueling San Pedro Sula’s astronomical murder rate), while tut-tutting as if we had nothing to do with it? Are we the entrepreneurs who run businesses (licit, illicit, or both) from La Rocinha, or the police working to pacify the place? Are we the Western militaries, diplomatic services, and aid agencies wondering how to operate in this environment if, God forbid, we find ourselves dragged into it? The examples discussed in previous chapters suggest insights for several of these groups, and the rest of this final chapter outlines some of these insights—not as definitive conclusions, but as tentative hypotheses that will need a lot of further testing. Before examining specific insights, though, it makes sense to put forward some overall observations.
II. “Bending the Curve”
The first, most obvious insight is that whatever the future of conflict may be, most of the time it won’t be much like Afghanistan. Given the historical patterns I mentioned in Chapter 1, we’ll probably see strong operational continuity (frequent irregular and unconventional warfare, stabilization operations, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief, with rare but dangerous instances of state-on-state conflict). But we’ll also see a sharp environmental discontinuity: the future environment (crowded, coastal, urban, connected) will be so different from Afghanistan (remote, landlocked, rural) that we’ll have to consciously reconsider much of what we think we know about twenty-first-century conflict.
How, for example, will drones and satellites operate over urbanized spaces where we can see any house from the outside—but not know who lives in it, or what’s moving in the sewer systems underneath it, or in the covered laneways that link it with other houses under the urban canopy? The capacity to intercept, tag, track and locate specific cellphone and Internet users from a drone already exists, but distinguishing signal from background noise in a densely connected, heavily trafficked piece of digital space is a hugely daunting challenge. How will special operators or strike aircraft engage targets in the same tenement or shack system as thousands of innocent bystanders? These people won’t long remain bystanders if we go in hard after a target and disrupt their lives in the process. How will heavy armored vehicles maneuver in streets that are three feet wide? How will battalions and brigades do population-centric counterinsurgency in cities so gigantic they could soak up a whole army and hardly notice? How will expeditionary logistics function, in cities that can barely feed or water themselves or supply their own energy needs, let alone fill logistics contracts to support an external military force? How will offensive cyberoperations help against virtual swarms of hackers when disrupting an urban population’s electronic connectivity turns out to be one of the most provocative things you can possibly do? All these things will demand hard and wide-ranging thought. (Some detailed ideas on these issues, and others, are in the Appendix.)
Don’t get me wrong: the counterinsurgency era is far from over, much as people might want it to be—historical patterns suggest that Western countries will almost certainly do large-scale counterinsurgency again, probably sometime in the next decade or two, whether we want to or not. So it’s absolutely imperative that military forces retain the lessons and skills they’ve learned in those conflicts, yet simultaneously figure out how to do such operations in the megaslums of tomorrow—a tall order indeed. Mountain warfare, with its extreme demands on troops and equipment, is also far from a thing of the past: mountain campaigns will most certainly happen again. Specialist mountain troops (such as France’s outstanding Chasseurs Alpins, who so distinguished themselves in Afghanistan), light infantry (such as the American 10th Mountain Division), and airborne (parachute) or air assault (helicopter-borne) forces will remain essential because of their ability to infest a landscape, move quickly across broken and complex terrain, engage with a population, and get right up close and personal with a determined enemy. As the world gets ever more littoral, Marines will, if anything, become even more the force of choice for the complex expeditionary operations in which they specialize.
But as a proportion of the whole, wars in remote, mountainous, landlocked places such as Afghanistan will get rarer by comparison to urban littoral conflicts, simply because wars happen where people live, and people will be overwhelmingly concentrated in coastal cities. We may be doing the same kinds of operations as today, but the places where we’ll be doing them will be radically different. Versatility and adaptability—being able to work in the widest possible variety of environments, perform the widest possible range of missions, and transition rapidly and smoothly between terrain and mission types—will therefore be much more important than optimizing for any one scenario. Terms such as full-spectrum, versatile, and adaptable are often used as a way to avoid making hard choices about capability trade-offs: by optimizing for everything we optimize for nothing. But, as Chapter 1 showed, even though we can’t predict specific future conflicts (akin to predicting the weather), we can make informed judgments based on projections about the future conditions and circumstances under which these conflicts will take place (understanding the climate). That future conflict climate, as we have seen, will be coastal, networked, and overwhelmingly urban—so we need to orient ourselves toward, rather than optimizing solely for, conflict in connected cities.
This leads to my second overall observation, which is that security thinkers need to start treating the city as a unit of analysis in its own right. Dominant theories of international relations take the nation-state as their basic building block. Western governments talk of “national security”; there are “country teams” in our embassies and “country desks” in our diplomatic services, intelligence organizations, and aid agencies. This nationa
l-level shorthand (“Indonesia,” “Pakistan,” “Nigeria,” “India,” “China”) lumps together huge and diverse areas of enormous countries as if they were single, indivisible units and flattens out the crucially important variations among population groups within them. Yet Jakarta and Merauke, Karachi and Q uetta, Lagos and Kano, Mumbai and Hyderabad, or Shanghai and Urumqi could hardly be more different from each other, and each of these cities contains dozens of distinct population groups who also differ dramatically. We need to bring our analysis down to the city and subcity level, understanding communities and cities as systems in their own right (perhaps, via the flow-modeling approach I’ve described in this book, treating cities as biological or natural systems). We need to understand how a city’s subsystems and subdistricts fit together as well as how that city nests within and interacts with regional and transnational flows and networks. Much of the work to enable this approach has already been done in the urban studies, ecology, systems engineering, political geography, and architecture communities—it’s partly a matter of taking models that already exist in other disciplines, bringing them into the national security field, building on them, plugging in new variables, and looking closely and creatively at the results. In this respect, the political science community may perhaps be able to help, applying recent research on modern and medieval city-states as an organizing framework—doing for coastal cities what Antonio Giustozzi did for Afghanistan’s city-states in his magnificent study of Afghan warlord state-building, Empires of Mud.26
A related insight is the need to conceive of a city as flow and process, rather than just place, with violence shaping and creating the landscape, not just happening in it. This jumps out at me from the Tivoli Gardens example we looked at in Chapter 2. The military traditionally treats urban terrain as a “special environment,” which makes sense at the tactical level, where combat engagements are so fleeting (seconds and minutes, to hours or days at most) that the landscape is effectively a constant. Having been brought up this way, until I studied Kingston through the lens of competitive control theory, looking at it in terms of long-term conflict between Jamaican political parties and their client gangs, I naively thought of a city as just a piece of real estate—a fixed backdrop against which the action happened. I understood how dramatic an effect urban terrain could have on conflict; what I didn’t fully grasp was that this could work the other way—that processes of conflict and competitive control at the street level could literally create the physical terrain of an urban area, demolishing entire districts in one place, creating new districts in another, determining the locations of key pieces of urban infrastructure, and defining the spatial relationships between parts of the city. And physical terrain (initially formed by conflict) can then channel and define how subsequent conflict occurs, so the urban organism both reflects and perpetuates the conflicts that created it.27 Having once had this insight (which I’m sure is entirely obvious to many people but just hadn’t quite struck me before), I can never see cities the same way again. An urban area, as it exists in any one instant, is now to me just a snapshot of a dynamic disequilibrium. Like a still image from a video clip, it’s in midflow, and it seems permanent only if you ignore what’s happening on either side of the freeze-frame you happen to be looking at in any one moment. Flow, not space, is what defines urban areas: the mathematics of cities is calculus, not geometry.
But if cities are in a state of dynamic disequilibrium, this calls into question policy makers’ emphasis on stability as a goal. Planners talk about stabilizing a country, returning to normality. The military has a whole doctrine called “stability operations,” NATO has a school for “stability policing,” aid agencies do “stabilization programming,” the World Bank and the IMF issue “stabilization loans,” and political scientists talk of “status quo powers” and “hegemonic stability theory.”28 But at the city level, none of this makes much sense—there is no status quo, no “normal” to which to return, no stable environment to police. Think about Dhaka, exploding from 400,000 to 15 million, or Lagos, growing from 3 to 20 million, or Mumbai from 2.9 to 23 million, all in the same time frame.29 These aren’t stable systems; even if you could somehow temporarily get every city function under control, the frantic pace of growth would rapidly overtake the temporary illusion of stability. In fact, that’s exactly what has occurred in many cities, where planners have repeatedly devised solutions to problems as they exist at one particular moment, only to find these solutions overtaken by events before they can be implemented. In maneuver theory terms, rapid dynamic change has gotten inside planners’ and political leaders’ decision cycles: they repeatedly develop policies that would have been adequate for a set of circumstances that no longer exists. Rather than focusing on stability (a systems characteristic that just isn’t present in the urban ecosystems we’re examining here), we might be better off focusing on resiliency—helping actors in the system become better able to resist shocks, bounce back from setbacks, and adapt to dynamic change. Instead of trying to hold back the tide, we should be helping people learn to swim.
Another insight that arises from this line of thinking is that the territorial logic of any given city—the way things work, how the place flows, what drives what, what matters and what doesn’t—will be totally opaque to outsiders, at least at first. Taking the time to observe a city for long enough to sense the flow and to see the rhythms of its metabolism turns out to be critical in understanding it. (Think about how thoroughly Lashkar-e-Taiba scoped Mumbai before the 2008 attacks, studying the city and its flow for more than a year, and compare that to Task Force Ranger in Mogadishu.) A one-time analysis, however detailed, doesn’t say much about a city’s flow. Big data can sometimes help, since advances in cloud computing and data mining now make it possible to produce dynamic visualizations of flow patterns. Analysts can track millions upon millions of data points (traffic patterns, say, or cellphone usage, or pedestrian movement, or prices in markets, or Internet hits, or bank transactions, or numbers and types of cars in parking lots)—things that dozens of businesses across the world analyze every day for marketing purposes—to understand how a city works. But how do we do that in enormous megaslums that are constantly growing and morphing and which don’t have the spatial frameworks (down to street names and building addresses, for example) that allow geo-referenced data to mean something?
Obviously enough, we go in on the ground, and we engage directly with the people who live there. Caerus field teams under Matt McNabb and Richard Tyson have done exactly this in Liberia and Nigeria over the past two years, working with marginalized urban communities to help them create maps of their own environment and thus give them a voice in negotiations on land use, infrastructure, crime, and public safety. These teams have found that in these poorly serviced and barely governed periurban settlements, basic spatial relationships and flows are highly contested, which makes them extremely hard (and sometimes very dangerous) to map. This underlines another basic insight, namely, that self-aware ignorance—a constant realization that outsiders don’t understand how things work, and therefore need to experiment, test hypotheses, start off small, and seek local context—is a crucially important mental discipline if we want to be effective. If a city is a continuous dynamic flow, then it’s also a continuous natural experiment, and taking a consciously experimental approach will be key.
Less obviously, though, the same city that baffles outsiders may be completely opaque to locals. It’s clear enough that strangers coming in—the proverbial white guys with clipboards, patting the locals on the head, telling them to “stand aside, there’s a good little fellow, while we fix your problem”—have often done vastly more harm than good. You could think of UNICEF’s disastrous intervention in water supply in Bangladesh, which, at a conservative estimate, left twenty million people with chronic arsenic poisoning.30 Or the well-meaning efforts of Western movie stars handing out mosquito nets, putting local net manufacturers out of business and thus i
ncreasing, not reducing, people’s long-term vulnerability to malaria.31 Or, indeed, the many occasions in Iraq and Afghanistan—chronicled by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Tom Ricks, George Packer, Linda Robinson, and (with a certain unconscious irony) Paul Bremer—when our efforts had tragic unintended consequences because we just didn’t get how things were supposed to work.32
But here’s the thing: just because you live in New York, London, Sydney, or Tokyo—let alone Lagos, Karachi, Rio, or Cairo—doesn’t guarantee that you understand how these giant coastal cities work, either. You can be a complete local, live your whole life in a place, yet still not understand what’s driving the problems that affect it—because you only have a partial view, because your perspective is skewed by your own interests or affiliations, because living there limits your access to certain kinds of technical or functional knowledge that you’d need to understand the problem, or because where you live is just too big and complex and variegated for any one person to fully grasp what’s going on. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, someone standing in Trafalgar Square can’t see greater London, let alone all of England.33 Likewise, a crack addict on the streets of a big American city, a social worker in the neighborhood, a nurse in the local emergency room, or a police officer on the beat may all have a profound understanding of a particular set of hyperlocal issues and conditions, but that doesn’t mean they grasp the overall pattern in their city as a whole, or understand how to fix the problems they inhabit, any more than outsiders do.
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