An analogy from the death penalty may be helpful. There too, the means employed affect the ethical dimensions of the practice itself. The gas chamber and the electric chair—both used in the United States even after the Holocaust—became fraught with meaning. Their symbolism soured public opinion on the death penalty. By contrast, the clinical or medical nature of lethal injection at first reduced the political controversy surrounding executions. Only over time, with botched lethal injections and questions surrounding the drug cocktails and their true effects, have there been more questions raised. But it has taken time for the negative publicity to catch up with lethal injection. Drones, at this point, remain far less fraught than conventional targeted assassinations.
The newness of the drone, its surgical nature, and the fact that there are no domestic casualties, no body counts on nightly television, not even the possibility of a domestic death—these all ease their use. But the point is not just that drones are easier to use. More importantly, they make the counterinsurgency paradigm an easier framework to embrace. They make killing even US citizens abroad far more tolerable. And this tolerance is precisely what ends up eroding the boundaries between foreign policy and domestic governance, something we will come to shortly in Part III.
Like every new military technology that seems at first invincible—the submarine, the V-2, the machine gun—drone technology will one day be less omnipotent. One day, in all likelihood, even newer technology will allow the targets to hack into the remote-control system and send the Hellfire missiles back to the Predator drone, or even worse, into civilian populations. And then a new, perfectly safe killing device will be invented. But for the time being, these drones epitomize the logic of counterinsurgency theory: a deadly machine that eliminates the revolutionary minority, terrorizes their neighbors, and projects the power of the US government—in such a way as to convince the general population of their greater strength and dependability. It is a lethal new addition to modern warfare.
The drone has provided real momentum in the historic transformation we have witnessed over the past few decades. Part of what has contributed to the triumph of counterinsurgency strategy as a foreign policy—and to its domestication—is precisely the technological advances that have made the dream of total information awareness a possibility and the aspiration to surgically eliminate the active minority attainable. Technological innovation—the ability to capture all digital traffic or safely direct a drone strike oceans away—these technologies make it possible to imagine that we have come closer to the ideal that counterinsurgency theory envisioned. These new technologies help realize modern warfare. And they ultimately set the stage for the domestication of the counterinsurgency-warfare paradigm.
5
WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS
THE THIRD PRONG OF COUNTERINSURGENCY THEORY CONSISTS in winning the hearts and minds of the general population to stem the flow of new recruits to the active minority and to seize the upper hand in the struggle. This goal can be achieved by actively winning the allegiance of the population, or by pacifying an already passive population, or even simply by distracting the masses. The bar, ultimately, is low since, on the counterinsurgency view, the people are mostly passive. As Roger Trinquier noted in 1961, “Experience has demonstrated that it is by no means necessary to enjoy the sympathy of the majority of the people to obtain their backing; most are amorphous, indifferent.” Or, as General Petraeus’s manual states, the vast majority is “neutral” and “passive”; it represents an “uncommitted middle” with “passive supporters of both sides.”1 The third prong, then, is aimed mostly at assuaging, pacifying perhaps, or merely distracting the indifferent masses.
In the case of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and broader foreign policy, the third prong has translated, principally, into three tactics: investments in infrastructure, new forms of digital propaganda, and generalized terror. Together, they juxtapose the beneficent and humanitarian with the terrifying and terrorizing. They include some innovations, especially new digital technologies that update more traditional approaches to wooing a population. And over time—from the occupation of Iraq to the war on ISIS—the emphasis has shifted from infrastructure investment to digital propaganda. Undergirding them both, though, is the third tactic, the threat of generalized terror, that serves as a foundational method and looming constant.
In How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Rosa Brooks writes that since 9/11 we have witnessed the expansion of the military and its encroachment on civilian affairs. “We’ve seen,” in her words, “the steady militarization of US foreign policy as our military has been assigned many of the tasks once given to civilian institutions.” Brooks warns us of a new world where “the boundaries between war and nonwar, military and nonmilitary have eroded.” It is a world in which, Brooks notes, the military is no longer confined to guns and battles, but does all kinds of civilian tasks—like “train Afghan judges and parliamentarians, develop television soap operas for Iraqi audiences, and conduct antipiracy patrols off the Somali coast… They monitor global email and telephone communications, pilot weaponized drones from simulated airplane cockpits thousands of miles away, and help develop and plan for high-tech new modes of warfare, from autonomous weapons systems operated by computers using artificial intelligence to DNA-linked bioweapons.”2
We are indeed facing, as Brooks powerfully demonstrates, a new world of an ever-encroaching military. But what this reveals, more than anything, is the rise of the counterinsurgency paradigm of government. It is the model of counterinsurgency warfare—of Galula’s early turn to building schools and health facilities, to focusing on the hearts and minds of the general population—that has pushed the military into these traditionally civilian domains, including total surveillance, rule-of-law projects, artificial intelligence, entertainment, etc. In effect, it is the counterinsurgency paradigm of government that has become everything, and everything that has become counterinsurgency. The blurring of boundaries between war and peaceful governance is not merely the contingent result of 9/11, it is instead the culmination of a long and deliberate process of modernizing warfare.
Brooks’s diagnosis—of a military encroaching on civilian realms since 9/11—can best be understood in the broader framework of the ascent of counterinsurgency as foreign policy. The blurred lines between war and foreign policy, embodied for instance in the development of soap operas and social projects in Iraq, was not some sort of fluke. It represented instead the growing influence of counterinsurgency thinking.
The first tactic, then, is the investment in infrastructure and civil society—a strategy that has, at least at the outset, a humanitarian character. This was one of David Galula’s key strategies of modern warfare, and Galula himself invested an enormous amount of time in Algeria in setting up schools, constructing roads and forts, and enhancing medical care.3 General Petraeus followed suit, and his field manual stressed the importance of engaging in social projects. Many on the ground recognized the reluctance of some in the military to engage in social work—as well as the military’s lack of competence in the area. Nevertheless, General Petraeus’s manual underscored that “durable policy success requires balancing the measured use of force with an emphasis on nonmilitary programs. Political, social, and economic programs are most commonly and appropriately associated with civilian organizations and expertise; however, effective implementation of these programs is more important than who performs the tasks.”4
Providing basic necessities, labeled “essential services” in the field manual, is a key counterinsurgency practice. It consists primarily of ensuring that there is “food, water, clothing, shelter, and medical treatment” for the general population. General Petraeus’s manual explains the rationale in very simple terms: “People pursue essential needs until they are met, at any cost and from any source. People support the source that meets their needs. If it is an insurgent source, the population is likely to support the insurgency. If the [host nation]
government provides reliable essential services, the population is more likely to support it. Commanders therefore identify who provides essential services to each group within the population.”5
General Petraeus’s field manual gave the example, for instance, of the development efforts in the city of Tal Afar in northern Iraq, which was the target of heated insurgency in early 2005. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment—under the leadership of Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, who would later become national security adviser under President Donald Trump6—reclaimed the area in the summer of 2005, and after expelling the insurgents, began a project of reconstruction. The manual describes the efforts in these terms:
With the assistance of the Department of State and the US Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives, efforts to reestablish municipal and economic systems began in earnest. These initiatives included providing essential services (water, electricity, sewage, and trash collection), education projects, police stations, parks, and reconstruction efforts. A legal claims process and compensation program to address local grievances for damages was also established.
As security and living conditions in Tal Afar improved, citizens began providing information that helped eliminate the insurgency’s infrastructure. In addition to information received on the streets, multinational forces established joint coordination centers in Tal Afar and nearby communities that became multinational command posts and intelligence-sharing facilities with the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police.
Unity of effort by local Iraqi leaders, Iraqi security forces, and US forces was critical to success. Success became evident when many families who had fled the area returned to the secured city.7
General Petraeus also emphasized the correlative need to relate positively to the local population. You will recall Mao’s “Eight Points of Attention” to his fighters mentioned earlier, that reminded them to “talk to people politely,” “observe fair dealing in all business transactions,” and “return everything borrowed from the people.” Galula had similar prescriptions, such as to deploy counterinsurgency forces “where the population actually lives and not on positions deemed to possess a military value.”8 General Petraeus learned Mao’s and Galula’s lessons well. Here are some of Petraeus’s twenty-four commandments that accompanied, by memo, his field manual:
LIVE WITH THE PEOPLE. We can’t commute to the fight. Position joint bases and combat outposts as close to those we’re seeking to secure as feasible…
WALK. Stop by, don’t drive. Patrol on foot whenever possible and engage the population. Take off your sunglasses. Situational awareness can only be gained by interacting face-to-face, not separated by ballistic glass or Oakleys.
BE A GOOD GUEST. Treat the Afghan people and their property with respect. Think about how we drive, how we patrol, how we relate to people, and how we help the community. View our actions through the eyes of the Afghans and, together with our partners, consult with elders before pursuing new initiatives and operations.9
Note that, in his original version of this last point, General Petraeus had written: “View your actions through the eyes of the Afghans. Alienating Afghan civilians sows the seeds of our defeat.”10
In order to make good on all these promises and invest in civil society, the American government flooded the occupied territories with money. The United States spent $113 billion in Afghanistan between 2001 and early 2016 for reconstruction, which represented far more than the Marshall Plan in postwar Europe. It spent about $14 billion a year on contracted work. General Petraeus aggressively promoted “the practice of pumping money into the economy of Afghanistan,” arguing that dollars would buy peace. “Employ money as a weapons system,” Petraeus wrote in 2008. “Money can be ‘ammunition.’”11 Most of these dollars went to American private companies and to local establishments, serving another objective of minimizing American casualties.
The result was a dizzying distribution of cash, marked by extreme corruption. With very little oversight of procurement bidding and with the strategic need to rely on apparent friends and allies, contracts were dished out in ways that created instant fortunes for the lucky and the connected. From 2007 to 2014 alone, the United States gave out $89 billion in contracted moneys in Afghanistan.12 As Matthieu Aikins reported in the New Yorker:
“There were so many contracts out there that you could win anything you wanted,” Simon Hilliard, a former British soldier who worked on KAF [the main US base, known as Kandahar Airfield] as the managing director of Watan Risk Management, an Afghan-owned security company, told me. “The margins were insane.” He said that, in eighteen months, Watan’s revenues increased from five hundred thousand dollars to fifty-eight million.13
The corruption was documented in cases like United States of America v. Sum of $70,990,605, et al., in which the US Justice Department accused one Afghan entrepreneur of bribery; and criminal cases surrounding these, like the ones in which eight US soldiers pleaded guilty on related charges. The Center for Public Integrity published a study in May 2015 that found that “at least a hundred and fifteen US service members who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been convicted of bribery, theft, and contract-rigging charges since 2005.”14
Naturally, much of the money found its way back with the Taliban and the forces that the American military were fighting. A forensic audit conducted in 2010 by the military, Task Force 2010, discovered for instance that, of about $31 billion in contracts inspected, about $360 million ended up in the hands of the Taliban, corrupt officials, or criminals; and that was only what could be directly accounted for. Recognizing some of these problems, General Petraeus put in place, in September 2010, guidelines to reduce corruption and stem the flow of moneys going to the Taliban. “The scale of our contracting in Afghanistan represents both an opportunity and a danger,” Petraeus said. “With proper oversight contracting can spur economic growth and development.”15
Ultimately, counterinsurgency theory calls for providing social goods and building infrastructure, but in Iraq and Afghanistan the government followed this dictate somewhat partially and lazily, leading to much corruption. This result reflects, of course, the difficulty of hewing to counterinsurgency theory, as well as the imperfect embrace of it. But as we will see, it also reveals a more solid undercurrent of modern warfare, namely, the use of terror.
A second approach to securing the neutrality of the majority is more psychological. In the early days of modern warfare, examples of this approach included measures such as the resettlement of populations, in the words of counterinsurgency experts, “to control them better and to block the insurgents’ support.” This is what the British did in Malaya, and the French in Algeria. Other examples included basic propaganda campaigns.16
As time has gone by, new digital technologies have enabled new forms of psychological counterinsurgency warfare. One of the newest involves digital propaganda, reflected most recently in the Center for Global Engagement set up under the Obama administration in early 2016. Created with the objective to prevent the radicalization of vulnerable youth, the center adopted strategies pioneered by the giants of Silicon Valley—Google, Amazon, Netflix—and was originally funded at the level of about $20 million. It targeted susceptible persons suspected of easier radicalization and sent them enhanced and improved third-party content in order to try to dissuade them, subliminally, from radicalizing or joining ISIS. In the words of an investigative journalist, “The Obama administration is launching a stealth anti-Islamic State messaging campaign, delivered by proxies and targeted to individual would-be extremists, the same way Amazon or Google sends you shopping suggestions based on your online browsing history.”17
There were several steps to this approach, and they were all modeled on the latest algorithmic recommendation techniques of digital giants like Google and the most sophisticated digital advertising methods of Facebook and social media.
The first step was to collect and data mine the digital traces that all Intern
et users leave on social media, retail sites, web browsing, video games, and other digital venues to identify persons at risk of radicalization by ISIS or other extremists. Just as the retail giant Target could identify pregnant women through their digital traces before other family members could, the Global Engagement Center would data mine all our digital traces in order to identify those susceptible to radical influences even before they began to fall prey to those influences themselves.18
The second step was to identify third-party content that has a moderating, rather than radicalizing, effect, and then to enhance and improve that content so that it was even more effective. Providing consultation and financial support to third parties, the center ensured that they were using the best practices of the digital advertising industry—for instance, more images and better rhetorical strategies. The idea here, according to reports, was to “give local nonprofits, regional leaders, or activists invisible financial support and technical expertise to make their videos or websites or radio programs look and sound professional—and let them own and distribute the message.” In these efforts, the center took its cue from the private sector, relying especially on the best practices of the digital advertising industry. Apparently, the center worked directly with Facebook, and its spokesman, Jodi Seth, indicated that Facebook shared their research with the center in order to show administration officials “factors that help make counter-speech more successful,” such as better formatting of content (for example, it is now believed that including photos and videos will increase the likelihood that posts are read) and improving the tone of the content (here, for instance, it is believed that it is better to be constructive and to use satire or humor rather than just attack ads).19
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