Knowing the Enemy

In the Dec 18 2006 edition of The New Yorker, George Packer (pp.60-69) wonders about Knowing the Enemy and Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"? The article is really managing the discontent among the wretched of the earth instead of alleviating the discontent.

Diagnosis and Cure

David Kilcullen, a Lt. Colonel in the Royal Australian Army, is quoted as saying

“I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor,” he said. “After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.” In West Java, elements of the failed Darul Islam insurgency—a local separatist movement with mystical leanings—had resumed fighting as Jemaah Islamiya, whose outlook was Salafist and global. Kilcullen said, “What that told me about Jemaah Islamiya is that it’s not about theology.” He went on, “There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’ ” Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, he said, “People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.” He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates.

Emphasis Mine

The immediate problem with this analysis is there is no cause. Rebellion is presented as something that exists. Here only the explanation is of how rebellion maintains itself.

This shallow analysis leads to an equally shallow prescription:

Steve Fondacaro, a retired Army colonel who for a year commanded the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force in Iraq, is in charge of the Human Terrain project. Fondacaro sees the war in the same terms as Kilcullen. “The new element of power that has emerged in the last thirty to forty years and has subsumed the rest is information,” he said. “A revolution happened without us knowing or paying attention. Perception truly now is reality, and our enemies know it. We have to fight on the information battlefield.” I asked him what the government should have done, say, in the case of revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. “You’re talking to a radical here,” Fondacaro said. “Immediately be the first one to tell the story. Don’t let anyone else do it. That carries so much strategic weight.” He added, “Iraqis are not shocked by torture. It would have impressed them if we had exposed it, punished it, rectified it.” But senior military leadership, he said, remains closed to this kind of thinking. He is turning for help to academics—to “social scientists who want to educate me,” he said. So far, though, Fondacaro has hired just one anthropologist. When I spoke to her by telephone, she admitted that the assignment comes with huge ethical risks. “I do not want to get anybody killed,” she said. Some of her colleagues are curious, she said; others are critical. “I end up getting shunned at cocktail parties,” she said. “I see there could be misuse. But I just can’t stand to sit back and watch these mistakes happen over and over as people get killed, and do nothing.”

Emphasis Mine

So the message is spin early and spin often. This is truly totally fucked. Have these people no idea what is going on in the rest of the world? Did they really think that by just changing the channel, everything will be made better and have a happy ending?

There is a myopia here that looks at the world through a television set. Control the programming and you control the world. The reason that other sources of information is because of the demand for information that better explains the reality people are seeing and feeling.

For a Western culture, it is now hard for us to realise that people talk to each other in the rest of the world. They move about. They see the devastation. They remember life before the West came.

There are no isolated incidents to be explained away. What is happening to them is happening to others as well.

This information is not to keep the natives happy - it is keep Westeners comfortable in their ignorance. As long as we have our creature comforts, we can ignore the cries of pain coming from the outside. Ignorance can then be truly bliss.

The Cold War and the GWOT

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is now to seen as the replacement for the Cold War:

Kilcullen’s thinking is informed by some of the key texts of Cold War social science, such as Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” which analyzed the conversion of frustrated individuals into members of fanatical mass movements, and Philip Selznick’s “The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics,” which described how Communists subverted existing social groups and institutions like trade unions. To these older theoretical guides he adds two recent studies of radical Islam: “Globalized Islam,” by the French scholar Olivier Roy, and “Understanding Terror Networks,” by Marc Sageman, an American forensic psychiatrist and former covert operator with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. After September 11th, Sageman traced the paths of a hundred and seventy-two alienated young Muslims who joined the jihad, and found that the common ground lay not in personal pathology, poverty, or religious belief but in social bonds. Roy sees the rise of “neo-fundamentalism” among Western Muslims as a new identity movement shaped by its response to globalization. In the margin of a section of Roy’s book called “Is Jihad Closer to Marx Than to the Koran?” Kilcullen noted, “If Islamism is the new leftism, then the strategies and techniques used to counter Marxist subversion during the Cold War may have direct or indirect relevance to combating Al Qaeda-sponsored subversion.”

Emphasis Mine

This is the closest the article comes to recognising that there might a common cause for both Communist Revolution and Islamic Jihad. The article then goes on to examine whether such approaches are relevant and makes some suggestiosn that Janet Albrechtsen, while saying that There is no substitute for knowing your enemy, interprets as:

But that depends on two things. Muslim communities must recognise and own the problem that exists in their communities. And non-Muslims must work with them to build up trusted networks, providing better alternatives to radicalism. It's here, at the grassroots, that the battle of ideas needs to be fought and won.

Emphasis Mine

And she misses the whole point which was to divert the discontented away from joining organisations that confront the new world order into those that work within the system.

Complex Warfighting

In the New Yorker article, the cause of this discontent is never mentioned or examined. It just exists as if it were part of human nature.

However, Lt Col Kilcullen is more forward in Complex Warfighting which he wrote for the Royal Australian Army. He says that [t]he key driver is Globalisation (pp.2-3):

5. The key influence on contemporary conflict is Globalisation. A widely accepted definition of Globalisation is ‘a process of increasing connectivity, where ideas, capital, goods, services, information and people are transferred in near-real time across national borders’.²

6. Globalisation, during the last decades of the twentieth century, has created winners and losers. A global economy and an embryonic global culture are developing, but this has not been universally beneficial. Poverty, disease and inequality remain major problems for much of the world, and the global economy has been seen as favouring the West while failing developing nations. The developing global culture is perceived as a form of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism: corroding religious beliefs, eroding the fabric of traditional societies, and leading to social, spiritual and cultural dislocation. This has created a class of actors – often non-state actors – who oppose Globalisation, its beneficiaries (the developed nations of the ‘West’) and, particularly, the US.

7. Globalisation has created enemies of the West, and given them unprecedented tools to further their cause. Globalised media, satellite communications, international travel and commerce, and the Internet facilitate the coordination of diffuse movements that oppose Western dominance. The free flow of capital, people and ideas allows the spread of movements inimical to Globalisation, and provides them the means to further develop.

8. Moreover, Globalisation is not fully controllable by governments. Multi-national corporations, trans-national organisations, and non-government actors are key players in Globalisation. Indeed, this is one reason why inequalities and problems have developed: in many cases, forces other than conscious national policy drive the process of Globalisation. This hampers an effective response to the opposition provoked by Globalisation.

9. Finally, national security, like almost all of national life, has become globalised. Under Globalisation, a nation’s security interests no longer equate to its territory. Indeed, the Government’s 2003 foreign policy White Paper emphasised this, stating that ‘Australia’s interests are global in scope and not solely defined by geography’³. National security concepts based on geographical theories such as the ‘sea-air gap’ or the concentric circles of the 1980s ‘defence in depth’ concept are hence not applicable to Australia’s circumstances. Such geographical determinism assumes Australia will automatically be secure if we keep an adversary out of our physical space. However today, Australia’s economic, political, technological, and industrial interdependence with the rest of the world means that our interests and sovereignty can be seriously threatened without an attack upon our territory.

In other words, global capitalism is rapidly expropriating wealth at a rate that is causing widespread discontent. And there is nothing governments can do about it. The areas of exploitation are now required to be defended by the Australian Armed Forces in order to keep the exploitation running smoothly.

An all we Westeners have to do is believe that poverty and despair is the problem of the poor. It is their fault for being poor. not ours. We just stole their wealth - so can we be held responsible. Next time you know, you would say Capitalism is a crime against humanity and join a Communist Party.