Explaining the Awakening: Engagement,Publicity, and the Transformation of Iraqi Sunni Political Attitudes

This article explores the reasons for the dramatic change in Sunni Arab Iraqi attitudes toward the United States from 2004 to 2007, which made possible the “Awakenings,” local groups of mostly Sunni tribes and former insurgents that decided to cooperate with the United States against al Qaeda in Iraq. While there have been many studies of the military strategy, there has been little attention paid to the reasons for the underlying attitude change. This article argues that the dramatic changes in the information environment and in the nature of direct contacts across a range of Sunni society played a crucial role. It draws on a wide range of Arabic language primary sources that have generally been neglected in U.S. military-centric accounts. No single dialogue flipped the Sunnis, and the change would not likely have happened without the material changes underpinning their interests. But years of ongoing, intensive dialogues across a wide range of interlocutors reshaped the foundations of the relationship and to convince those involved individuals of the possibility of a strategic shift. American counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine and the surge helped by proliferating the points of contact with Iraqis and by transforming the relations at the individual level. This has broad implications for key debates in contemporary U.S. foreign policy, as well as for counterinsurgency and international relations (IR) theory.     

The Future of War and American Military Strategy

The outcome of ongoing debates over the future of American military strategy will play a critical role in shaping the foreign and military policies of the United States over the next decade. Traditionalists worry about the shift towards emphasizing counterinsurgency (COIN) operations and irregular warfare, believing that the use of force is often ineffective in COIN situations and the American military should concentrate on planning for conventional war. In contrast, COIN advocates argue that the United States must focus its efforts on preparing for the wars it is most likely to fight, irregular wars. However, both schools of thought rely on assumptions about the future security environment that may reveal another path forward. First, although it seems intuitive to view irregular warfare as the dominant future concern, it is exceedingly difficult to predict accurately the future security environment, as the last 20 years have clearly shown. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the character of emergent threats will depend on how the United States focuses its resources. Paradoxically, no matter what it emphasizes, the military threats the United States is or will be most capable of defeating are the ones it is least likely to face, since potential adversaries will be deterred and seek other ways of confrontation. However, with some smart and careful investments, including the recognition that not all parts of the military have to be optimized for the same task, the United States military can both lock in its conventional dominance and continue to improve its ability to succeed in the irregular wars most likely to dominate the landscape in the short to medium term.     

暴力方式与民心向背：寻找治理族群叛乱的条件组合

治理族群叛乱的目标既包括土地的控制，也包括人的控制，这是治理族群叛乱区别于其他形式叛乱的特点之一。人的控制实际包含两个内容，既包括人心向背，也包括人员数量的控制。人心向背关乎民众支持，而争取民众支持的必要性在于，虽然拥有民众支持并不必然导致叛乱的平息，但是没有民众支持是不能平息叛乱的。在族群叛乱已经发生的情况下，国家政府只有赢得更多当地民众的支持，才能成功治理叛乱。根据冲突各方的暴力行为方式及其对当地民众支持的影响，成功平息叛乱应具备国家政府有区别使用暴力、叛乱组织无区别使用暴力、当地温和派主导平叛行动等三个必要条件，以争取更多民众支持。这三个条件构成的条件组合，可以有效控制和减少叛乱组织能够招募到的人员数量，只要国家政府的平叛战略能够有效控制叛乱组织所招募的叛乱人员数量，叛乱组织就将走向衰败并最终消亡，也就是说这一条件组合能够成为国家政府成功平叛的一个充分条件。通过对结合俄罗斯、印度和西班牙等国家治理族群叛乱的经验和教训的分析，进一步证实了以上观点。     

Flipping the Switch: Combat,State Building,and Junior Officers in Iraq and Afghanistan

Contemporary us counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan requires junior leaders to engage in both combat and state-building activities. This study aims to explain the fundamental challenge in merging these. I argue that difficulty lies in separating insurgents from civilians, and translating doctrine from senior to junior officers. Junior officers consistently develop a similar ad hoc decision-making tool— role-switching—to simplify complex situations to a binary of “hostile or not.” They understand themselves to fill only two roles, the violent “on” role and the non-violent “off” role and develop several tools to minimize the difficulty of role-switching, help their subordinates switch, and signal switching to local populations. Ultimately, however, problems with role-switching—role stickiness, inappropriate switching, and role bias—can in some cases encourage indiscriminate and excessive violence, pointing to the fundamental failures of using military forces as a one-size-fits-all solution to state-building projects abroad.     

Razzia: A Turning Point in Modern Strategy

The razzia, a tactic of swift and brutal raids used by the French military against recalcitrant tribes in Algeria in the 1840s, was a necessary step in modern military thought. At first glance the destructive and violent razzias stand in stark contrast to the constructive and non-violent bureaux arabes—an institutional ancestor of Provincial Reconstruction Teams. But both were developed in the same conflict and by the same men. These two innovations, this article argues, were also flipsides of the same coin: what today is called war “among the people.” The razzia consequently appears as a necessary historic precursor for contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine.     

Using Manpower Policies to Transform the Force and Society: The Case of the Pakistan Army

Military manpower policies have an impact beyond the garrison. Policymakers have long held that military service can darn social fabrics that have been rent by ethnic, communal, class, and other cleavages, while scholars debate whether and how this occurs. Because military participation has implications for citizenship, marginalized groups have campaigned to be allowed to participate in the military, and leveraged their service to achieve greater enfranchisement. Military service affects the society as a whole in other ways as well: for example, leaders with military experience are less likely than others to prefer military force when other options are available. This paper examines the Pakistan Army, which, with its domination of the state, feared Islamist tendencies, and incessant belligerence toward India, seems to differ markedly from other militaries. But, using army recruitment and household survey data, it shows that even the Pakistan Army has used personnel policies to reshape its force, despite the numerous challenges of such a course. Whereas recent manpower studies dilate upon how socially marginalized groups employ military service to achieve greater access to citizenship, my analysis exposits how an army uses service in its ranks to cajole reluctant citizens into the national project of Pakistan and encumber them with the responsibilities and rights thereof. While this essay provides greater insights into the Pakistan Army specifically by focusing upon this ostensible anomaly, I hope to inform the larger literature on defense politics and the instrumentality of manpower policies.     

Politics and Threat Perception: Explaining Pakistani Military Strategy on the North West Frontier

Abstract

Analysts and policymakers agree that the Pakistani military has engaged in selective repression of and collusion with armed groups. Yet beyond this general observation, fine-grained theory and evidence do not exist to systematically explain patterns of military strategy across groups and over time. This paper provides a theoretical framework for explaining regime perceptions of armed groups and the strategies state security managers pursue toward different types of groups. It then probes this framework using a combination of new medium-N data on military offensives, peace deals, and state–group alliances in Pakistan’s North West and four comparative case studies from North and South Waziristan. We argue that the Pakistani military—the key state institution in this context—has assigned armed groups to different political roles reflecting both their ideological affinity with the military and the operational benefits they can provide to the army. This mixture of instrumental and ideological motivations has created a complex blend of regime threat perceptions and state–group interactions across space and time. A clearer understanding of how the military views Pakistan’s armed political landscape can inform policy debates about the nature of Pakistani counterinsurgency, as well as broader theoretical debates about order and violence.     

We Always Fight the Last War? Prior Experiences in Counterinsurgency and Conventional Warfare and War Outcomes

Does previous experience with conventional warfare harm a military fighting an insurgency? Or, conversely, does prior experience with a counterinsurgency lower a military’s likelihood for winning a conventional interstate war? Whereas firepower, maneuver, and associated tactics are essential for conventional warfare, counterinsurgency requires restrictions on firepower and effective policing in order to “win hearts and minds.” These competing requirements for military preparedness for conventional warfare and counterinsurgency have been extensively debated. However, the consequences of fighting counterinsurgency on a state’s readiness for fighting conventional wars (and vice versa) have been unexplored. We examine the relationship between past experiences with one type of conflict and war outcomes of the other type of conflict through a quantitative analysis of all wars that ended between 1838 and 2005. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that past experiences with either counterinsurgency or conventional warfare have little association with future success in war, conventional or not.     

The Soldier, The State, and The Clash of Civilizations: The Legacy of Samuel Huntington

The major military challenge that the United States faces today is the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is engaged in a grueling counterinsurgency campaign against the Islamist movement known as the Taliban, which is based among Pashtun tribes in Southeastern Afghanistan and Northwestern Pakistan, who have never been permanently subdued by a foreign military force. This challenge comes in the wake of that other grueling counterinsurgency war that the U.S. military has had to conduct in Iraq, where its chief adversary was the Islamist movement known as al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Moreover, the challenge in Afghanistan comes on what could be the eve of an impending military challenge, perhaps even a war, with Iran, as that Islamist state relentlessly moves toward acquiring nuclear weapons. In its entire history of two- and-a-quarter centuries, the United States has never been engaged in an unbroken succession of three wars, in three different countries. Together, the U.S. wars with or within Islamist countries add up to what is a “long war,” indeed.     

“The War Will Come to Your Street”: Explaining Geographic Variation in Terrorism by Rebel Groups

Geographic variation in rebels’ use of terrorism is not well understood. This article explains the use of terrorism in civil conflict through examining geographic variation in terrorist attacks across first–level administrative regions. Two explanations are tested using data on 47 groups in 21 countries: that terrorism is intended to punish supporters of counterinsurgency efforts or to destabilize regions of the country that are both outside of rebels’ military reach and have substantial grievances against the regime. Results show that terrorism is most prevalent in national capitals and regions that are more deprived. The findings suggest that rebel groups face multiple incentives for violence beyond zones of direct military confrontation with the government, using both highly visible attacks against the center of power and attacks intended to geographically expand the rebellion. The findings imply maximizing public service provision and minimizing economic inequality may reduce the breadth of rebels’ potential expansion.     

Fuel to the Fire: Natural Disasters and the Duration of Civil Conflict

Do natural disasters prolong civil conflict? Or are disasters more likely to encourage peace as hostilities diminish when confronting shared hardship or as shifts in the balance of power between insurgents and the state hasten cessation? To address these questions, this study performs an event history analysis of disasters’ impact on the duration of 224 armed intrastate conflicts occurring in 86 states between 1946 and 2005. I contend that natural disasters increase conflict duration by decreasing the state’s capacity to suppress insurgency, while reinforcing insurgent groups’ ability to evade capture and avoid defeat. First, disasters’ economic impact coupled with state financial outlays for disaster relief and reconstruction, reduce resources available for counterinsurgency and nation building in conflict zones. Second, the military’s role in administering humanitarian assistance can reduce the availability of troops and military hardware for counterinsurgency, prompt temporary ceasefires with insurgents, or both. Third, natural disasters can cause infrastructural damages that disproportionately hinder the state’s capacity to execute counterinsurgency missions, thereby making insurgent forces more difficult to capture and overcome. The combination of these dynamics should encourage longer conflicts in states with higher incidence of disaster. Empirical evidence strongly supports this contention, indicating that states with greater disaster vulnerability fight longer wars.     

A Requiem for American Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency as an operational method employed by the American military to achieve policy aims at a reasonable cost in blood and treasure has failed miserably. The idea that it has worked should be buried in the ground with a requiem stating that counterinsurgency is dead. Unfortunately, a large group of writers over many years have constructed a deeply flawed narrative that suggests that it is alive and well and continues to shape and influence American foreign policy toward and activist use of American military force in the world's troubled spots.     

Religious Intelligence

Sacred rituals and symbols can act as force multipliers that motivate and constrain the effectiveness of actors. Religious intelligence involves an assessment of how these rituals and symbols affect combat operations. The fourfold challenge faced by the religious intelligence analysts is to ascertain how prominent a role religion will play in a given conflict, what the relevant sacred phenomena are, how salient they are for the specific religious communities present, and how they will affect a given conflict. The case studies that form the core of this article highlight three issue areas open to religious intelligence collection and analysis, and exhibit variation in the ability of intelligence analysts to correctly assess those religious factors. Egyptian and Israeli decision making prior to the 1973 Arab-Israeli War illustrates how information about sacred time can influence war initiation. The diverging outcomes of two counterinsurgency operations at the same sacred site, “Operation Blue Star” (1984) and “Operation Black Thunder” (1988), demonstrate the utility of intelligence about the parameters of sacred space. A final case study explores the U.S. failure to grasp the importance of religious authority in the Iranian Revolution. I conclude by considering the actors best suited for gathering and processing religious intelligence. Religious intelligence requires interdisciplinary teams that combine expertise in religion, area studies, and military operations.     

Islam,institutions and insurgency: territorial and network jihad

Contemporary research and policies often reduce Islamic insurgency to a simpli?ed notion of jihad, and, simultaneously, the religious doctrine of jihad to pure militancy. Such an approach fails to consider the complexities that de?ne and di?erentiate Islamic insurgents, and hinders further understanding of when, how and if they implement jihad. This paper attempts to address these shortcomings by considering how the ideological histories in?uencing territorially-based movements yield either an adherence to a modern jihad doctrine or a secular nationalist doctrine. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories provide the case studies wherein this distinction is manifest in their respective popular bases, institutions and military relations. Responding to assumptions of an emergent ‘third form’ of jihad—the network—this study applies the inverse model of the territorial doctrines to the Arab-Afghans and al-Qaeda (the network headed by Osama bin Laden) in order to elucidate its potential explanatory limitations, as well asto o?er some insights.     

The Heroes of COIN

The conventional wisdom holds that security in Iraq only improved after Gen. David Petraeus implemented a new counterinsurgency doctrine that stressed population security instead of aggressive operations against insurgent forces. This interpretation is strikingly similar to the historiography of the Huk Rebellion, the Malayan Emergency, and the Vietnam War. In each case observers criticized initial efforts as brutal and counterproductive, only to be rescued when enlightened new leaders arrived on the scene. This article challenges the familiar hero narrative, arguing that critics routinely exaggerate the importance of leadership changes because they view conflicts as experiments in counterinsurgency rather than exercises in state-building. Whereas counterinsurgency (COIN) theory emphasizes issues like public security and government legitimacy, theorists of state-building describe a bloody and protracted competition for power under conditions approaching anarchy. The upshot is that the “heroes” of late-stage COIN might actually depend on the earlier “villains” who did the dirty work of establishing political order and coercing the population into obedience.     

Parity and stability: Some conclusions from geometrical models of military operations in Central Europe

This paper presents a model analysis in support of the assertion that parity at lower forces levels does not by itself improve military stability in central Europe. Most of all, a stable military regime requires that force concentrations can be constrained in a verifiable manner the more, the lower the mutual force levels become. However, this is not to be obtained with a doctrine of linear defense by means of homogeneous forces consisting of the traditional highly mobile multi‐purpose forces designed to be employed in all combat modes. Theoretically, a stable situation would result if the antagonists adopted a two‐component defense consisting of ‘reactive’ defense elements deployed in some depth and incapable of being employed in large scale offensive operations and of a smaller fraction (about 20%) of the traditional armor forces serving as operational reserves.

The basic dilemma of nearly all reactive defense elements proposed in the West‐German military reform debate rests with the generally shared assumption that mobility is incompatible with defensiveness. However, the ratios at which the traditional elements would have to be substituted by stationary reactive elements are quite high. Thus, a new type of mobility is required for reactive defense elements that permits to counter‐concentrate quickly without being useable for large scale offensive maneuver.     

Counterinsurgency and terror expertise: the integration of social scientists into the war effort

In this paper the authors draw upon the tradition of Power Structure Research to analyse the increased interpenetration of the military and the social sciences, particularly the recruitment of anthropologists and the adoption and adaptation of counterinsurgency strategies. It is argued that such actors should be understood not as disinterested ‘experts’ but as being organically embedded in a military–industrial–academic complex. The paper considers a number of contemporary examples as well as considering the historical roots of these trends. It is argued that this interpenetration violates the ethical norms of the academy and the moral and social responsibilities of intellectuals.     

Political Culture and Information Technology in the 2001 Singapore General Election

Within the political configuration of advanced Western democracies, analysts agree that technology is a significant empowering force for organization and mobilization of political parties. However, it is clear that information technology is deployed and employed within a larger political culture, and therefore it is reasonable to expect that political culture has a mediating effect on the role of information technology and political practice. This essay presents a case study from the Republic of Singapore, a nation that has a vastly different political culture from the Western nations, to examine the ways in which assumptions about technology affected both the deployment and regulation of the Internet as a political force during the 2001 general election. Contrary to assumptions and arguments that the Internet has similar qualitative impacts across national boundaries, this essay argues that political culture, including regulation, plays a significant role in contextualizing and limiting the effects of new media on political practice. The results demonstrate significant national differences in the ways in which the Internet is used in campaigns, in soliciting feedback and discussion, and in establishing a political profile.     

Formulating Victory and Implications for Policy

The national debate about the decisions to intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq suggests that policymakers and scholars need more precise language and concepts to define victory in war. Without clear language for victory it is difficult for policymakers to describe what they seek to achieve from military intervention. This article discusses a framework for understanding victory and evaluates its implications for policymakers who decisions about whether to intervene with military force.