Telling tales

Influence is all the rage: persuading key audiences that your ideas are right is seen by many as the key to success in our fight with militant Islamists of various stripes.

Surely it should be easy enough to obtain influence through our ‘strategic communications‘ with the Muslim world. After all, we’ve got a good story to tell – our values deliver prosperity and individual freedoms. What we need to do, clearly, is make sure our messages to Muslims are factual, truthful and consistent (these days its easy to get caught in a lie). Naturally, the messages should reflect our values: we want the audience to know what they’re missing out with all this takfiri repression. And telling the story should be easy – we’ve got the best minds in advertising, marketing, media and design.

What could possibly go wrong?

Somehow, it turns out that this well-meaning model of influence hasn’t been all that effective. Many of the studies on strategic communications put this down to bureaucracy – we need more money, different organizational structures, better minds – the ‘best and brightest’, even. A good survey is this recent RAND report [pdf]. Others suggest that it’s the result of our foreign policies – the best communications strategies in the world are just lipsticking the pig. Perhaps President Obama’s more sophisticated approach will sweeten the pill of western values. A third group suggest that the problem is our vague, incoherent message – in contrast to the allegedly simple, coherent line put out by the enemy: we don’t have a clear narrative, they do. I’m not persuaded, either that ‘their’ story is simple or coherent, or even that having a simple consistent story is the elixir.

I think there’s more to it. Why won’t they believe us? This Defense Science Board study has a stab at an answer [pdf]:

To be effective, strategic communicators must understand attitudes and cultures, [and] respect the importance of ideas. [...] To be persuasive, they must be credible.

Credibility. How to get that, if telling the truth doesn’t cut it? I’m writing a paper about this at the moment, so won’t spill all the beans. But as a tease – it turns out that theories of cognitive and constructionist psychology can tell us a great deal about how people receive and process incoming information. This offers some good clues as to why factual messages about attractive values have little traction with target audiences and, into the bargain, provides some insights on how to better achieve credibility and influence.

Oddly, this huge body of rigorous psychological literature doesn’t feature all that much in the recent strategic communication and influence work. Theorists of COIN, wars amongst the people, and so on have drawn in part on marketing and advertising, which – to some extent, of course – rest on psychology and sociology. This earlier RAND study is a fine example of that, and makes many good points. And yet the literature is on the whole maddeningly vague, beyond the commonplace thought that these wars are about ideas and persuasion.

So then, from cognitive psychology, we have theories of dissonance, bias, judgmental heuristics, analogical reasoning. And from constructionism, concepts of identity, mythology and memory. Communities are, to some degree, imagined by their members. The thrust of all this is that people are not passive recipients of information, that their identities are to some extent constructed, and therefore unfixed, but that these beliefs – once acquired – are stubborn to shift, even in the face of ostensibly plausible new information.

Frank Kitson once wrote that:

It is in men’s minds that wars of subversion have to be fought and decided.

That sounds right. But Kitson left it there, concluding ruefully that the area was

so hedged around with imponderables that no useful purpose would be served by further speculation in this context. Perhaps some qualified person will take the matter up later on, and research it in a scientific way.

Can we help him – and can you help me? Where are the psychologists who will do for COIN what David Kilcullen has done from an anthropological perspective? Any reading suggestions greatly appreciated, as always.

Here’s one from me: If you’re interested in the state of the art, Matt Armstrong has the best blog around on strategic communications.

Kenneth Payne

Kajaki revisited

You remember the story. It was a triumph of British military cunning, as a giant hydroelectric turbine was smuggled through the desert, past Taliban ambushes, and deposited at the Kajaki dam on the Helmand River. The effort was a clear signal to the locals that the British were serious about their welfare, and were there for the long haul. With the new turbine, power generation and irrigation on a much larger scale would be possible.

I was reminded of all this fine sentiment when reading Eric Newby’s very funny book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, recounting his travels in Afghanistan in 1956, 3 years after the Kajaki dam was completed by American contractors.

Sticky with melon, we arrived at a town called Girishk on the Helmand River. There, under a mulberry tree, squatted the proprietor of a chaie khana [tea shop], a long-headed, grey-bearded Pathan, chanting a dirge on the passing of a newly founded civilisation, no new thing in this part of the world.

‘There is no light in the bazaar. the Americans brought light when they came to build the great dam, but when they left they took the machine with them, and now there is no more light. [...] Once I worked in a German woollen mill but now I am poor; we are all poor.’

[...] We asked him about the dam, that vast scheme of which so much vague ill had been spoken all along the way.

‘It is all salt,’ he moaned, ‘the land below the American dam. They did not trouble to find out and now the people will eat salt for ever and ever.’

We rose to leave.

‘You will be in Kandahar in two hours’ he went on. ‘The Americans build the road; they have not taken that away.’

This environmental degradation has affected not just local Afghans, but the delicate ecosystem across the border in eastern Iran, where the Helmand drains into Lake Hamun. There’s long been an agreement between the two countries about the level of water that should flow across the border, but it hasn’t always worked in practice – the Taliban, in particular, cut the flow dramatically. There have been social consequences too, with displaced Afghanis moving into the eastern Iranian province, and Iranian farmers moving out as competition for resources drives down the productivity of their land.

Still, I’m sure more thought has been put into things this time round.

Eric Newby in the Hindu Kush, 1956
photographed by his traveling companion Hugh Carless

Kenneth Payne

Are British soldiers mercenaries?

The paper by Hew Strachan I mentioned last time makes another intriguing point:

The British armed forces are composed of volunteers who have enlisted because soldiering is their chosen career: in this sense (rather than in any pejorative sense) they are mercenaries. Britain has no tradition that men serve in the armed forces out of civic obligation, partly because it escaped the Rousseauist legacy of the French Revolution but principally because home defence has not been a prime requirement of strategy.

 I think that on this point, Professor Strachan draws the contrast between the military and civilian society too starkly. Civic obligation might not require that most British men serve, but nonetheless, I am sure that a great many of those who do are motivated by an idea of Britain and of its values, as well as by the desire to pursue their vocation in the military profession.

There is, however, a bigger point here about civil-military relations, and the separateness of the military from wider society – and on this I’m in complete agreement with Strachan. The military is necessarily different from the rest of liberal, postmodern British society, not least because – as I’ve written - its members must have a different view on killing and being killed than do many of us civilians. 
 
More broadly, the armed forces have a moral ethos that is radically different from societal liberalism that emphasises the individual’s worth. As Strachan writes:

The armed forces believe that they cleave to higher moral standards than civil society; that they elevate the collective good over individual needs; and that they do both for excellent reasons. Why, they ask, should they be required to forfeit such qualities? And, if they do, is there not a danger that they will fail in the next war? [...] The underlying tension in civil-military relations resides in the fact that civil society is predicated on an expectation of peace, whereas military society anticipates war.

This is convincing – the values of the British army have been tested in battle. I would though, add two important caveats: first, civil society does not always fit the neat liberal label I’ve given it. I suspect that old fashioned notions of patriotism, sacrifice and the greater good are still held by a great many civilians too. After all, many soldiers serve only a few years before returning to civilian society themselves. And second, soldiers may cede some of their rights as individuals while still holding to the importance of those values for wider society.

The article, well worth a read if you’ve got access, was written in 2003. Since then there has been much fretting within the armed forces about their relationship with wider society – what’s called the military covenant. One unpopular war in Iraq, and a troubled one in Afghanistan have exacerbated these concerns. But as public trust in other institutions crumbles, the military convenant seemingly remains strong.

Liberals like me seem to recognise that protecting our values sometimes requires the employment of people who voluntarily opt out of our ethical code. In that sense, Strachan’s point about mercenaries makes sense, provided the term is understood non-pejoratively, as he suggests. As a society, we have contracted out our defence to a group of people who espouse different values.

Kenneth Payne

Nice pants, soldier!

When your platoon warrant yells ’stand to!’ you grab your rifle and your helmet and go as you are. Zachary Boyd might want to invest in some olive drab jammies though.

Obama: Conservative realist

I’ve just finished reading Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists – a cracking good read, which, as with his Terror and Liberalism, makes some telling points on the totalitarian nature of Al Qa’eda’s ideology and its echoes of earlier, European, totalitarianism.

Towards the end, he delivers an intriguing insight: that the once radical ‘68ers, Joschka Fischer and Bernard Kouchner, have belatedly found much common foreign policy ground with George W. Bush. These three men traveled a long way from opposite ends of the political spectrum to meet together in broad agreement that individual human rights matter in international affairs, sometimes more than state sovereignty, and that sometimes its worth fighting for them.

What’s more, the three would characterize today’s conflict between AQ and the west as one between rival ideologies, totalitarian and liberal. And, like Tony Blair, the personification of this fusion of liberal activism and neo-conservatism, they wouldn’t be averse to intervention to protect individual and group rights from brutal leaders, and to promote societal change. That might not have been the reason that Bush got into Iraq, but it became his leitmotif once the situation deteriorated there.

Where does that leave Obama and his agenda for change? You might think he’d be in tune with Kouchner and Fischer, but no. In fact, Obama sometimes sounds a bit like George W. did, before his conversion to democracy-promoting evangelical.

Here he is, on the campaign trail, in Powell Doctrine mode:

As Commander-in-Chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm’s way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home.

Here he is, arguing against the surge in 2007, and arguing too for the Iraqi version of Nixon’s Vietnamization strategy, because in his view intervention by outsiders cannot achieve political change:

In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else’s civil war. As the President’s own military commanders have said, escalation only prevents the Iraqis from taking more responsibility for their own future.

Lawrence Eagleburger, Secretary of State for Bush Sr, once argued similarly about the Balkans. ‘This tragedy is not something that can be settled from outside’, he said: the quote is from Richard Holbrooke’s insider account To End a War.  ‘Until the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it,’ he concluded. Colin Powell, who stayed on as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the first months of the Clinton administration, thought in similarly conservative terms: No President, in his view, could ‘likely sustain the long-term involvement necessary to keep the protagonists going at each others throats all over again at the earliest opportunity’. Ancient hatreds were not susceptible to liberal intervention.

And when it comes to nation-building, Obama is skeptical of the west’s ability to actively reshape other societies. Here he is in a recent interview:

What we can do is make sure that Afghanistan is not a safe haven for al Qa’eda. What we can do is make sure that it is not destabilizing neighboring Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons. [...] We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy.

Again, Colin Powell, reflecting on an earlier intervention, comes to mind: ‘Somalia was not an African version of a western state,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘Nation building … struck me as a way to get bogged down in Somalia, not get out.’ And get out they did. ‘We could not substitute our version of democracy for hundreds of years of tribalism,’ Powell recalled telling President Clinton.

One word for Obama’s position is realist, another is conservative. The chaos of the last few years in Iraq and Afghanistan should concentrate the minds of anyone who favours radical, liberal interventionism to redress wrongs in other countries. Such conservative realism might, though, be a difficult sell for a man so publicly committed to change.

Don’t mess with my narrative, dude.

Hmmm…perhaps President Karzai needs better advisors.  Or maybe he just needs to be reminded the precarious position he finds himself in.  This doesn’t need to be a ‘New Jack City’ hanging-off-the-bridge shakedown, but rather a simple whisper into the ear of the ‘Mayor of Kabul’ that without outside help, his days—nay, hours–would be numbered.

You see, Afghanistan is no longer a place, or even a conflict.  It is a project.  To Americans, perhaps, the fight there is about the World Trade Centre and all that, but to most of its Allies, it is very much about ’sending Afghan girls back to school’, ‘no more Burkhas’, and other such things.  ‘We’ are in Afghanistan to save it and to turn it into a kinder, gentler, place.  Taliban, and their neolithic approach to socio-sexual relations, bad.  Karzai, and his post-Loya Jirga re-constructed modern Afghan state good.  True or not, that is the ‘poster’ that has allowed Europeans, Brits (ed: not the same thing) and Canadians to supply, and have die, their sons and daughters.

And, perhaps oddly, but not so much given the end of his tenure, the S-G of NATO had the stones to say it so many words.  According to what he said to the BBC:

We are there to defend universal values and when I see, at the moment, a law threatening to come into effect which fundamentally violates women’s rights and human rights, that worries me… I have a problem to explain to a critical public audience in Europe, be it the UK or elsewhere, why I’m sending the guys to the Hindu Kush.

Now forget, for a moment, the whoppers in there: forget the word universal, forget that as NATO S-G he doesn’t ’send’ anyone anywhere.  But still: NATO member states (and, more importantly, their publics) did not go to Afghanistan to allow Pashtu men to rape their wives.  As one politician, who has already had a tough time convincing his parliament and voting public put it:

[Canadian] Prime Minister Stephen Harper dramatically raised the stakes Saturday in the battle over women’s rights in Afghanistan, warning President Hamid Karzai that critical allied support for the mission could shrivel if he doesn’t change a law that many say would legally allow men to rape their wives.  “The involvement in the international community, and particularly Canada and our NATO allies, is based on the pursuit of very fundamental values in opposition to the kinds of values the Taliban stood for.

This represents the view of a guy who is contributing over 2500 troops in Kandahar. 

As wise men, such as Lawrence Freedman and Michael Vlahos, have told us war is about meaning.  We need a ’story’, a ‘narrative’ to explain why we are there.  As Vlahos mentions:

Narrative may sound like a fancy literary word, but it is actually the foundation of all strategy, upon which all else—policy, rhetoric, and action—is built. War narratives need to be identified and critically examined on their own terms, for they can illuminate the inner nature of the war itself. War narrative does three essential things. First, it is the organizing framework for policy. Policy cannot exist without an interlocking foundation of “truths” that people easily accept because they appear to be self-evident and undeniable. Second, this “story” works as a framework precisely because it represents just such an existential vision. The “truths” that it asserts are culturally impossible to disassemble or even criticize. Third, having presented a war logic that is beyond dispute, the narrative then serves practically as the anointed rhetorical handbook for how the war is to be argued and described.

So there.  Screw ‘grass roots’, screw ‘Afghanistan for Afghanis’.  Call it ‘imperialism’, ‘neoliberalism’–call it whatever you want.  The West is in Afghanistan for a host of reasons, but they way they convince their publics to put with casualties is to appeal to a fairy tale that has girls reading and taking an equal place in a new Afghanistan.  Whether or not this will ever come to pass is beside the point: Karzai is messing with the narrative.  And this will never do.

MEMRI Urdu-Pashtu Media Project

Not being an Arabic speaker, over the years I have made a lot of use of the enormous number of translations of Arab media made available by the Middle East Media Research Institute. Now via email from Tufail Ahmad (a former KCL War Studies student) I see that they have started a Urdu-Pashtu media project and blog which I hope will be equally helpful.

Commons Hearing on Afghanistan

Last week I gave expert testimony to a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Afghanistan. In one respect, it is odd for this committee, as opposed to the Defence Committee, to be looking into the war. But it soon became apparent from the line of questioning that a key issue troubling committee members was the nature and extent of UK national interest in prosecuting the Afghan War. Given the cost in blood (145 British service personnel killed) and treasure (over £3 billion spent in operations and aid), this is a fair concern. Moreover it points to the failure of the government to clearly articulate the national security imperative for this war.

See the discussion surrounding questions 10-16 from the uncorrected transcript of expert testimony to the committee.

Class notes #246: 9/11 and all that…

Last and final lecture I shall be loading on KOW this year. From next year, I’ll be using webCT or some such platform. For my students, I say: ‘enjoy not having to write furiously during my lecture.’ For KOW readers, the usual apologies apply for cluttering up the site.

9-11-lecture

Now back to Patrick Porter’s interesting question about the benefits v costs of UAV strikes in Pakistan. On the alternative – namely, supporting Pakistani efforts to hunt down and kill/capture Al Qaeda, the NYT reports that the US is already doing this. A special forces task force is based in Pakistan, has been training a new 400 strong Pakistani commando unit for anti-Al Qaeda and Tabilan operations. Most interesting….

Boots Beat Bolts: The Complicated Curse of Mechanisation in COIN

An interesting article from a source not usually associated with research on COIN.  The most recent edition of International Organization contains a solid, quantitative analysis of about 300 insurgencies fought since 1800.   Its ’statistics-heavy’ approach seems to support the ‘boots beat bolts’ hypothesis, which is the conventional wisdom in the COIN field these days. 

After much mathematical voodoo (well beyond this bureaucrat’s ken), the authors note:

While the majority of nineteenth-century wars were decided in favor of the incumbent, this trend reversed itself in the early twentieth century, with states increasingly unable to avoid conceding defeat or proffering concessions to weaker insurgent forces after World War I. (p. 68.)

and wonder:

Why do we observe this change in the pattern of outcomes? (p. 68.)

Their conclusion is that:

…this shift can be ascribed to the increased reliance of states on mechanized forces as the cornerstone of their militaries in the post–World War I era.   Nineteenth-century militaries were organized around “foraging” principles in which soldiers extensively interacted with local populations to acquire supplies in the conflict zone.   The collision of industrialization and World War I forged a new “modern” system of military organization, one premised on the substitution of machines for soldiers to increase mobility and survivability on contemporary battlefields.  Built for direct battle, mechanized forces struggle to solve the  “identification problem”—separating insurgents from noncombatants selectively—because their structural design inhibits information-gathering among conflict-zone populations.  Faced with “information starvation,” mechanized forces often inadvertently fuel, rather than suppress, insurgencies. (emphasis added; p. 68.)

 Distilled into a single sentence, the authors believe that:

While lethal in direct battle, mechanised militaries struggle to sift insurgents from noncombatants because they do not interact with local populations on the same scale as their foraging predecessors. (p. 75.)

This thinking is not new.  For instance, David Last spoke in 1997 about the need for soldiers engaged in non-traditional operations (such as peacekeeping) to develop ‘contact’ skills (engagement with locals), in addition to their ‘combat’ skills (use of force against opponents).   Others, including David Betz, have made the case that ‘boots on the ground’, and not high technology, are the key in ‘wars amongst the people’.

The article contains a mini-case comparison between two divisions in Iraq, 4 ID and 101st AB to illustrate a ‘hands-on’ (led by then-MG David Petreaus) approach, versus a ‘hatches-down’ approach.  I leave it to you to decide if the case comparison is compelling or novel.

While the conclusions are not new, they are empirically grounded (Full disclosure: don’t get me started on the flaws with a quantitative approach, ranging from the tyranny of regression analysis to the appropriateness of proxies.  I have a strong qualitative bias.)  What is perhaps more interesting is the implications arising from the conclusions. 

First, foraging is not a likely model to which we might return.  But the ‘berets rather than helmets’ (à la the British forces in Basra March 2003-Sep 2005) approach is a model that might be more widely adopted. 

However, there is a rub: it is not just that Western armies are mechanised because of a conventional warfighting orientation hang-over from the Cold War.  The issue of force protection–and casualty avoidance–is deeply implicated in the decision to button up, drive fast, take a helo, use a drone, etc.  Doctrinally speaking, it is difficult to disentangle the one from the other. 

In that sense, going lighter, getting closer to the locals is not a simple matter of style.  The very fact that soldiers are ’sharing vulnerability’ with the locals may be what endears them and buys them information, but it also elevates the risks to their safety, and by extensions, jeopardises their continuation on an operation. 

In fact, what we see is not one model over another, but (and this is a generalisation) a combination.  Kinetic and non-kinetic; physical and cognitive; combat  and contact forces serving together; infantry and armoured battalions operating next to CIMIC groups and PRTs. 

Can this bifurcation achieve the necessary mix of hard and soft?  The jury is yet out, but this blended model certainly appears to be in fashion, especially in Afghanistan.  Cross-tabulate that, Chi-guy!