(Illegal) Drugs And Insurgency II

Insurgencies at every step of their development from the coalescence from inchoate political discontent all the way to the final stage of armed conflict are both self-organizing and emergent systems (in the definitions generally employed in chaos theory.) This means that each and every insurgency, or, to err on the side of accuracy, each and every group which mounts an insurgency, has a very real weakness. A weakness which, if noticed by the counterinsurgent status quo and properly exploited, means the insurgents will lose.

It's worth mentioning in passing that the same weakness exists in partisan movements such as the French, Norwegian, Dutch, and other resistance groups during World War II. The only exception to this general rule was the Yugoslavian forces under the command of Joseph Broz Tito.

Self-organizing emergent systems have very real advantages in the waging of political or armed conflict against a more tightly structured opponent such as great flexibility, a willingness to innovate, faster reflexes when confronted with new challenges, and a widely distributed leadership echelon. All of these pluses have been on display in Afghanistan and are responsible for Taliban's increasing tactical sophistication as well as its impressive physical growth over the past few years.

Also on display, but not so widely noticed by both civilian and military observers, has been the weakness shared by all insurgent entities. The weakness is both simple and inherent to the dynamic of self-organizing emergent systems. Taliban, like all such groups throughout modern history, is subject to perturbation because of its lack of a command and control system which exists independently of personality.

Structural integrity is achieved only painfully and slowly in all insurgent movements. The merging of components, the acceptance of individuals as leaders, the maintenance of either loyalty or obedience to the leadership structure are neither quickly or easily developed. Once in place these are not retained let alone strengthened without great, continuous effort--and a fair amount of bloodshed.

One of the often overlooked facts of insurgent life is the amount of effort expended in movement consolidation and purification. The lurching progress of all precursors of insurgency along the track from latent political discontent to armed conflict is marked by two interlocking phenomena.

The first is the gradual emergence of evermore extreme positions on the part of leaders which brings with it an evermore extensive agenda, evermore expansive goals and an increasing unwillingness to compromise with the status quo. The second walks in tandem with the first. The increasingly expansive goals of the insurgent movement demands greater commitment from all the movement's adherents. As a result movement consolidation is reinforced by movement purification.

The less committed, the less willing, the less extreme members must be eliminated. Groups which do not share the totalistic agenda of the emerging leaders must be purged. Those who waver, those who say, "yes--but," those who are willing to accept, even search for compromise with the status quo must be eliminated lest they poison the political will of the hard core.

These twin phenomena are the reason that many, if not most, insurgent entities kill more people within their own natural constituencies of support than among the supporters of the status quo. Bluntly, insurgent movements must consolidate and purify their central structures if they are going to last in the field against the status quo forces. Insurgencies eat their own young.

Insurgent movements which emerge in the context of traditional tribal societies riven with ethnic or linguistic differences are more likely to have great difficulty establishing the minimum necessary degree of command and control structure. This is paralleled by evident problems in establishing and maintaining a committed consensus upon goals and means beyond some sort of hazy, vague overarching and typically symbolic end.

This implies that the status quo and its supporters are not fighting one monolithic insurgent group with a generally accepted chain of command and a universally supported goal. Instead the status quo is seeking to counter a large number of insurgent groups each with a slightly different set of motives and goals, each with its own organic leadership.

This dynamic presents a set of clear vulnerabilities wide open to exploitation by the status quo. It is important to see these deep and exploitable features as being separate from but aligned with the other, contextual divisions which can be exploited by the status quo. These, the contextual divisions within the contested population, have been considered in earlier posts and will be put aside here.

The essentially and necessarily fragmented nature of self-organizing insurgent groups has been recognized at least in practice in a number of earlier counterinsurgent campaigns. The government of the Philippines went for the wedge between various components of the Huk insurgents with a varying degree of success. American special operations and clandestine service personnel did the same in South Vietnam with the Quang Ngai Special Platoon program and some aspects of Operation Phoenix.

In these campaigns as well as others, there was no theoretical basis for the operations, but rather they were ad hoc efforts at divide and conquer. The absence of a unifying theory helped assure that these efforts at organizational perturbation were not integrated with other aspects of the counterinsurgent strategy. As a necessary consequence, results were limited in both space and time and were finally defeated by the insurgent's self-organizational roots.

Afghanistan provides an almost ideal theater in which to focus on organizational perturbation, to take advantage of the fatal weakness which exists in the self-organized nature of Taliban's many, many component parts. The Taliban is a loose congeries of local groups, each of which has self-organized from the unique human context of its home turf. Not all are wedded to the extreme, austere version of Islam which marked the Taliban of Omar. Not all are even slightly interested in taking power in Kabul.

The leaders of many, perhaps most, Taliban constituents are looking for the best possible deal. The best possible deal for themselves personally as well as the best possible deal for the folks back on the home turf. For some the "best possible deal" includes some sort of Shariah, but for others it does not.

Hamid Karzai understands the fundamental reality of Taliban in Afghanistan, even if we do not. He understands that playing fifty or sixty different forms of "let's make a deal" are more important to his retaining power than the sacred (to the West) ritual of elections. He has telegraphed his priorities by stating that he will talk peace with those Taliban leaders who are willing to accept the "constitution of Afghanistan."

Karzai apparently also understands that there are limits to coercion when facing self-organizing emergent systems as your political-military opponent. There are places for coercion, but it is not a universal solution since pressure, particularly lethal pressure, consolidates a group long, long before it fractures the group's political will to continue. Karzai's offer of talks, more importantly the way this offer has been nuanced each of the several times it has been made, indicate that he properly, even if intuitively, appreciates the nature of organizational perturbation and its "good twin," co-option.

Hamid Karzai may be a very unpleasant and difficult person. He may be corrupt personally, given to vote fraud, nepotism, lining his and his relatives pockets, but there is a critical role for him to perform if we are going to eliminate al-Qaeda and the Islamist jihadist contingent within Taliban. He is the warm fuzzy in comparison to the cold sharpies of our forces taking the war to the most committed of Taliban and other Islamist jihadists.

Our role is to protect the civilians of the uncommitted majority, assist in demobilizing the soft core support for the Islamist jihadists, and to kill those of the hard core, the True Believers of the Taliban groups. Our role is to demonstrate the very undesirable alternative to the "big tent" which is being offered by Karzai.

It must be recalled that self-organizing entities respond to the environment in which they exist. Think of it as evolution in action. Those Taliban components which have evolved in the direction of Islamist jihadism must go extinct. That is up to us and our allies. Other components of the Taliban which are less committed to martyrdom must be encouraged to form a "separate peace" with the central government of Hamid Karzai.

Because the process is non-linear, it is impossible to predict in detail what will finally result from the combination of the Karzai Peace Offensive and the McChrystal Doctrine. In broad brush terms it is possible to forecast that the outcome will not be a Western style liberal democracy with separation of mosque and state, an independent judiciary, free enterprise, a free and open media, women's rights, and all the other features so rashly promised by the neocons of the Bush/Cheney administration.

Because the process of self-organizing from the bottom up which is what is going to happen in Afghanistan regardless of the intents and plans of foreigners is inherently messy, about all that can be predicted is that Afghanistan in the near to mid-term will become more stable than Somalia but less so than, say, Bangladesh. Over the next few years Afghanistan will be far less Islamist, far less inclined to the jihadist than it was under the unified Taliban of Omar, but far less secular than, say, Pakistan.

But, even this less than optimal outcome will be impossible unless and until the outside actors, including, most importantly, the US realize the limits of coercion and the unpredictability of organically self-organizing groups which move from the bottom up, from the local to the central, from the private space to the public. This is a very difficult paradigm shift for Westerners, particularly Americans to make right now.

It requires that we set aside the past seventy-five years of increasingly centralized government, ever more expansive public space, and think back to the "horse-and-buggy-days" of our earlier history. It requires that we place our faith, not in experts, in lawyers, in economists, in authorities on government operations, human rights, and all the other paraphernalia of our post-modern institutions and orientations. It means we must place our trust in people, a culture, and a context alien from our own and often quite incomprehensible in our terms.

A tough task to be sure, but one we must undertake successfully. The alternative is a Taliban victory under one guise or another. And, that means living with more Islamist jihadist terror.