KNOWING THE ENEMY, by GEORGE PACKER - The New Yorker

[applegrove]

KNOWING THE ENEMY
Can social scientists redefine the “war on terror”?
by GEORGE PACKER
Issue of 2006-12-18
Posted 2006-12-11
The New Yorker


"In 1993, a young captain in the Australian Army named David Kilcullen was living among villagers in West Java, as part of an immersion program in the Indonesian language. One day, he visited a local military museum that contained a display about Indonesia’s war, during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, against a separatist Muslim insurgency movement called Darul Islam. “I had never heard of this conflict,” Kilcullen told me recently. “It’s hardly known in the West. The Indonesian government won, hands down. And I was fascinated by how it managed to pull off such a successful counterinsurgency campaign.”

Kilcullen, the son of two left-leaning academics, had studied counterinsurgency as a cadet at Duntroon, the Australian West Point, and he decided to pursue a doctorate in political anthropology at the University of New South Wales. He chose as his dissertation subject the Darul Islam conflict, conducting research over tea with former guerrillas while continuing to serve in the Australian Army. The rebel movement, he said, was bigger than the Malayan Emergency—the twelve-year Communist revolt against British rule, which was finally put down in 1960, and which has become a major point of reference in the military doctrine of counterinsurgency. During the years that Kilcullen worked on his dissertation, two events in Indonesia deeply affected his thinking. The first was the rise—in the same region that had given birth to Darul Islam, and among some of the same families—of a more extreme Islamist movement called Jemaah Islamiya, which became a Southeast Asian affiliate of Al Qaeda. The second was East Timor’s successful struggle for independence from Indonesia. Kilcullen witnessed the former as he was carrying out his field work; he participated in the latter as an infantry-company commander in a United Nations intervention force. The experiences shaped the conclusions about counter-insurgency in his dissertation, which he finished in 2001, just as a new war was about to begin.

“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.

Indonesia’s failure to replicate in East Timor its victory in West Java later influenced Kilcullen’s views about what the Bush Administration calls the “global war on terror.” In both instances, the Indonesian military used the same harsh techniques, including forced population movements, coercion of locals into security forces, stringent curfews, and even lethal pressure on civilians to take the government side. The reason that the effort in East Timor failed, Kilcullen concluded, was globalization. In the late nineties, a Timorese international propaganda campaign and ubiquitous media coverage prompted international intervention, thus ending the use of tactics that, in the obscure jungles of West Java in the fifties, outsiders had known nothing about. “The globalized information environment makes counterinsurgency even more difficult now,” Kilcullen said.

...............SNIP"

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061218fa_fact2

[applegrove]

1. Long but worth the read. On what * is not doing to have any chance at winning the

war of global jihad.

[stillcool]

2. that was the most dis-heartening

article I've forced myself to read in a long time. The object is to occupy the world? The solution is winning the battle with insurgencies, who don't particularly like their country and it's resources being inhabited by global corporations. If indeed, there is plausible reasoning for the need of the continued global spread of these corporations, surely the means to the end are not dependent on the defense industry. Creating insurgencies to defeat...I guess if you work in the Pentagon it's your life-blood.
edited to add small example

Kilcullen doesn’t believe that an entirely “soft” counterinsurgency approach can work against such tactics. In his view, winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you—as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe—but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion. Kilcullen met senior European officers with the NATO force in Afghanistan who seemed to be applying “a development model to counterinsurgency,” hoping that gratitude for good work would bring the Afghans over to their side. He told me, “In a counterinsurgency, the gratitude effect will last until the sun goes down and the insurgents show up and say, ‘You’re on our side, aren’t you? Otherwise, we’re going to kill you.’ If one side is willing to apply lethal force to bring the population to its side and the other side isn’t, ultimately you’re going to find yourself losing.” Kilcullen was describing a willingness to show local people that supporting the enemy risks harm and hardship, not a campaign like the Phoenix program in Vietnam, in which noncombatants were assassinated; besides being unethical, such a tactic would inevitably backfire in the age of globalized information. Nevertheless, because he talks about war with an analyst’s rationalism and a practitioner’s matter-of-factness, Kilcullen can appear deceptively detached from its consequences..................................
...........................
When I asked him to outline a counter-propaganda strategy, he described three basic methods. “We’ve got to create resistance to their message,” he said. “We’ve got to co-opt or assist people who have a counter-message. And we might need to consider creating or supporting the creation of rival organizations.” Bruce Hoffman told me that jihadists have posted five thousand Web sites that react quickly and imaginatively to events. In 2004, he said, a jihadist rap video called “Dirty Kuffar” became widely popular with young Muslims in Britain: “It’s like Ali G wearing a balaclava and having a pistol in one hand and a Koran in the other.” Hoffman believes that America must help foreign governments and civil-society groups flood the Internet with persuasively youthful Web sites presenting anti-jihadist messages—but not necessarily pro-American ones, and without leaving American fingerprints.

Kilcullen argues that Western governments should establish competing “trusted networks” in Muslim countries: friendly mosques, professional associations, and labor unions. (A favorite Kilcullen example from the Cold War is left-wing anti-Communist trade unions, which gave the working class in Western Europe an outlet for its grievances without driving it into the arms of the Soviet Union.) The U.S. should also support traditional authority figures—community leaders, father figures, moderate imams—in countries where the destabilizing transition to modernity has inspired Islamist violence. “You’ve got to be quiet about it,” he cautioned. “You don’t go in there like a missionary.” The key is providing a social context for individuals to choose ways other than jihad.

Is this anything new?

[applegrove]

3. Well they are already doing the coopting part..without the attempt

at presenting an alternative to local community complaints. I would much rather positive attempts to bridge culture than big war. I suspect that what the neocons want is a series of wars which will kill off all their enemies over time..to hell with civilians. War has to be the worst possible outcome..unless you are a neocon. What he talks about is soft power but on a very smaller scale.

"presenting anti-jihadist messages—but not necessarily pro-American ones, and without leaving American fingerprints".

I would much prefer if "agent Mike" was on a Pakistani website than the DU. I think that would be a better use of his time. But the whole text describes a President who is wasting chances left and right..while thinking "big guns" and hurting civilians with "long wars" are the only way to go. Don't you wish the State Department had its former role..perhaps downsized to local communities rather than what it does now..which is pretty much nothing?

At least it is food for thought.

[bemildred]

4. Sometimes there is no solution.

It is both easy, and wrong, to think that every problem can be fixed. Sometimes it is better, sometimes far better, to walk away.

[teryang]

5. Very misleading article

Our object in Iraq was the destruction of their economic order. This was put into effect by the Bremer edicts. Despite all the ballyhoo about WMD, liberty, and democracy, the object was conquest and plunder, with the additional objective of gaining a foothold on the Asian landmass for more conquest and plunder on behalf of anglo-American global corporations. While there are cultural dimensions to this, namely, the traditional ugly-American syndrome, conquest is not likely to be well received in established cultures.

No amount of cultural sensitivity, awareness or propaganda is going to change this. The moral and ethical dimension to a war that starts as a Nuremberg violation and the slaughter of tens of thousands is not likely to be overcome. The resistence to reality based counterinsurgency is inherently ideological, namely, a rejection of the foreign notion that globalist corporations and their disney culture are a panacea. Saddam's society inherently rejected this notion as an encroachment on sovereignty and colonialism in a not so effective disguise. This rejection had nothing to with misguided adolescents looking for a movement. I'd note in this regard that the Australian protoganist in this essay with his worship of TE Lawrence, the colonial tour de force, is more the young turk looking for adventure and action, and exactly the type of totalitarian sophist with a venal need to belong as described by Hannah Arendt in the Origins of Totalitarianism.

The movements for change in the Islamic world judge us by our murderous actions and rapacious greed, not by cultural finesse or media information management techniques. I'm the first to admit that it helps to know your enemy, but we intentionally and deliberately create our enemies. The first principle of understanding enemies is understanding yourself. We are the enemy. We are the invaders. We are the putative conquerors. We are engaged in an overt attempt to control by force Iraqi business, markets, banking, resources and real estate. This is part of a larger plan to dominate Asia. This is the "soft" underbelly from which we expect to expand our dominion over other nations and their resources. We killed hundreds of thousands in this hare brained misadventure. Too bad there isn't an information blocking jungle in Iraq. Then we could engage in direct and unmitigated wholesale genocide without anyone noticing. Unfortunately, when you kill peoples loved ones in a war of colonial conquest they do talk about it at the rumor mill. No amount of intellectual sugar coating is going to change that reality. Torture and death camps just can't be covered up like they used to. This is also the problem of a nation proudly proclaiming they were going to tear up the Geneva Conventions and set up an international gulag. The camps in GITMO, Bagram and elsewhere are an international disgrace. Yoo, Gonzales, Dinh, the president and his cabinet of corporatist fools, proudly proclaimed their torture doctrine. The regime proudly declared its policy to pre-emptively make war and now suffers the consequences. TFB.

The so called global aspect of this counter jihad non-sense is little more than an excuse for bwana to interfere in the internal affairs of potential colonies throughout Asia and Africa. It's the colonial drive that led to WWI and WWII all over again. Al qaeda is an intelligence agency construct meant to advance the interests in the non status quo powers who are afraid if they don't provoke a pretext for aggression, the emerging global and regional power centers will permanently eclipse them in the competition for control of world resources. Hitler had a similar fear to motivate him.

It isn't bin laden's media strategy that helps bush electorally. The content of bin laden tapes is confabulated by pro=western intelligence sources. The pentagon and bush needed a bogeyman who is still useful in larger plan to disintegrate the new states into compliant tools of western economic and strategic objectives. Bin laden also provides further excuses for ridiculously exhorbitant defense budgets that result in military failure and the necessity for a police state to oppress a dissatisfied populace at home. Bin laden works for Saudi Arabia, ISI and the American intelligence community. And what a useful agency it has been. The shareholders rejoice. As a geo-political strategy counter insurgery and a campaign against "world wide" jihad are dead on arrival.

[applegrove]

6. I fully believe the * WH went to war to agitate the radical fringe in the

middle east so they would stand out and * could kill them all. The question in the article is that it isn't working (and why would it..war & civilian death never impresses anyone but warmongers). It isn't talking about corporate takeover...that is going on with governments in Indonesia as we speak. The question is the radical islamists who lure people to their terrorist cause all across asia. They are not talking about the majority of people in Indonesia or Pakistan (at least not today). They are talking about how to engage people so the radicals do not grow as they have in Iraq and Afghanistan and now perhaps Pakistan.

Indeed it is the choice between growing the radical islamists and not growing them. Rummy & Cheney seemed to want the radicals to grow & show themselves so they can be engaged in war. While this person seems to think the idea is to make sure they stay small in numbers. Indeed he wants the numbers of radical islamists to shrink with fewer followers. Not on the Bush agenda at all. And that is the difference between the two. And as the man says.. they will have to wait for Bush to leave office before they try anything like his plan.

[teryang]

7. I fully believe that the intel agencies of the US and its allies

...deliberately support and promote the radical islamist movement and terrorist incidents. It's machiavelli 101. The US and the financial elites of its allies could give a shit less about unemployed angry young men. What do the manipulators of civil discontent do without angry young men to manipulate into some bogus international security threat? How could they otherwise justify their interventionism, belligerence, and constant meddling in the affairs of ostensibly sovereign states.

Frankly, the guys full of it.

[applegrove]

11. I fully believe the neocons are terrified of the coming generation of

disaffected youth in the middle east and will do anything... including starting a series of wars ..to bash them over the head and either lure them out as radical islamists...so they can kill them...or turn them into people who want peace more than anything - because they have lived through a bloody war in their neighbourhood.

* likes to bring war to the local level. This guy is talking about trying to bring peace and winnning hearts and minds to the local level. Surely you don't think that anyone but radical islamists did the bombing in Thailand this week. Point is do you want them to grow as * does (so they can be eliminated in a big war)...or do you want them to not grow in numbers as this guy is hoping for.

I guess we are never going to agree. Happy New Year by the by.

[teryang]

15. This reminded me of John Paul Vann, The American Experience

in Vietnam. (John Paul Vann was a bigamist.)

Vann had a prominent position in Vietnam, he enjoyed helping Vietnamese, loving Vietnamese and killing Viet Cong. There is nothing like war to bring out all the thrills. But he's an ethical killer, allegedly, like this australian political climber. The only thing the wonkers have to gain social mobility is to say "I'm better at it (counter insurgency/counter terrorism) than you are." I call this the "been there, got the belt buckle" source of authority. In an academic and policy sense, the empirical experience is not an authoritative source. Yet I'd hear this over and over again from high ranking intell officers and generals, who really didn't understand crap about the cultural conflicts they were describing.

Where the underlying policy is wrong or fraudulent, whatever the location, you just can't sugarcoat it.

Your argument is a version of the spurious, fight em over there, so we don't have to fight em over here.

You have a great holiday today. I like reading your posts.

[applegrove]

16. I do believe there is terrorism. I do. And I believe it when they

say it is growing. I just wish the USA had stayed in Afghanistan and finished the job there. Now it seems to be embolding the terrorists which is what I think the neocons want.. a war over there..where they can kill off many. My greatest worry is that they will get a series of wars...and bash the civilians over the head with war..so they can wean potential terrorists supporters off the idea of signing up. I don't think it is working and I think it is immoral and it is radicalizing more youth.

I think the only thing that will work to bring democracy to the middle east is Israel Palestine peace deal. That is where the might of America should be. Peacekeeping some Oslo type thing.

And right back at ya with the posts. I enjoyed this discussion.

[bemildred]

10. Laced with KoolAid, yes.

The stuff about how the terrists were all alienated from the fathers was a dead giveaway about the level of "thought" at work here.

[applegrove]

12. Actually in the past..terrorists were overwhelmingly middle class

kids angry with parents. So it isn't such a stretch to say that the 9/11 bombers had issues. They have in the past. These jihad terrorists are a little different than the middle class kids who ran terrorism in Italy and Germany in the 1970s. But I'm sure they have alot in common with each other.

[bemildred]

13. Yes, I know, I'm not saying it isn't true.

I'm saying that it does not explain anything. It is an irrelevancy. The number of men who have had issues with their fathers far exceeds nineteen, very few fly planes into buildings. It is not shown that there are not many committers of political violence who have had excellent relations with their fathers, either. There is no causal relation at work.

[applegrove]

14. Okay. Got Ya!

:hi:

[yurbud]

8. great euphemism in last sentence about counterinsurgency & media

Translation: we can't kill enough of the uppity natives to make a difference with the media watching.

[yurbud]

9. packer needs to cut BS and say it plainly: sometimes people fight back when you screw them

You don't need a social scientist to explain that, you just need to read history like East Timor without the built in assumption that we or allies are automatically right.

Why should other people react differently than we did when we rebeled against British rule or the French or Russians did under Nazi occupation?

A lot of people seem to admire Packers work, but he seems to be one of these namby-pamby types who know what the Bushies are doing is wrong but can't bring himself to call it by its right name because it would expose related actions that people hadn't noticed because they were done more competently. We recognize Bush as a rapist because his victim is thrashing and screaming but his frat brothers who use roofies are just as guilty.