ExumOSI7OCT10

8/8/2019 ExumOSI7OCT10

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/exumosi7oct10 1/5

A. M. Exum

Remarks to the Open Society Institute

7 October 2010

First off, allow me to thank Erica for inviting me to participate in this discussion.

Erica hails from the same parish in Louisiana as my mothers family, and I will

always cherish a dinner at her home in Kabul last year that consisted of Cajun

dirty rice and libations perhaps more appropriate for New Orleans than for the

Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. (I take full responsibility, by the way, for the

latter.)

Second, I am honored and humbled to share the podium today with Michael

Semple, who has forgotten more about Afghanistan and the war there than I

could hope to learn. So I am here as much to learn from him as I am to say

anything of consequence myself.

The advent of the information age, with 24-hour cable news programming and

internet reporters stretched from the Amazon to Zimbabwe (with the ability to

describe events to the rest of the world in real time), has led to what Colin Gray

has described as a political and cultural-moral audit of military operations that

is, more often than not, a headache for western commanders, diplomats and

policy-makers alike. The conflict in Afghanistan, however, has seen both examples

of when this audit has overwhelmed the policy and strategic debates without

contributing anything particularly useful and here I am specifically thinking of

the 92,000 documents recently published by Wikileaks several months back and

examples of when the auditor in question has not only raised vital moral and

political issues but has also helped U.S. and allied diplomats and military

commanders wage a smarter campaign going forward.

Erica Gastons work for both the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict and

the Open Society Institute falls into the latter category. In 2009, Ericas work on

the effect Afghan civilian casualties were having on the ability of the U.S. and

allied militaries to wage their campaign against the Taliban and other insurgent

groups helped lead the commander in Afghanistan, Stan McChrystal, to put into



place strict new guidelines for the employment of force where Afghan civilians

might be present on the battlefield. Ericas ability to convince U.S. and allied

military officers that this was not simply a moral question but also a pragmatic

one was instrumental in realizing tangible change.

In the same way, Ericas new report for the Open Society Institute is grounded in

both moral and pragmatic concerns about the U.S. and allied mission in

Afghanistan. For that reason, I hope it will give U.S. and allied policy-makers and

implementers as much to think about as her earlier work.

Force falls into two categories: brute force and coercive force. The difference

between the two is that the latter involves a choice on the part of the object.

Brute force is simpler to understand. If I want Jacks wallet, and I beat him up to

take it, thats an example of brute force. The militaries of western nation-states

understand and prefer to employ brute force, in large part because it plays to our

strengths. Destroying an enemys fighting forces or his industrial base is a task for

which western militaries are particularly well-designed. (It is also, it could go

without saying, easier to understand intellectually.)

Coercive force is different. If I beat up Michael here with a baseball bat and then

threaten to Jack that Im going to do the same thing to Erica if he doesnt give me

his wallet, thats an example of coercive force. Im letting Jack make a choice.

Weaker actors such as terrorists and insurgents better understand and are

used to employing coercive force than western nation-states. If Jack were seven

feet tall and 100 pounds heavier, it would make more sense for me, as the weaker

actor, to threaten to beat up Erica rather than directly challenge Jack with brute

force. Thats the same logic that explains why insurgent groups use coercive force

against large and well-organized nation-states. But coercive force has almost

always been employed by western nation-states as well, and even in the mostconventional of conflicts. The atomic bomb, for example, despite its destructive

power, was used to coerce the Japanese into surrendering at the end of the

Second World War.



In Afghanistan, coercive force is being used by all sides of the conflict, especially

with regard to the Afghan people. Both sides of the binary conflict between the

insurgents and the government of Afghanistan, for example, need the Afghan

people to behave in certain ways. (And I am aware, of course, that the conflict in

Afghanistan is perhaps not best described as binary and that none of the actors

on either side could be accurately described as unitary. But one aspect of the

conflict is certainly a binary struggle between the government in Kabul and those

who aspire to govern in its place. So bear with me here through what I am about

to say.) The insurgent, for his part, needs to the population to, at the very least,

be silent about his activities. If possible, the insurgent wants to convince the

population to sympathize with the insurgent cause and to even participate in the

insurgents activities.

The population, for its part, is just trying to survive. If left to its own devices, it will

survive by way of passivity (laying low), autarky (saying to hell with all of you

and acting like the character Omar from The Wire), hedging (having three sons,

for example, and putting one in the Taliban, one in the police, and one in the

army) or swinging from side to side. Only if forced to do so will it definitively

choose sides. But thats exactly what the government and the counterinsurgent

forces are trying to get the population to do. The government wants and indeed

needs the population to commit to the government in concrete ways. It needs in

Afghanistan, to give but one example, enough Afghans to volunteer for the

Afghan National Security Forces.

This is why counterinsurgency is necessarily population-centric. Being population-

centric isnt about airy-fairy stuff like passing out flowers and candy and never

killing anyone. Its about the cold hard recognition that we and the enemy both

need the population to act in certain ways for us to be successful. The insurgent

wants to intimidate the population into not cooperating with the government,and we need the population to step forward in large enough numbers to train the

kinds of local security forces necessary to defeat a persistent insurgency.

The insurgent, by the way, is using coercive force against us as well. The Taliban

has no hope of destroying the U.S. Army in the field á la Akbar Khan over General



Elphinstones army in 1842. Instead, the Taliban and its allies are instead just

trying to kill enough Americans and other western forces that we abandon the

field. As far as the United States and its allies are concerned, the insurgent in

Afghanistan is using a classic exhaustion strategy, and this is an example of

coercive force.

I completed my second and final deployment to Afghanistan as a U.S. Army officer

in 2004 and did not return until 2009. I spent most of the intervening years

studying the conflicts in Lebanon, and especially the 18-year Israeli occupation of

southern Lebanon that ended in 2000. One of the things that struck me while

reading Ericas latest report was the similarity between the way we have used

force in Afghanistan and the rather clumsy way the Israelis used coercive force in

two conflagrations in southern Lebanon in 1993 and 1996 respectively. In each

instance, the Israelis aimed to coerce the people of southern Lebanon into

withdrawing their support for Hizballah militants via devastating air and artillery

campaigns. And from the Israeli perspective, the force they used was selective in

nature. After all, they were only bombing those Lebanese communities suspected

of supporting Hizballah.

But thats not the way it appeared to the Lebanese. To the Lebanese, the violence

appeared indiscriminate. And this is something the armies of nation-states getwrong all the time when it comes to coercive force. First, we fail to establish what

Stathis Kalyvas calls a coherent structure of incentives for noncollaboration. To

the population, in other words, it appears as if they are going to get punished no

matter who they are or no matter what they do. So they have no incentive to do

anything different.

Second, we often assume the message we are sending is the one received by the

population. In Afghanistan, Erica sketches for us an environment in which our

best intentions have failed to be communicated to the Afghans, who, for reasons

that go beyond paranoia and conspiracy theories and into rather legitimate

grievances, mistrust the U.S. and allied presence in Afghanistan and our

operations there.



I told Erica that I would keep my remarks deliberately brief because I am as

interested in the conversation that will follow as by any grand insight or analysis

on my part. But I hope what I have thus far said provides an additional lens

through which we can view the dynamic Erica describes, and I once again

commend her on yet another successful if merciless audit of U.S. and allied

operations in Afghanistan.

Works referenced: War Continuity in Change, and Change in Continuity by

Colin S. Gray; The Logic of Violence in Civil War by Stathis Kalyvas; Stability

Operations Fundamentals by David Kilcullen; Arms and Influence by Thomas C.

Schelling; Deterrence by Lawrence Freedman; The Wire by David Simon

ExumOSI7OCT10

Documents

Transcript of ExumOSI7OCT10