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 mother’s 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 Gaston’s work for both the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict and
the Open Society Institute falls into the latter category. In 2009, Erica’s 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. Erica’s 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, Erica’s 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 Jack’s wallet, and I beat him up to
take it, that’s 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 enemy’s 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 I’m going to do the same thing to Erica if he doesn’t give me
his wallet, that’s an example of coercive force. I’m 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. That’s 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 most
conventional 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
insurgent’s 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 that’s 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 isn’t about airy-fairy stuff like passing out flowers and candy and never
killing anyone. It’s 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
Elphinstone’s 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 Erica’s 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 that’s not the way it appeared to the Lebanese. To the Lebanese, the violence
appeared indiscriminate. And this is something the armies of nation-states get
wrong 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