Out of the Mountains (21 page)

Governments such as that of the United States that draw sharp distinctions between warfare and law enforcement and between domestic and overseas legal authorities will experience great difficulty, and may find it impossible to act with the same agility as irregular actors who can move among these artificial categories at will. Capabilities that combine policing, administration, and emergency services, backed up with military-style capabilities so that police can deal with well-armed adversaries—capabilities traditionally associated with constabulary,
gendarmerie
,
carabinieri
, or coast guard forces—may be more effective against these hybrid threats than civil police forces alone, and less destructive than unleashing the military.

Nested Networks

Another implication from this discussion of the future threat is that it will be
nested
—threat networks will be embedded in a complex urban littoral environment, illicit activities will nest within licit systems and processes, and local threats will nest within networks at the regional and global level.

In the extremely complex, coastal, urban, and connected environment I've outlined, threat actors (like the terrorists in Mumbai, the Somali militias, or the Jamaican organized crime posses in Kingston) will be able to nest, avoiding detection, by remaining beneath the clutter of dense urban development and overpopulation. Because of the connectedness among threat networks, periurban communities, and city systems, it will be virtually impossible to target a dark network without also harming the community within which it nests. This will deter some governments from acting, while making it harder (as we've just seen in the case of Israel in Nablus and the United States in Tarok Kolache) for those who do act to justify their actions.

As well as nesting in the urban environment itself, threats can nest within international and national systems, including international transportation networks, financial networks such as the remittance industry, and even humanitarian assistance systems. In Mogadishu, for example, there's evidence of connectivity among Somali piracy syndicates, organized crime networks in Europe, and the Shabaab insurgency. Clans and criminal networks in Mogadishu, or in Somali coastal cities including Kismaayo and Haraadhere, draw little distinction between their military and political activities, on one hand, and their business activities (both legitimate and criminal), on the other. Conflict entrepreneurs—such as the clan traders who set up refugee camps around Mogadishu in
2008
to divert humanitarian assistance into the black market or to their business partners in Shabaab—operate on a continuum from legitimate business through illicit activity, outright crime, terrorism, and insurgency.
118

Because threat networks often nest within essential licit flows, it can be virtually impossible to shut them down. For example, as the investigative journalist Matt Potter showed, drawing from official and academic sources as well as local eyewitness accounts, some (though, of course, by no means all) of the same air charter companies that operate humanitarian assistance flights into drought-stricken or conflict-affected areas such as the Horn of Africa also smuggle weapons, drugs, and other contraband. Humanitarian aid workers and NGOs are perfectly well aware of this, but neither they nor the governments involved in relief efforts can shut down these trafficking flows, since it would mean an end to the movement of humanitarian assistance cargo.
119

Beyond Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism

A final, very obvious point is that counterterrorism and counterinsurgency (dominant discourses of the past few years) are clearly only part of the solution here—and to only part of the problem. Neither of these approaches would have allowed us to fully understand, let alone deal with, any of the three cases discussed in this chapter.

I've written elsewhere in detail on the intellectual history of counterinsurgency, and on various critiques of the theory.
120
For now, though, it's enough to note that there is solid evidence that counterinsurgency, or COIN, can work if done properly, with sufficient resources, for long enough.
121
But it's also clear that COIN is not the answer to every question. Likewise, counterterrorism (ranging from the comprehensive “global war on terrorism” of President George W. Bush's administration to President Obama's unrestrained drone warfare) can help to temporarily suppress a particular type of threat, but it can't do much about the broad and complex range of challenges we're about to face. In fact, any theory of conflict that's organized around dealing with a single type of enemy is unlikely to be very helpful in a conflict environment that includes multiple overlapping threats and challenges.

Instead, to deal with complex future conflicts, we're going to need something more like a unified field theory: an approach that is framed around the common features of all types of threats (rather than optimized for the particular characteristics of any one type of threat) and considers the environment in toto as a single unified system. We'll need to acknowledge that many security challenges in the future environment will be “threats without enemies,” which, by definition, are just not amenable to military solutions. And we'll need to recognize that even when there's an identifiable adversary—usually, but not always, a nonstate armed group—there are still no
purely
military solutions to many of the challenges we will encounter, meaning that disciplines such as law enforcement, urban planning, city administration, systems design, public health, and international development are likely to play a key part in any future theory of conflict.

The unified field theory that best fits the currently known facts is what I call the “theory of competitive control.” This is the notion that nonstate armed groups, of many kinds, draw their strength and freedom of action primarily from their ability to manipulate and mobilize populations, and that they do this using a spectrum of methods from coercion to persuasion, by creating a normative system that makes people feel safe through the predictability and order that it generates. This theory has been part of many people's thinking about insurgency and civil war for a long time. But the cases we've examined in this chapter suggest that it applies to any nonstate armed group that preys on a population. It applies to insurgents, terrorists, drug cartels, street gangs, organized crime syndicates, pirates, and warlords, and it provides useful explanations and insights for law enforcement, civil war, and diffuse social conflict—not just for insurgency. I will suggest that we treat this theory (until another theory emerges that better fits the available facts) as a working model for dealing with future threats. The next chapter explores the theory of competitive control in detail.

3

The Theory of Competitive Control

Development in my area was slow until a huge migration of people especially from the northeast of Brazil, in the late 70's came to Rocinha. Then some major building took place in many areas of the favela. The drug gangs came into power around this same time and instituted rules in the favela. Since the government and police never came here anyways, the drug guys took control of the neighborhoods and set the rules, no stealing, raping or killing inside the favela. I am not sure on the exact details because I was a kid. . . . The drug gang bought hearts and minds by aiding some of the poorest residents by providing food and necessities. Also many in the drug gang were “cria” or from the favela. Interesting dynamic it is and far more complicated than I can explain here. The drug gang became the parallel power and filled the role of the government. The gang built community centers and had simple roads paved. If you live in the community what would you think? After years of being neglected and shunned by the government, who do you turn to? The gang filled that role. I wouldn't say people were happy about it, but they accepted it. What else could they do?

—
Life in Rocinha
, 2012

I. The Fish Trap

5:20 a.m., April 15, 1999

Mushu Island, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea

The camp is
quiet in the dawn. I've just rolled out of my mosquito net by the buttress roots of the enormous jungle tree my signalers are using as an antenna mast for our high-frequency radio, the only link for over a thousand miles back to our headquarters in northern Australia. Most of my soldiers are still sleeping, but a few have been up for hours, fishing in the inlet with spears and traps, which they and our local partners made the day before. We're in our third week of survival training with our sister unit, 2nd Battalion of the Pacific Islands Regiment, on an island off the north coast of New Guinea.
1
And I'm looking closely at the fishing trap as I rub the sleep out of my eyes.

Many societies in Australasia and the Pacific, like most others throughout the world, seem to have independently invented the fishing trap some time in the late Mesolithic period of prehistory.
2
One traditional type is woven from narrow strands of bamboo, reeds, or grass, to form a cylinder that is closed at one end, with a conical opening at the other that lets fish enter but stops them from backing out. This is a standard type of trap in New Guinea, and as well as being a beautifully intricate work of traditional art, a trap like this is a highly effective hunting tool. With the right bait, placed with a good understanding of tides, currents, fish behavior, and movement patterns, it can produce at least one catch every day. The trap I'm looking at is only a few hours old, but it has already caught four coral trout from the inlet.

Fish traps look ephemeral, but their flimsiness is a deliberate deception: the strands, individually weak, form a resilient network. Indeed, the flimsier the trap looks, the less the fish notice it—on their way in, hungry for bait, they brush nonchalantly past the very spikes that will later imprison them. The trap's strength is its structure.

Insurgents make fish traps, as do militias, gangs, warlords, mass social movements, religions (Jesus, for instance, called his apostles to be “fishers of men”) and, of course, governments.
3
Like real fish traps, these metaphorical traps are woven of many strands—persuasive, administrative, and coercive. Though each of the strands may be brittle, their combined effect creates a control structure that's easy and attractive for people to enter, but then locks them into a system of persuasion and coercion: a set of incentives and disincentives from which they find it extremely difficult to break out.

We've already looked at the megatrends that are transforming the planet and will shape the conflict environment of the next generation. We've explored concepts such as urban metabolism, carrying capacity, cities as biological systems, feral cities, dark networks, and the ways in which nonstate armed groups interact with populations and governments in these complex urban systems. In Chapter
2
, we looked at three examples—Mumbai, Mogadishu, and Kingston—that cover the spectrum of threats that exist now and which will be even more widespread in the urban, littoral, networked environment of future conflict. In each of these examples, the interaction between a nonstate armed group and a local population prompted a series of events in an urban microhabitat, while networked connectivity gave these events a far broader effect.

In this chapter, I want to drill down to that hyperlocal level, to look at the intimate interaction between nonstate groups and populations. My goal here is to understand the way that nonstate armed groups try to control populations, and the way those populations manipulate them in return. A secondary objective is to begin the search for a paradigm that goes beyond the confines of classical counterinsurgency theory, and I start by examining the relationship between armed groups and populations from the point of view of the armed actor, before looking at the same relationship from the standpoint of the unarmed or noncombatant civilian. In essence, this chapter looks at how nonstate armed groups of all types (and the states with which they compete, coexist or partner) seek to control populations—the kind of complex two-way interaction that's highlighted in the quote that began this chapter, from a resident in an urban slum in Brazil.
4
And the fish trap is, it turns out, a very useful analogy for the network of incentive structures they use to do so.

II. Insurgent Control Systems in Afghanistan

It's useful to begin with a description of how a real-life control system operates, and the war in Afghanistan has unfortunately provided many opportunities to observe such systems in action. It's also helpful to start with a nonurban example, since this lets us look at processes of control in a simpler society and a less cluttered environment, without initially having to account for the complex impact of urbanization, littoralization, and networked connectivity. In addition, this example helps to demonstrate that patterns of competitive control are independent of terrain or type of group—indeed, they may be universal.

So, let's imagine a village elder in Kandahar province in
2011
.
5
He may have a dispute with a neighboring village over orchard land, grazing rights, or water for irrigation. Such disputes are common in Afghanistan, where population displacement, agricultural disruption, and changed settlement patterns have eroded community consensus about land ownership. Decades of conflict, in a society where
44
percent of the population is under fifteen years old, have meant that disorder is all most Afghans know.
6
Written records of land ownership either never existed or have been destroyed. The fall of the monarchy in
1973
, the brutal Communist land reform program in
1973
–
78
, the Soviet-Afghan war of
1978
–
89
, the civil war of the
1990
s, the
2001
invasion, and since then the Taliban insurgency have all contributed to population movement and displacement that magnifies this chaos.