Out of the Mountains (25 page)

He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land—I mean literally. You can't understand. How could you? With solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence—utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion?
40

Heart of Darkness
is, of course, fiction. But most analysts agree that it closely parallels Conrad's real-world experience as captain of a river steamer, the
Roi des Belges
, in the Congo in the 1890s.
41
In an earlier piece, written soon after his return from Africa, Conrad made a similar point:

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion.
42

And here lies another critically important point: as Conrad understood, it's the
predictability
inherent in the existence of rules, publicly known and consistently enforced, not the
content
of the rules themselves, far less the
popularity
of a given government, that creates the feeling of safety that allows a normative system to function. Predictability, not popularity, is the key: you don't need to like the police or agree with the speed limit for the road rules to make you feel safe.

As long as people have a well-founded expectation that the police will consistently enforce the rules—that those who break the rules will be punished, while those who obey have nothing to fear—then the government's popularity or otherwise is completely irrelevant. We saw this in Tivoli Gardens, where many people supported the local don because of the perception of predictable security that the System generated, while the don had a strong incentive to be consistent, fair, and predictable in enforcing his rule. The same set of incentives is at work in the Taliban court system described earlier. More broadly, in the kinds of normative systems that Bernard Fall, Stathis Kalyvas, and Joseph Conrad describe, people don't have to support a group's ideology in order to follow its rules. They do so because of the predictability the normative system creates, whether they like its owner or not, or indeed whether they're even fully aware of the system or not.

Al Q
 
aeda in Iraq: Brutal and Brittle

We noted earlier that a group that establishes a wider range of capabilities, covering more of the spectrum from persuasion to coercion, will be stronger and more resilient. This is worth exploring in some detail, by comparing narrow-spectrum to wide-spectrum groups.

Al Q
 
aeda in Iraq (AQ
 
I) is a good example of a narrow-spectrum group that mainly applied coercion. Early in the Iraq war, AQ
 
I cells moved into Sunni neighborhoods and established control over the population through acts of terror. They applied restrictive rules—banning smoking or the playing of music, prohibiting any kind of cooperation with the government of Iraq or the occupation forces, enforcing the strictest imaginable codes of Islamic dress and behavior upon both men and women, forbidding people from listening to tapes of moderate imams' speeches, seizing control over economic activity in the district, and so on—and punished anyone who broke these rules in a brutally harsh, violent, and public manner. Thus, although they did establish a normative system (rules and sanctions) they focused their efforts entirely at the coercive, violent end of the spectrum.

It wasn't uncommon, for example, in towns such as Ramadi and Tal Afar, for the bodies of local civilians to turn up in the street with the two first fingers of the right hand cut off (a punishment for smoking); for non-AQ
 
I religious leaders to be assassinated; for the children of tribal leaders who opposed AQ
 
I to be tortured to death, their broken little bodies sent back to their families as a message; or for acid to be thrown in women's faces as a punishment for wearing their veils pushed back too far.
43
In farming areas, AQ
 
I developed the habit of leaving the decapitated heads, or other body parts, of their victims in fruit boxes to be found by their families.
44

AQ
 
I cells were thus cruelly capable and effective at the coercive end of the spectrum, but almost totally lacking in administrative and persuasive capabilities (as well as basic humanity). AQ
 
I attempted nothing like formal governance, nor did it ever even try to provide any significant administrative services—it gave no tangible benefits to its supporters and provided no essential support or humanitarian assistance to the Sunni population. Its message to the population was, in essence, “Follow our rules, or we'll kill you.” (In this, AQ
 
I differed greatly from Shi'a militia groups such as Jaysh al-Mahdi or the Badr Organization, both of which—though also extremely violent—put a great deal of effort into winning support through social, economic, and humanitarian programs.)

This is not to say that AQ
 
I's approach to violence was unsophisticated. On the contrary, the group cleverly established domination over the community through fear and through a carefully engineered cycle of sectarian violence, intimidation, and revenge. The cycle worked as follows. Having established a base in a Sunni-majority neighborhood and enforced their code of silence and fear on that community to give themselves a secure base of operations, members of an AQ
 
I cell would set out to provoke a neighboring Shi'a community. They would kidnap Shi'a children, especially young boys, brutally torture them to death, and then dump the bodies in their families' streets, or would attack Shi'a social and religious institutions, seeking to throw the blame on the Sunni community. These atrocities in turn would prompt retaliatory attacks by the Shi'a population against Sunni districts. Perhaps the most prominent example of this was AQ
 
I's bombing of the Samarra mosque, one of the holiest shrines in Shi'a Islam, on February
22
,
2006
. This attack prompted a tsunami of retaliatory bloodletting by Shi'a groups, targeting Sunnis across Iraq. At the local level, AQ
 
I launched dozens of attacks against Shi'a districts from bases in Sunni-majority areas, including a notorious and bloody series of market bombings in
2006
–
7
, which prompted Shi'a retaliation against Sunni neighborhoods.

This approach worked for AQ
 
I at first. Members of the Sunni community, attacked by Shi'ite vigilantes and hounded by representatives of the Shi'a-dominated Iraqi state (especially the Iraqi National Police, some units of which became notorious for extrajudicial killings of Sunni men and boys), felt they had nowhere to turn.
45
Many began to see AQ
 
I as the only thing standing between them and oblivion at the hands of the Shi'a, an ironic turn of events since (like a gangster in a protection racket) AQ
 
I posed as the protector of the Sunnis—pretending to be the solution to a problem that AQ
 
I itself was creating and exploiting.

After the death of its first
emir
, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on June
7
,
2006
, AQ
 
I's new leadership began a limited attempt to translate its terror into broader political support, through the establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Iraq and the Mujahideen Shura Council. But AQ
 
I's approach was still fundamentally one of intimidation and fear, an approach that relied heavily on coercive means with little attempt at building administrative capability or persuasive activity. Thus, while AQ
 
I did indeed establish a normative system that was capable of controlling the population, its capabilities all lay at the coercive end of the spectrum, and its control was therefore brittle. AQ
 
I could offer its supporters nothing positive, and its violence and brutality against the population, along with its disregard of community leaders' authority, its intolerance of traditional forms of Islam, and the fact that its leadership was largely urban or non-Iraqi, was building a groundswell of hatred against AQ
 
I within rural and periurban Sunni communities. The only thing that kept these communities from turning against AQ
 
I was the pall of fear the terrorists had cast over the population, and the expectation that anyone who opposed AQ
 
I would die a slow, horrible, and publicly humiliating death.
46

The so-called Awakening, the uprising against AQ
 
I from within the Sunni community that began in
2006
under a group of leaders that included Sheikh Sattar of the Albu Risha, was by no means the community's first attempt to throw off these parasites. On the contrary, the
2006
Awakening was at least their fifth uprising.
47
What made all the difference in
2006
was the U.S. troop surge. It wasn't enough for the local community to hate AQ
 
I: to rise up successfully, local civilians also had to believe they would survive the attempt. On every previous occasion, community leaders who went up against AQ
 
I had been slaughtered. In
2006
–
7
, the extra troop presence of the surge meant that for the first time, the coalition could hold and defend population centers on a permanent basis, support the Sunnis when they turned against the terrorists, and protect people against retaliation. The partnership between U.S. troops and the local community—arising in part from counterinsurgency tactics that emphasized protecting the people where they slept—gave the community the confidence to rise up again, and this time they succeeded. Within a matter of weeks AQ
 
I was destroyed, its control was swept away, and its cadres were mercilessly killed by the very population they had terrorized.
48

Thus, AQ
 
I is an excellent example of the brittleness that can result from too narrow a spectrum of capabilities. AQ
 
I established a terrifyingly effective ascendancy over the Sunni population, but because this dominance was based entirely on fear and coercion, it had no resilience. As soon as the surge created a minimal assurance for people that they would survive the attempt to turn against AQ
 
I, and as soon as coalition forces in Anbar demonstrated that they could kill or capture members of AQ
 
I cells, the myth of AQ
 
I's invincibility was shattered and the people turned on AQ
 
I in a flash and swept it away. And because the terrorist group had little to offer but fear and intimidation, it had no way to counteract or bounce back from its loss of control.

We might note in passing that trying to control a population solely through persuasive or administrative means, relying on these parts of the spectrum only and excluding coercion, is equally doomed to failure. Making a population like you, through administrative benefits and persuasive “hearts and minds” programs—an approach taken by some coalition contingents in both Iraq and Afghanistan—may initially appear to work. But at some point a competing armed group will turn up, put a gun to community leaders' heads, and ask, “Who do you support now?” At that point, coercion trumps persuasion. More broadly, the field evidence that has emerged from many recent conflicts, as well as from patterns of organized crime and gang activity, suggests that a wider spectrum of control measures generally tends to overpower a narrow set of measures, whether these are primarily coercive or persuasive.

Living the Hezbollah Lifestyle

In contrast to AQ
 
I, the example par excellence of a wide-spectrum group is Lebanese Hezbollah. Hezbollah brings to bear an extremely broad range of capabilities across the full spectrum of a well-developed normative system. The resilience and staying power that this generates can be seen most clearly in the events of 2006, which was a watershed year in Lebanon, as in Iraq.

Hezbollah (the name means “Party of God”) was established after the
1982
Israeli invasion of Lebanon, with the goal of protecting the Shi'a community, resisting Israeli military occupation, and fighting Israel's allies in the Phalangist militia and the South Lebanese Army (SLA). The organization began as a small militia that received training from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, funding from Iran, and political support from Syria as well as from the Lebanese Shi'a community. Over time, however, Hezbollah has expanded and diversified into a wide-spectrum social and political movement that not only includes a capable military wing but also maintains regional and district administrative councils, law enforcement organizations, dispute resolution and mediation systems, employment programs, health clinics, schools, labor representation, a reconstruction organization, charity programs, a mass political party with elected representatives in the Lebanese parliament and at the local and regional levels, a series of local radio stations and print publications, the satellite television channel Al-Manar, and a significant Internet presence. Hezbollah is, in effect, a counterstate within the territory of Lebanon. This counterstate fields an extraordinarily effective “fish trap” system of incentives and disincentives that fully encapsulate its target population: you can live your whole life within the Hezbollah lifestyle and almost never need to engage with the outside environment.