Out of the Mountains (29 page)

We often (consciously or otherwise) tend to regard such marginalized and excluded populations as passive, supine recipients of government intervention and international assistance, or as victims of groups (such as an insurgents, gangs, or criminal networks) that governments regard as illegitimate. We think of the population as lacking in agency, simply a beneficiary or victim of the actions of others—like a silent-movie heroine tied to a railway track, helplessly awaiting rescue.

As Mullah Salaam's case shows, nothing could be further from the truth: not only are noncombatant civilians in these environments extremely active and highly influential, but they are in many cases masters of manipulation and experts in leveraging the presence of rich, ignorant, gullible outsiders in order to get what they need, outsmart their rivals, and survive another day. Indeed, any community leader who is still alive and in a position of authority today in Afghanistan, after thirty years of war (or in Tivoli Gardens, after sixty years of gang domination, or in Mogadishu, after twenty years of state collapse) is, through natural selection alone, almost certainly an expert in manipulating and balancing external interveners and local armed groups. For this reason, to examine the relationships between nonstate armed groups and populations solely through the lens of the normative systems that armed groups create is to miss at least half of the interaction that generates competitive control.

Domination, Resistance, and Manipulation

The great Professor James C. Scott of Yale University, writing in 1976, described subsistence farmers in Southeast Asia in the following terms: “There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.”
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Scott, the father of an entire genre of political ethnography sometimes known as “resistance studies” or “subaltern studies,” explains that peasant populations—precisely because they live on the subsistence margin, where the downside risk of failure is so much greater than the upside potential for success—tend to be extremely risk-averse. One year's crop failure can push a peasant family below the starvation threshold, forcing family members to sell capital assets (such as land or livestock) to survive, reducing them to supplicant status in a village, or forcing them off the land entirely, so they never recover their independence. For this reason, over generations, marginalized populations have become experts at fine calculations of risk and tend always to minimize risk, maximize predictability, and limit the influence of outsiders such as governments. They value predictability, even at the expense of overall profit, and have developed what Scott calls a “safety-first principle” that embodies a series of “classical techniques for avoiding undue risks often at the cost of a reduction in average return.”
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Scott cites as an example of this risk-aversion behavior peasants' resistance to government interventions designed to improve their lot; another is their reluctance to embrace agricultural innovations such as higher-yield but less reliable strains of rice.
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He argues convincingly that this behavior isn't limited to Southeast Asia but can be seen in precapitalist or subsistence farming populations across the planet; in his later work he examines marginalized and excluded urban and periurban populations and shows that a similar calculus of risk-minimizing resistance permeates the behavior of urban as well as rural groups.
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Scott argues that populations on the margin typically prefer the kinds of patron-client relationships that we observed in Tivoli Gardens—predictable arrangements whereby better-off members of a community sponsor its weaker members—even though such relationships are often exploitative, involving long-term dependency and what Jamaican commentators such as Obika Gray call “benefits politics.”
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Like Scott, Karl D. Jackson, in his classic study of traditional authority and religion during the Darul Islam insurgency in West Java in the
1960
s, showed similar patterns of patron-client relations in village and periurban populations in Indonesia.
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My own fieldwork with the same population in the same area almost thirty years later showed that these patterns can be remarkably persistent once established: once locked into an incentive system, it can be extraordinarily difficult for a population to break out of established behavior patterns of this kind.

In the presence of an insurgency, criminal network, or gang conflict—bringing the risk of violence, death, and major property damage into the equation—the downside risk of miscalculation becomes dramatically higher, but so do the potential upside benefits. Aid agencies, police, military forces with emergency funds, and government and nongovernment “experts” of all kinds (most of whom are entirely ignorant of local conditions but have vast amounts of money, little time, and less accountability) flood into a local area, looking for allies and creating enormous opportunities for profit and benefit. Local elites (such as Mullah Salaam, as we have seen) can see outsiders as a source of revenue and influence as well as of risk.

Moreover, since outside military or law enforcement interveners often bring with them heavy weaponry and enormous coercive firepower, well beyond anything that the local community can muster, they can radically alter the local balance of power among competing armed actors and can therefore become a game-changing resource for any local player who can successfully manipulate them into destroying his or her enemies. Any coalition soldier who has worked in Afghanistan or Iraq, or indeed any inner-city police officer or counternarcotics agent, can give dozens of examples of populations trying to use the police or military as a tool to smash local rivals, reporting their local adversaries as “insurgents,” “criminals,” “terrorists,” or “militia” to persuade security forces to target them, or settling scores by informing on each other.

Like Scott's marginalized peasants and periurban populations, communities in a high-risk environment such as an insurgency, a garrison neighborhood, or a slum that's experiencing high levels of violent crime become expert at navigating a complex and ever-changing set of choices, always seeking to maintain safety, minimize risk, maximize profit from external interveners, improve their position vis-à-vis local rivals, and resist or exploit external control. Indeed, one reason effective normative systems attract support from such populations is that—as Stathis Kalyvas showed, and as the Taliban decree I quoted earlier illustrates—normative systems create predictability and order, reducing transaction costs for populations and minimizing the risk of a potentially fatal miscalculation. My own observations in places as variable as Pakistani refugee camps, port cities in New Guinea and Indonesia, East Timorese coastal towns, Sri Lankan displaced persons' camps, and cities such as Mogadishu, Kandahar, Tripoli, and Baghdad suggest that population survival strategies in these environments fall into seven basic categories: fleeing, passivity, autarky, hedging, swinging, commitment, and self-arming. Let's briefly examine each in turn.

Fleeing
—an extreme response to chaotic violence—occurs when populations react to the danger of their situation simply by leaving an area. For unencapsulated nomads or tribal pastoralists (such as the Bedu of Iraq, the Kuchi of Afghanistan, or Somali clans), fleeing to avoid government influence or escape violence is an entire way of life: as I've noted elsewhere, desert tribes run when mountain tribes would fight.
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Pastoralists' wealth is mobile, residing in their flocks, and thus movement away from threat is a natural response. But for agriculturalists or, even more so, urban dwellers, fleeing an area is an extreme step. Their wealth is in the land, in their business, or in their residence, and moving away may mean that they can never come back and that local rivals will seize their property. Thus, whole families rarely leave a violence-affected area—but individuals may emigrate, move to the city, or move to another district. The flows of rural-to-urban migration that we noted in Chapter
1
, along with the patterns of emigration and diaspora formation in the Somalia and Jamaica examples in Chapter
2
, clearly illustrate this tendency.

Passivity
occurs in populations that have been traumatized by extreme violence or where local elites have been killed or driven off by conflict. This approach manifests itself in an extreme reluctance to take any kind of action or to accept responsibility for any decision whatsoever. Some neighborhoods (
muhallas
) in Baghdad in
2007
exemplified this survival strategy. These areas were subjected to atrocious sectarian violence and were left largely to their own devices in
2005
–
6
. As a result, community leaders in these
muhallas
were highly reluctant to take any initiative in rebuilding or securing their communities: the carnage of the preceding year, on top of decades of Ba'athist oppression, had taught them that the most dangerous thing they could possibly do was to take responsibility for their own actions. Indeed, the people left in charge of these neighborhoods after the intense violence of
2005
–
6
were often the
least
decisive leaders—the active players had been weeded out, or had exposed themselves by taking the initiative to protect their communities and had been killed, often in ways that traumatized the community or were specifically designed (by groups such as AQ
 
I) to discourage such independence.
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Those who survived sought to hide behind the excuse that the coalition or the insurgents had forced them to take a particular action. This strategy of appearing helpless, while clearly well adapted to minimizing downside risk, was ineffective in generating benefits or support from the government or the coalition. Over time, some communities moved past this approach to a hedging or swinging strategy, but others—often the most marginalized and traumatized periurban communities—never did.
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Autarky
, in this context, is an extreme from of armed neutrality, a strategy of self-sufficient independence that denies allegiance to anyone or anything outside the local level. It's sometimes expressed as a “plague on all your houses” attitude toward the government and nonstate armed groups alike, or—more subtly—in the kinds of independence-maximizing strategies we saw in the case of Mullah Salaam or the Somali clans. If fleeing is the default strategy of desert nomads, then armed neutrality is the natural strategy of mountain people. The behavior of the Waygal Valley elders before and during the battle of Wanat (described in the introduction) typifies the behavior of mountain populations, who for terrain reasons can't flee the encroachment of government or external armed actors, are tied to particular pieces of land, and must therefore stand and fight to resist outside influence. Autarky, as a strategy, can be effective in minimizing risk (through the deterrent effect of armed neutrality) and generating benefits for a local population. It needn't be purely defensive, and may manifest itself in externally aggressive behavior aimed at deterring interference. In particular, the ability to raid or prey on other local groups or passing travelers—especially for populations who sit astride key flows in an urban metabolism, as do the Kenyan gangs discussed in Chapter
1
, or who control a major port or airport, as does the Shower Posse—can force outsiders to buy off an autarkic group, or allow a marginalized group to maintain its autonomy.

Hedging
, one of the commonest survival strategies in conditions of competitive control, consists in simultaneously supporting all sides. Like a bettor laying an across-the-board bet on a horse race, or a corporation giving campaign donations to both parties in an election, a population that adopts a hedging strategy seeks to minimize risk by paying off all sides—while maximizing the potential for benefits by ensuring it supports the winner, whoever that may be. This strategy is popular precisely because it simultaneously lowers risk and heightens the prospect of profit. But, like cheating on a mafia don, it can be risky if one particular armed actor discovers the population has been supporting another, and so it is often conducted subtly. For example, some Afghan families have one son fighting with the Taliban and one in the Afghan Army—not because their loyalties are confused but as an insurance policy against a victory by either side. They can support each side as needed but can also maintain plausible deniability. Similarly, urban populations who pay protection money to a local gang but also pay off the police are adopting a hedging strategy—but they can always claim that the money was extorted by force. In this context, playing the victim and deemphasizing autonomy can be a useful tactic to support a hedging strategy.

Swinging
, like hedging, consists of supporting all sides in a conflict, but unlike hedging (which involves simultaneously but covertly supporting each side), a swinging strategy involves periodic, carefully timed switching of sides. A population engaged in a swinging strategy supports only one side at any given moment but shifts its allegiance as the local balance of power changes. If hedging is like sleeping around, swinging is like serial monogamy. The population's goal is to back the strongest local side at any given moment, changing sides when one group becomes more dominant, changing back when the situation shifts, and strategically throwing their own influence into the balance in order to ensure a result that benefits a local leader or group. Mullah Salaam's behavior, described in detail above, exemplifies such a swinging strategy, along with a strong tendency toward autarky. Like hedging, swinging is popular since it minimizes subjective risk while maximizing opportunities to extract benefits and concessions from all sides. But it too is a dangerous game, since it depends on correctly predicting changes in the relative strength of armed actors: populations have to learn to switch sides at just the right moment to avoid being caught on the losing side. We might also note that populations tend to factor into their risk calculus the degree of violence an armed group is likely to inflict as punishment for changing sides. Violence trumps benefits in this context: if an insurgent or street gang is going to kill you for switching sides but the police or army is likely to try to win you back with benefits, then you'll default to supporting the gang, since the downside risks of opposing it are greater. This is precisely why, as we saw in Chapter
2
, Jamaican gangs reserved their harshest punishments for those who informed to the police or changed political allegiance. It's also why, in our discussion of normative systems, we noted that the strength of a normative system—however well developed its persuasive and administrative elements might be—ultimately rests on the coercive capabilities of its enforcer.