Out of the Mountains (5 page)

Many people are rightly concerned by the authoritarian tendencies that lie behind these kinds of urban systems, even while also recognizing that the alternative—as people had just lived it in Baghdad—might be even worse. In a free society, there's clearly a balance to be struck between the risk of violence from insurgency, crime, or social chaos (nonstate violence, if you like) and the risk of state repression. This was exactly the problem in Iraq, with ordinary people caught between nonstate violence from Sunni extremists, on one hand, and state violence from the Shi'a-dominated Iraqi National Police, on the other. Could we, then, help a neighborhood become self-defending against all comers, making people both safer from nonstate violence
and
harder for the state to oppress? Would it be possible, on the basis of a charter agreement co-designed with local inhabitants, to work with rather than against a community, to help people design security into the actual fabric of their urban landscape? This would not just make it harder for militias, gangs and insurgents to prey on people but also minimize the need for security forces to flood into a threatened area—a cure that many citizens might think was worse than the disease. In Baghdad, as in many places where Steve and I had worked, adding troops and cops wouldn't necessarily make people safer: it might just give them more opportunities to get shaken down. And for an overstretched police service or a military lacking the numbers for counterinsurgency, this system would allow a far smaller force to secure a much greater area, making better use of scarce assets.

Our brief drink became a long discussion: we cleared the whiskey glasses off the table, drew some maps and system diagrams, and tried to pull together the outlines of an approach. That first discussion became many more sessions, then structured design workshops over computer models and satellite photographs, then a long-term collaboration with Steve, my team at Caerus, software designers, architects, and an Oslo-based urban design firm. Over the years we've jointly developed a methodology that combines all the elements mentioned above, working on design solutions for cities as diverse as Kandahar, Muscat, and Rio de Janeiro, and developing community participative maps and urban violence models for cities in Liberia, Nigeria, and Honduras and for the U.S.-Mexico border area.

This chapter sets the scene for the rest of this book. It lays out some of the insights that emerged from these conversations, from the field experiments and projects that followed, and from the wider body of research on what things will be like on the future planet. It's an attempt to formulate what it is about the urban, networked environment that makes conflict there so different from conflict in places such as Dara-i-Nur, before we begin (in the chapters that follow) to describe how real-world conflict happens on the ground today.

II

Since the start of this century many soldiers, diplomats, and aid workers have had their heads in the Afghan mountains. Governments have expended enormous effort on hunting down fast-moving, lightly equipped bands of guerrillas in the world's most forbidding terrain. Aid agencies have grappled with the need to stabilize and reconstruct the remote communities where these guerrillas operate. But if, as I'll show in this book, the future is actually going to be urban, networked, and coastal, then the issues that Steve and I were discussing—the need to ensure that cities can both meet their populations' needs and preserve people's safety—will be the main challenges of the next generation. To deal with them, we'll need to get ourselves, mentally and physically, out of the mountains.
3

International troops have left Iraq, and most will leave Afghanistan by the end of
2014
. But there will be strong elements of continuity after these conflicts wind down. Formally declared warfare among nation-states, for example, is likely to keep getting rarer, while violence involving nonstate armed groups (whether we call it “war” or “crime”) will probably remain the most common and widespread form of conflict.
4
As just one example of this, we might note the long-standing historical pattern in which the United States conducts a large-scale or long-duration counterinsurgency or stabilization operation about once a generation and a small or short-term mission about once every five to ten years—far more often than it gets into declared wars against other nation-states.
5

Since the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, the United States has been drawn into literally dozens of small wars and irregular operations. Even the few conventional wars during this period—including the U.S. Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First and Second World Wars, and the Korean War—involved guerrilla conflict, stability operations, and postconflict nation building. The Spanish-American War, for example, triggered a drawn-out and controversial counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines, and several follow-on operations in Cuba.
6
During the Korean War, which is generally regarded as “conventional,” General Douglas MacArthur's landing at Incheon (discussed in the Appendix) stranded thousands of North Korean troops behind United Nations lines—they fought as guerrillas for several years, preying on local villagers, creating no-go areas, and attacking lines of communication. It took a major effort, over several years, to deal with this threat.
7
Likewise, the
1991
Gulf War, the quickest and most cleanly conventional of recent American conflicts, brought with it a long tail of humanitarian, enforcement, and stabilization operations. These included the northern and southern no-fly zones, a major U.S. Air Force effort intended to deter Saddam Hussein from reprisals against the Iraqi people, and Operation Provide Comfort, a humanitarian assistance effort that kept U.S. troops on the ground in Iraqi Kurdistan more than five years after the hundred-hour ground war was over.
8

This pattern of frequent irregular warfare—the military term for conflict that involves nonstate armed groups—seems to be totally independent of policy makers' preferences.
9
In particular, presidential desire (or lack of desire) to carry out these operations has no detectable impact on how often they occur. President Lyndon Johnson, for example, considered Vietnam a distraction from his domestic goals, yet oversaw an escalation that drew almost six hundred thousand U.S. troops into the war at its peak in
1968
. President Bill Clinton came into office with a similarly domestic focus and a desire to avoid overseas entanglements. He delayed committing troops to the Balkans and sidestepped Rwanda altogether, scarred by a failed intervention in Somalia. Yet he ultimately sent troops to Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Haiti, and Liberia, maintained no-fly zones against Iraq (including a major air campaign in
1998
), and deployed ships and planes to support the Australian-led intervention in East Timor in
1999
. As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush opposed stability operations and derided nation building. But as president, he led the United States into its largest war since Vietnam, its largest nation-building effort since World War II, and the largest NATO stabilization operation ever. He committed forces to not one but two simultaneous large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns, along with counterterrorism and nation-building interventions worldwide. None of these presidents had any subjective desire to get involved in irregular conflict: all of them did so anyway, and all at about the same rate as their predecessors.

In January
2012
President Obama became the latest in the long line of leaders to express a desire to avoid this kind of conflict. In his guidance to the Defense Department, the president signaled a rebalancing toward Asia and the Pacific in the aftermath of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and directed that U.S. forces “no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.”
10
If we leave aside the inconvenient reality that the Afghan war was, even at that time, far from over (and that conflicts were ongoing in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Nigeria, and the Congo), history suggests that the president's directive, even though undoubtedly sincere and well intentioned, won't change much. Leon Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” American policy makers clearly don't like irregular operations, and the U.S. military isn't much interested in them, either, as an institution. But the deep structure of American engagement with the world, over at least the past
150
years, has meant that the military ends up doing these operations anyway, much more often than it does conventional state-on-state wars.

To be sure, new technologies—drones and offensive cyberwarfare, for example, both of which are discussed in Chapter
4
—give policy makers ways to avoid putting boots on the ground, and we're already seeing more emphasis on what we might call remote warfare as part of what some have dubbed the “Obama Doctrine.”
11
But literally dozens of new technologies have entered the arsenal over the past
150
years, without any detectable effect on the number of irregular operations. If anything, these technologies may make policy makers
more
likely to intervene in future conflicts, because they offer the tempting possibility of fewer troops deployed, fewer body bags coming home, and less political controversy, through the promise of a lighter “footprint.”

This history suggests that there will be a strong, continuing demand into the foreseeable future for military operations against a variety of nonstate actors, and not just for the United States: in
2013
alone, the French undertook a major irregular intervention in Mali, British forces deployed to several countries in Africa and Asia, Australian troops were operating in East Timor and several Pacific islands as well as in Afghanistan, twenty-seven nations contributed ships to a naval anti-piracy task force in the Gulf of Aden, there were regional peacekeeping and counterinsurgency operations all over Asia and Africa, and many other countries were engaged in military operations against nonstate armed groups.

But the evidence also suggests that the future environment—the
context
for these operations—will differ radically from what we've known since
9
/
11
. In particular, research on demography and economic geography suggests that four megatrends are driving most aspects of future life on the planet, including conflict. These are rapid population growth, accelerating urbanization, littoralization (the tendency for things to cluster on coastlines), and increasing connectedness. If we add the potential for climate-change effects such as coastal flooding, and note that almost all the world's population growth will happen in coastal cities in low-income, sometimes unstable countries, we can begin to grasp the complex challenges that lurk in this future environment.

Crowded, Coastal, Connected Cities

As I just noted, Western governments and militaries have focused since the turn of the century on wars like those in Afghanistan. This is the world of the Dara-i-Nur ambush I described in the preface: a place of mountain terrain, micropolitics, and remote villages, where outsiders move—only half understanding what they see—in a landscape defined by centuries of tradition and by a harsh and unchanging geography. The last decade has also, of course, seen intense urban fighting, mainly in Iraq—from high-intensity battles such as in Fallujah or Ramadi to urban insurgency in Baghdad or Basra.

Urban warfare in Iraq had a huge impact on the American military, but its international effect was far less pronounced. For one thing, although roughly the same number of governments sent troops to Iraq as to Afghanistan (fifty in Iraq versus fifty-one in Afghanistan), far fewer sent
combat
troops to Iraq, so a smaller number of countries bore the brunt of the actual fighting.
12
For another, the Iraq war was very concentrated in time and space. Almost all the fighting happened between
2004
and
2008
, with by far the heaviest combat occurring from March
2006
to September
2007
, the deadliest eighteen months in Iraq's modern history. During this period, as for much of the war, the violence was concentrated in Baghdad. In
2006
, for example, almost twice as many civilians were killed in Baghdad city as in the rest of the country combined.
13
As I wrote while preparing to deploy to Iraq in January
2007
, almost half of all combat incidents at that time happened within the Baghdad city limits, in a purely U.S.-Iraqi operational sector.
14
Thus Americans and Iraqis experienced sustained, heavy urban combat, but most others—with the sole significant exception of the British in Basra—were lucky enough to miss this experience, either because they didn't send combat troops or because their soldiers were in more rural, less violent areas outside the capital.

So, by default, Afghanistan has been the defining experience of modern conflict for many of the developed world's armies and air forces—the model, in effect, for twenty-first-century warfare. And the war in Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is extremely diffuse. The conflict is spread across the country, and the heaviest fighting happens mostly in rural areas, far from Afghanistan's cities—which, for most of the war, have been far safer than the countryside. To be sure, as the counterinsurgency fight intensified in
2010
–
12
, the Taliban shifted to urban attacks (bombings, drive-by assassinations, and raids) and the level of guerrilla fighting in the countryside dropped in relative terms. But in absolute terms, the war is still mainly one of small mountain villages, farming areas, and frontier valleys.