Non-State Belligerents The bombing of a Baghdad ice cream parlor reminded George Will (hat tip: Donald Sensing ) of a similar scene in Fran...
Non-State Belligerents
The bombing of a Baghdad ice cream parlor reminded
George Will (hat tip: Donald
Sensing) of a similar scene in Franco Solina's the Battle
of Algiers (scene 65). In the late 1950s the Algerian FLN drove the
French out of Algeria through a successful campaign of terror. George Will
believes that similar methods will not work in Iraq because the Iraqi insurgency "does
not have a fighting faith" of the FLN. While the Algerian insurgency
"was fueled by the most potent 'ism' of a century of isms -- nationalism
... one of the strange, almost surreal, aspects of the Iraqi insurgency is its
lack of ideological content."
Professor Max
Manwaring of US Army War College (hat tip: Austin
Bay) argues that it is precisely for that reason -- the lack of ideological
content -- that modern insurgencies are so dangerous. The FLN was an insurgency
aspiring to become a state; whereas many modern insurgencies are "nonstate
belligerents" without such ambitions and they comprise most of the security threats in the world
today.
While some international boundary disputes remain alive such as the
Bolivian desire to regain access to the Pacific Ocean, and the chronic
problems between India and Pakistan, the Koreas, and Ethiopia/Eritrea only a
relatively few conventional formations of enemy soldiers are massing and
preparing to invade the territory of a neighbor. What we see instead are
numerous nonstate and transnational actors, including gangs, actively engaged
in internal disruption and destabilization efforts.
Manwaring argues that security threats in the 21st century are less likely to
come from invading armies than Osama Bin Laden's terrorists, cults, warlords,
transnational criminal organizations, institutionalized West African crime and
powerful street gangs. "Rather than directly
competing with a nation-state" these Third Generation gangs "can use a
mix of complicity, indifference, corruption, and violent intimidation to co-opt
and seize control of a state or a portion of a nationstate quietly and
indirectly" so that they can go about their rackets. From Central America,
to Afghanistan and the Middle East, nation-states
are being stalked by organizations which require chaos to thrive. Like
terrorists in Iraq but unlike the FLN in Algeria, most of these "Third
Generation Gangs" care nothing about traditional nationalism except as a
public relations cover to justify their self-serving acts. For them
"fighting faith" is not a creed but a talking-point.
In examining warlordism
in Afghanistan LTC Raymond Millen of the US Army War College notes that the
disintegration of the Afghan permitted the archetypical nonstate belligerent,
the Al Qaeda/Taliban, to arise. Now having expelled the Taliban, America faces
not a challenging army in Afghanistan, but a succession of gangs and gang
alliances seeking to fill the vacuum.
Over 2 decades of incessant warfare destroyed Afghanistan as a functioning
state ... In the maelstrom of incessant internecine fighting in the 1990s, the
Taliban clawed its way to power and installed a medieval regime, providing
stability through brutality. The Taliban regime likely would have ...
continued its rule had Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda not provoked the United
States into a war ... The swift expulsion of the Taliban and al Qaeda
militants resulted in yet another regime change, but it did not ameliorate the
fundamental malaise afflicting Afghanistan warlordism. Because of their power
and wealth, Afghan warlords and their militias represent the greatest
challenge to Afghanistan’s rehabilitation as a functioning state ...
In the western hemisphere, Central American gangs have by corruption and
intimidation taken over large parts of their country's state apparatus.
Manwaring cites among many examples the fact that "Guatemala’s Vice
Minister of Defense, was operating a drug smuggling and robbery ring in
conjunction with Colombia’s Cali cartel" and drily notes that the pupils
have surpassed their teachers.
As a result, crime rates have increased dramatically to the point where the
Honduran annual murder rate ... is double that of Colombia’s ... important
because Colombia, with its ongoing internal conflict, is widely considered to
be the most violent society in Latin America. ... A majority of those murders
took place in public, in broad daylight, and many of the mutilated bodies were
left as grisly reminders of the gangs’ prowess.
For this reason Manwaring terms such organizations "the new urban
insurgency". He warns that waiting to for Third Generation Gangs to exhibit
classic motivations such as 'nationalism' before regarding them as national
security threats constitutes a dangerous failure of perception. Nonstate
belligerents he says, will stick at nothing, including acquiring WMDs.
Thus, we reiterate that if third generation gangs look like ducks, walk
like ducks, and act like ducks they indeed are insurgent-type ducks. ...
Nonstate war involves criminal and terrorist actors who thrive among and
within various host countries. This type of conflict is often called “guerrilla
war,” “asymmetric war,” and also “complex emergencies.”
Manwaring's central insight is brilliant: he knows that Al Qaeda is as much
about amassing money and power as about any tenet of the Islamic faith. It's is
as much about private ambitions as ideology. It's not personal: it's business.
George Will, on the other hand, persists in trying to understand the insurgency
through nation-state theory. He compare the Iraqi insurgency to the FLN and
wonders what they are about.
Iraq's insurgents are degenerate Hobbesians ...by promiscuously dispensing
death, thereby creating the chaos of a Hobbesian state of nature, the
insurgents hope to delegitimize the Iraqi government for its failure to
provide the primary social good: freedom from fear of violent death. ... To
escape such horrors, people would make a rational, if stark, social contract.
They would consent to surrender their natural rights to empower a severely
strong government that would at least release them from fear of violent death.
What they are about is local, private fiefdoms. Rather than a strong central
government, the strategic goal of the Iraqi insurgency may in fact be chaos; the
endpoint not a nation-state but warlord-power in an atmosphere congenial to
criminal activity. The War College monograph Strategic
Implications of Intercommunal Warfare in Iraq by Andrew Terrill points out
that the major danger facing Iraq isn't that the insurgency will somehow defeat
and expel the US Armed Forces, however devoutly the Left may wish that. The real
danger is that the insurgency will ignite a civil war in the years after the US
withdrawal.
Immediately following Saddam’s ouster, the U.S. leadership hoped that
militias would not take root in the Iraqi political system ... this hope has
now proven illusory, and senior U.S. officials acknowledge the need to
tolerate some militia activity.... Senior U.S. policymakers currently
suggest that militias will become unnecessary as legitimate governmental
security institutions are strengthened, and militias are replaced or absorbed
by national and regional governmental security forces. Most major Iraqi
militias are associated with religious and ethnic political parties, although
some are also tribal. As such, these militias would be expected to fight in
the interests of their sectarian or ethnic communities, should relations among
Iraqi communities decline or collapse.
But an collapse of Iraqi civil society might simply be one among many such
failures worldwide. More than a few countries in Central and Latin America, the
former Soviet Republics, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East are becoming
or have become failed states. From their festering carcasses will crawl not
armies but transnational criminal and terrorist organizations of the most
vicious kind. The kinds of transformations operational necessity has imposed on
US government institutions may hint at what is to come. The emphasis on homeland
security, border control, tracking criminal funds flows, developing intelligence
databases and the reworking of the Armed Forces so that it can fight
mini-engagements in living rooms and alleyways suggest that it is unconsciously
evolving to meet this new kind of enemy. But we continue to see the bombing of the Al Riadhy ice cream parlor in Baghdad through the prism of the fictional Cafeteria Rue Michelet in in the Battle of Algiers, the conscious part of the public mind lingering in the era before the challenge to the nation-state had emerged. Solutions to international security problems will continue to be sought through the ambassadors, ministers and representatives of states long after they have lost internal sovereignty; and the United Nations considered all the more important in proportion to its irrelevancy. The darkness will flow onward while we wonder in perplexity what has blotted out the stars.
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