Are we fighting aliens? Ralph Peters thinks so. He is a retired US officer and polemicist, and dreads the Taliban as savages who might as well come from another planet, as they “prefer their crude way of life and its merciless cults.” The war with them is a “head-on collision between civilizations from different galaxies.”
Peters is no triumphalist. He fears militant Islamists are tough enemies, ferociously driven by an “angry god” to wage war, with televised beheadings, human shields and the current wonder weapon, the suicide bomber. He believes American soldiers are shackled by a hostile media, ignorant rulers, and a detached populace, vulnerable in their affluence and liberalism. In American and contemporary idiom, Peters updates Rudyard Kipling, who warned Victorian Britain that its costly, overstretched armies would be picked off by cheaply-trained “home-bred hordes.” Afghanistan is the place where empires go to die.
The cultural turn to the exotic, as an answer to the complexities of warfare, transcends political divides. To embrace diversity is now a mark of intellectual respectability. The late Samuel Huntington’s prophecy of a “clash of civilizations” may not be fashionable among graduates. But ethnocentrism has few takers. The idea that foreigners are ultimately like us is tainted by the Iraq war and the Bush project to remake the globe in the image of the United States. The balance of opinion has tilted towards difference (somewhere Huntington must be grinning).
The current wars of the United States, as a general claims, are now culture wars at the “edge of empire.” To operate in strange lands, whether in stability missions or armed nation building, the US military seeks to reform itself and weaponize culture. We see the rediscovery of colonial anthropology in the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Teams program, in the new counterinsurgency field manual FM3-24, and a revival of classic works on the “Arab mind.” Historically, imperial crises, like the Indian Mutiny of 1857, stimulated a discovery of ethnography and tribal lore. In 1940, after wars with “strange people,” the American Marine Corps produced its Small Wars Manual, urging the study of “racial characteristics.” It is an old reflex.
Exotic enemies
Culture is an antidote to the technological hubris of the 1990s, where visionaries believed that precision munitions, information technology and satellites would give the United States not only unparalleled lethality but a panoptic gaze over the battle space. This would dispel the fog of war and make the overdog invincible. Iraq and the resurgence of the Taliban brutally discredited these ideas. The cultural revolution, the return to identity and blood, soil and faith as engines of conflict, rebukes this fantasy.
But a stress on culture, like that on technology, is open to error. The assumption of sameness may be dangerous, just as a fixation with the bizarre is. Arab “pride” and Islamic “honor” underpinned US torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And the belief that we “know” an enemy intimately, or acquire systematic cultural knowledge, can generate false confidence and analytical failure. Nobody forgets the CIA’s seasoned Iran specialist in 1979 who praised the shah’s stabilizing rule six months before the revolution.
If there is a place regarded by outsiders as a culturally immobile nest of exotic enemies, it is Pakistan/Afghanistan, where a US-led coalition now fights. Clichéd literature since 2001 refers to a timeless “graveyard of empires,” a “land of bones” that has repelled past intruders, from Alexander the Great to Brezhnev’s Soviet lunge. Commentators warned that the Taliban could only be understood in terms “alien to western thinking.” Observers saw the war as a culture clash between an archaic theocracy and a rich, hi-tech superpower. The Taliban, overthrown in the autumn of 2001, are in a revolt that many regard as profoundly cultural. (A special forces captain called it “the Flintstones meets the Jetsons.”)
It is tempting to treat Afghans as prisoners of their traditions. Some claim that Pashtun tribes who make up most of the Taliban are bound to a vengeful honor code of blood ties. As The Economist broods: “His honor besmirched -- and here’s the problem for Americans -- a Pashtun is obliged to have his revenge.” Others present the Taliban as mystical Muslims from another world. When Taliban soldiers paused in an interview to pray, a journalist envied their “strength and purity... transcendental sense of peace and purpose and closeness to death and God seldom experienced in the modern West.” The message is clear: Where we are strategic, modern and political, they are visceral, otherworldly and primitive. And it is not only westerners who are gripped by a sense of radical difference. As an Afghan fighter boasted, “The Americans love Pepsi Cola, but we love death.”
When they overran almost all of the country in 1998 after the civil war, they imposed a draconian sharia on the population. In a country where puritanical Islam had rarely been dominant, the new order banned music and alcohol; it introduced punishments such as amputation and death by stoning, and iconoclasm, smashing thousands of pre-Islamic artefacts in the Kabul museum and blowing up ancient Buddhist statues (especially in Bamyan). It carried out ethnic cleansing, murdering thousands of (Shia) Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif; executed homosexuals and political dissidents; banned girls’ public education; and created a religious police force which beat women for offending the dress code.
However the Taliban showed themselves to be realists of a kind, rewriting their rules as they went. They shifted their stance on poppy cultivation, turning from godly opponents into defenders of the narco-state and guardians of rural life. In Musa Qala, they relaxed strictures on social behavior to win the population over, rescinding their demand that men grow beards, and their ban on music and movies. And they reshaped their view of suicide bombing. Previously some Taliban argued that wearing an explosive vest was cowardly. A Taliban faction placed an advertisement in a Kandahar newspaper promising to punish those responsible for a suicide bombing, an affront to Islam. Now the Taliban do it. Their religious leaders re-interpret the Koran to justify it, with stories about willing martyrs in a seventh-century Muslim army.
Agile and not so tribal
In the information war, the Taliban have adjusted to the broadcasting power of modern media with an agility ahead of their enemies. They give television interviews, run computerised propaganda shops, send representatives to Iraq to learn from al-Qaeda’s video production arm, and mimic western practices with an embedded journalist. In government they outlawed depictions of the human form as idolatry. Now, they violate taboos on image making, transforming into guerrillas of the information age. The movement that banned music now enlists singers in its propaganda, creates cassettes with songs praising the Taliban martyrdom and damning infidels in a style similar to American rap music.
In their bid for the loyalty of Afghans, the Taliban fashion an alternative government or counterstate, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They commit atrocities. But they pose as providers as well as predators. They have a shadow system of courts, law enforcement and clinics, as well as an ombudsman’s office near Kandahar, where complaints can be lodged. They attempt to restrain vigilantes with codes of conduct that forbid house raiding, robbery, rape and such vices as smoking. As the Taliban and the US coalition compete, they respond in comparable ways to the logic of civilian alienation. The Taliban study western counter-insurgency doctrine with its emphasis on hearts and minds. Strategic interaction with the enemy is as important as cherished traditions.
While the Afghan insurgency has an ethnic base among Pashtuns, it is not reducible to tribalism. Traditional tribal loyalties in Afghanistan, and their agricultural power base, were disrupted and altered by the emergence of tanzims (roughly political parties or groupings) as well as the qawm system of sub-national loyalties that includes religious sects and practical alliances. The Taliban do not just operate tribally. Their leadership has both Durrani and Ghilzai members. They include rival tribes, including marginalized Hazara groups in Ghazni. They contain many Tajik and Uzbek clerics allied to their cause. And they have supply lines and communications in areas populated mostly by non-Pashtun ethnic minorities, and stage recruitment drives outside their regions of control. The emerging neo-Taliban tries to expand its recruitment beyond its Pashtun base by appealing to local grievances.
The Taliban loathe what they see as the degenerate parts of modernity, but want the benefits that its technology can deliver. They preach tradition, but practice change.
Al-Qaeda presents a similar paradox. We can see it as a medieval throwback, with a dream of an Islamic caliphate, mourning the loss of Spain in 1492. Or we can see it as a strategic actor that uses force as an end in itself: warfare not as an instrument of politics, but a theatre of horror.
Yet al-Qaeda is formed out of a worldwide marketplace of ideas and technologies, even if it may nourish itself on medieval dreams and reactionary nostalgia. As a network, it struggles to control its violent, puritanical adherents who alienate Muslims from Algeria to Iraq. But it is far from a premodern movement, and is more than a nihilistic drive to terror for its own sake.
Its communiqués contain classical strategic principles. When Osama bin Laden declared war against the United States, he justified his guerrilla tactics not only as an expression of sacred violence, but as a necessary method against the “imbalance of power” created by overwhelming US military might. Al-Qaeda’s chief theoretician, Ayman al-Zawahiri, cares about translating violence into political outcomes, writing that successful operations against Islam’s enemies will be wasted if they do not result in a “Muslim nation in the heart of the Islamic world.” Al-Qaeda left behind annotated copies of the Prussian theoretician Carl von Clausewitz’s On War in the hideout in Tora Bora.
Al-Qaeda adapts ideas from the infidel and its training camps are full of western literature. It plunders western training manuals and revolutionary leftists, quotes contemporary fourth generation warfare theory, and Mao’s three-stage concept of guerrilla struggle. Its ideas are a fusion of religious beliefs with classical and contemporary strategic thought.
Culture matters. New attention to the social worlds of foreign societies has helped the US army reform itself as more effective and humane. In a war of insurgency, communal conflict or state breakdown, it helps to be prepared.
But because culture can be treated at many levels of sophistication, the word should always make us nervous. We may never banish the mythologized Oriental from our consciousness. Like fear of death and darkness, it is too powerful to be fully exorcized and will remain a silhouette on our mental horizon. But the fluidity and hybridity of the Taliban and al-Qaeda demonstrate that war jumbles and connects as well as polarizes. No culture, however strange, is an island.
Patrick Porter is a lecturer in Defence Studies at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Kings College London and author of Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (Columbia University Press & Hurst, 2009).
© 2009 Le Monde diplomatique – distributed by Agence Global
Operation Breakfast Redux