David Kilcullen leaves Iraq and Afghanistan behind to concentrate on how to keep malignant masses of desperate people at bay in a coming urban apocalypse.
David Kilcullen writes of the “coming urban apocalypse.”
[Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla by David Kilcullen (October 2013: Oxford University Press); Hardcover; 352 pp; $27.95.]
David Kilcullen is the brilliant but largely invisible architect of America’s failed counterinsurgency policies in Iraq. According to Bob Woodward, Kilcullen was the top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus during the “surge” of targeted killings of Sunni insurgents, which was coupled with the U.S.-funded alliance with competing Sunni tribes known as “The Awakening,” in 2007-‘8.
The Pentagon declared the victory over those insurgents was based on a two-pronged approach of killing the “irreconcilables” while arming and funding the “reconcilables.” The terminology was Petraeus’ but the doctrine was Kilcullen’s.
“While many boast of victory, defeat is always an orphan,” President John Kennedy said after his Bay of Pigs debacle. Now that those insurgents the U.S. surge “defeated” are rising again in the Sunni regions of northwest Iraq and pockets below Baghdad, a review of Kilcullen’s (and Petraeus’) strategic thinking should be in order. But the public debate is politicized narrowly into whether to blame George Bush, Barack Obama, or both, not the underlying national security debates about counterterrorism or counterinsurgency.
Some will assert there was nothing wrong with the U.S. military doctrines, but that the “surge” — and the war itself — should have continued indefinitely, regardless of casualties, cost and public opinion. Others might blame the stubborn al-Maliki for failing to share power and resources with the Sunnis. Whether or not that was a foolish liberal hope, the U.S. never used its might to block al-Maliki’s Shiite regime from imposing sectarian exclusion on the disempowered Sunni minority. Now it seems far too late.
He was an original proponent of the Long War doctrine that underlies our military policy.
Kilcullen apparently has moved on too. He was an original proponent of the Long War doctrine that underlies our military policy, a war against Muslim insurgents projected to last 50 to 80 years, approximately the length of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. In the Long War perspective, Iraq is only a phase, a “small war within a long one,” as he has dubbed it in a subtitle. Kilcullen also is a critic of Obama’s drone war strategy too, on the hawkish grounds that thousands of advisers and ground forces are necessary to winning.
But Kilcullen’s recent writings leave Iraq and Afghanistan behind to concentrate on the greatest current threat he sees: how to keep malignant, violent, and irrational masses of desperate people at bay in a coming urban apocalypse. Kilcullen’s Out of the Mountains, the Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (Oxford, 2013) is an important read for anyone seeking to avoid the wars he is preparing for.
Of interest to the Left, Kilcullen’s new book is blurbed by my old friend and colleague, Mike Davis, who writes on the book’s cover that, “Although (I am) an enemy of the state, I must concede that this is a brilliant book by the most unfettered and analytically acute mind in the military intelligencia.”
Kilcullen lists Davis’ Planet of the Slums (2006) as a seminal work on the coming chaos centered in urban slums. Both authors are entranced by dystopian specters of anti-social violence and breakdown arising from the underclass. Here the two thinkers part: the specter of urban collapse frightens Kilcullen, while Davis is often intrigued by its possibilities. He has written sympathetically on LA’s street gangs, and recently wrote A Brief History of the Car Bomb, which Kilcullen finds to be authoritative. Davis holds a MacArthur Genius Award, which Kilcullen, an Australian, must envy.
Kilcullen’s picture of the violent urbanized planet is “littoral” (coastal), swamped by population growth, paralyzed by lack of services and infrastructure collapse, and connected like never before by the new communications technologies. Such places turn “feral,” he writes, with swarming chaotic mobs that can only be controlled, if at all, by a heightened police surveillance and pacification programs.
Kilcullen defines the ‘feral city’ as one where once-‘domesticated’ humans have ‘regressed to the wild.’
An enthusiast for biological metaphors, Kilcullen defines the “feral city” as one where once-“domesticated” humans have “regressed to the wild,” the same terminology, which was applied to the young black men falsely accused of the 1989 rape during a “wilding” spree in Central Park. Another blurber of Kilcullen’s book, former NATO Commander James Stavridis, sees Kilcullen’s predictions as “part Blade Runner and part Minority Report.”
Kilcullen identifies his new enemy as the multiple non-state armed actors which include “urban street gangs, communitarian or sectarian militias, insurgents, bandits, pirates, armed smugglers or drug traffickers, violent organized criminal networks, vigilantes and armed public defender groups, terrorist organizations, warlord armies and certain paramilitary forces.” (p. 126)
Whew. If that’s not enough to make the reader sweat, Kilcullen warns that the violent threats often come from fluid, self-perpetuating outbursts by handfuls of people who briefly centralize before they evaporate. He quotes Marshall MacLuhan who predicted in 1971 that World War Three would be an information war, though McLuhan’s version was more symbolic. American security forces have to come down from the mountainous rural areas of Iraq and Afghanistan, he argues, and engage on the wired battlegrounds portrayed by Davis.
Kilcullen here might want to borrow more from Davis’ Marxism and less from his dystopian reflections, since there is virtually no reference to class as a cause or solution in this 300-page work. One reason for the vast urban migrations of our era is the globalization of corporate and financial capital. When NAFTA’s privatization came to Mexico, it caused displacement among thousands of campesinos and indigenous people who trekked north to the big cities. When private companies left Los Angeles and urban America for cheap labor havens abroad, tens of thousands of young people of color were stranded in Watts with few opportunities beyond the drug trade and gangs.
Either Kilcullen doesn’t think there are root causes of the upheavals, a position taken by moralistic neoconservatives, or believes it is too late for anything but security measures. To be fair, he does incorporate a few lines about the crisis of inequality on page 247, speculating that while, “inequality per se might not be the problem…inequality without opportunity…can create lethal, city-killing resentments.” He goes no further, except to hope that civic society will manage to generate that quota of hope necessary to keep people clinging to reform above the abyss.
Kilcullen seems blocked by his conceptual model from seeing why people might freely choose revolution or violence as options.
Kilcullen seems blocked by his conceptual model from seeing why people might freely choose revolution or violence as options. Since his blockage is common among national security theorists, it’s worth deconstructing briefly. In his model, radical social movements give rise to power-driven “predators” who seek control over innocent populations. Whether racketeers, underground communist revolutionaries, al-Qaeda recruiters, or other non-state actors, they act out a script of top-down manipulation.
They use grievances to mobilize recruits, “blood them” through violent confrontations with rival groups, “groom them” through involvement in illicit actions, and lead them into “an ever-greater level of illegality and alienation from society,” finally absorbing them into a trap they cannot leave. Kilcullen compares the process to luring fish into a cage before shutting the gate.
This “theory of competitive control” is Kilcullen’s effort to explain why insurgencies develop parallel power structures of their own, either underground or in “liberated zones.” In previous writings, Kilcullen has described the trapped villagers as being “accidental guerrillas” because they have been coerced to choose the insurgent side or face terrible consequences. We’ve seen their fate played out in many Hollywood gangster movies.
The basic flaw in this model is Kilcullen’s inability to accept that the nationalist, radical, or revolutionary anti-Western aspirations of these “innocent” populations can be sincere and independent. Instead, he argues that people are manipulated into taking sides based on the need to keep their families safe. They secretly help the extremists because they have to, not because they want to.
To think otherwise would require Kilcullen to review his own assumptions about race, class, imperialism, colonialism, religion, and a host of factors that affect the choices of people under oppression. Usually there is no “accident” about joining or protecting a guerrilla movement; it is preferable to turning them over to an alien power.
The same fallacy lay at the root of President Kennedy’s dream of the Green Berets.
The same fallacy lay at the root of President Kennedy’s dream of the Green Berets: that somehow American fighters wearing jungle fatigues could win the villagers of Latin America away from the Cuban-inspired guerrillas. Being liberals, it was difficult for the Kennedy generation to realize that they ultimately were on the side of the old order, however reformed, for example, in denying colonial intent but taking over the role of the French in Indochina or the British in modern Iraq.
Try as they did to invent a “Third Way,” they failed again and again, and when a real “third way” was presented by the Non-Aligned Conference, the U.S. was opposed to its left-leaning neutralism between the Cold War blocs.
Two of Kilculllen’s intellectual forerunners died during military missions. Bernard Fall was killed in South Vietnam in 1967 during a U.S. Marine operation in Hue, the coastal city then south of the Demilitarized Zone. Another of Kilcullen’s heroes, John Paul Vann, was a devotee of counterinsurgency who died in a U.S. helicopter crash in June 1972. Vann was a legendary figure who befriended such young reporters as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. Daniel Ellsberg, whom Vann mentored, was at his funeral. Sheehan’s biography of Vann, A Bright Shining Lie, is still considered an authoritative history of the conflict. Kilcullen, like Fall and Vann, is often in dangerous zones, practicing what he calls “armed social science.”
Following Fall and Vann, Kilcullen has joined a virtual national security cult which has evolved since the Vietnam experience. These cosmopolitan, mostly liberal, warriors originated with the Kennedy administration’s counterinsurgency approach of isolating the “unreconcilibles” while winning the “hearts and minds” of the peasantry they were said to prey on.
In the late Sixties in South Vietnam, the doctrine crystallized in the so-called Phoenix Program.
In the late Sixties in South Vietnam, the doctrine crystallized in the so-called Phoenix Program, a CIA-led effort to identify and capture villagers suspected of operating as agents in the Vietcong’s clandestine infrastructure in health care, education and literary, rice-growing and local security operations. Vann was heavily engaged in this so-called “pacification” program, a term which was borrowed from the French. These village networks were much easier targets for the U.S. and Saigon forces than the battle-hardened Vietcong and allied North Vietnamese armed forces hidden in jungle sanctuaries or underground tunnels.
The effect of the Phoenix Program, revealed in U.S. congressional testimony, was to kill, capture, imprison, and torture many thousands of South Vietnamese, confining the rest in heavily-secured “strategic hamlets” similar to the reservations built in America’s Plains Wars or the “gated communities” where countless Iraqis live under camera surveillance behind blast walls, amidst check points and patrols.
The Phoenix Program finally folded amidst protests against widespread torture by South Vietnamese forces and their American trainers and advisers. The Vietnam war wound down to its final debacle, which should have left the Phoenix Program in the dustbin of history.
But it wasn’t to be. As in legend, the Phoenix rose again from the ashes. Military leaders like David Petraeus forged a new narrative from defeat, arguing that the Phoenix Program would have succeeded if the American liberals hadn’t ended the war prematurely. Few in the ranks of the peace movement or mainstream media even noticed the legend reviving, since it seemed so beyond any rational account of the war.
Yet Petraeus restored the myth as official doctrine while in Iraq, then incorporated Phoenix as a forgotten model of “success” in the 2007 revised U.S. Army-Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual written in collaboration with Harvard liberals at the Carr Center To drive home the point, Kilcullen himself wrote a huge document on countering insurgency which called for a “global Phoenix Program.”
Given all this history reinvention in the wake of failure, Kilcullen recalls the “best and brightest” in David Halberstam’s history of the intellectuals who thought us into the graves of Vietnam. Or perhaps he resembles the Great Gatsby who, along with his upper-class friends, never cleaned up after the carnage they created.
One wonders how Kilcullen plans to isolate the “real terrorists” from the millions of innocents at their websites in quiet desperation or who, like Mike Davis, already consider themselves to be enemies of the state. Is cyber-warfare what lies beyond counterinsurgency? Will Anonymous be the equivalent of the Vietcong “headquarters” which was never located? If the enemy is information in our heads, who is the sniper and who the Pied Piper?
One thing is certain. Despite Kilcullen’s trouble in accounting for the past, he always is on the frontlines of the military future, never more so than in this age of the Internet Guerrilla.
Read more of Tom Hayden’s writing on The Rag Blog, including his continuing commentary on Iraq and U.S. foreign policy.
[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin.]
Tom is absolutely correct to assert a continuity of intellectual hubris and moral depravity between McNamara’s whiz kids and the Rumsfeld-era advocates of a ‘revolution in military affairs.’ And what are Obama’s drones except a robotized version of the Phoenix program?
Tom may also be prescient in implying that the current celebrity of the unorthodox ‘warrior thinker’ – whether personified by Kilcullen or the sinister General McMasters – doesn’t necessarily put any new ideas on the empire’s table. But Down from the Hills – and this why I blurbed it – does register with stark honesty a global reality that foreign policy mandarins have generally ignored: the consequences of warehousing a billion poor people in peripheral slums with negligible hope of ever finding employment in the formal world economy.
An agricultural ‘apocalypse’ (and here the term is accurate) has driven hundreds of millions into cities where, apart from the world factory of China and its periphery, capitalism no longer creates jobs or rewards education. Moreover, economic globalization, as it were, has ‘leaked space.’ Without an international red menace incubating in the slums, governments have often abdicated everything except police violence and extortion in their poorest and most rapidly growing urban districts.
Into this “vacuum” of governability, Kilcullen claims, has rushed a motley mob of terrorist militias and super-street gangs who have transformed the despair of the young into a new strategic weapon: suicide bombers. A chief architect of counter-partisan warfare in the Middle East, he now concedes that special-ops can also be a steroid to the very movements it seeks to behead. So ‘smart power’ must now pay attention to underlying causes. Indeed the analysis in his new book drives him part way into the arms of Jeffrey Sachs. (Or, more accurately, into those of Dilma Roussef, Brazil’s ex-1960s-guerrilla president, who extols the military occupation of Rio’s favelas as ‘profound reform.’)
Tom gives all this a deserving yawn: hearts and minds redux. While desperate liberals having been seeking light at the end of Obama’s tunnel, Tom has been thunderous in denouncing this scary administration’s love affair with executive immunity, special ops and universal surveillance.
But I believe if you carefully read Kilcullen and the literature coming out of places like the Naval War College (where they recently had a think-tank discussing the implications of ‘deglobalization’), you’ll come to the recognition that the Pentagon’s killing machines are not the most profound danger ahead. Rather it’s the fact that the military intellectuals are already exploring the consequences of writing off the future of a large part of humanity. They see an absolute darkness on the horizon.
During the high Cold War, of course, there was no social group or acre of sovereign land that wasn’t seen as a valuable ‘stake’ by one side or another. Ideology had to rhetorically address the condition of all humanity, whether by the promises of five-year plans or Alliances for Progress. With the collapse of the USSR, however, the ‘Free World’ became an unnecessary pretense on a planet of free markets while any vision of common humanity was abdicated to NGOs and UN speeches.
What material interest now remains in wooing the poor or helping them adapt to global warming? What geopolitical leverage do they possess in a world without a powerful international left?
The ultimate warning of my book Planet of Slums was about the ‘triage of humanity’ that since the 1990s had become the new unspoken framework of international politics. The greatest evil is no longer that capital exploits labor but that it expels it from the circuits of production entirely. To the extent that this surplus humanity poses no realistic threat of reorganizing society on more egalitarian principles, it’s simply a problem whose ultimate management – after the helicopter gunships and Predators – may be through pandemic disease, famine, and unnatural disaster.
In another of my fraternizations with the enemy, I had a beer with an admiral a few years ago in Coronado who wanted to pick my brain about the convergence of urban poverty and natural disaster.
He had commanded a carrier task force in the Gulf and as he put it, “my kids really didn’t like bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan. But morale soared when we provided relief after the 2004 earthquake/tsunami in Indonesia.” He emphasized that only the US Navy could bring the infrastructure of a medium-sized city (in the form of ships supplying power, medicine, supplies, helicopters, etc) to a littoral region devastated by floods or quakes. “No one else – not China, Russia, the UK or the UN – has this capability.”
“But here’s the rub,” he said, “Congress will never authorize a serious expansion of humanitarian missions, especially when we’re likely to see more Katrinas and Superstorm Sandys on our own coasts.” “So at some point,” I completed his thought, “no one would ride to the rescue.” “That’s right,” he said, “no one. And this is the kind of future that some us at Newport [Naval War College] have been trying to understand.”
Mike Davis reiterates the chilling conclusion that millions of people living at the global margins will die as a result of their complete irrelevance to the global masters of corporate power. What Mike predicted in Planet of Slums, and was cited by Kilcullen, is already occurring on a massive scale.
I’m not certain that this macabre version of “the end of history” will come to pass without a new dialectics of resistance emerging. But an obvious lesson we all need to ponder is how Kilcullen and the security apparatus simply assume that the techniques of fighting “terrorism” honed abroad should be, and are being, reproduced at home. Or is it the other way around, that the SWAT teams born in the domestic “wars” on gangs and drugs were the model for our massive counterterrorism and counterinsurgency policies abroad? I know, for example, that LAPD anti-gang specialists have consulted with US forces in Baghdad. Wherever it began, Kilcullen’s book reveals how encircled we are by the doctrine. And to go deeper into our unexamined past, notions of ridding countries of their “surplus” populations are rooted in Western policy going back to Lord Trevelyan.
I would not call it hope, but there is a strategic opportunity I see in Kulcullen’s security nightmare: that whole populations cannot be written off as redundant, not without resistance of many kinds. For example, the mass incarceration of so many young people of color has not prevented [a] a strong movement to curb the “prison-industrial complex”, and [b] a rising concern about the drain of billions in taxpayer costs that could be invested in energy, health care, and educational needs. Movements at home for civil liberties and domestic priorities are a threat to the War on Terror and the surveillance state. Similarly, the requirements of escalating secrecy in the War on Terrorism have led unexpectedly to a new generation of whistleblowers and opposition by many lawyers, journalists and politicians of both the liberal and libertarian stripes.
As time goes on, the public realization will grow that the War on Terrorism is breeding the very conditions of more “terrorist” attacks, both at home and abroad. A popular platform for the Left [and perhaps the Right] might be to argue everywhere that the current wars are unwinnable, unaffordable, undemocratic and unsafe. We have a window of opportunity before the inevitable coming of the next 9/11.
Like Mike, I see some slight evidence that even Kilcullen understands the need for what used to be known as social programs, if only to dampen the domestic rage that threatens the status quo. Kilcullen even makes brief reference to Occupy and the recent work by Thomas Pikkety as trends worth examining. One hopes for the gradual “demilitarizing” of Kilcullen’s thought. Some of our strongest social justice advocates, after all, have emerged from backgrounds as hardcore militarists. Engaging Kilcullen’s thought is a project worth pursuing, even if he cannot become the next Daniel Ellsberg any time soon.
Back in the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the “father of sociology,” taught us that to change a “social fact” you had to change the *cause* of the social fact, e.g., you can’t stop crime by jailing more criminals, you have to address why crime is occurring. Likewise you can’t effectively stop social movements by repression, you have to deal with their causes. Lots of luck making that public policy.
An intelligent discussion. Thanks.
We are now seeing more and more global unrest, which I see as strongly linked to global resource depletion in the face of increasing population. For example when the global price of oil reached $147 a barrel in 2008, the US economy took a nosedive. An energy crisis really due to an expansionist economy in collision with limited resources tends to mislead by manifesting itself as an economic crisis in the public eye. Michael Klare’s work on resource wars is good, and Gail Tverberg’s “Our Finite World” blog is also quite good at analyzing these complex interactions:
http://ourfiniteworld.com/author/gailtheactuary/
Another important source of such geopolitical analysis, IMO, is Fareez Ahmed’s “Earth Insight” blog in the Guardian. Here are some links that seem quite relevant to the discussion about these dystopian global trends:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/16/blowback-isis-iraq-manufactured-oil-addiction
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/feb/28/global-riots-protests-end-cheap-fossil-fuels-ukraine-venezuela
If you are searching for an optimistic but insightful outlook, check out this link:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/19/open-source-revolution-conquer-one-percent-cia-spy
I cant see much connection between resource depletion and the proxy war in Syria between the Saudi’s and Iran. Same for the religious wars in Iraq and Sudan and the geopolitical war in Ukraine and coming struggle for supremacy between China and most of its neighbors.
Trying to prove who has the biggest pair of balls is usually all that is needed to spark a war. The resource issues are usually just cover.
Proud to be an Extremist2TheDHS
The question is will civic society rise to the occasion to foil the domestic implementation of the counterinsurgency model? Lets hope an informed public will recognize that ‘enforced anomie’ is an official policy consisting of smoke, mirrors, astro-turf and self fulfilling prophesy.