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WAR | Noah Brier

Fighting Different Wars

Looking at the two wars being fought in Afghanistan.

March 10, 2009 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 4 COMMENTS

As I mentioned last week, I've been reading The Forever War, which is a chronicle of life in Afghanistan and Iraq by Times columnist Dexter Filkins. Anyhow, it's been intense so far, but there's one particular thing I wanted to share (mostly because I heard it before and it's been playing in my head since).

A few months ago I was watching the Fareed Zakaria GPS podcast. The interview was with counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen and one thing he said has stayed in my head:

In the middle of 2006, a special forces patrol was ambushed in Uruzgan. And a number of Americans and Afghans were pinned down in their valley for about six hours. The reason they were pinned down was because locals from three different villages within a few kilometers of the ambush site ran home, got their rifles and came back, and joined in the fight. And after the fight, our guys said to them, "You know, we thought you didn't support the Taliban." And they said, "We don't." And they said, "Well, why were you fighting us?" And they said, "Well, you have to understand how, A, how boring it is to be a teenager in a valley in Afghanistan. This is the most exciting thing that's happened in our valley for decades. And if we're going to wait this fight out and sit on the sidelines, that would be dishonorable." But if you're going to join in, you're not going to join in on the side of the foreigner. You're going to join in on the side of the Afghan. And so, these are what I call accidental guerillas. They're people who are fighting us, not because they hate the West, but because we just turned up in their valley with a brigade, and the extremists come to them and say, "Whose side are you on?" And they choose their own people rather than the infidel foreigner. And I think that's a perfectly understandable reaction by Afghans, but it's one that we have to figure out a way to break. How do you get in there and provide security to the population, co-opt those who can be co-opted, and, frankly, kill or capture those who prove themselves to be irreconcilable, which is a very small number?

When I read some similar passages in Filkins' book, I knew I had to post them. Towards the beginning he writes this about the war in Afghanistan:

Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends, a tournament where you never knew which team you'd be on when the next game got under way. Shirts today, skins tomorrow. On Tuesday, you might be part of a fearsome Taliban regiment, running into a minefield. And on Wednesday you might be manning a checkpoint for some gang of Northern Alliance. By Thursday you could be back with the Talibs again, holding up your Kalashnikov and promising to wage jihad forever. War was serious in Afghanistan, but not that serious. It was part of everyday life. It was a job. Only the civilians seemed to lose.

Now I don't think I can add a lot of commentary to that, so I won't really try. But I do find it striking that the common demoniator between the two quotes is the idea that both sides are partaking in different activities. The United States is fighting a War (capital "w"), Afghans are engaged in something entirely different.

While I haven't read it in a few years, I remember being equally struck by this Rand Corporation piece called "Cyberwar is Coming" (hopefully it holds up).


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COMMENTS

1Sriram Venkitachalam

This has very little to do with the post in general but I'll recommend the film Blackboards by Samira Makhmalbaf that gives a glimpse into the "bored teens in a war zone" scene better.

March 10, 2009

2 MV

Reminds me of the kids who grew up towards the end of the Serbo-Croatian war. They allow the Serbian nationalist movement all the way into their pop culture, but then drive home listening to American songs in German cars.

Having grown up in the shadow of war you sort of reconcile the heavier roles of oppressor and victim into the more neutrual role of consumer-in the cultural AND material senses. Take what makes sense to you and change into something else when it doesn't fit the need. By comparison, when you enter war as an established self, it becomes more personal and critcal to attain a single definition of success.


http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/18/report-from-a-concer.html

March 11, 2009

3ana

Hey, "Cyberwar is coming" paper is super-interesting.

An insight how cyber-war sometimes plays out in reality:

When NATO bombed Belgrade, where I lived at the time, they had superior "information about the battlefield". They approached the ground from the information-grid perspective, and thus were targeting only power, water, communication, and military infrastructures. (and not civilian objects).

So, once we figured out that NATO has superior information about the field, and a very precise coordinates on their targets, we were able to continue our lives as usual. (um, relatively speaking).

In some crazy way, there was a sense of security among civilians amid all the explosions. A very different kind of war.

March 11, 2009

4Colin Nagy

Kilcullen has a new book out-- was reviewed pretty favorably in the WSJ today. "The Accidental Guerilla"

March 15, 2009